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

[muccamukk]

Thanks so much for answering! I love long comments.

I guess it's a little hard for me to picture, someone said it was a really different way of seeing the internet which, I guess is right. If I clone form one hub to another, and on the first hub I kept say, a photography blog, with all my pictures posted there and commentary on them, etc, would that move over to the new hub with me?

(Kinda the only example I have of this is importing form LJ to DW back in the day, which copied the text, the comments, and the metadata wholesale, but left the pictures behind and just had links to where there were hosted on LJ.)

I was never really a tumblr person, so I mostly relate to blogging as it happens on LJ/DW, or on something like wordpress: where I make a post as a static object, and people comment on that with their comment objects. I count the post and the comments as "stuff that matters to me" if that makes sense, actually more so than network contacts, who I can usually manage to find again.

There was a lot of concern over on my post about what might happen if the person admining a hub (and as I understand it paying for the servers) flounced without warning, how much data that would take with it. Has your general push buttons find what happens worked out anything about that?

Sorry for so many questions. I'm really still (slowly) trying to get my head around the functionality.

[aka_vamp]

If you clone - and continue using the original blog as a photography blog, the clone would also be a photography blog. They're essentially the same blog.

But, if you make a second channel, that would be different.

Channels are confusing, but are essentially 'a blog'. Like your primary blog on tumblr or your default journal here. You can make as many channels as you like, and they're like sideblogs on tumblr or I think some people make a comm here and use it like a sideblog? Additional channels are like that.

But cloned channels... well. An example:

My main channel/default identity/whatever: https://fandom.stopthatimp.net/channel/vamp

My old channel, the one I cloned from (but then assigned as the clone): https://hub.disroot.org/channel/vamp

If you look at them both, there's some cosmetic differences, but they are essentially the same channel. My identity (vamp@fandom.stopthatimp.net) is the same on both channels, even though the second is on hub.disroot.org.

That's a clone. The old channel (now the clone) has everything from the new one, plus the stuff I posted before I cloned (just a few posts while I was poking around trying to figure it out).

If you're cloned, then the clone will have a mirror of your posts, and the comments left on your posts BUT ONLY AFTER THE CLONING EVENT. Anything from before will remain on the old instance. I seem to recall the option (which I declined) to transfer all that stuff during the clone process but I can't promise that that is true.

And, I'VE JUST REALISED, the images you upload. I'm going to say probably any files you upload also, but I haven't done that yet, so again, no promises.

So if our admin disappeared and took the hub with them, I'd have a backup of these things and could just switch back to hub.disroot and carry on.

I think they might take wikis and webpages, though, but these are very simple to export and re-import to a new place, so as long as a user takes responsibility for backing up their own stuff, everything will be fine.

That's the same with a clone. Only the user can clone their own channel, it's their responsibility, not the admins.

This is probably really confusing, I'm so sorry LOL

[muccamukk]

So cloning is basically making a mirror of yourself that constantly backs itself up. Every time I post to stopthatimp, I'm also posting to disroot? Or is that not correct? Is that not basically doubling the server load one person takes up?

*is really not very techie*

[aka_vamp]

That is correct, to the best of my understanding, anyway.

I suppose it does double the server load, but it's also spreading the load.

And I guess to mitigate the effects of hubs that might crash and/or burn, it's considered worth it.