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.