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(Mirrored on Dreamwidth and Hubzilla)
Fandom is, once again, in flux. Anyone who’s been around for more than a few years knows the signs have been building: deleted accounts and new terms of service, followed by talk of moving elsewhere, fracturing communities over multiple platforms, sometimes breaking communities entirely. It’s a common pattern a lot of us have come to see as an inevitability, just something that happens every five or ten years. But of course there is a cost, archival as well as communal. That chatfic you loved gets deleted. The old homepage of your favorite vidder goes down. Entire fandoms’ discussions disappear forever.
We’ve all been there at least once, Or we’re about to be there, because again: it’s happening with Tumblr. People won’t all leave at once. The demise of LJ was measured in years, not days. But eventually, even if it’s still up, it won’t be what it was. Content will slowly degrade - image hosting, external links, even the posts themselves deleted due to inactivity or changes in management. Link rot, in other words.
So. It’s happening. What can be done about it?
There have been a lot of really good discussions so far. Consensus so far appears to be some combination of the following: the new platform must allow photo/text/video sharing as well as conversations; the new platform must allow NSFW content and have robust filtering; the new platform must be resistant to the kind of profit-driven vicissitudinous behavior most tech companies embrace.
I agree with all of this. I also agree with the problem statement, which I’ve seen repeated again and again, that fandom should be more distributed - that no single (especially not corporate-owned) social network should be the point of failure.
So. Let’s talk about server federation.
The most well-known federated technology right now is probably Mastadon. In simple terms, Mastadon is a Twitter-like social network. However, one huge difference between it and Twitter is federation.
What is federation? Well, once upon a time, the internet was much more distributed. One of the backbones of that distribution was mailing lists - which were email-based. Imagine a world where you can only send emails to other Gmail users! That’s basically how Twitter functions right now. Email, fortunately, is protocol-based; any technology that uses the protocol can send and receive emails. What matters for communication is the <em>protocol</em>, not the website or brand or company or framework. Federated social networks, wikis, and media hosting aims to bring that pattern back.
Under the hood, Mastadon implements protocols like ActivityPub to exchange information. These protocols are standardized so that different Mastadon servers can replicate data, and so that different <em>platforms</em> can communicate and <em>exchange</em> data. What this means in practical terms is that the following scenarios are possible:
- On Mastadon.one, A makes a post. On Mastadon.two, B enters “UserA@Mastadon.one” in the search bar. B then follows A, and can see user A’s posts, even though they are on totally different servers run by completely different people.- On Mastadon.one, A follows UserB@Hubzilla.two. Hubzilla is a totally different, Tumblr-esque platform. But because Hubzilla <em>also</em> implements the ActivityPub protocol, A can see B’s posts in A’s Mastadon feed.- A is on Mastadon.one. On Mastadon.one, NSFW content is required to be flagged. B is on Mastadon.two. There are no content controls on Mastadon.two. Despite very different priorities and values, A can still follow B and vice versa, while remaining within their own communities.
This sort of setup is also fairly future-proofed: what matters is the protocol. You don’t have to worry about someone’s hobby framework going under, for example. Hubzilla takes this idea one step further and implements what they call “nomadic identity”. The basic idea is that you can log into different Hubzilla servers with the same credentials, and each account is equivalent, so even if your original account dies, your identity persists on all other servers.
Federation would solve a lot of fandom’s current problems. For starters, there is a huge variety of roll-your-own federated services out there. There’s Peertube, which is focused on video hosting; Pixelfed, focused on image hosting; Mastadon and other microblogging frameworks; Friendica and Osana, which are focused on social networking; Hubzilla, which is focused on all-purpose social networking, file storage, and wiki management; and Nextcloud, which is focused on file storage. This network of frameworks is incredibly powerful, and some of them are very easy to set up. I’ve run a Nextcloud instance for several years. It has my calendar, my files, a chat platform, an audio streamer, a Trello-esque project management app, and an e-reader. Hubzilla can be used as a wiki, a forum, a personal blog, a Reddit-esque community, or some unholy combination of all of the above. All of these platforms can communicate within separate instances of the same framework (Nextcloud to Nextcloud, or Friendica to Friendica), and many can communicate between frameworks too.
So: there are frameworks to do basically every fannish activity you could imagine, and a few of them even encompass Tumblr’s functionality. But also, because these frameworks were built by privacy-focused nerds, there are often a LOT of privacy and filtering controls. The idea behind federated communities is partially that even groups of decent people aren’t always going to get along, and a group of 100k+ people is likely to be incredibly hard to manage and no longer a true community. Federation gives you the ability to exist in online communities without being completely isolated from one another. Mastadon takes this idea so far that it shows health as green/yellow/red, with larger instances being less healthy.
Federation allows for data replication, so that data’s more resistant to takedowns. All of the above frameworks are open source, which means that fandom-specific extensions can be built without having to build the whole framework. Fandom has tons of technologically capable people who’d be capable of installing instances, and tons of data science people who could help ensure they don’t disappear.
I would strongly suggest everyone look at federated frameworks, maybe play with getting them set up if you already have a server. This would be a brilliant and relatively quick way to get people onto independent platforms. Corporations’ websites are often nicer, because they pay people to make them look shiny and new. Those salaries come from you, come from us. Ad revenue, subscription, angel investment, it doesn’t matter; eventually, some C-suite douche will look at all our wonderful weirdness and ask why they can’t pull in influencers instead. We know we need to get out ahead of that garbage; that’s why AO3 exists. My proposal is we build on that by joining the ranks of people who know decentralization is the answer tonn passionate, fractious communities staying together. It’s time for fandom to join the fediverse.
A few other things about federation:
- Because federated networks are decentralized, they are resistant to both actual censorship and people losing their hub host because of RL or money stuff. Hubzilla has robust channel data import features as well as the “nomadic identity” concept mentioned above. Fandom would need to work a bit at data backup strategies and stuff like that, but as long as you have a login on a single Hubzilla server somewhere, you have a login on other servers too. That’s a huge, huge thing!
- With federation, we no longer have to fight over whether microblogging or video-based stuff or longform blogging is better. Hubzilla alone has microblogging, longform blogging, wikis, chats, and web pages. This has huge implications for fandom - we can stay distributed and off in our own corners, but we’re also not silo’d.
- Federation could be fandom-specific, ship-specific, or even your-ship-opinion specific. Most frameworks have really advanced privacy controls; you can (and should, in the case of shit like pedos and neo-nazis) ban whole servers, but you can also configure privacy groups down to individual users, and you can filter posts from users you’re connected to. This means a vastly more curated experience than is possible on twitter OR tumblr right now
- Because federated social networks are modern applications, they can host external files. This means it’s possible to embed stuff from YouTube, Vimeo, Imgur, etc. However, Hubzilla also has INTERNAL file storage, so if you want to run a Hubzilla exclusively to be your fanart archive? YOU CAN.
Federation frees us from about 90% of the worry we currently have. It gives us options and flexibility. It means that if fandom fundraising or organization for social networking is needed, that can go towards stuff like long-term archiving, backups, and extensions, rather than the bare bones of a social networking site. If you’re curious or want to give an instance a test drive, message me for mine. Or spin up your own! Times are changing, and we can drive that change if we choose to.
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