Federation without Decentralisation: a quick and dirty reflection on the Fediverse
The series:
- Federation without Decentralisation
- Careful with that Axe, Eugen
- The tape is a circle, but who really cares?
Shortly before disappearing, Nosleba Dlorah wrote an influential essay critiquing a Fediverse server project, arguing that the design was anti-thetical to its goals; most importantly that it would most likely result in less autonomy and understanding given to their users.1
Upon returning to the Fediverse for some time, I am convinced that this problem is not localised to this software development group and their followers. Rather, it is a manifestation of problems latent in the entire Fediverse. As I wrote in Software and Anarchy, these sort of problems produce forms of centralisation even in "decentralised" networks; and so we have the curious case of federation without decentralisation.
How to become an amateur lawyer
It is not even easy to join the Fediverse. One must take many variables into consideration when picking a server to use, including
- that one must accept the rules of the server. This is usually not a problem, but one may agree that their account may be deleted after inactivity, or they may accept some "standards" which are hopelessly vague, such as agreeing to "not shit on [someone] for liking [something]". What does that mean? Must I agree with everyone I see, or at the least stay quiet? Should I be prepared to write a proper rebuttal to any terrible ideas presented, regardless of whether I think the other person is acting in good faith or not?
- One must observe the server to see if it is in good standing; perhaps a server that otherwise looks fine has a toxic and discriminatory userbase. This, among other variables, is also likely to change over time, and so one must be constantly aware of their online surroundings. If one makes a bad observation, it is likely that their messages will misteriously never be acknowledged, because the other server has blocked their server.
- One must also see if the administrators are administrating. Many agree that this is almost impossible with sufficiently large servers, but it can be spotty even with smaller servers.
- One must predict if the server will go down at an inconvenient time. This does happen, but I will admit that Fediverse servers tend to have better uptime than Matrix servers, for example.
- One should also guess if they will get along with other users on the server.
A thorough analysis of these variables can take hours, even with friends who have some knowledge of the Fediverse, from my experience. I was not satisfied with my decision; so in the odd case that I ever decide to return, I might have to dig up my notes and continue searching.
Recently, I found that one of the servers Dlorah used (but quickly left), which had a "free software" theme of sorts, now has a terrible problem with racist people. One onlooker commented that "social media interns" should do better auditing of servers2, as many free software projects use that server to post updates and answer questions. This is an unfair expectation; auditing servers like this is a very laborious and slow process. These sorts of server-sized phenomenon may also explain why the Fediverse approximates "communities" with servers, which is another alienating practise.
How to alienate as many people as possible
The idea that one can quantize communities and social relations into servers should be laughable at best, but it is basically accepted on the Fediverse.
For example, one is likely to be associated with other users on their server, for better or for worse. Dlorah's arguments were easily tossed out with shallow replies calling mih a "FOSS bro", a "reply guy", and so on, because eh had made the grave mistake of (again) using a free software "themed" server. Myself, I did not suffer from any of this, as I picked a well respected server, fortunately. Nonetheless, this form of connotation is one of the ways the Fediverse may tolerate shallow thinking, and it is terribly convenient for someone attempting to escape criticism. By reducing a viewpoint to one which is so obviously wrong, it is easy to dodge any claim. (And, as said in S&A, anyone with sufficient social capital can do just about anything without interrogation.)
Users of one server also seem to be expected to be more familiar with each other. Most Fediverse clients provide two message streams which are not just the people one has followed: a "local" stream with messages from everyone on the server, and a "federated" stream with every incoming message from anyone on any server. For all the times I have joked that one eventually becomes, say, an alcoholic by reading the federated stream, I have felt the same way while reading the local stream. At least you can silence and block people on the local stream, as the number of people on one server is much more finite than the number of people on all servers.
On the other side of the fence, administrators have their work cut out for them. It appears their position in administration is not well understood. One Fediverse sellout states:
The peer to peer situation means that each individual is captain of their own ship and makes their own decisions about who to connect to and what to share, but this may sometimes involve a lot of duplicated curation effort.
Federation offers a third way of doing things, in which decisions about what is or isn't acceptable may be partly collectivized, but not to a totalizing extent as in the centralized case. This allows peers to offload some of their preferences to their affinity group, which may improve the user experience and reduce cognitive workload. For example, collective defense against known bad entities.
This could not be further from the truth. To use the unsympathetic language of software engineering, we might call this team a "bottleneck". To use more sympathetic language, they work laboriously to handle reports and messages, they invariably make the final decisions, and they are likely overstressed because of it. The collaborative filtering proposed by Dlorah, which I hope to implement in Netfarm, avoids this bottleneck, and also partly avoids the conflation of community and infrastructure.
In the case of a hybrid filtering system, where users delegate their friends to draw predictions3 from, it would be much more reasonable to call the filtering group an "affinity group". Calling an arbitrary gathering of users with arbitrary preferences an affinity group is ridiculous. Are we going to form affinity groups based on the first letter of our family names next? Perhaps the distribution of Fediverse users is somewhat less random, but it is hardly a better reason to organise; should we believe that, by the previously mentioned list of factors to consider, one cannot make a particuarly good choice of server, without a lot of time to waste.
How to terminate thoughts quickly
The "social capitalism" we had previously mentioned in passing induces a vicious cycle, where it is excusable to ignore or flame out at dissenting opinions (and possibly tell one's gathering about some extrapolated version of the dissenter, which makes them sound as horrible as necessary), and accumulate more of a gathering by reiterating the status quo; making it possible to further badmouth the opposition and further distort their appearance.
There is also a mentality to boost and star anything vaguely agreeable, without properly interrogating it. This is not unique to the Fediverse, but it still happens. We were very surprised when we found the people we were critiquing boosting our announcement of a draft of Software and Anarchy; it was clear very few people had actually read it. This is completely understandable, as our current draft consists of about 12 thousand words, which span about 50 6×9 inch pages, but then we should have seen no reaction, given no one had actually engaged with it.
Conclusion
So, we have many factors which contribute to the centralisation of the Fediverse, despite that many would consider it to be a decentralised network. (I still wouldn't, if my analysis was on network architecture.) We observe a centralised federation, where anyone not following the status quo, and without the ability to invest time in following it, is basically non-existant, for better or worse.
How I would love to return to the only somewhat bothersome blue I once knew, where I would also have assumed that the Fediverse is almost as good as it gets for online socialisation, and my social problems laid elsewhere. But it appears to promote behaviours contrary to how people do socialise; it quantizes social circles in some ways, it makes freedom of association difficult, and it promotes lousy thinking. The observation that the Fediverse, or some incremental improvement to it, is "the place" for any particular category of people is a very depressing observation.
Footnotes:
I have eh's word that conversations about the other issues presented convinced mih that the response of the community further cemented the idea that there was a terrible authoritarian streak in the development process.)
And something feels terribly wrong with only accusing interns of needing to look harder. Has no one else had insufficient time to scour server lists and cross-check them, and has no one else appeared innocent in this situation?
The word "prediction" does not draw much optimism towards the effectiveness of such a system. Assuming that administrators enforce their rules perfectly, then one is still predicting what will be best for them by selecting a server, and thus an administrator group. A collaborative filtering system also is somewhat self-regulating, and can quantify divergence in opinion; most systems utilise this, and weight recommendations according to how similar they are to one's own recommendations.