Fandom's new home is still getting drywall and fixtures, but the foundation's built solid

[alyndra]

A few thoughts on fandom migrations. I love seeing all the renewed Dreamwidth activity, and I'm back here for the long haul now. I hope both Pillowfort and Dreamwidth continue to grow and innovate and do well. (Twitter can die. They're going to have to crack down on nsfw content too because of SESTA/FOSTA, only they're not even going to give the advance warning tumblr did.)

Discord's not done growing its fandom presence by far, and that's exciting, too -- I love using Discord. I only recently got curious enough to go look up how it's run, though. There's good news and bad. (Forgive me if you know all this already.)

Discord was created for gamers to talk to each other in 2015, and it's funded by venture capitalism. Also, despite calling individually modded communities "servers," all the data is still on the company's various server farms, we're not hosting our own.

The good news is that it's not based on ads or selling people's data. They charge a few bucks for a few extras like the ability to bring your own custom emojis with you server to server. This is essentially the same model used by Dreamwidth, Pillowfort, even early LJ. And since the market is primarily gamers and one of the things they charge for is a little suite of exclusive games, it might work out really well in the long term. But it has to work out not just well enough to pay the bills (which for this level of data handling are not cheap), it also has to be enough to keep making the venture capitalists their money back and more. It might, it might not: if we ever start seeing ads on the service, that'll be a pretty good sign it's time to move again.

I don't expect Discord to be our primary fandom home. I expect it to fill the little gap between now and when we can settle into our own space for real.

Some smart people have been discussing this for a long time, much longer than just the past few days. This is a good starter post with links to talk about fandom and federated systems.

"...so far the best is Hubzilla, which I'm sort of poking around now. It's interoperable with Mastodon, and it works - I'm just figuring out this language myself - on a hub system where you join a hub and the hubs link up, so nobody is dependent on any one hub and different hubs can have different rules and are interoperable, and if you don't like one or have a fight with the mod or get interested in wanting to be on another hub, you just take all your stuff and move; they call this a nomadic identity."

This one will really start making sense of it.

"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."

THIS. This is the future, this is Web 3.0, this is where fandom can and should go. It has everything we need, ticks all the boxes, except some of us need to spend some time figuring out how to connect all the widgets in a nice user-friendly package, and then work out how it all goes and write user guides for everybody who’s not into learning tech wizardry. But that’s all really, really doable! So it’s maybe not quite ready for all of fandom *yet* - we can hang out on other platforms, Discord, Pillowfort, I love Dreamwidth - but in a year or so? Hubzilla, or some new branch of it, is going to be the place to BE.

And in the meantime, if you’re inspired and you want to come play in this cool new sandbox, come check out the discord for it! https://discord.gg/c3E72cT

Comments

[havocthecat]

Discord has an opt-outable mandatory arbitration clause, btw:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/discord-introducting-mandatory-binding-arbitration-can-opt-out-within-30-days.75531/

They're not fandom's perfect place either, alas! But they're still better than a lot of places.

[temetnosce]

Thank you. My mom was telling me how the answer absolutely had to be server based rather than reliant on the present internet's model of corporate servers having complete control over hosting or not hosting our content. We - and a lot of the communities that nest beside us - need to be outside of that kind of control, and that's terrifying and exciting. Can't wait.

[hit_the_books]

Decetralised web, basically, is what Web 3.0 needs to be, as you've described it.

Even Sir Tim Berners-Lee is working on this, though his version involves a language called Solid. But it sounds a lot like that Hub principle you mentioned.

Hmm, maybe I need to give Mastodon another go...

[mecurtin]

I'm not feeling terribly intelligent at the moment. I don't understand who would own the servers if we use Hubzilla, and I don't have a sense of what kind of face it would present to the noobies and lurkers.

I'm on a couple of discords and slacks, but in my experience you have to know someone to find them, they don't come up in searches. Is Hubzilla different?