what's sovereignty worth to me, anyway?
Feb. 2nd, 2019 04:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sciatrixSo 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![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-03 09:09 pm (UTC)Muccamukk above said they're going to jump in and try it outt, but honestly I just don't have the mental bandwidth to maintain presences in too many places at once, if I tried to jump into this federated stuff I'd end up having to drop something I use already. I'd already ditched tumblr months ago because I couldn't keep up with both it *and* twitter *and* discord.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-03 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-03 11:32 pm (UTC)Pillowfort is in, what, its third year of dev? And I'm not convinced it's learned the right lessons, either, and after that boneheaded TOS move and the server issues, I lost a lot of faith in its ability to negotiate the hard ethical choices that are my highest priority. Other people's highest priority might be the ability to easily pass along images, or a seamless user interface, or to never, ever again be exploited by a for-profit enterprise, or to simply be where the greatest volume of fandom is happening.
I'm real tired of platform migrations, and I'm tired of big ideas that aren't deliberately crafted to minimize the damage of the inevitable worst-case-scenario byproducts of humans humaning at one another.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-03 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-04 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-04 03:42 am (UTC)ITA. Pillowfort just doesn't seem to know what they're doing, and they constantly try to reinvent the wheel. And they're still closed to sign-ups, which means a lot of the momentum they could have had from the Tumblr disaster is going to places like Discord and Dreamwidth. Imzy had more people who had a lot more experience than the PF folks do, and that place crashed and burned within three months.
Like I said over at Mucca's, a big part of moving to DW for me was the founders' commitment to their ethical code, and the idea that it would stay small and never be appealing to the giant companies who want to pay the founder billions and then attempt to monetize it and then scrap it. Like you, that really matters to me, and I personally want that at the forefront of any new platform I'm going to investigate.
I'm real tired of platform migrations
ME TOO. And I am just not in the mood for "come on over you don't have to be a tech we're all figuring stuff out and bashing it together as we go." I don't have the bandwidth (and that's kind of providing another perspective on being urged into unpaid labour for me). Before I put a lot of effort into anything, I want to see more of what it's going to be about.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-04 06:28 am (UTC)I read all these posts about people being very enthusiastic, and I feel like I'm a downer at least inside my own head, but there are certainly issues that seem to be sort of hand waved away at this point, while they're pretty important when it comes to the actual longevity and day to day running of things.
Same about being tired of migrations, not to mention there's only so much time and energy one has, and I'd like to spend my time in fandom on fannish things, not setting up the platform, and I suspect most other people are like me in that.