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]

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.

[sciatrix]

<3