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

[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

Re: Not punishing, just learning

[sciatrix]

You're saying that like I'm not one of those people who thinks by talking. ;P

[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?

[sciatrix]

I'll give you mine--I put some of that under my access, but more the stuff where I'm sitting here going "mmmmm if someone puts this together with my professional ID and googles me, do I want them finding it without me giving them access?" I like reading boring personal stuff, but I also like not pushing people's boundaries, so...*flail*