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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[thisweekmod]

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

[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.

[kore]

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.

Yeah, like Mucca said over in her space, the motto of this is starting to look like "trust the mods" or "it will depend on the goodwill of the mods," and that's....a lot to ask right now of fandom, I feel. For various reasons.

[elf]

A key aspect of the Fediverse that's not being covered well in the discussions: These aren't like "every admin sets up their own DW comm/email list/online forum." It's like, "every admin sets up their own tiny Livejournal clone that can have a readlist that draws from any of the other clone sites."

The hosts have control because they're paying for server space. Because they're (somewhat) liable for the content under their control. In addition to all the tiny-fiefdoms problems, there will be an endless string of, "eep our host graduated, got a serious day job, and decided to stop wasting time (and money) on maintaining the server. Everyone download what you can and find a new place, quick!" And that's if you get warning, and not just "server host stopped posting a couple of months ago, and we tried to log in today and found the namespace is gone."

For the tiny-diverse-fediverse to work, you have to trust the server host.

[olivermoss]

I agree. Fediverse stuff as it stands is very isolating. With small separated subgroups, one person can throw the dynamic from healthy to totally toxic. It also reminds me of the old days when people used coded terms to hide smut, yaoi and rpf. The old 'if you don't know we won't tell you' mentality. That is what I keep running into in Mastodon. It's super gatekeepery and every time there is a gate I wind up on the wrong side of it.

I keep seeing article on where fandom should go next and they all mention Mastodon, but very rarely mention DW. The article talk like Mastodon is THE place for pretty much the sort of content and atmosphere I like but I can never get into an instance where the party is allegedly happening. I've had a lot of bad experiences over there and am not eager to give it another try.

[jadislefeu]

I just keep being like--what happens if people stop being able to afford all these servers everywhere? Or the person hosting burns out on keeping it up? It's relying on so many people to do so much work. Even if you want to assume they all mean well and moderate perfectly and don't go off on power trips or flounce. I modded a discord of several hundred people for a while and it was just a mind-boggling amount of work. For a reward of basically 'people get mad at you for making different decisions than they would have'. And the people running instances will have to own domains, which will make them more easily doxxable by someone who doesn't like their ruleset (because they allow underage or ship the wrong thing in a contentious fandom or etc etc etc).

Muccamukk above said they're going to jump in and try it outt, but honestly I just don't have the mental bandwidth to maintain presences in too many places at once, if I tried to jump into this federated stuff I'd end up having to drop something I use already. I'd already ditched tumblr months ago because I couldn't keep up with both it *and* twitter *and* discord.

[jayeless]

I have found Mastodon very hard to get into. Every guide that I've read always stresses, "Choosing the right instance is the most important part!" and yet… that rather requires you to already be familiar with a number of instances, which you're probably not if you're only just signing up!

It is basically like Twitter, but it's true that your experience is highly dependent on the instance you join (despite how unfriendly this is to new people). Different instances have different rules, so some are swamped by pornbots, others allow Nazis, and then you have some that actually expect their users to be real people who adhere to certain standards of behaviour. Many instances refuse to federate with Nazi/pornbot instances, but then sometimes instances refuse to federate for petty reasons… like just recently one stopped federating with the flagship instance because they felt it was too big and popular. If you were a user on that instance who DOESN'T want everyone on the largest instance to be blocked from your content, now you have to migrate… and while you can migrate your past toots over, I don't think you can bring your followers over with you. So people are reluctant to do that.

I feel like I like the idea of decentralisation and federation in theory, for similar reasons as – way back when – I liked that DW let users crosspost to other LJ-based sites and users of other sites could use OpenID to be granted access and post comments here. Just that the more things are federated, the fewer parallel accounts you'd have to maintain to talk to people – and it's also a nice escape from the advertiser-beholden major platforms of today. And yet, the actual experience of using it hasn't exactly grabbed me. Discovery is really hard, and I still haven't found enough users whose toots I enjoy to keep me coming back reliably. And while decentralisation certainly solves some problems, the moderation issues are definitely a new one being introduced.

[megpie71]

To be honest, to me the fediverse stuff really does sound like people are trying to recreate Usenet over HTTP with more picture content. And the big problem with Usenet, the thing which effectively killed it eventually, was without readily accessible servers reasonably close to you, which served the groups you wanted to keep up with, you couldn't follow those groups.

I can remember the fun of moving from Perth to Canberra, changing ISPs, and having to re-find all my various groups so I could keep up with things (and there were a couple the ISP in Perth carried that the ISP in Canberra didn't... then that ISP in Canberra went under, and I had to change ISPs, and oh goody, can I actually follow any of these groups they have on their list or are they all there for show to say "oh yes, you can subscribe to over a gazillion newsgroups with our service", without actually getting any of the content?). Then the second ISP in Canberra decided they weren't going to carry Usenet any more, because everyone was moving to the World Wide Web, and "you can just get it all from Google Groups anyway, right?".

Which is why I'm a leetle bit wary of the fediverse idea to begin with. Yeah, it's a nice notion. Now let me know whether there's a server anywhere which works in my timezone - preferably in my city, so I can go and talk to the admin in person when problems arise.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I can see that. I also see mastodon servers (gargon finally admitted that "instance" wasn't the best idea) as akin to forums, which required similar cash and technical expertise to set up, with the arguable advantages that people can talk to each other across different servers.

But, a large chunk of my frustration here as someone who's been in the computer-mediated communication world going on three decades now is that everything has failed in different ways. Centralized services either become actively evil (Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google) or run into a serious funding pinch where they struggle maintaining quality of service (Metafilter, Dreamwidth).

So we're stuck between choosing micro-services where administration is possibly untrustworthy, vs. mega-services that are absolutely untrustworthy. At least on mastodon (queer.town possibly moving to lgbt.io), I'm substantially less likely to get dogpiled by terfs and biphobes using search tools.

[silveradept]

It sounds like federation and/or any service that wants to have fans on it needs two important things (which I have noodled on at length about in my own space).

Public documentation of decision-making (in addition to your posted rules, TOSes, and Codes of Conduct).

An easy way for someone to nope out and take all their stuff with them to somewhere else if it turns out that they're not trustworthy enough.

It doesn't seem like federated tools have those things in mind while they're being designed, since they're about trying to get disparate things to talk with each other first and foremost.

I think many of us are looking at it askance because we're not yet seeing the ways in which trust (or its lack) gets designed for and implemented among the humans living there.

Thank you for the post - it was very enlightening to think about.

[momijizukamori]

Yeah, having seen the rise and fall of a number of different sites, I'm kind of like 'we'll talk in two years if you're still around and stable'. Also I get the (possibly incorrect) impression Mastodon is geared for Twitter-style microblogging, which is a format that makes me want to throw my computer out a window before even touching the social side of the blue hellsite.

(and I will admit to being biased towards DW because of the amount of time I've put in as a volunteer dev here)