In fact, I fear I am a jack-of-all-trades.

arbcards

Part 1 - Rain, Fine Later: Unevolved

Buster Bros

【Ichiro Yamada】

【Jiro Yamada】

【Saburo Yamada】

Mad Trigger Crew

【Samatoki Aohitsugi】

【Jyuto Iruma】

【Rio Mason Busujima】

Fling Posse

【Ramuda Amemura】

【Gentaro Yumeno】

【Dice Arisugawa】

See Evolved Cards

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hypmic arb hypnosis microphone arb cards unevolved rain fine later ramuda amemura gentaro yumeno dice arisugawa ichiro yamada jiro yamada saburo yamada samatoki aohitsugi jyuto iruma rio mason busujima

antique-romantic demonandthedogstar

transjon

cats are like. i am very small and have cute little triangle ears. also locking me out of the bathroom is a hate crime

chlostars madgear

librarycard

gerard (without pause):

bandom

cubistemoji gilrael

the-eldritch-angel

*throws ibuprofen on the ground and watches the aging tumblr populous peck at them like chickens*

mctreeleth

Don't be ridiculous. Our backs and knees absolutely cannot do that.

ukiyosen canoeingninjin

wildersage

Honestly with some distance i think I'd say german teenagers were onto something when they used "hobbyless" as the default insult in the early 2010s

asters-disaster

me @ normies memes

chlostars zawehzawah

taumoeba

John Greens twitter going out with a bang. Im so sorry for what we did to you sir

[id: screenshot of a tweet from @JohnGreen that says "People often ask this coffee company about my favorite taste. My favorite taste is coffee. Not only that, but coffee smells amazing. 100% of profits to charity". A link to awesomecoffeeclub.com is attached. /end id]

man.

gulabijamuns fellhellion

kimabutch

Tumblr famous is like, gladiator famous, where you have a lot of people cheering for you but it’s because you’re being eaten by a lion

cjmarlowe dynamicsymmetry

pencilcat

jm stopthatimp

Fandom: It’s Time to Join the Fediverse

stopthatimp

(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 protocol, 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 platforms can communicate and exchange 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 also 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.

stopthatimp

lol well it’s been awhile but I have a Masto instance set up with invite-only registration, message me if you want an invite. This is a backed up instance that I will be taking administration of seriously (by this I mean it shouldn’t go down regularly nor will I delete any data). Twitter shitting the bed in the manner it is has me concerned! And I love to microblog.