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

[sciatrix]

Are DW and MeFi currently financially struggling? It's my understanding that much of MeFi's funding crunch initially came from reductions in ad revenue caused by differences in Google list indexing, and that user-donation-driven fund drives are now picking up a substantial part of the revenue load. It's also my understanding that the current strain in metafilter moderation is being heavily driven by The Whole Sort of General Political Hellstorm, and the megathreads more specifically.

(I haven't been aware of DW's funding issues?)

I mean, mastodon vs tumblr, sure. (Choosing mastodon over twitter would be harder for me because most of the professional networking in my field is Twitter, but I also don't do a lot of socializing outside my professional network circles there either. And access to those circles can be crucial to careers...)

[cbrachyrhynchos]

It seems like every month there's a new metatalk thread that circles around how constraints on moderation manpower influence how moderation happens over there.

And Dreamwidth has failed to deliver on some key features of LiveJournal. It has also not substantially changed its interface to keep up with the reality that desktop is not the majority platform anymore.

[aurumcalendula]

May I ask which features?

[muccamukk]

Off the top of my head, #1 a mobile interface that works well, #2 a posting system that doesn't require html or other coding knowledge and doesn't send everyone who sees the results screaming for the hills, #3 some kind of image sorting and easy posting of images systems, not just jamming them all in the one folder and making you c/p the code to post them.

[aurumcalendula]

Good point!

Mobile stuff does seem to vary greatly depending on theme, and the posting system isn't the best (I hardly even posted on LJ, so I can't remember how their's compared)

[muccamukk]

Enough whiskey has passed under the bridge that I no longer remember what posting there is like. I don't recall the rich text editor being a lot better though. There was a reason I learned the piss poor collection of html tags I can now summon up. (Though do I remember to close them? NO!)

[sciatrix]

The other thing that gets me is that theme feels more important to mobile friendliness on DW than I hazily recall on LJ? Like, the light theme isn't a mobile-friendly one by default. And that seems like a very bad idea.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I did Sims2 stories on LiveJournal for a while, and posts there would consist of a few dozen carefully orchestrated and composed screenshots taken with in-game assets and cameras. The slow evolution of image hosting on Dreamwidth has been extremely frustrating, and my work-around has just been to use a folder on my own web server instead.

[sciatrix]

Yeah, that's a megathread issue, tbh. More staff aren't likely to solve it very effectively if the politics megathreads keep burning everyone out. I think right now there's a discussion on seeing if we can begin winding that back before we get Democratic Primaries 2020: Fight To The Death.

[kore]

Desktop is the majority platform. It's certainly not phone apps.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Mobile has displaced desktop for all the important metrics about five years ago. Mobile captured the majority of game revenue last year.

[kore]

"all the important metrics"

You are stacking the deck.

[sciatrix]

Hey. I think both of you have made your points at this point, and I would like you to take a step back from this aspect of the discussion.

[kore]

Dreamwidth has failed to deliver on some key features of LiveJournal

That's not "a serious funding pinch where they struggle maintaining quality of service." That's you as one user being unhappy with how some features are being implemented. It is NOT the same thing as MeFi going "we're basically going to have to shut down or drastically change how we do things."

[aurumcalendula]

Yeah - that confused me as a response, because like those are two separate things?

[kore]

I definitely think Dreamwidth could probably stand more dev work, but that is REALLY not caused by any serious funding pinch, which DW doesn't have anyway. As for a phone app, I think denise explained why there isn't one in the comments to that welcome post, and there's a thousand of them by now....OK, from what I see in her intro, it's a combination of needing to work on prerequisites because of older design decisions, and they're not in haste to get it done because the App Store was the reason Tumblr had the Nipplepocalypse in the first place. I mean, this is the site that decided not to bow to Paypal's pressure re censorship and they still don't to this day.

The other thing is, a lot of people call DW "ugly" but the truth is the founders just weren't that interested in providing the typical web 2.0 slick interface with infinite scroll and buttons instead of links and hover menus and all that. I think that's what some people are reacting to -- that kind of workmanlike look -- when calling it "ugly," because they're used to a very similar "modern" design across most social networks, especially the apps. But that's just kind of the ethos of the site, the DW founders aren't that interested in having a pretty front end that matches the latest slick design of the web. I mean, some newcomer already made a "making Dreamwidth less horribly ugly" comm where the designs are all based on the typical low-contrast dark squared-off look of mobile apps, which look really ugly (and unusable) to me. So I think it's more that ugliness, like beauty, is typically in not just the eye but the expectations of the beholder.

[aurumcalendula]

Exactly!

[sciatrix]

All of that aside, DW really should have better mobile site functionality out of the box. That doesn't mean it needs an app--neither MeFi nor the AO3 have bothered, for example, and their userbases don't mind about it. But both of them have default approaches that render them easy to read and use on mobile (as long as you aren't reading a MeFi megathread, which is slow as hell), and that makes them easier to participate in when I'm moving back and forth. I know one person who does all her (novel-length) fic writing on mobile, and I know a lot of people who really need the ability to engage in communications on mobile easily.

I can have a pretty decent DW experience and participation on mobile but only because I have found someone else's patch that allows me to create a mobile-friendly theme for myself which responds well to very narrow window sizes. And I don't have any idea how to customize it in a pleasant-on-the-eyes color scheme, so I've kept the monochrome preferred by the original theme customizer. It's not horribly ugly to me, but it is very dull, and I see the same three or four mobile-friendly themes an awful lot these days.

Mobile accessibility is an accessibility issue, and whether or not it's caused by a funding pinch--and I agree with you, I don't see evidence to that effect--it is a serious hindrance to many people trying to use it who are using the Internet in a very common way. It's not necessarily a design interface issue, it's about responding well to typical mobile-use window sizes. And DW, out of the box, just does not do that effectively or well. Neither do many of the customized themes many people use.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

And on further investigation, I was half-wrong. Some of the communities I visit have really crappy themes that don't scale well.

The user homepage however is unusable without significant pinch-and-zoom though. Here's a screenshot:

https://imgur.com/a/sgRhLpQ

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Dreamwidth didn't have image hosting for years. Then for years, the primary supported method of getting images up to Dreamwidth was email and not a web-based uploader. The current image-hosting tools finally have dynamic resizing but not tagging or folders from what I can see.

These are all features that were necessary to do my Sims2 stories, which were active before Dreamwidth fork.

Of course they are different examples of monetary pinches affecting quality of service, which is why I listed in them in separate paragraphs and described them differently. Dreamwidth is not "fine" when you look at things like accessibility (not just on mobile but also on smaller laptop screen), and the glacially slow pace for their adoption of improvements to usability, some of which could be accomplished with trivial modifications to the light theme, making a link to the option universally available to visitors who are not logged in, and consistent display of those links for people who are logged in.

[sciatrix]

I wanted to come back to this because I think this really is key to the conversation about moderation and paid labor: the moderation stuff is because there is a lot of discussion, much of it emotionally charged, and it's hard to scale that up even just by adding new staff because everyone has to be highly aware of what is happening and how to recognize the community cues that discussion is about to go south and what long-running debates are going to need to be nipped in the bud immediately.

Server costs and hosting costs--keeping the lights running--and dev issues aren't even remotely a big chunk of MeFi's overhead--IIRC 80% of the budget is staff salaries, and effectively all of the staff are full-time or part-time moderators. As far as I'm aware, that makes MeFi unique on the internet. In the context of a broader discussion about community curation and how the structures of internet sites facilitate or hinder functional communities, that's an interesting piece of the puzzle that I'm not sure how to fit together quite yet.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Good points. My suggestion is that this isn't easy, they've admitted problems meeting the moderation needs, and it seems like every month there's a thread blow-up that results in multiple contributors leaving. And Metafilter culture has its own flavors of toxicity on some subjects where people have just given up contributing. It's not a place where I feel comfortable putting my own links on a variety of topics because of a history of gaslighting, derails, bad-faith misreading, and need to do 101 clarifications.

And as I said earlier, this coming from a place of deep frustration having been an early adopter, sometimes moderator, and researcher in online communities for nearly 30 years now. My assessment of what the major commercial spaces are doing right now is pretty dismal. I'm looking at what's available and how we're forced to choose between actively evil, or less evil but still unwelcoming in various ways. And I participate on less-evil spaces like Metafilter (difficult culture and moderation) and Dreamwidth (accessibility) but I'm kind of reluctant to recommend them generally. I've become deeply skeptical that mass social media is good, so I'm more and more interested in looking at tools to build local and focused communities that can develop their own norms.

[sciatrix]

Yeah, absolutely. I think another part of that puzzle is that there is no such thing as a social space that is universally welcoming. Everyone needs spaces at different times that have varying subsets of people with particular experiences in them, including spaces that are not welcoming of certain other people or mindsets. Mass social media needs to acknowledge that as well as the notion that no space can be all things to all people, and that trying to do so only serves to blind moderation to the unstated unwelcoming aspects of the space and to muddy the waters for people who are trying to work out who is and is not welcome.

And of course one of those things that complicates that discussion is that openly stating "these people are not welcome here" is something that a number of people who are not in the group of [these people] will immediately hear as unsafe and unwelcoming, in part because they are used to looking at more subtle gateposts of welcome.

I think that social media is just a different form of all the perils that come with socialization and humans trying to achieve social interaction in any format, and I'm not sure I am willing to say that online media is inherently worse or better than offline media in that respect. It's just easier for us to see and process because it's compartmentalized into the Internet, and therefore lives in the little electronic boxes we use to access that Internet. Which is not the case for other forms of textual media that may interact with us at any time, whether or not we're actively attempting to do so (e.g. Muzak, text that appears in visual backgrounds from advertising, graffiti on city walls, even modes of dress and the very tone of voice and language in which people are speaking.)

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Yes, I agree.

[kore]

(I haven't been aware of DW's funding issues?)

That's because there aren't any, and it's IMHO really inaccurate to suggest that DW is teetering on the edge like MeFi is (and I'm being polite with "inaccurate"). DW is fine. Are there issues with how quickly if at all some features are getting added, sure. That is not at all the same thing.