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

[brithistorian]

Ah, so that's what this whole federated thing is trying to emulate. I've been looking at it and trying to figure out what's the point and why it just made me kind of twitchy to think about it and I think I'm starting to get it now.

And it still has the social problems around different sites with different mod policies and people not trusting the mods on other sites.

And not just "not trusting the mods" but having to deal with mods with wildly different goals. If I'm running Nazi-Free Federated, I'm going to have very good reasons why I don't want to connect my instance with White Power Federated. So, um, yeah - I expect the whole "all of Federated can talk to all the rest of Federated" to last until - well, I'm very surprised it's still working now. (Is it still working now?)

[kore]

I dunno, but from what I have seen, the people interested in fannish federation want it to be neutral re content -- i.e. they'll work with antis AND with the HTP. And I'm just like....good luck with that, they couldn't even coexist on Tumblr. And I personally want to share as little fannish space with antis as possible.

[melannen]

I have been told that one of the benefits of Mastodon is that all the good guys have already blocked White Power Federated so they're all stuck in their own little corner only talking to each other. I'm not sure that's actually a great outcome, though. And of course, that means that every new instance has to already just know where White Power Federated is and that they need to block it.

It's like they've decided that running an entire social nework around the concept of everybody knowing about the missing staircase is the ideal.

[kore]

It's like they've decided that running an entire social nework around the concept of everybody knowing about the missing staircase is the ideal.

THAT'S TOTALLY IT, yes.

[havocthecat]

It's not that I want to share a social network with white power advocates (but if there are any on Dreamwidth, I've obviously managed to miss them), but who makes the decision on what constitutes a missing stair and locks them out? What happens when someone decides that Reylo shippers are Nazi instances and they should be locked out, and that Hydra Trash Party instances are a missing stair and deserve to be locked out? It's hard to just go and join another mailing list where slash isn't banned if your entire ID can't see your Hydra Trash Party and Stormpilot friends won't talk to your Reylo friends. (They may not already, I don't know SW dynamics, I pay NO ATTENTION to any of this stuff.)

I'm just going to wave my hands around and think about it for a bit and mull on our fannish history in light of all of this. I'm not sure about how I feel about all of this.

[sciatrix]

Oh, god, and the lines blur--although I will say, the HTP gets much more :| in the light of the increasing waves of actual fucking Nazis sincerely adhering to these ideas. I don't know that much from anyone who was pro-Hydra Trash Party (or Reylo, for that matter--SW is not my fandom, although Captain America is*), but the unease and distaste I had over the entire thing was less about kink and more about the fact that part of why I have a particular fondness for Captain America fandom is the explicit rejection of Nazis, white supremacists, and exclusionists in the metaphorical fandom that is humanity.

Particularly in light of that hideous fucking "Cap is a Nazi now!" Marvel comics arc.

So... I guess, talk to me about the line you draw in the sand? I know denise actually elaborated on DW's policies re: Nazis and similar a few months ago, in the tumblr purge response threat. I think I'm okay with that particular place to draw the line: you can talk about that shit in your own space with people who agree with you only, and the moment you try to get anyone to agree with you or act on it, out you go. Although I am still worried given that whole worst-case-scenario-American-politics context I find myself in.

*I didn't see much about the Hydra Trash Party folks aside from quiet grumbled "that's in real bad taste" waves that I can recall, and it's a huge fandom.

[melannen]

In its defense, none of the HTP people I know are in any way pro-Hydra (or even pro-"Hydra members who were not brainwashed are redeemable" or even in most cases "Hydra are hot") - they are "Hydra is unredeemably, completely awful and that gives us a way to work out our kinks for completely awful stuff."

(unlike, say, most of Reylo fandom. Reylo and HTP are not natural allies at all.)

There are segments of Cap fandom that are more pro-Hydra or woobie-Hydra but unless HTP has drastically changed since I wandered away from it, they are no more welcome there than anywhere else in the fandom.

Which is sort of a demonstration of why making these calls is hard, isn't it?

[sciatrix]

Absolutely! I was off thinking about that while monkeying in my sound chambers--the possibility that the HTP folks and the creepier pro-Hydra fans might not be one and the same. (And a quick Fanlore check implied the same thing even before you commented, too.)

Which comes back to "okay, so... you also gotta track down what furious accusations and absent hearsay is actually accurate and which is hyperbole and which is slander and which is just mistaken identification, too."

[melannen]

Yep! I was in pro-Sitwell fandom for awhile after Winter Soldier too, and that sounds pro-Nazi on the surface too, but of course it was actually "it's really fucked up that they made the only Hispanic character a Nazi and that part of the plot was way OOC for everyone, clearly he was undercover."

Which is why moderation by whisper campaign is usually a bad plan.

[havocthecat]

Thank you for chiming in. Hydra Trash Party is not my thing, but I believe it's mostly a kink thing and also a "Hydra is pretty terrible, let us demonstrate how with written aids" thing.

Also, while I am not a Reylo shipper, I can categorically say I know at least a Reylo shipper or two who aren't white supremacists. I'm sure there are more. I cannot imagine you could paint the entirety of one shipping group with the same brush.

Which is why, yes, I don't believe you can make the broad, sweeping generalizations.

[sciatrix]

+1 to both the "thank you for chiming in" thing and the "best not to tar entire swathes of fandom with one brush" sentiments.

[melannen]

Oh, no, I didn't mean to imply that Reylo shippers are white supremacists! But in my experience Reylo (and Kylux) shippers tend to be more toward the "First Order aren't really Nazis" or "My favorite isn't in it for the ideology, just revenge/power/daddy issues" or "there is good in him yet! Love will save him!" end of things, as opposed to the "nope, they're just plain terrible, but I want to write/read terrible sometimes" end. I personally find that end more uncomfortable than the HTP end in terms of slippage to current RL politics, and I think a lot of HTP people would agree, but ykinmkato, y'know? And a lot of Reylos probably think HTP is awful because they're writing about people who do have those beliefs. It's illustrative though that you can have two different groups of people writing about quasi-nazis who may both think the other side is going too far. This is why this kind of thing is hard!

[havocthecat]

I mean, only if you want to get really, really period-specific, but then we label them neo-Nazis and are done with it? Also, even if he weren't in it for the ideology and were in it just for revenge/power/daddy issues, it wouldn't matter, because he's still supporting the ideology no matter why he's doing it and if you want to write a redemption and have love save him, okay, but he's got to work for that shit. (I said similar stuff about Spuffy back in the day, honestly, where he was a mass murderer and you could make his redemption because he wanted to earn the love of Buffy happen, but you'd have to make him work for that shit.)

But anyway. Yes! Basically I agree. I wasn't sure you were implying it? Or not? But I thought I'd ask and we'd maybe talk and clarify what each other meant? Just to be sure.

[havocthecat]

I'm not talking about my specific lines? Why would I be talking about my line?

I mean, I'm talking about is do we have a collective, agreed-upon, fandomwide consensus (ahahaha, fandom consensus) on where we draw an agreed-upon line on what is Beyond The Pale, and is someone going to then say 'every Reylo* shipper is a fucking Nazi, ban them,' and is someone else going to say, 'Hydra Trash Party* is pro-Nazi, ban those guys,' and then what goes onto what instance, and whose instance is banned from which other instance?

Or do we end up with a bunch of different people who have different groups and Instance Y fans will only talk to Instances X, M, and N, and Instance X fans will only talk to Instances N, H, and Z, and then Instances N and Y will only talk to Instances A, R, and Q, but Instance Y will get in trouble for its stance on accepting Instance B's shipping practices, and all of the fans had better know whose side they're on because the wrong thing will get them blocked from Instance N, and good luck finding a new instance to federate with?

(That was really run-on, but I hope the idea got across?)

(I may be thinking of my time in Forever Knight fandom, when finding a pan-shipping, pan-character email list was nearly impossible and you had to be In The Know, and being voted onto certain character email lists was, in fact, A Thing, and you could be rejected for having a name that wasn't serious enough, or if your name was too close to someone else's name and you might be A Spy. )

I am not saying "federated fandom is going to splinter like the days of yore," but I could see a less-complicated version of it happen. Which is kind of funny, because I remember everyone complaining how LJ caused the splintering of fandom because everyone was able to create their own communities - the horrors! :) Surprisingly enough, fandom did survive - and Tumblr being a giant pile where you searched by tags was not terrible in that way either. In other ways, yes.



* Disclaimer of the Day: Reylo is just shipping, and, as far as I can tell, Hydra Trash Party is just a fandom kink thing. Don't like, don't read, we're all friends or friendly here; these are only examples, and no judgment is implied on my part.

[sciatrix]

Oh, hell, I was not articulating what I meant to there at all. What I was trying to get at re the "where do you draw the line?" comment was more of a "what is your thinking on this topic? how do you balance these conflicting when you think about fannish consensus, or at least your own opinions on the subject?" I think I was picking that up from thinking about denise's opinion on the subject as a platform host, to be honest.

(Agreed that fannish consensus is really more of an ideal than a reality... *rueful laughter*)

I mean, right here, we've got me going "but if Hydra Trash Party is pro-Nazi, do we want to be associated with them?" and melannen going "wait, hold on--they're not, exactly, you're conflating two different segments of that fandom, one of which is unsavory and one of which isn't" right back. I think that one of the things that set Tumblr up for wank was the possibility of people, outraged, reblogging my "but wait, is this association...?" thing and maybe adding more furor to it or taking it as a citation of truth, and showing it to all their friends... without those friends seeing the rest of the conversation I was having in response to melannen at the same time.

I don't think these federated platforms are exactly like that--and I mean, obviously DW isn't; anyone who linked to my vague "I thought this was associated with that" comment would see both yours and melannen's immediately too. But I do suspect that the sort of "can't keep up with every explosion of fannish arguing" and the general tendency of anti attacks to muddy the water and create the kinds of vague associations that low-information commenters like me have is very, very likely to cause exactly the kind of fragmentation you're describing. Which sounds like the more-fragmented LJ/DW days on steroids, tbh; at least in the middle of full-scale comms drama you couldn't have rival comm heads actively blocking the ability of whole chunks of followers to see each other's responses. And then you get to spark up all that low-information muttering again, like smoldering embers after a wildfire...

_{*Disclaimer acknowledged, and god knows I have no problem with either kink or the HTP description I saw on Fanlore when I bothered to go look it up, which I generally trust; don't like, don't read is certainly a rule I subscribe to there as well.}

[havocthecat]

Oh! Okay, good. I was confused, but mostly because I've participated in so many conversations lately that I'm burning out a little. So partly it was me!

I honestly never though HTP was pro-Nazi, but I was intending to imply that someone, somewhere, is going to think it is. So I apologize for adding to the confusion! I was not clear.

The thing about the low-information muttering is it's reminding me of other parts of the days back like in email list fandom, where the email lists had people who were on all the lists (and I do mean ALL OF THEM, don't ask me how they had time) and we got our information from those people, and it was really a rumor and gossip campaign half the time.

I mean, this whole thing is making me go /hands/ and want my nice, safe, threaded DW conversations where I'm pretty sure that I can see all the conversations.

(Do you mind if I add you? I think we've chatted in a couple of places' comments a couple of times. You seem interesting and I'd like to keep in better touch.)

[sciatrix]

LOL no I just proved your point totally for you! and yes, +1 also on the whole "participating in so many conversations" thing being a little burnouty.

Like, I'm really glad that here on DW you can have someone going "wait no your rumor grasp is wrong" and have that just snap the conversation into better focus, you know? And then anyone who is reading along here (which: why are you punishing yourself like that, presumed lurker?) can see that and can see that that "oh! it's like this!" moment happened.

(No, absolutely go ahead; I think I'll go ahead and add you back while I'm thinking of it! I like hearing what you have to say.)

Not punishing, just learning

[jesse_the_k]

And admiring the shiny minds who can think and theorize and emote all at the same time

/relurks

[havocthecat]

I do like the thing on DW where people talk and snap the conversation into focus and people can see what's going on.

(Oh my goodness, lurkers! I encourage participation, if not here, elsewhere! But that's the fun for me, meeting new people, so no pressure, lurk away if you prefer!)

Awesome! Access, subscription, I don't know if you want my boring personal life stuff?

[brithistorian]

As I think more it about it, it would also depend on White Power Federated staying in the same instances, rather than regularly creating new instances and forcing everyone into a giant game of whack-a-mole. Plus it also doesn't take into account that the individual members of White Power Federated would be as likely as not to just colononize someone else's instance.

[ljwrites]

One function that may help in this case is the ability of individuals to block instances. So even if your instance mod won't block antis.instance on an instance level, you can do it from your own account so posts made on antis.instance won't show up in the federated timeline for you and accounts on anti.instance can't interact with you.

[brithistorian]

I was unaware of that function - that definitely makes a difference. It makes it as if the people you don't want to talk with are signing themselves up for a block list!

[ljwrites]

It's like a built-in block list!

[havocthecat]

I pity the poor person on anti.instance to hang with their friends who gets blocked by everyone even though they're not an anti.

I can't see this going horribly awry and making the fandom polarization worse.

[ljwrites]

I hear you as someone who is kind of in that position, at least until I was denounced by antis for not being anti enough. Antis and fandom-critical fans are not as clearly separate as large parts of fandom want to believe, and the word "anti" itself has multiple meanings in actual use.

One possible solution for our fan-with-anti-friends is to create another account on a different instance, where they won't at least be blanket-blocked for the server they're on. They could still be blocked because they are associated with antis but at least people can make that judgment individually.

Of course, not everyone likes to have their online presence split that way. I have three Mastodon accounts myself, but I know it's not everyone's cup of tea. That's one of my frustrations with the rhetoric surrounding federated fandom. There's this assumption of rugged individualism/technical knowhow for users, as though it's easy for most users to pack up and leave an instance if it goes bad/goes under, as though everyone can juggle multiple accounts etc. I think it's a bias that comes from the founders and proponents of the Fediverse themselves being those kinds of self-sufficient and technologically proficient types.