what's sovereignty worth to me, anyway?

[sciatrix]

So muccamukk hosted a set of questions for the Fediverse over at her blog today, and impertinence has done a really nice job of answering them from the perspective of social systems, moderation, and how communities attempting to avoid worst-case-scenarios really work.

I think, though, that I'm still uneasy, and I'm fundamentally uneasy because to me what I am hearing echoed from the various Fediverse/p2p/Mastodon schools of How Fandom Should Do Next is that the future of fandom should be decentralized and spread around many small communities, each maintained and monitored by a few moderators. Like a set of fiefdoms, but administered without hereditary rule, with mobile users who can transfer allegiances from one fiefdom to another quickly--at least in theory.

I think I am uneasy because I am concerned about handing out ultimate power--as opposed to social power--to many different people of unpredictable ethics and morality, with limited ability to leave a toxic space without abandoning friends and limited ways of getting in touch with people who follow. I'm going to talk out loud for a minute to see if I can pin that down.

One of the things I like about the structure of Dreamwidth is that the communities that do form here, and around individual users, are like... a series of connected salons, with both personal and public spaces for everyone, such that anything I post to my personal journal is mine and mine alone and anything I post to a community is surrendered to the moderators of that community, who I can know and trust ahead of time without ever necessarily stepping under their authority, just by reading publicly. It is not clear to me that you can do that on these decentralized fediverse systems.

Another thing I like is that the ultimate authority on how a service will be hosted and moderated is not someone who is modding the individual communities, such that relationships breakdowns with a moderator of a particular community has zero impact on my ability to interact with the rest of Dreamwidth. The odds that I will fall into a personal acrimony with denise or mark is slim to none; they straight up don't have the personal bandwidth to necessarily notice me as a person, and I feel safer in that anonymity.

Metafilter is the inverse of that, in some ways--it's a service where the site owner is also an active moderator, and where he and the mod team really do publicly interact in places where I might converse with them anywhere, and my ability to speak on the site at all is definitely mediated by my being a member in good standing with those mods--but also, I can see them and observe them and decide whether I trust the judgement of the MeFi mod team beforehand. I trust that even when I disagree with them, they'll still be decent people to me, and I can do that based on long observance.

So why am I uneasy about a fediverse instance while I'm comfortable on Metafilter, which operates (as far as I can tell) like one enormous federated instance? I cut my teeth on forums; why am I balking at this?

...oh.

Oh, oh, oh.

I've watched so many dysfunctional forums, is the thing, with a lot of dysfunctional modding carried out by people who had neither the skill nor the confidence to have any business modding, who didn't know how to manage a community and didn't take community stewardship seriously as its own thing. I've made the decision to leave forums based on moderation and known grimly that unless things were bad enough to take a significant fraction of users with me--and at one point, I was in that situation!--that I was giving up a lot of my ability to get back in touch with people later, including people who I was really fond of, and that my friendships would have to be very strong indeed to survive a platform migration.

I'm thinking of fediverse as like the old forum systems, but without the option to lurk before deciding to trust someone, and with spinning up a new forum also including some outlay of actual hard cash, so that fewer people can try it.

Woof.

No wonder I'm feeling cagey.

Comments

[kore]

My thought is that if I can figure it out as it goes, it'll be an easier adjustment

I'm not against the whole idea, but I am not, me personally, interested in climbing on board something I don't see a whole lot of firm information about to begin with, and figuring it out as it gets going, and potentially experiencing a lot of wank along the way. I am just too old and too tired.

[kara_mckay]

Well, I certainly hear you on that. For me, I'd probably just look for names of people I know. I find that, in general, I'm not terribly interested in hanging out on a chat server with anyone. I remember having lots of fun with such things, but like you, thinking about it just makes me tired.

[sciatrix]

*wringing hands* I have a little Discord, and it's very nice, but I struggle to keep up just with the five or six people on that. And I love this whole blogging aspect of things, and the conversation spaces I can set up.

I may follow, if all the conversation goes there, and I wind up feeling starved out; but the moment all the activity spun up on DW again I settled in here very very happily. I feel as if the only reason I intend to leave any time soon will be hunger for discussion.

[kara_mckay]

Yup, me, too. Arriving at DW was like coming home. I'm interested in federated fandom because I don't want to end up in the spot where I found myself when LJ started falling apart. People were scattering, and everyone wanted to adopt a wait and see attitude, but waiting and seeing ended up meaning losing people. Then, there was some resistance to Tumblr in some quarters, which I absolutely understand. By the time the Next Thing became just The Thing, I felt too far out of step to catch up, and I just drifted. I don't plan to leave DW, but if it's within my abilities, I'll definitely set up fandom's Next Thing so I have it ready if needed.

I use Discord to call my son downstairs to bring in groceries. Sometimes I send him cat pictures. That's my entire use of Discord.

[kore]

Yeah, I was amazed at how much less depressed I feel personally with all the conversation coming back to DW. I loved it before, but now it's like a big shot in the arm! And I love conversations you can go back to and threaded comments and everything not be dependent on timing. One thing I really dislike about Discord is it still seems if you aren't there at the right moment, or are in the wrong time zone, you miss out on conversations, and it's hard to go back to them. (I know people say they can do it, but every time I've tried, it's been crickets.)

[stellahibernis]

I like this aspect here as well, all the years I was basically just on tumblr I kept thinking everything interesting happens while I'm asleep. Here it's much easier to jump in because conversations last longer and don't get lost in the flow.

[sylvaine]

Yes, all of this! ♥ Dreamwidth ♥