Federation is definitely a topic trending across many discussions of "Where do we go from here?" in relation to Tumblr blowing up. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
muccamukk
got the ball rolling with some questions about how it's supposed to work, and some of the common scenarios that fandom-on-federation might run into and how those are supposed to get managed. (I have waded into some of the discussions on that post with my own limited understanding, and I'm not sure if I did it well or clumsily.) There's a lot of really useful discussion of both the questions and federation in general going on there, so if you like wading through deep comment threads, enjoy!
Afterwards,sciatrix zoomed in on one specific possible dealbreaker about federation - trust in the moderators and administrators of your chosen home. Because there's still the very real possibility that, unless you're running your own server/instance with your money and technical know-how behind it (which is a fucking huge barrier to participation in a lot of things), the person who is in charge of your space might make decisions that you find rephrehensiblie, or might up and disappear because they got bored or moved on with their life or they collected an evil ex and needed to disappear.
( Going forth into the long-windyness now. )
The more I learn about fandom, though, the more I learn that trust is where a lot of fandom's scars are, both individually and collectively. Same as with marginalized communities interacting with the majority. A lot of people get into fandom because they're not seeing themselves in the stuff the majority puts out, and they want to push back against that erasure in whatever small way they can. They already don't trust that people in power are going to use it responsibly (because by and large, they haven't), and they sometimes can't even trust the people around them not to do something terrible or allow something terrible to happen to them. In that kind of environment, how can anyone flourish?
I guess that's what it comes down to, now that I've spent a lot of words on the topic. Trust mechanisms have to be exposed and made public such that people can get a sense of what they're joining. On the obverse of that, though, there has to be an easy mechanism for noping out and taking your stuff with you in case that trust is betrayed. Any service that can manage to do both of those things well, federated or not, is likely to get popular with fans and fandom and seem like a good place to hang out. (And then can, hopefully, build in the technical tools that fans will need to express themselves that aren't already present.)
muccamukk got the ball rolling with some questions about how it's supposed to work, and some of the common scenarios that fandom-on-federation might run into and how those are supposed to get managed. (I have waded into some of the discussions on that post with my own limited understanding, and I'm not sure if I did it well or clumsily.) There's a lot of really useful discussion of both the questions and federation in general going on there, so if you like wading through deep comment threads, enjoy!
Afterwards,
sciatrix zoomed in on one specific possible dealbreaker about federation - trust in the moderators and administrators of your chosen home. Because there's still the very real possibility that, unless you're running your own server/instance with your money and technical know-how behind it (which is a fucking huge barrier to participation in a lot of things), the person who is in charge of your space might make decisions that you find rephrehensiblie, or might up and disappear because they got bored or moved on with their life or they collected an evil ex and needed to disappear. ( Going forth into the long-windyness now. )
The more I learn about fandom, though, the more I learn that trust is where a lot of fandom's scars are, both individually and collectively. Same as with marginalized communities interacting with the majority. A lot of people get into fandom because they're not seeing themselves in the stuff the majority puts out, and they want to push back against that erasure in whatever small way they can. They already don't trust that people in power are going to use it responsibly (because by and large, they haven't), and they sometimes can't even trust the people around them not to do something terrible or allow something terrible to happen to them. In that kind of environment, how can anyone flourish?
I guess that's what it comes down to, now that I've spent a lot of words on the topic. Trust mechanisms have to be exposed and made public such that people can get a sense of what they're joining. On the obverse of that, though, there has to be an easy mechanism for noping out and taking your stuff with you in case that trust is betrayed. Any service that can manage to do both of those things well, federated or not, is likely to get popular with fans and fandom and seem like a good place to hang out. (And then can, hopefully, build in the technical tools that fans will need to express themselves that aren't already present.)
