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]

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