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

[melannen]

I keep thinking of the Fediverse as being basically the days after Strikethrough but before Tumblr, where there were:

a) people on LJ who didn't care and didn't want to leave;
b) people on DW who didn't like LJ's modding (and many of them also hated JF's modding and didn't think GJ's was reliable and objected to IJ's choices and wanted a site that was more up-to-date than DJ)
c) people on JF who didn't like LJ's modding (and many of them also didn't trust DW's modding and didn't think GJ's was reliable and objected to IJ's choices and wanted a site that was more up-to-date than DJ)
d) people on IJ and GJ and DJ because take your pick of the above.

Those were all, pretty much, instances of the open-source LJ software, in exactly the way the fediverse uses the term. And there were a lot of high hopes for awhile that this might actually become a fully distributed system where you could be on whichever instance you wanted and still be part of one big community. And indeed, between crossposting clients, and openID, and RSS feeds, which were all getting better all the time, you could mostly still read and interact with people on other sites, except when for some reason you couldn't, or when somebody had locked their content down to just the one instance, or as the mods of the smaller instances got tired of bothering and stopped maintaining the sites and stuff started breaking on them.

(And there are still a few people who do that kind of federation between LJ/DW/Twitter/Tumblr with the same sorts of tools we used in 2010 - rss, ittt, crossposting clients, etc.)

Fediverse makes the crossposting/reading/interacting a lot more seamless than it was back then, and it's designed from the ground up to work as interlocking intances instead being kludged together like the distributed LJ system was. But it still has the problem that instances can talk to each other just fine until for some reason someone decides to stop talking to someone else. And it still has the social problems around different sites with different mod policies and people not trusting the mods on other sites.

And frankly, the main reason people stopped bothering to keep trying to maintain the smaller interlocking LJ instances is that it was just easier to all be on one site that was proven to be stable and to have reasonably reliable modding, and stop having to mess with it. And I don't want to go back either...

[sylvaine]

This is a good point.

Honestly my biggest current problem with this whole decentralised fandom thing is whenever I try to read up on it my eyes cross over. It's like my brain goes "no, too hard!" and then refuses to interpret any further data input.

Anyway I'm sticking to Dreamwidth for the time being; I'm perfectly happy here.

[siderea]

Iiiiiiii have feels and thoughts about this issue, of a OH AND FOR ANOTHER THING/YOU HAVE NO IDEA sort. Would you mind my using this post as a point of departure for a post of my own, and quoting extensively?

[sciatrix]

No, go ahead!

[sciatrix]

Mmmmmmmmmmhm. I sometimes think that especially the kind of Linux-friendly no-one's-gonna-control-me decentralization-is-the-way-to-go types underweight the costs of learning all of the poorly documented home-made tools that everyone pays, because those sorts of folks a) are usually experts in the platform types and generally coding specialists of some stripe, so maintaining this expertise is literally part of their day job and relatively cheap, and b) overweight the costs of centralization relative to the rest of fandom, such that the costs of decentralizing seem a small price to pay, because c) they seem to be less reliant on social networks qua social networks of the variety where the time spent maintaining them is a valuable investment and anything that disrupts those networks can be a heavy price indeed.

I just. There is a very toxic-masculinity flavor of devaluing lasting social connections and the inevitable disruption to those connections that comes with any platform shift of attention that makes me purse my lips and squint.

Disruption for disruption's sake is not a neutral good.

[sciatrix]

Oh god, that TOO. I run Linux, I am very experienced kludging things together, and I'm not taking my own eyes glazing over as a sign of anything but "this gonna require work, and you're tired."

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

Honestly, I kind of like the lack of moderation involved in like tumblr, and I like the fact that although ao3 has solid "customer service" when it comes to reporting harassment/other bad things, all types of content are still allowed and protected. I do like the idea of being able to have control over which federation to join (based on what their policies are and how much you agree with those terms/restrictions or lack thereof), but on the other hand, I'm not big on the idea of admins being recognizable figures or having control over the entire like... system, if that makes sense. It would be like if the CEO of tumblr single-handedly decided to shut down the site one day; theoretically, the host of an instance can just lose interest in the 200 or whatever people depending on it and it'd just die. Whereas larger platforms that aren't federated have more of an administrative body to fall back on.

[melannen]

Yep.

I do think one of the things fediverse does better than what we're comparing it too is that it's *supposed* to be pretty easy to switch servers without disrupting your social connections, but I think that only remains true as long as the different servers are all basically the same, in terms of both tech and moderation. And we see how long that lasted with the LJ instances.

(That the answer to the question of what happens if the software versions on different implentations start to drift apart was "if they aren't running the most recent version nobody should talk to them anyway" didn't make me... optimistic, on how well this will scale if we get to the point where we run out of linux-y types to run all the servers. Not to mention the idea that linux-y types can keep it going without forking all over the place... Being a librarian makes me kind of militant on the topic of "backwards compatibility is a social justice issue!")

[wellthisisnice]

Most fandoms and social communities around here are organized via Facebook and WhatsApp groups, each with their own mods, admins and community rules, so that's kind of... already a thing here... for at least the last 10-15 years. LiveJournal and Tumblr never became popular as fandom spaces, because most of the content in them was and is in English, so although they influenced us, it was mostly secondhand via the few (mostly university students) folks who could at least sort-of read in this language.

Fandoms, like the spanish-speaking ace community, migrated directly from moderated forums into moderated Facebook groups, and dysfunctional (often bigoted) modding has continued to be an issue for as long as there's been online fandoms in spanish. And althought you can join Facebook and WhatsApp groups and just lurk around, by joining them you're forced to give some personal info away, whether your phone number or your real name. Some people have fandom Facebook accounts under fake names, but you can be TOSed at any moment for doing that...

Then again, big social platforms (from FFN to today's social media) tend to be more lenient on TOS enforcement in non-english communities, most likely because they have less people monitoring us. Unless they're photos or illustrations, in which case everyone is equally fucked.

[wolffyluna]

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I'm a bit... hesitant, about federation being the new home of fandom.


I haven't been in fandom long enough to have been around in the days of forums and individual fansites etc. but I have heard of the problems with them: the moderation issues you mentioned, how easy it is for it all to go up in a puff of smoke. And a lot of the pro-federation people don't fully address that.

(Also, a lot of the calls for federation seem to fall into the pattern "We're having a problem with The Thing-- let's do the exact opposite of The Thing! There's no good reason/advantages to The Thing." Like, with tumblr, the centralisation does mean that edicts from on high can screw over a lot of people, and if it wasn't centralised that wouldn't be a problem-- but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are no advantages to centralisation.)

[cimorene]

The concept of making a solution out of federated technologies that could scale for all of fandom, ie the hypothetical 'social network of our own', is definitely supremely uncertain, and is way way way far in the future from where the people working with federation are now. Even if their explorations end up producing a possible solution, it's not one they can see clearly from where they are now.

They might be right that there isn't a way for fandom to create a centralized solution instead, or they might not. There's nothing stopping other people from pursuing the possibility of a centralized solution - or a solution based on anything other than federated network technology. There were people who were talking about non-federated solutions as well in the early conversations around the Tumblrpocalypse, at least; I don't think I've heard anything else about that recently, but maybe some people are still working on it.

But either way, anything that started being planned within the last four months or so is going to be a long way off. I mean, if you look at how long it took AO3 to reach open beta, or how long it took Dreamwidth even, years and years.

[j_quadrifrons]

Thank you for those links, that's the first time I've felt like I actually understand what Fediverse is and what people are suggesting. And, like you, I don't like it, I don't trust it, and it's bound to be a magnet for drama.

("How do you stop people from doing this?" "Well, they won't, because community norms." ahahahahahaha *wipes tear*)

[fairestcat]

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.

This is very much where I'm at. I've seen too many trusts betrayed in fandoms and too many friendship splits with ugly splatter radius to trust my ultimate technical and social power to the same people.

Newer fans especially don't know who to trust based on past interactions. I can all-too-easily envision a situation where PurityBNFAlpha runs an instance, and FanOmega joins that instance and becomes friends with everyone on that instance, and then they do or say something PurityBNFAlpha doesn't like and suddenly they're not just socially cut off, they are literally, physically blocked from interacting with their other friends on that instance. That's way too much power over my fannish experience to hand to one person.

[fairestcat]

Also, I think I know why I think of this kind of federated fandom as distinct from Discord servers, which I've been hanging out on a lot lately. I have conversations on Discord, which I'd be sad to lose access to, but I recognize them as ephemeral to begin with, whereas if I post something publicly it's with a desire for that to be a permanent record.

[amaresu]

I was thinking they sounded a lot like the old mailing lists, but forums work too.

Thing is I have vivid memories of waking up to a mailing list, and thus the fandom, on fire. I remember mailing lists that just disappeared overnight because the mod didn't want to do it anymore. Sometimes you'd get notice, sometimes just one last message from the list explaining things.

I don't really want to go back to obsessively backing up everything I see that I like because it might disappear tomorrow. I know we could all wake up tomorrow and have DW gone, but that's highly unlikely. There's too many people and it's a business for denise and mark. Not something someone may get bored with or annoyed with the userbase, or any of the millions of reasons mailing lists and websites used to disappear.

[sciatrix]

Right? And I've identified why I'm so much more comfortable hanging out here in Denise and Mark's space, or over on MeFi Cortex' space--partly it is that I trust all of them to be good community stewards insofar as that goes, but I also feel safer with actual paid professionals whose job it is to look after the day to day and the server costs and the possibility of Nazis setting up camp and needing to be ejected. Like, I feel safer trusting them to stick around and put the work into the community if they are being paid to do so, and also I feel better about using the space if they are making a good wage and taken care of financially in response to the work they are doing. I have seen the state of open source freeware, and it is invariably the sort of thing built as people have time, fixed and documented slowly, and very, very tragedy of the commons-style kludgeware.

Paying for good work is safer and fairer, because you aren't gambling that someone else will keep wanting to do it for love or for power or for their own interest, while also having to do paid work elsewhere that takes up their full priorities and attention. I would rather find people who are good at this kind of thing, who I trust to continue being good at this kind of thing, and pay them to focus on doing it full time for my own benefit.

[thisweekmod]

Hello! I've linked to this post on today's thisweekmeta issue. :)

[sciatrix]

Thanks for the heads up!

[kara_mckay]

I keep wondering how people meet other people in federated fandom. I admit that I don't keep up with new technology, and I often don't understand how things like this work until I start messing with it myself, so maybe my concerns are completely groundless. It feels to me, though, like you just about need to know people before you can effectively start or you're just another person with a blog of some sort, even if it is a highly portable blog that you own and could, in theory, transplant without losing contacts. Part of why I like DW is that you can find and friend people, even if today is your first day in fandom, with relative ease. I hope this is just one of those things I'm not understanding.

[muccamukk]

I think there's some kind of universal tagging, so you can find people posting about Thing You Like and follow them.

[kore]

Oh boy, I remember when people were crossposting from Twitter, and everyone on LJ HATED it. Just hated it and would not put up with it. Even if you put it behind a cut and tagged it and it was completely avoidable, people still complained voraciously about it. It was one of those things where people just quit doing it because it wasn't worth the vicious sniping you would get.

And there were a lot of high hopes for awhile that this might actually become a fully distributed system where you could be on whichever instance you wanted and still be part of one big community. And indeed, between crossposting clients, and openID, and RSS feeds, which were all getting better all the time, you could mostly still read and interact with people on other sites

Hmmm, I don't personally remember this happening. What I do remember is people keeping comments open on both DW and LJ, but posting to one or the other and crossposting, and the discussions would get split, and then comments got imported, and it was more a question of playing catchup rather than "this person on DW said this in a comment, and this person on LJ is now replying to that," which is my impression of what the goal of the fediverse is. I just don't remember it as working that way at all. I remember people mirroring on IJ, but it was as a backup. Most people I knew used IJ for RP, it wasn't stable enough and not enough people were there for being part of that kind of network.

I do have one (1) person on my DW flist who consistently used ITTT to post from Tumblr mostly to DW, with the result that they had a lot of interaction on Tumblr, and almost none on the DW xposts. When Tumblr went up in flames they went back to mostly posting on DW, and people picked up on that and started commenting more. But from what I could see the perception wasn't so much "Ah, here I can comment on stuff that was originally on Tumblr and keep in touch that way," but more "This is a backup for Tumblr and considered less important than that site." -- Even though the person would respond to comments on the DW posts! I think a lot of people have that perception that if something is a mirror, it's a backup that's not going to get a lot of attention.

What I do see people using ITTT for mostly is notifications across various websites, mostly for PR. But that's as a broadcasting thing.

[kore]

Disruption for disruption's sake is not a neutral good.

I want this on a t-shirt.

[kore]

Being a librarian makes me kind of militant on the topic of "backwards compatibility is a social justice issue!")

BLESS

I'm always reminded of that bit in Stephenson's Command Line where he tries opening an earlier Word document with a later Word program and gets gibberish. Not a good thing!

[kara_mckay]

Yeah, and see, Thing You Like isn't necessarily how I like experiencing fandom, weird as that may sound. Most of the people to whom I'm subscribed on DW are fans of the same things I fan, true, but they're also whole people. I like interacting with whole people, not just an interest, and I like staying in contact with those people regardless of whether they move in different directions from me in fandom. Thing You Like following was part of what I didn't like about Tumblr, and that made it feel impersonal to me; it's also what I don't understand about what people these days seem to want out of their main fan social activity spot in general.

[kore]

Oh, dude. Dude. I have not felt so dumb and non-tech in a conversation in a long time. And I'm not a total tech geek, but I did have my own Geocities pages back in the day! I consider myself fairly comfortable with a lot of backend stuff! And IDK, I am just getting sick of some of the analogies and they just don't compute for me and I really need a better mental working model of what exactly all this means. But I feel like I keep getting "You need to see it in action!" responses.