federated fandom

[arduinna]

I'd seen a few posts about this whole federated fandom idea and thought it sounded interesting, if weird, and I was looking forward to seeing what shook out when other folks got further along and things were ready for using.

I actually told people, straight up, that I wasn't going to do any poking at it; this is too techy for me, I need a finished product, wtf is an instance, anyway.

Then I signed up for Mastodon (a twitter-like microblogging system), which I'd at least heard of, but the default interface was terrible for me and drove me right off. So then I clicked a link in cesperanza's comments and signed up for what seems to be the current fannish-testing-ground on Hubzilla, fandom.stopthatimp.net.

... Seriously, I had NO INTENTION. But here I've been for the last few days, and I gotta say, I'm pulling for Hubzilla to be the next big thing. I'll leave the technical stuff to other people, and just tell you why I'm liking the system as a user.

• Customize your view
  
  • You can set your stream to sort in three different ways:
    
    • by "Commented date", which bundles posts and comments together and pops any post that's been interacted with to the top of your stream;
      
    • by "Posted date", which bundles posts and comments together and leaves things in chronological order by post (newest at top), regardless of if someone adds a comment;
      
    • or by "Date Unthreaded", which gives you a chronological order of everything without bundling comments to their posts. In this view, everything has a "view in context" link on it so you can click through to see what it's connected to if it looks interesting.
    
    
  • You can also set your homepage and stream posts to show with comments expanded in place (this is the default), or toggle the "blog style" layout where comments are hidden and you have to click through to see them.
    
    • Sorting by "Date unthreaded" ignores "blog style" layout and just gives you a raw stream of everything individually as it gets posted.
  
  
• Write any length post you want
  
  • At least, so far I haven't seen any indication that there's a character limit on posts, or on comments for that matter.
  
  
• Privacy settings
  
  • You pick the type of blog you want, and the system applies automatic privacy settings for that level of blog
    
    • You can choose "Social - Federated" to have your posts show up on other services (if fandom's going federated, this is probably the one you want)
      
    • You can choose "Social - Mostly Public" which is roughly the equivalent of a public blog on LJ/DW/Tumblr, where anyone can go see it
      
    • Or you can choose to lock it down further, to access-list-only but people can see that you exist in the directory ("Social - Restricted"), or to access-list only and not visible in the directory ("Social - Private").
    
    
  • You can install an "Affinity Tool" that gives you a slider that you can apply to each of your connections, giving them a general closeness level to you. When you post something, you pick the general affinity level that it should go out to.
    
  • You can install a "Privacy Groups" app that lets you create specific groups of people, like DW's access & subscription filters. This gives you total control over who's seeing your posts, and whose posts you see, much more precisely than the Affinity slider.
    
  • When making a post, you can also set an on-the-fly custom privacy setting, where you pick right then who can see a particular post, without having to create a new Privacy Group. You can choose as many people as you want here.
    
    • This also lets you you pick people to exclude from seeing your post on an on-the-fly basis, so if you're doing something like planning a birthday surprise for one person in your Friends group, you'd go to the custom setting, pick "Show Friends", and also pick "Don't Show [birthday person]". Again, you can pick as many people as you want to either Show or Don't Show.
    
    
  • Lots of other stuff: you have individual control over all kinds of things for each of your connections, including whether people can administer your channel, upload or edit files/photos to your channel, post on your channel (like posting on someone's wall on Facebook), etc. The system sets defaults based on the kind of channel you create (which honestly will be just fine for most people most of the time!), but within that there's a lot of granularity if you want it.
  
  
• Image galleries
  
  • There are galleries for images! You can upload photos and arrange them however you want!
    
    • The amount of storage available will probably vary depending on what server you're on, but the capability is there.
  
  
• Reblogging/sharing
  
  • You can reblog/share almost anything, including individual comments to any post. !! It doesn't seem to be possible to reblog the commentary someone else has added to a post, but I might just be missing something so far. If you hit Share on a shared post, it shares the original post. There's a clear description of who wrote the original and a link to view the original, so it's easy to see the conversation.
    
    • On the one hand, you lose the fun of reblogs that go off in their own direction with great commentary. On the other hand, you can leave actual comments, so the converstaion can happen in one place, without people only being able to see one small thread of it.
  
  
• Cut tags/read more tags
  
  • You can do a single level of cut tag - I haven't found a way to nest them, or to have more than one on a post yet. But it's really easy to do the one level. You put the informational text you want people to see above the cut between [summary] and [/summary] tags, and that text will show up as regular text with a link below to "View article".
    
    • So I would write the above like this: [summary]You put the informational text you want people to see above the cut between (summary) and (/summary) tags, and that text will show up as regular text with a link below to "View article" [/summary]
  
  
• Calendar
  
  • It comes with a calendar - actually, two calendars. I'm poking at this with a few other people, and it has some huge possibilities. Like, say, a fest forum that puts its dates up in its events calendar for its members to see and copy to their own calendars if they want more direct reminders.

And so forth. It's a sort of composite of LJ/DW, Facebook, and Tumblr, with solid default settings and hugely customizable individual settings if you like to be that granular. If you like journal-based fandom, it's going to be a pretty painless shift.

Which is not to say it's ready for fandom to shift over whole-hog; it still needs some hammering out, and fandom is going to want a lot more themes, and variations within the themes themselves, and how-tos on how to do everything.

But it has a lot of promise, and you really can talk effortlessly with people on some other systems (like Mastodon). You really can just pick up stakes and move to a different Hubzilla server ("instance") without losing your contacts. You can't track a tag per se like on tumblr, but you can search for something and see posts that mention it, whether in the body or the tags.

I'm really, really liking this, is what I'm saying. :)

You can find me on Hubzilla at https://fandom.stopthatimp.net/channel/arduinna :)

Also on Mastodon at https://fandom.ink/@arduinna, although I'm not using that one at the moment.

Comments

[dorinda]

This sounds super promising! And I suspect that even I might be able to use it. :D

(I mean, probably not right now. But once more people doing hammering-things have hammered more out, and once I feel more confident, etc. I'm not an early adopter, by nature.)

(Just in case anybody worries, I'll still be here on DW, too. I stopped xposting on LJ primarily because of its monetary and political situation, not because I have any objection to existing in two places.)

[arduinna]

You will totally be able to use it!

And yeah, I don't want people to vanish off DW; I really love it here. But I would be happier with some redudancy built into the system, and I gotta say, I am really digging the whole calendar idea. We're still trying to figure out how it could be used for something like a broader fandom calendar, but even if it's just something like mods setting up a calendar for their fest with all the various dates, in time-zone-adjustable times, that people can copy over to their own calendars and have *right there* - man, that would be amazing. Or, like, the upcoming I-Man watch - those dates could be copied directly to people's own calendars.

Anyway. I am excite! *beams*

[meri_oddities]

I did the same thing. First picked up fandom.ink, but I didn't really know anyone there and wasn't crazy about the interface. I followed that same link and found I liked hubzilla better. I also felt it was easier to use without instructions. I plan to poke around more. But it's really promising.

Are you going to Escapade? I mentioned this to Jenn, and the possibility of a panel, but I don't know anything about it really. I'd like to do something to tell people about this.

[nestra]

I'd love to attend a wildcard or ad hoc panel about this.

[arduinna]

👍

[meri_oddities]

I don't know enough about it to really do a panel. I've only been there a few days. And there is a lot of info to absorb. I would need to find someone who knows more than I do.

[arduinna]

Right? I was surprised how fast I adapted to it, and I really like how smoothly it all works. And if fandom is spread out over a zillion servers/hubs/instances/whatever, one of them going down won't even be a ripple; the others can absorb the refugees without a blink. (I still don't entirely have a grip on that, but I have faith in fandom to pull it off *g*)

I'm not going to Escapade, sadly, but I think this would make for a great panel!

[meri_oddities]

It would. But alas, I don't know enough to do it by myself.

There is just so much information and it would be great to have it distilled down for users.

[princessofgeeks]

Thanks for the heads up!

[kass]

This sounds fascinating. I'm not going to be an early adopter (heh, I never actually really made the leap to tumblr) but I look forward to hearing more.

[arduinna]

There's tons more - it's a really flexible system. I have high hopes!

[the_shoshanna]

Oh, man, I'm going to have to learn some things, aren't I?

[arduinna]

It's worth it! *beams*

[ratcreature]

I could probably manage joining this from the technical side (as a long time Linux user I'm not easy to scare off, lol), but I have yet to see explained how the federated model solves the fundamental P2P problem that you host and distribute other people's content, and could end up distributing things that are illegal to distribute in your jurisdiction, especially if your local laws differ in key points from the US laws.

German law for example is significantly more restrictive than US law in some respects (forbidden symbols and such are one example) -- like the comic store I use had shipments it got from the US confiscated several times over the years (and I missed my pull list because of subsequent delays), because German authorities considered some covers they saw in a shipment as law breaking.

German law also forbids distribution of certain kinds of porn (though unlike child porn possession and acquiring them is not illegal) among them porn with violence and animals for example. And with that you get easily at least adjacent things that I actually enjoy reading and looking at in fandom (depending on what you consider "porn" which is as vague in Germany as in the US, I mean classical images on Greek vases of people fucking animals aren't generally outlawed to distribute here either).

But right now as far as I understand my situation as a non-lawyer here, if I look at (and thus at least temporarily download) a fanart piece with say bestiality or violence I'd be fine as acquiring and owning such is ok here even if it was considered porn, but uploading to someone else might not be, because you are not supposed to distribute it.

[cesperanza]

My understanding here is that if you're on any social network already at all, you have a bigger problem with this than you would on a Federated Instance. Cause you'll only see what you sub to, and you have granular, person by person choice of who you sub to; moreoever, you could join an instance that had a set of rules that fit rules that were legal/best practice for you, and lock yourself down to that if you wanted. But I don't see how it's any different than being on Facebook or Twitter--or rather, it's safer than being on Facebook or twitter. The idea of federation is that each instance is only 150-200 people, so it's Dunbar's rule in action--an easy group to moderate. I've been told that it's on Tumblr and Twitter etc. that you're likely to stumble on something that's NSFW/illegal/a problem, because there's no abuse or moderation on those enormous sites; and of course, people who are into seriously illegal stuff are often on servers where they are locked down themselves and don't want to risk interoperating with anyone who could report them. So I don't see how you're more likely to have, say, bestiality or violence on a federated instance than through a random Tumblr tag?

[ratcreature]

But it's no problem for me to see or download certain things. I actually enjoy for example fictional bestiality (certain kinds anyway -- though realistically probably nothing anyone would bother to prosecute here even for distribution because I'm not into animal harm or videos with real animals, but that's not the point of my argument) or say certain kinds of rape porn, and it is legal here to have either as a consumer, it is just illegal to distribute. Only people providing it to others might run into trouble.

And right now that porn may be hosted on a server in a place with more liberal porn laws, so neither side has a problem (unless say the German state asks service providers here to block stuff, then I can't see things, but in principle). But as I understand this "federated" thing, if I want to look at bestiality porn, I have to distribute bestiality porn.

And this is actually an even bigger problem as soon as possibly underage fans come into the mix, because youth protection requirements here are much more rigid than in the US. You are not allowed here to distribute any adult things to youths (unless you are their parent and thus allowed). Now here generally naked people or two people having sex isn't necessarily considered "adult" as such, but violence imagery is more restricted.

So it's not that I wouldn't want to see things, or even that I wasn't allowed to consume them, just distributing them to others isn't the same legally here.

[cesperanza]

I think you're confusing federated with p2p? Which is related but different: with federation fans gather in groups of say 150-250 on servers that are owned and adminned by one of that group and can be located ib whatever country, and those small servers communicate. So fandom's social network is hosted on a bunch of small servers that cost 120$ a year for everyone, all 150-250 ppl, rather than on giant central servers like the otw. But you're not distributing anything yourself. P2P is a hosting solution that could interoperate and be useful for large works like vids, but that's different and separate from federation.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, oulfis made that distinction in another comment. So with that I wouldn't have any problem being a client in such a system.

I still think it remains an issue, because right now big hosting providers at least in the US have a level of protection that they are not responsible for user content they host as long as they take action as soon as they notice. Smaller servers won't have that protection so their exposure risk will be much higher and they would probably have to really carefully moderate. And in Germany with much less expansive free speech protection it would be even more of a problem to provide a server than in the US, because you are held responsible more (people hosting message boards in Germany have run into legal trouble with this for user posts). And if you need one fan with a server for every 250 fans, a *lot* of fans need to be willing to host for this to scale.

[oulfis]

Right now at least "federation" and "P2P" are still really different things. Like, a Hubzilla instance isn't P2P at all -- it is a regular website that a single fan pays to have hosted on a server in exactly the same way all other websites operate, so a user's risks (as far as I understand them!) really are exactly the same as a user's risks on something like Twitter. The person who runs/hosts the server has some risks, but they mitigate those by moderating the server. Which is why we talk about each individual instance staying smallish -- small enough that a single fan can afford to host and to moderate it.

I think literal P2P is important to fandom's future to address the costs of hosting, but whereas federation feels to me like a conceptual bridge to P2P in terms of distributing the load (instead of 1 person being Tumblr, 100 people are 1/100th of Tumblr with federation, leading to 100000 people being 100000/th of a Tumblr in the dreamy future) -- but the technology is legally pretty distinct.

[ratcreature]

Ah, okay then I misunderstood "federated". I had assumed every user had to shoulder part of the traffic and would be both server and client in the network.

[oulfis]

It's totally an easy mistake to make! Especially since a lot of the discussions floating around *are* about the classic P2P model where users *would* also be serving content. I definitely get it :)

[cesperanza]

+1!

[arduinna]

I'm glad you asked, because I wasn't entirely sure myself, and I know some people who were concerned about the bandwidth end of P2P even beyond the legal end. Good info to have!

[aerye]

I am not spending half as much time (or learning half as much) as I want to—but I love the potential in this! Thank you for this post; it opens some new doors for me. I definitely plan on making a home there.

And for anyone wandering by: https://fandom.stopthatimp.net/channel/aerye

[arduinna]

I really love the "poke at the buttons to see what happens" stage of things, so am having a blast, as it turns out.

[msmoat]

Thank you! I am willing to give this a go! I know some who have gone off to Mastodon, so having this way to connect with them, in an interface that I can understand pretty easily, is really helpful! I'm a not-quite-early adopter. *g* From your description, this really sounds promising.

[arduinna]

\o/

The cross-platform functionality seems great. It's a bit limited to what protocols you can install, but definitely the sharing with Mastodon works. I was just playing around with the search function and typed in the first few letters of a word, and half the suggested results were on fandom.ink, which is Mastodon. So cool!

[tinny]

thank you for making such a comprehensive post!

I'd been following post_tumblr_fandom, but they made it sound a lot less ready-to-use than you do.

I guess I'll check it out (although my current fandom, Guardian, actually moved to DW (yes!!!) and there is wonderful interaction and everything I need is right here).

[arduinna]

You're very welcome!

Things are definitely still in the beta stages; 3/4 of the conversation is people posting "what happens if I push this button?" and the like, and trying to figure out how best to adapt things for fandom. If you're not a tire-kicker, it may be too soon to try it out. There'll be plenty of time later.

If you do like kicking the tires, though, dive in! The more the merrier :D