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silveradeptFederation is definitely a topic trending across many discussions of "Where do we go from here?" in relation to Tumblr blowing up. 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.
While there are plenty of possible solutions to this problem that exist in federation (mirroring yourself from the start to multiple places, for example, so that if your preferred place poofs, you can pick back up immediately in a new space), there's a certain advantage that comes with having a singular space associated with a company or a non-profit that can pay people to mind the store and make sure it stays up, and to have responsible people craft policies about what to do if the company or its space folds up completely. (And to potentially provide tools for someone to export their content and re-stand themselves up in another place that has the same format or runs the same code, if they're being ethical people.)
Whatsciatrix hits on, though, is that part of the ability to know whether someone is going to be a trustworthy and committed moderator is by watching them make decisions about moderation and administration and seeing whether their ethics and ways of handling the problem are in accord with you. And to take a poke around their space and see if it's the kind of space that's favorable to people that you would find terrible. If the only way you can see whether someone's going to be good or terrible is by rolling the die and signing up with them, they're not going to attract a whole lot of people. Having a Code of Conduct out front is helpful, of course, but sometimes it's in seeing what happens when someone actually is accused of a violation that is most informative to someone about whether a space is going to be a good fit for them.
Time for an example that has basically nothing to do with fandom, but is absolutely illustrative of how this sort of thing happens.
Understand that librarianship as a profession, much like teaching, is primarily composed of white cis women. (This is not accidental, as white women have been the face of "civilizing" populations for a very long while, and libraries have often been used as a vehicle for that same "civilization.".) What that means in practicality, though, is that when confronted by the possibility that something happened was profoundly and flagratly racist, there's a lot of behaviors on display that aren't "condemn it flatly and in no uncertain terms." They probably fall under the rubric of White Fragility, for the most part, becuase it's not like White people have to experience the entirety of their lives having to consciously and subconsciously understand how being White changes people's relationships to and perceptions of them.
Dr. April Hathcock, at the 2019 ALA Midwinter meeting, had to suffer through a tirade from another ALA Councillor about herself during a public event. After what happened, though, the Forum moved on, as if it couldn't figure out what to do with the attack when it came so openly. From what fragments I also have in other context, in addition to what's mentioned in the post, there were some attempts afterward to reopen the issue and discuss what happened much more frankly, as more important business to the Council than the planned agenda, but those attempts did not succeed, much to the aggravation of the people trying to start a necessary conversation.
What the Council actually did (and has done, so far) is release an anodyne statement that said the person responsible for the attack has resigned, and that the ALA is committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion. Without mention of the potential intimidation of Dr. Hathcock detailed in the blog post, and without acknowledgeing their own inability to even start the conversation in a forum at the request of several of the people present who were Councillors and interested persons. If they do everything in the statement about making the Code more effective, and trying to make the conference more safe, and engage in more training, and working with OLDOS, they're...making the conference better, sure, but we also want to see that work go outward.
Because there were plenty of other incidents that happened at that conference, based on the accounts of others on social media, many of which didn't rise to the level of a Councillor going on a tirade against someone, but that are definitely part of the same system.
(I'm not sure I would have risen to the occasion myself, because I would probably have been too shocked by the complete breach of decorum I was witnessing to actually do anything about it. White Fragility, I has it, too, lest anyone get the impression that I'm some sort of Superman.)
How much trust do you think librarians of color have right now about the ability of the ALA to look out for them, keep them safe, and help them in their librarian careers? There's been a lot of hue and cry about wondering where the not-white librarians are, and how should the profession change to make itself more welcoming? And yet, when presented with an opportunity to prove that not only have they been soliciting improvements from the people that know best, they're actually going to do what was suggested hard at them, ALA (and a lot of the members of the profession) went splat. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of librarians of color decided this isn't the profession for them after all, based on this incident (and probably several other aggressions, micro and otherwise, that their organizations have committed against them in this vein). And several others who might be considering the profession might have decided it's not for them, either.
This is what having public policies and having public record of what your decision-making is good for -- it helps people decide whether you're a good fit for them. And that works for national professional organizations, monolithic services like Tumblr, and federated instances, too. If you're trusting someone with your data, your presence, or being the representation of your profession to the people outside of that profession, you want to choose wisely. Which means you have to see how someone acts as well as what they say.
Federation has a lot of advantages in terms of robustness, and will hopefully be working things out in terms of ease of movement, should it become necessary, but it's really coming back to two major questions, especially for fandom, which dashes headlong into the transgressive as it performs its transformative works.
Federation lowers the barriers of question two by providing some of the pieces ready for someone to grab on to, but they don't eliminate them entirely. Plus, there are a lot of people who don't want to be sysadmins. They want to be fans and post their stuff and not have to think about the underlying technical magic that makees it all work. So, it really becomes about question one.
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. While there are plenty of possible solutions to this problem that exist in federation (mirroring yourself from the start to multiple places, for example, so that if your preferred place poofs, you can pick back up immediately in a new space), there's a certain advantage that comes with having a singular space associated with a company or a non-profit that can pay people to mind the store and make sure it stays up, and to have responsible people craft policies about what to do if the company or its space folds up completely. (And to potentially provide tools for someone to export their content and re-stand themselves up in another place that has the same format or runs the same code, if they're being ethical people.)
What
sciatrix hits on, though, is that part of the ability to know whether someone is going to be a trustworthy and committed moderator is by watching them make decisions about moderation and administration and seeing whether their ethics and ways of handling the problem are in accord with you. And to take a poke around their space and see if it's the kind of space that's favorable to people that you would find terrible. If the only way you can see whether someone's going to be good or terrible is by rolling the die and signing up with them, they're not going to attract a whole lot of people. Having a Code of Conduct out front is helpful, of course, but sometimes it's in seeing what happens when someone actually is accused of a violation that is most informative to someone about whether a space is going to be a good fit for them.Time for an example that has basically nothing to do with fandom, but is absolutely illustrative of how this sort of thing happens.
Understand that librarianship as a profession, much like teaching, is primarily composed of white cis women. (This is not accidental, as white women have been the face of "civilizing" populations for a very long while, and libraries have often been used as a vehicle for that same "civilization.".) What that means in practicality, though, is that when confronted by the possibility that something happened was profoundly and flagratly racist, there's a lot of behaviors on display that aren't "condemn it flatly and in no uncertain terms." They probably fall under the rubric of White Fragility, for the most part, becuase it's not like White people have to experience the entirety of their lives having to consciously and subconsciously understand how being White changes people's relationships to and perceptions of them.
Dr. April Hathcock, at the 2019 ALA Midwinter meeting, had to suffer through a tirade from another ALA Councillor about herself during a public event. After what happened, though, the Forum moved on, as if it couldn't figure out what to do with the attack when it came so openly. From what fragments I also have in other context, in addition to what's mentioned in the post, there were some attempts afterward to reopen the issue and discuss what happened much more frankly, as more important business to the Council than the planned agenda, but those attempts did not succeed, much to the aggravation of the people trying to start a necessary conversation.
What the Council actually did (and has done, so far) is release an anodyne statement that said the person responsible for the attack has resigned, and that the ALA is committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion. Without mention of the potential intimidation of Dr. Hathcock detailed in the blog post, and without acknowledgeing their own inability to even start the conversation in a forum at the request of several of the people present who were Councillors and interested persons. If they do everything in the statement about making the Code more effective, and trying to make the conference more safe, and engage in more training, and working with OLDOS, they're...making the conference better, sure, but we also want to see that work go outward.
Because there were plenty of other incidents that happened at that conference, based on the accounts of others on social media, many of which didn't rise to the level of a Councillor going on a tirade against someone, but that are definitely part of the same system.
(I'm not sure I would have risen to the occasion myself, because I would probably have been too shocked by the complete breach of decorum I was witnessing to actually do anything about it. White Fragility, I has it, too, lest anyone get the impression that I'm some sort of Superman.)
How much trust do you think librarians of color have right now about the ability of the ALA to look out for them, keep them safe, and help them in their librarian careers? There's been a lot of hue and cry about wondering where the not-white librarians are, and how should the profession change to make itself more welcoming? And yet, when presented with an opportunity to prove that not only have they been soliciting improvements from the people that know best, they're actually going to do what was suggested hard at them, ALA (and a lot of the members of the profession) went splat. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of librarians of color decided this isn't the profession for them after all, based on this incident (and probably several other aggressions, micro and otherwise, that their organizations have committed against them in this vein). And several others who might be considering the profession might have decided it's not for them, either.
This is what having public policies and having public record of what your decision-making is good for -- it helps people decide whether you're a good fit for them. And that works for national professional organizations, monolithic services like Tumblr, and federated instances, too. If you're trusting someone with your data, your presence, or being the representation of your profession to the people outside of that profession, you want to choose wisely. Which means you have to see how someone acts as well as what they say.
Federation has a lot of advantages in terms of robustness, and will hopefully be working things out in terms of ease of movement, should it become necessary, but it's really coming back to two major questions, especially for fandom, which dashes headlong into the transgressive as it performs its transformative works.
- If I subscribe to a service, do I trust the people running the service to make decisions that are good for both the service and the people using it?
- This is emphatically not "Are the service administrators and moderators ideologically aligned with me?", although for some people's decision-making process, it can be, and can even be their primary criterion.
- If I don't trust the people running a service to make good decisions for the service, do I have the technical knowledge and skill, financial ability, and desire to create and maintain a service of my own?
Federation lowers the barriers of question two by providing some of the pieces ready for someone to grab on to, but they don't eliminate them entirely. Plus, there are a lot of people who don't want to be sysadmins. They want to be fans and post their stuff and not have to think about the underlying technical magic that makees it all work. So, it really becomes about question one.
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.)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 05:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 07:37 am (UTC)Questions about who pays for servers get total handwavium responses. The answers to just about everything seem to pretty much be ... oh that wouldn't cause problems because ... well it won't and you just have to trust a bunch of strangers individually managing lots of fiefdoms however they want to, but in such a way that it won't.
Well ...
Date: 2019-02-05 08:26 am (UTC)But you can find the instructions in a library or online. Tell people what you're going to do. Then do it. Don't be a dick. If you make a mistake, apologize and fix it as best you can. Lather, rinse, repeat. After a while, people who see you doing that will trust you.
Iv'e built up a lot of trust with my audience because they see me handled very fraught topics in my writing, and I do my best to post warnings so readers can make informed choices. I do my homework. And people will follow me into extremely squicky areas because they trust me to deliver a payoff worth the emotional investment and not fuck them over just because I could.
The same rules apply to building any other venue. Cyberspace is like the Jedi Tree, it only contains what we bring into it. If you do good and let people see you doing it, if you share the power of creation rather than forcing yourself on people, it turns into something great. But you have to do the work.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 03:08 pm (UTC)On both an organizational and personal level, it's important to be able to "read the room" and make sure you understand the situation. That's particularly important when people are upset. Comedians who lack empathy and 2009-era LiveJournal both have/had that problem. If you don't understand why people are upset when you believe you are doing the right thing, and try to make it their fault, you may lose what you thought was your audience.
Both individuals and organizations who have lost the trust of their audience get discussed extensively and unflatteringly on the whisper network. Under various circumstances.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 03:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 03:54 pm (UTC)Re: Well ...
Date: 2019-02-05 03:57 pm (UTC)That said, it wouldn't be hard at all for me to read this explanation and decide that it's condescension instead, with the way that you make the process of trust sounds easy and formulaic to follow, when it's humans that are being dealt with. And of I feel condescension from it, that makes me less likely to trust you and more likely to go somewhere else, where I don't have to endure being talked to like in a child. And in federation, that perception might mean I block your entire instance, so nobody on mine gets to see you or yours.
That could be a decision that makes me untrusted by my users, or it might make me more trusted by sending away someone they didn't want to see anyway. It depends on the people.
It is work, but it's almost never a matter of following a formula or reading a wikihow and believing you know everything.
I suspect most fans don't want to have to keep going from place to place where the administrators and moderators keep having to learn how to moderate fans over and over again.
I appreciate the comment, but I think you're wide of the point of the post.