Lady of the Land @Lady@cat.family

@gaditb i think tag labels should be blank nodes, and not have identifiers :P

but for cuddling

orange bites u

bitten

@gaditb i think generally we are in agreement conceptually i am just coming at this from a library sciences mentality whereas you are coming at it from a social sciences mentality so we're putting emphasis in different places

i want a library system which works, you want a social infrastructure enabling a certain kind of communication, the actual solution needs to be both of these things

@gaditb that's because these are best practices that are impossible to change once you do them wrong the first time

like mastodon accounts being unable to change their username because eugen decided to put that in the URL and if it changed it would break all the links and federation generally for every existing account

i put a lot of emphasis on not doing this because it's really important that you not do this lol. you need to be able to change “transsexual” to “transgender” to “trans” in the canonical version of the tag, even if some works continue to use outdated terminology, or else you will build systems (like the library of congress subject headings) which perpetuate outdated and offensive terminology long after better language comes about

as far as localization goes, i generally agree with your takes but also pokémon have different names in english and japanese and different people pick different ones; i think that can be supported. there will be bilingual communities and multilingual communities and even (especially) understanding that the tags are translations from a different language, people might still want to read them in a language they actually understand. i think that can be supported too

@gaditb you can't have that cake and eat it too though without those communities doing the work to, you know, define that agreed-upon ontology and put it out there in a format their members can use, which is the problem space i'm trying to tackle

@gaditb i think you're assuming that ontologies are being made from people outside of the community and my point is the opposite, that in a federated context communities can express themselves directly to their audiences using the language they both have agreed on, instead of needing a third party to wrangle that language into a globally-recognized form

@gaditb oh, i think we disagree about the purpose of tagging then

i think the primary purpose of tagging is aiding discovery systems, and i think this stance is strongly evidenced by how tags are used for search and filtering on AO3. i question why “Peter Parker is a Nice Jewish Boy” is being entered into the “tags” field and not the “description” field if the purpose isn’t associating the work with other works where Peter Parker is a Nice Jewish Boy

if that association IS desired, then it’s to everyone’s benefit if that tag is suggested to authors, for example, if they have already tagged the work with “Peter Parker”, so they don’t recreate the tag with a different spelling and require wrangling work to smooth over the differences (assuming user-suggested tags are even an option)

i don’t want to foreclose the idea of tags that aren’t discovery-oriented. i think you’re right that it’s a use case. but i also feel that users might want works tagged “Peter Parker is a Nice Jewish Boy” to appear in tag listings for “Peter Parker”, “Nice Jewish Boys”, “Jewish culture”, et cetera, even if those other tags weren’t supplied… and it’s an open question whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that this can happen even when a creator is primarily in a communicative frame of mind

@gaditb ah well i think part of that is just the lack of implementations

the design goal is something that can be hosted as JSON files on Github pages. i think that's the right level of necessary technicality but has the flipside of being utterly unopinionated about how you generate those JSON files and get them in Github pages. i have my own opinions here but i don't think there SHOULD be an opinion, generally, at a schema level

i don't think there is a NECESSARY lot of work around getting a basic tagset. i think it can be really simple. (i mean, i think you can do it by hand.) but i also think that there are plenty of fannish librarians who love categorizing things and i’m really frustrated in the lack of tools they have to DO that right now, so this is growing a bit out of that frustration

i also think you might be underestimating the advantages of structured data: if you ARE working with a limited tagset of known values, it is FAR easier to find the tag you want by going “Comics > Superheroes > Marvel > Spiderman” than by trying to remember if the correct tag is “Spiderman” or “Spidey” or “Peter Parker”. fuzzy text matching offers a better experience over a structured knowledge system if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but a typically worse experience if you do, because people remember a concept’s location in a hierarchy much better than they do its exact name. in both the case of people assigning tags to works as well as that of people looking for works, i think they can generally be assumed to have familiarity with the tags they are using, so i want to design for the system which works best for them. that means emphasis on structured relationships and text labels can be thrown to the wind (which is to say, left to authors without consequence)

(this is better for internationalization too)

@gaditb more friendly discussion here: https://blog.ladys.computer/2023-05-26/federated_tagging/

@gaditb is this an intentional or unintentional rep for https://ns.1024.gdn/Tagging/

fix THAT and then maybe we can start talking about building good software

the secret nobody wants to talk about is that EVERY developer of a major fediverse software, yes even that one, has a habit of excusing assholes as a matter of professional practice. it’s impossible to “be a good fediverse citizen” without doing it. without having conversations with the people who make the software that the nazis use, or, less extremely, with the numerous missing stairs running instances that you can’t make a big deal about without that stance coming to colour your entire project.

that professional obligation becomes a personal habit. don’t trust anyone who writes a fedi software used by more than five instances. they will not back you up in a pinch.

it doesn’t fucking matter. i want every person who wants to fix the fediverse to go and read “Thoughts about Community Support around Intimate Violence” <https://archive.org/details/zabalaza_2009_intimate_violence> and then really reckon with how far away we are from ever implementing ANY of those practices in this space. there is not the will or maturity here to tackle any of the really difficult conversations that an actual community platform would have to grapple with on a regular basis, and technologies of community organizing delivered to a social context where people are more worried about losing their parasocial relationship with some popular account than they are about actual abuse doesn't create communities, it creates cults. and mastodon is a space where time and time again i have seen people pay lip-service to “restorative justice” as a way of justifying allowing abusers to continue sharing a room with them while making those same spaces unsafe for all of their victims. conversations about this never happen because the people who get hurt are forced to leave.

nobody wants to talk about this. there is zero will to do the hard work of fixing it. but you think maybe by distributing posts a little differently, things would improve? the beef between myasstodon and PV would have been ten times worse if friends of myasstodon were in charge of formal networks of federated instances instead of just informal ones. “but then you could just block them all in one go” literally when has federation drama ever been this simple

i’m not saying we can’t make things better. i’m saying the social change has to come FIRST. stop trying to build technologies for a community which doesn’t exist and can’t effectively use them. look at the communities we actually have and the actual history of this platform, and take a scientific approach to creating a space which is better. organize and build political consciousness. people will fucking make the technologies they need in their free time if you can get the communities and social support in place for them to do it; we’re not lacking in tech whizzes here

wait fuck when did this die??