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== Feminist federating ==
__NOTOC__
''<nowiki/>'We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass'. It's always about critical connections.'''
'''nate wessalowski'''<br>
'''& Mara Karagianni'''
= From Feminist Servers to Feminist Federation =


- Grace Lee Boggs
<span class="running-header">From Feminist Servers to Feminist Federation</span>


'''Authors:''' mara karagianni, ooooo, nate wessalowski, vo ezn
== Abstract ==
Situated within the technofeminist care practices of feminist servers, this text explores the possibilities of feminist federation. Speaking from our collective practice of system administration, we start by introducing Systerserver, laying out the feminist pedagogies that inform our practice of learning and doing together with technologies and the politics of maintenance and care. We then revisit the identity politics of feminist servers as more than safe/r spaces in the cis-male-dominated domain of free/libre and open source software communities. Finally, we reflect on our experiences of building and federating a feminist video platform with the PeerTube software on Systerserver. Facing the techno-social challenges around the protocol of federation and adapting the software alongside our federating practice, we focus on sustainable and care-oriented alternatives to ‘scaling up’ the affective infrastructures of our feminist servers.


'''Abstract''' [yet to follow]
<blockquote>We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass'. It's always about critical connections. – Grace Lee Boggs</blockquote>


=== Intro ===
<!--
The following essay is concerned with practices of weaving feminist networks of solidarity and care<ref>Formulation following spideralex.</ref> in the age of hybrid on- and offline world making (Haraway). More specifically, it investigates the (im)possibilities of feminist federating that accompany the continuation of a feminist video platform project which has started in 2021.<ref>https:// tube.systerserver.net</ref> Federating is a technosocial practice characteristic of decentralized networks with different subnetworks communicating and relating to each other through communication protocols that follow an open standard. The practice of federating lies at the core of the so called Fediverse: a network composed of many different social media networks, each hosted on a plurality of servers individually or collectively run and maintained by system administrators (sysadmins). One of these networks is based on the free PeerTube software which allows servers (called “instances”) to share and stream videos away from centralized platforms. Like any software under a free license it can be run, studied, improved and shared<ref>Those are the four essential freedoms of free software, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms</ref> by anyone with the technical skills, time and a minimum of technical equipment, such as a laptop or another computer that can be turned into a server.
== Keywords ==
The idea of installing, maintaining and adapting the PeerTube software in order to build a feminist video platform emerged from the closely knit contact of three feminist servers: Anarchaserver,<ref>https://www.anarchaserver.org/</ref> Systerserver<ref>https://systerserver.net/</ref> and Leverburns.<ref>http://terminal.leverburns.blue/</ref>
feminist servers, federation, technopolitics, technofeminism, video platform, affective infrastructures, PeerTube, fediverse, alternative social media, decentralization, FLOSS, open protocols, ActivityPub
Feminist servers are precious and precarious, which makes writing from within or towards them a complex and sometimes difficult endeavor. They are an embedded technosocial practice as well as a critical intervention into the human-machine dichotomies, and protagonists of a speculative fiction calling upon a feminist internet (Toupin and Spideralex). By ‘techno-nature’ they are very connective and sociable, interlinking and forming temporary networks and working groups to exchange knowledge and tools, learn together and become involved with each others' infrastructure projects. The authors of this text form part of a wider ecosystem of technofeminists, sysadmins and allies, mostly across Europe and Latin America, who stay in touch via mailing lists, often work together through (self-hosted) digital tools and sometimes meet up during self-organized events such as the Ecclectic Tech Carnival or the TransHackFeminist Convergence.
-->


Even though in the context of feminist servers a ‘server’ is not a purely technical term, virtual and physical machines are integral to the technosocial practices which constitute feminist servers. The technical infrastructures of Systerserver, Anarchaserver and Lever Burns are either located within shared spaces, someones’ home or – in the case of Systerserver – are taken care of by mur.at, a media cultural data room.
<div class="page-break"></div>
Each of the servers maintains a set of free software that supports ways of technopolitical organizing from media cloud hosting, polls, online workshops to version control software and web hosting for archived cyberfeminist websites. The aim is not that all servers have every tool installed on their own hardware as if they were autonomous isolated islands/oasis/phantasms. Instead they have distributed services and hence depend on each other, sharing their tools while fostering webs of commitment, responsibility and care.
Most of the tools are ‘intimate’, where those who contribute to the infrastructures are the ones inhabiting and using them. One of the sysadmins describes her relationship to self-hosted etherpad as different from other kinds of software tools:


"I feel an added layer of intimacy, probably because I know where the data is stored, only I have access to the list of all the pads [I am also able to delete them], and I modified the interface quite a bit and expanded the functionalities by installing the plugins."
== Introduction ==
(Motskobili)  
In this text we adopt practices of weaving feminist networks of solidarity and care<ref>Formulation following spideralex, "Feministische Infrastruktur" 59. </ref> in the age of hybrid on- and offline world-making (Haraway 35f). More specifically, we investigate the possibilities of growing into a feminist federation, which accompany the continuation of a feminist video platform project based on the PeerTube software (tube.systerserver.net). The idea of installing, maintaining and adapting PeerTube in order to build a feminist video platform emerged from the closely knit collaboration of three feminist servers: Anarchaserver (anarchaserver.org) Systerserver (systerserver.net) and Leverburns (terminal.leverburns.blue). Each of these servers maintains free and open source software that supports different ways of technopolitical organizing, from media cloud hosting and tools for the creation of polls, to web hosting for archived cyber-/ technofeminist websites. While some of the sysadmins involved in the installation of PeerTube are or have been involved with two or even all three feminist servers, Anarchaserver and Leverburns mainly supported the project with their tools, while the PeerTube platform was realized through and on Systerserver. For this reason, we focus on the practices around Systerserver and the group of system administrators (sysadmins) actively involved in the PeerTube project. The authors and contributors to this text are women, trans and non-binary people currently part of Systerserver and with different geolocations in Europe. Systerserver organizes mainly through self-hosted mailing lists,<ref>The following lists are part of the extensive network of feminist servers: Adminsysters, https://lists.genderchangers.org/mailman/listinfo/adminsysters; Eclectic Tech Carnival, https://lists.eclectictechcarnival.org/mailman/listinfo/etc-int; Femservers, https://lists.systerserver.net/mailman3/lists/femservers.lists.systerserver.net/.</ref> video calls and other tools that enable shared working sessions and occasional meetings in person during feminist hacking or other, project-related events.


In the case of collectively administered infrastructures, a shared sense of trust becomes the base that can slowly enable processes around opening up to other feminist collectives and individuals in the proximities of the sysadmins.
The video platform was set up with the support of a Belgian art fund received in 2021, not as a permanent infrastructure but as an experimental process for sharing artistic videos and live streaming. A year later, when the funded period came to an end, two things became clear: although there was a need from video-makers<ref>Videomakers had gotten in touch with Systerserver’s video platform via the residencies and the TransHackFeminism Covergence, https://zoiahorn.anarchaserver.org/thf2022/bienvenides-a-la-convergencia-transhackfeminista-2022/.</ref>  to host their art and content in feminist and community-based environments, we didn’t want to become yet another centralized service infrastructure. Instead, awarded with another grant by a Dutch design fund, we set out to enable other collectives to host their own infrastructures and become part ofz an emerging feminist federation of video platforms.


The process of writing about the (im) possibilities of feminist federating had been initiated by the question of (non)scalability that is often imposed onto projects or collectives such as feminist servers which are understood to be “niche” or “small scale”: typically involving a limited number of people, known only within certain counter publics (Travers) or circles of friends, not geared towards profit, nor efficiency and often with a (trans)local embeddedness which cannot be easily replicated.
The process of writing about the possibilities of feminist federation started with Systerserver’s participation in the Minor Tech workshop,<ref>Minor Tech workshop facilitated by Transmediale 2023, https://aprja.net//announcement/view/1034.</ref>  where questions around scalability were discussed and researched. ‘Scalability’ is more than just a descriptive category: it has also been infused with the ethical obligation to facilitate participation (Sterne VII), namely to involve as many people as possible, if not to ‘change the world’. In this sense small scale projects are measured by their potential to finally and eventually ‘grow up’ and ‘become major’. Projects or collectives such as feminist servers, which are understood to be ‘niche’ or ‘small scale’, typically involve a limited number of people, known only within certain counterpublics (Travers) or circles of friends. They are not geared towards profit, nor efficiency, and often work with a (trans)local embeddedness, where geographies and cultures come together in virtual and physical spaces, and therefore they cannot be easily replicated. Starting from our practice of system administration and the embodied experiences of collectively building a feminist video platform, we turn to explore the process ‘from feminist servers to feminist federation’. Based on a technofeminist understanding of the political and gendered aspects of technology, we ask how technologies and protocols of decentralized social media networking and federation<ref>Overview of software and protocols for distributed and decentralized social networking, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking.</ref> can facilitate this process. What are the challenges of forming and growing into a feminist federation?
But ‘scalability’ is more than just a descriptive category: it has also been infused with the ethical obligation towards participation(Sterne), namely to involve as many people as possible, if not to ‘change the world’. In this sense small scale projects do not have value as they are – they only account for a provisional state and can solely be measured by their potential to finally and eventually “grow up” and “become major”. Resisting this interpellation and devaluation of our work we turn towards questioning the (im)possiblities of feminist federating: How can we resonate with a wider context while remaining situated and intimate media, how can we grow to make critical connections and be part of a mutually supported plethora of queer and feminist (tech) communities? How can we nourish this multiplicity of communities sustainably, in order to continue our struggles and to meet our urgencies? And, finally, can technologies and protocols of distributed social media networking and federation<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking.</ref> facilitate this endeavor and what then, would feminst federating look like?  


=== Inhabiting affective infrastructures ===  
== Feminist Servers ==
Feminist servers are how and where we develop and share our technical skills and care for our bodies, machines and tools. At their core, feminist servers are a way of nourishing communities of feminists with an interest in technologies or a digitally mediated (art and/or activist) praxis.  
Feminist servers are infrastructures for nourishing communities of feminists with an interest in technologies or a digitally mediated, art and/or activist, praxis. They are an embedded techno-social practice, a critical intervention into the human-machine dichotomies, and protagonists of a speculative fiction calling for a feminist internet (spideralex, “Internet Féministe”; Toupin/spideralex). Due to their ‘techno-nature’ they are highly connective, interlinking and forming temporary networks of care and solidarity to exchange knowledge and tools, learn together and become involved with each others’ infrastructure projects.<ref>For an extensive list of feminst servers, see https://alexandria.anarchaserver.org/index.php/You_can_check_some_of_their_services_in_this_section.</ref>  The genealogies of feminist servers are not easy to trace as they form ties and intersections with various movements such as cyber- techno- and trans hack feminisms, women-in-tech initiatives, academic fields around network, media and publishing, autonomous tech collectives and network activism, digital commons enthusiasts, the hacker, self-hosting, free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) movements, Do-it-yourself/together (DIY/T) culture, and feminist cybersecurity and self-defense. The motivations behind the formation of feminist servers often stem from the need for spaces in which lesbians, women, non-binary and trans persons, ''disidentes de género'' (gender dissidents), and queers can share knowledge about technology and organize themselves.<ref>While some feminist infrastructure projects are open to feminists of all genders, most of them - like Systerserver - are shaped by a separatist approach that excludes cis men from participating. We do this in order to create spaces where we don’t have to constantly worry about being gendered as ‘other to men’. Many of the ways we relate to and behave around cis men are deeply rooted in our cultural memories: counteracting male violences or carelessness, feeling pressured into proving to be ‘as good as men’, falling back into patterns of serving or pleasing men or just not taking the space due to fear of pushback. Excluding cis men is of course not a sufficient criteria for creating spaces without patriarchal violence but our experiences have taught us that it can be very liberating. Besides, cis men have many opportunities to engage in mixed/all gender tech related activism.</ref>
But what does server maintenance within a feminist server look like and what are the particularities of doing admin work engaged with feminist pedagogies? First of all, (feminist) sysadmin work is set in the collaborative and often volunteer based environment of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development(Eghbal). Here, software is the collective output of people working under the legal framing of open source, free or copyleft licenses such as the GPL (General Public License) which allows them to “hack” restrictions around copyright and propriatory regimes. This “implies a great potential for developing an application faster and/or in more interesting ways on a larger collaborative scale than in a scenario where only a handful of people ruminate on it.”(Motskobili) But it is not just efficiency or collaboration that is at stake in with free software. Free software is integral to a feminist approach to technologies(Snelting and spideralex) because is provides the precondition for breaking patterns of dependency, abuse and power monopolies held by big tech firms under the matrix of patriachal techno-domination. However, besides insisting on the use of free software, as feminists we need to address participation beyond the theoretical possibility of access by pointing to the intersectional and gendered imbalance between those with time, skills and knowledge to make use of their freedoms and participate in FLOSS projects and those without.
The work around administrating servers entails mostly maintenance rather than creating anew. It ranges from tasks such us checking automatic security updates, undertaking complex upgrades that require database migrations, making upgrades of the programming languages or frameworks, rebooting servers or even dusting off and replacing old hardware. Maintenance can be daunting, mundane, and often invisible (Hilfling Ritasdatter). Given that it does´t fit the IT industries’ self-promoting image of “software development as innovation”, maintainance in sysadmin work shares many characteristics with devalued and feminized “care” work - even if the field is presently monopolized by cis men. Put in practice, sysadmin work is easy proof that “care” and “technology” are not oppositional, but interrelated (Mol).
When it comes to hardware installations, feminist pedagogies stress the importance of doing it together (DIT) and with care (DWC)(Lange and wessalowski): Adding new disks, replacing failed ones or setting up a new server are frequent tasks of system administration. These are occations when we try to come together and travel to gather around our server machines whenever possible: More pairs of eyes and more ideas of how to approach or what tool to use for doing these tasks are the practical aspect of it, but it is the process itself, “how we do it and why” that characterizes feminist admin work. Seemingly simple operations such as placing a hard disk into a slot and making an operating system recognize it, become a slice of mapped territory of the otherwise hard to grasp layers of computing materiality. Everything implicates questions of collective responsibility. After long, challenging sysadmin sessions, documenting all steps for the sysadmins who weren’t present is no trivial task. Debugging technical issues is often a messy process. It’s easy to forget what exactly saved the day, or why we went down one path and not another. This makes it all the more necessary to document and note everything down in order to avoid losing ourselves in loops the next time we face a similar issue. Reading through tutorials together with your feminist peers is an empowering experience that radically differs from the wide spread and patronizing “obligation to know”(Reagle). In the context of feminist servers, utterances of ignorance are welcomed and even encouraged as we make sure not to repeat the exclusive mechanisms of competitive, meritocratic and antagonistic environments.  


The idea of a feminist server is sometimes linked to the concept of safe/r spaces<ref>The concept of safe/r spaces dates back to the heydays of the second wave of feminism when lesbians, trans people and women started organizing within and through woman* only spaces. It has since been adopted to online spaces as well, see (Kämpf).</ref> which actively oppose patterns of discrimination, taking intersectional safety needs into account. In this regard, feminist servers can become safe/r spaces for queer, trans and women identified persons who experience patriarchal oppressions and violence, especially in the cis male-dominated development of (Free/Libre Open Source) software but also in our activisms, at work and in academia, as well as in art, design and tech communities. Questions around vulnerabilities<ref> https://holistic-security.tacticaltech.org/</ref> and participation are tied to the invitation and identity politics of feminist servers. In the case of the femservers mailingslist<ref>https://lists.systerserver.net/mailman3/lists/femservers.lists.systerserver.net/</ref> for example, these require two insider advocates which will speak for a person before they can join the list. Another example is Systerserver who welcomes feminists of all genders except cis men.<ref>Not just because cis men will find many other places to engage in tech related activism but also to create a space where we don´t have to constantly worry about being gendered as “other to men”. Many of the ways we relate to and behave around cis men are deeply rooted: preparing for and counteracting the violences or carelessness of cis men, having to proof to be “as good as men”, falling back into serving or pleasing cis men or just not talking the space because we are used to pushback etc. Excluding cis men is of course not a sufficient criteria for creating spaces without patriarchal violence which is also being perpetuated by women, trans and nonbinary persons but the praxis taught us that it can be a liberating experience. </ref> And while questions of separatism and the reflection of hegemonic power dynamics are an integral part of feminist servers, calling a feminist server a safe/r spaces is not enough: Firstly because the idea of a safe/r space does not entail more-than-human relations and does not address ecological aspects of safety and well-being that play a role in the techno-social practices around feminist servers.<ref>https://www.kunsten.be/nu-in-de-kunsten/what-is-a-feminist-server/</ref> And, secondly, because the concept of safe/r space is not very well suited to address the techno-material conditions of building and maintaining those spaces.
Systerserver is one of the earliest known feminist server collectives. The server was launched in 2005 as an initiative of the GenderChanger Academy (Mauro-Flude/Akama 51) founded and composed by a group of women involved in a squatted Internet Cafe/ Hackerspace in Amsterdam (ASCII) during the late 90s (Derieg). GenderChanger Academy was formed, in early 2000s, to “get more women involved in technology”(Genderchangers) by initiating tech skill-sharing workshops.<ref>The adapter they are named after is a device that changes the ascribed ‘orientation’ of a port – both stressing the always gendered aspects of technology as well as the urgent need to reverse and counteract the cis male domination of technological domains.</ref> In 2002 the first Eclectic Tech Carnival (/etc) took place – a new format derived from the Amsterdam affiliated network that would enable skill-sharing sessions, workshops and discussions in the shape of self-organized hack meetings across Europe from Croatia to Greece to Serbia, Austria, Romania and Italy.<ref>More information about the /etc and past events see https://eclectictechcarnival.org/ETC2019/archive/.</ref> During these mostly annual meetings, Systerserver – while often dormant throughout the rest of the year – was activated as a supportive infrastructure for hosting websites, organizing, learning and archiving. When the frequency of the /etc meetings slowed down – partly due to a crisis in identity politics and remediation of trans-hostility and the inclusion of trans persons – new strategies to keep the server active were sought out. By that time, many people had been involved with Systerserver and most of those who had launched the server were no longer actively participating. In 2021 the current group of sysadmins applied for funds to develop a feminist video platform, in order to sustain the feminist server project and the community around it.
This is why some of us prefer the notion of affective infrastructures which not only holds space for the human, affective and techno-social dimensions of feminist servers but gives an important twist to the idea of infrastructures. Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant writes that “the question of politics becomes identical with the reinvention of infrastructures for managing the unevenness, ambivalence, violence, and ordinary contingency of contemporary existence.”(Berlant 394) To her, building and maintaining an infrastructure is a way of doing (techno)politics because “infrastructure is defined by the movement or pattering of social form” (393): They shape and organize the social relations that form around them. Looking at feminist servers in terms of affective infrastructure, we emphasize the ways in which we support and form part of our communication, documentation, the telling and archiving of our stories and, broadly speaking, feminist self-organisation. But it also enables a perspective on more than technological aspects of working with servers which foregrounds acts of maintenance and repair to render visible labour that is otherwise forgotten.


"As affective infrastructures, feminist servers
Even though in the context of feminist servers a ‘server’ is not a purely technical term, virtual and physical machines are integral to the techno-social practices which constitute feminist servers. The technical infrastructures of Systerserver, Anarchaserver and Lever Burns are either located within shared activist networks on virtual servers, someone’s home or, in the case of Systerserver at mur.at, within a net culture initiative that has a data room. Some of the servers are stable enough to distribute their services, and this allows the servers to depend on each other, sharing their tools while fostering webs of commitment, responsibility and care.
radically question the conditions for serving and service; they experiment with changing client-server, user-device and guest-host-ghost relations where they can. Who is serving whom? Who is serving what? What is serving whom? Are they being served?”
(Transfeminist Wishlist)<ref>https://hub.vvvvvvaria.org/rosa/pads/transfeministservers.raw.html</ref>


Feminist servers adopt the ideas of FLOSS where users can become (code) contributors, and develop it so that users will participate in the process of infrastructure making and maintenance. Feminist servers support a community where users are empowered to become sysadmins, perhaps echoing the user forums supported by hardware manufacturers in the 90’s (Akera). Doing so, Anarchaserver, but also Systerserver and others have come to start calling those who come to experiment with its software tools and infrastructures the “inhabitants” of the server, while inventing new roles for server related work such as data bodies, guardians, fire extinguishers, interfaces and scribas:<ref>Credit goes to Spideralex for initially thinking through these different roles for server related work for Anarchaserver, see https://alexandria.anarchaserver.org/index.php/Be_a_guardian,_a_fire_extinguisher,_a_scriba,_an_interface</ref>
In resonance with other writings on the subject of feminist servers, (spideralex, “internet féministe”, Niederberger, “Feminist Server”, “Der Server ist das Lagerfeuer”, Mauro-Flude/Akama, “A Feminist Server Stack”, Kleesattel) the following passages trace important aspects of the feminist pedagogies that inform the practices of maintaining a server and building a feminist video platform through Systerserver.


"I think a feminist server is also a space that we want to inhabit, as inhabitants, where we make a contribution, nurturing a safe space and a place for creativity and experimentation, a place for hacking heteronormativity and patriarchy."
== Making (safe/r) spaces for feminist and queer communities ==
(Motskobili)
The idea of a feminist server is sometimes linked to the concept of safe/r spaces,<ref>The concept of safe/r spaces dates back to the heyday of the second wave of feminism when lesbians, trans people and women started organizing within and through woman only spaces. It has since been adopted to online spaces, see Katrin Kämpf, “Safe Spaces”.</ref> which actively oppose patterns of discrimination, taking intersectional safety needs and trust into account. Feminist servers can become safe/r spaces for queer, trans and women-identified persons who experience patriarchal oppressions and violence, especially in the cis male-dominated realm of information technology and digital infrastructures. Most of the time, feminist servers stay intimate, known to small circles of friends and allies with no explicit or formalized politics of invitation. However, with the PeerTube platform Systerserver opened their affective infrastructure to seek out critical connections with other feminists and collectives with a shared interest in self-managed digital infrastructures away from the exposure to harassment, exploitation and censorship inherent to mainstream platforms.<ref>About video monetization and censorship on YouTube, see Mara Karagianni, “Software as Dispute Resolution System: Design, Effect and Cultural Monetization”.</ref> During these residencies, we entered into an exchange with the technopolitical desires, vulnerabilities and accessibility needs of different modes of inhabiting our feminist video platform. Together with Broken House (broken_house account), a community tool for sex-positive artists and porn makers in Berlin, we realized an unlisted and invite-only 24-hours streaming event that showcased a collage of post-porn art, archival material and video clips. The artists felt comfortable hosting a sensitive event on a feminist server, because knowing the people behind the machine, and knowing that the streaming remains unlisted, established a shared trust. Another residency with the design research collective for disability justice MELT (meltionary.com) resulted in an illustrated video about a project called ACCESS SERVER, which included sign language and was published as multiple versions of one video, each with a different set of subtitles.


Up until now the affective infrastructure set up through and alongside our servers had been precarious and volunteer-based, with sysadmin contribution depending on our availability and capacity. For the longest time the expenses for material and maintenance were covered through income from events, donations and from the members' own financial contributions. This changed when some of us decided to seek out funding for the realization of a feminist video platform in 2021. Awarded with the "A Fair New Idea" (AFNI) grant, we started to install, configure and customize a self-hosted instance of the free and open source PeerTube software. PeerTube is maintained by the French Framasoft initiative and it’s freely available for installation and configuration. To make it habitable and suited to our needs and desires we conducted a "digital maquillage" workshop to experiment with a more queerfriendly interface,<ref>https://www.npmjs.com/package/PeerTube-theme-maquillaje </ref> and defined a set of shared guidelines and terms of use.<ref>https://tube.systerserver.net/ </ref> With our platform<ref>https://tube.systerserver.net/ </ref> the feminist servers opened their affective infrastructure to seek out critical connections with other feminists and collectives by organizing an open call for artistic online residencies. During these residencies, we entered in exchange with the technopolitical desires and needs of different modes of inhabiting our feminist video platform. Together with the video practitioners of Broken House,<ref>https://tube.systerserver.net/a/broken_house/video-channels</ref> a tool for a sexpositive communities, we realized an unlisted and invite-only 24-hours streaming event. Another residency with the design research collective for disability justice MELT<ref>https://www.meltionary.com/</ref> created an illustrated video about their work ACCESS SERVER and included sign language alongside versions of the video with a different set of subtitulation for each version. Trust and openness regarding resonating political projectories, as well as a shared language and attitude towards intersectional matters of accessiblities and vulnerabilities defined the circumstances of our artistic collaborations. It confronted our feminist servers’ with questions of trans and disability justice in relation to server accessibility - not only from a technical perspective, but also in terms of bodies' needs and rights. After the funded period of the AFNI project, questions regarding the continuation of the platform and its maintenance as well as longterm availability were at stake. While the response from our communities was positive throughout, keeping the platform up to date seemed like a self-exploitative and unsustainable scenario. Thus instead of taking up more and more responsibility as a 'single point of service' and adopting the naturalized logic of 'scaling it up', we decided to explore different paths which led to a new project: 360 Degrees of Proximities.
== Feminist critique of FLOSS: Choosing our dependencies<ref>Formulation following “A Feminist Server Manifesto”.</ref> ==
The PeerTube software that we installed on Systerserver is free software for the creation of video and streaming platforms, which is maintained and developed by the French non-profit Framasoft initiative. PeerTube forms part of FLOSS, an umbrella term for free and open source software such as the Linux kernel, Firefox web browser, NextCloud or Signal Messenger. Freedoms are granted through licenses such as the GPL (General Public License) or, in the case of PeerTube, Affero GPL.<ref>Affero GPL has an extra provision that addresses the use of software over a computer network (such as a web application), and requires the full source code be accessible to any network user of the AGPL-licensed software. “Affero General Public License”. In Wikipedia, accessed June 4, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License.</ref> By circumventing existing proprietary copyright regimes, this allows everyone with the necessary skills to run, study, improve and distribute the software. Feminist servers – whenever we can – run and adapt free and open source software with regards to our specific and embodied needs. Free software aligns politically with feminist servers’ core values, such as sharing knowledge, empowering each other and working against power hierarchies based on gatekeeping, access to resources, tools and knowledge, as it allows them to run the software for themselves and on their machines (see also Snelting/spideralex 4, with reference to Laurence Rassel, Niederberger, “Der Server ist das Lagerfeuer” 7f). This is a form of emancipation from centralized or autonomous tech infrastructures, which are often administered by cis men, which thus challenges the historical attribution of femininity as something in opposition to technology, and the power awarded through technological proficiency (Travers 225, citing Cockburn). Free software therefore allows for bypassing the power monopolies held by tech corporations under the matrix of patriarchal techno domination. Despite continuous efforts to address the diversity of identities in FLOSS development,<ref>See, e.g., the artist project “Read The Feminist Manual” about gender discrimination in FLOSS, an online governance research organized by the Media Enterprise Design Lab of Boulder University of Colorado, accessed on May 21, 2023, https://excavations.digital/projects/read-feminist-manual/.</ref> however, only around 10 percent of contributions in FLOSS stem from women (Bosu/Sultana). These injustices are rooted in interrelated causes that form access barriers, such as sexist bias (Terrell/ Kofink/ Middleton/ Rainear/Murphy-Hill/ Parnin/ Stallings) and toxic behavior paired with the refusal to acknowledge forms of discrimination (‘gender blindness’) given the supposedly open nature of FLOSS projects (Nafus). Feminists have also pointed to factors such as the unequal distribution of care work and unequal wages resulting in an imbalance regarding free time for contributing volunteer work. Many digital infrastructure projects, even though in theory open for anyone to participate, are therefore prone to reinforcing mechanisms of exclusion and power hierarchies alongside intersectional patterns of marginalization (Dunbar-Hester 3f).


=== How not to scale but resonate ===
== Maintenance as Care ==
The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has criticized the prevalent conceptualization of ‘scalability’ by pointing out how projects of scale are often implicated in extractivist, colonialist and exploitative modes of production (Tsing a). She defines scalability as a characteristic of something that can expand without transforming, “without changing the framework of knowledge or action” - and therefore prone to rendering surrounding landscape and nature (including humans) into raw resources (for profit/progress),(Tsing b 507). As the mere potential for ‘expansion without transformation’, scalability is not compatible with deeply situated, power-sensitive and non-exploitative approaches that characterize (eco)feminist and decolonial activism, taking local knowledges and the embodied needs of people, landscapes and machines as their starting point. But if scaling is out of the question, what does it take to reach out and make our networks of solidarity grow - not in the distorted sense of infinite progress but in sustainable and careful ways?
Computer science and IT industry culture has tried to distinguish between software development as creative work in contrast to the tedious labor of software maintenance (Hilfling Ritasdatter 156f).<ref>In chapter III on Maintenance, Hilfling Ritasdatter critically contests the differences between unproductive labor, which sustains life, and creative work that produces and changes the world, as those have been articulated by various political theorists such as Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (Hilfling Ritasdatter 149), See also the distinction between development and maintenance in the “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” from 1969 by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, talked about in the context of feminist servers by Ines Kleesattel, 184f.</ref>  This distinction also applies to sysadmin work, which is mostly about maintaining, repairing and updating infrastructure and thus shares many characteristics with invisiblized, racialized and feminized care work (Tronto 112-114). The problems of devaluation are rooted within the intricacies of the server-client relationship, as well as the ‘software as service’ or cloud paradigm. The questions “Who is serving whom? Who is serving what? What is serving whom?” lie therefore at the center of the critical practice around feminist servers, which “radically question the conditions for serving and service; they experiment with changing client-server, user-device and guest-host-''ghost'' relations where they can.(Transfeminist Wishlist).
The practice of federating is a common principle within the realm of FLOSS that leads the development of federated social media, such as the Fediverse. Federation is a concept that derives from a political theory of networks in which power, resources and responsibilities are shared between all actors thus circumventing the centralization of authority.(Mansoux and Roscam Abbing) Robert Gehl and Diana Zulli have described the politics behind federated social media through the concept of covenant federalism, a subset of federalist political theory developed by Daniel Elazar (Gehl and Zulli). According to them, a covenant is “created by groups of people who all agree to abide by and be governed under ethical principles.” It is based on the principle of ethical choices as well as context and requires continuous consent by all participants which distinguishes it from contract federation based on legal texts and institutional laws (Gehl and Zulli).
The idea of federating our feminist video platform with other feminist platforms did not seem far fetched as the underlying PeerTube software is already built around the open ActivityPub protocol: the federating standard at the heart of the Fediverse. Besides, federated PeerTube instances also make it possible to stream videos of other instances in a decentralized peer2peer manner.
However, as we started to look out for instances with whom to federate there were hardly any queer or feminist platforms around that we knew of. This is when Systerserver decided to facilitate and participate in the setting up of two locally embedded video platforms in the course of our 360 Degrees of Proximities project, realized with the help of the Dutch Creative Industries Funds: One at Ca la Dona, a feminist community center in Barcelona and one with Broken House, the Berlin based community tool with whom we had already collaborated in the form of a residency during the first project phase. The installation and federating processes will be part of a week-long program acted out together with the local communities in each city. Supporting local communities in the endeavors of federating comes with the challenges of meeting other spatial and cultural realities as well as getting to know about different needs tied to video infrastructure. After the installation (yet to take place in May and September of 2023) the video platforms will hopefully continue to thrive and be further embedded and sustained by local sysadmins. In the processes of federating, the content of each community will be aggregated through the other community's’ web interface, thereby establishing connections with other radical feminist and queer communities.<ref> For ore details about the collaboration, see https://mur.at/project/syster360/.</ref>


Self-hosted and organized social networks are connected to theories of radical democracy, where participants become active citizens (Rodríguez). Feminist servers take this idea further with participants and media producers taking care of the affective infrastructures that support them and their projects. Videographers take the role of journalists who accompany and document protests and can become visual narrators of complex technopolitical ideas and movements such as cyberfeminist resistance.<ref>Work by Feminist Ninja: Actualizando el feminismo interseccional a la clase hacker, subtitles in English and Italian
Practices of care and maintenance within feminist servers must be understood as negotiations of collective responsibility. One important agreement for Systerserver is the no-pressure policy, which allows its sysadmins to participate according to their availabilities and thereby extends the principle of care towards themselves by taking into account the different intersectional precarities that define their situation. Contributions to the maintenance of the machine, and to the social relations around it, entail security upgrades, hardware replacements, backups, data migrations, and attentive documentation. In the case of the Systerserver video platform, this includes adapting the software to the needs of its community and specific use cases, curating new accounts, updating the platform’s code of conduct and communicating changes to the inhabitants of the platform. Nonetheless, the attitude of feminist servers’ work does not comply with the superimposed specters of seamlessness, infinite resources and the nonstop availability of computing.<ref>See also "A Feminist Server Manifesto" where it states that “A feminist server... tries hard not to apologize when she is sometimes not available.” </ref>
https://tube.systerserver.net/w/vFDmRpiQjyDcChUfVBnX2s</ref> Transcending from producing media to producing platforms, (Benjamin) there is an empowering dimension at play as participants start to engage with the technical affordances of the platform, trying to figure out the ground rules of their covenant and possible modes of federating. This is what we may call resonance of queer and feminist voices, facilitating and hearing each other in order to find common ground in recognizing the differences, engaging in heated debates as well as embodied modes of sharing and becoming.  
Technofeminist struggles range from queering server administration and building safe/r spaces on- and offline, from taking into account matters of online access and disabilities, inclusivity of trans bodies, and exploring the trajectories of transfeminist (server) manifestos. What will be the terms of feminist federating and how can collectively administered platforms reach a consensus in federating with other platforms? This will be figured out in the course of the next month(s). On our about page we put down some starting thoughts about the spaces we want to create with our video platform:


"We welcome radical, post-porn, controversial content - as long as it shows responsibility, accountability and care, in an intersectional, queer-friendly, interspeciest, non sexist, anti-racist, anti ableist, non-extractivist, anti-capitalist, antipatriarchal way. We will intervene in case of transgressive/abusive behaviour.
== Affective Infrastructures ==
We encourage non-binary classification and content notes to account for plural and (neuro)diverse realities and needs. Therefore, we suggest to use tags for indicating trigger warnings."<ref>https://tube.systerserver.net/about/instance</ref>
Feminist servers are often described in terms of digital, material and discursive or speculative infrastructures, which ties in many of the above mentioned aspects around making space, looking into issues of safety, trust, access and questions of being served, as well as maintenance and care (Niederberger, “Feminist Server”). Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant writes that “the question of politics becomes identical with the reinvention of infrastructures for managing the unevenness, ambivalence, violence, and ordinary contingency of contemporary existence.” (Berlant 394) To her, building and maintaining infrastructures is a way of doing (techno) politics, as infrastructures shape and organize the social relations that form around them. While critiquing the dismissal of the material nature of ‘cyberspace’, an infrastructural approach can sometimes tilt into prioritizing the technical over the social aspects. This is why some of us understand feminist servers in terms of affective infrastructure, foregrounding acts of community-based maintenance and affective labor. Everyday and mundane repair necessary for when things break down, can – in small and multiple increments – lead to larger changes in knowledge production (Hilfling 168 with reference to Graham and Thrift)


While we explicitly state what kind of content is welcome on the platform, there is an assumed understanding of identity politics and shared ethics. Due to our curated approach, the process of registering a “user account” (in order to add videos and channels) remains undisclosed. So far, most accounts have been created during our physical and online work sessions, either those which we organize collectively or those organized through each of us in our extended networks, through our art residencies, through artists who reached out to us, and through our collaborators. This attitude mirrors the onboarding approach of new members for the feminist servers themselves. There is no manifesto, declaration or written protocol of how to become a sysadmin on any of our servers. We choose to work in a trusted ambiance and are aware that our politics of invitation are not explicit, responding to our limited resources of time and energy as well as to our vulnerabilities.
Affective infrastructures suggest a different relation to tools and data, an “added layer of intimacy” (Motskobili 9) based on the collective practice of hosting and adapting software to meet our needs and desires. In reference to the histories of queer resistance and the re-appropriation of the ‘pink triangle’ (Jensen) by the queer community, Systerserver’s video platform adapted the pink triangle as a deconstructed PeerTube logo: one of its tactics of designing a queer-friendly interface. This also changes the practices of engaging with the infrastructures as a “space that we want to inhabit, as inhabitants, where we make a contribution, nurturing a safe space and a place for creativity and experimentation, a place for hacking heteronormativity and patriarchy.” (Snelting/spideralex 5)


From where we are now and according to the resources available to us, we choose to focus on the social and technopolitical aspects and not on the development of the software itself.
== Feminist Federation ==
This means that for our attempt at feminist federating we make do with the existing open protocol of ActivityPub and the PeerTube software, which is in congruence with our basic needs for free software, decentralized infrastructures and basic options for content moderation and customization. ActivityPub is based on pump.io, an engine that supports the Activity Streams Application Programming Interface (API), which was first released by the commercial industry in 2009.<ref> By facebook, a commerical social media platform.</ref> It is “a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content”.<ref>Activity Pub website, accessed on April 30th, 2023, https://activitypub.rocks/ </ref> Lead author of ActivityPub standard, Christine Lemmer-Webber notes “that the team predominantly identified as queer, which led to features that help users and administrators protect against "undesired interaction."<ref>In January 2018, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the ActivityPub standard as a Recommendation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub#cite_note-W3C-recommendation-2 </ref> However PeerTube, Mastodon and other social networks are still centered around individual producers and up until now do not support group accounts, or community video channels. And while the Fediverse allows for a social design of privacy by putting effort into providing finer moderation tools,(Mansoux and Roscam Abbing 131) allowing to set visibility preferences, and organizing protocol, software and platform policies via version control ticketing open to contribution, gender inclusivity is still mostly absent from FLOSS related discussion on privacy:
After the first phase of the PeerTube platform was implemented on Systerserver and a curated period of try-outs had come to an end, questions regarding the continuation and maintenance of the video platform as well as long-term availability arose. While the response from the resident artists and collectives was very encouraging, growing Systerserver’s video platform into a more visible instance<ref>Instance is the term for a particular installation of a software on a server.</ref> did not align with the sysadmin’s capacities, resources, and interests. Thus, instead of taking up more responsibility as a ‘single point of service’ and adopting the naturalized logic of ‘scaling up’, Systerserver decided to explore a different path to nurturing feminist communities: the formation of a feminist federation. This is an ongoing process that, at the time of writing, has just started to unfold. This text can thus only provide a preliminary outline of what a feminist federation on the basis of the PeerTube software might eventually grow into.


"At this time, the digital security and privacy community has largely ignored trans* communities. Despite trans* community members, the community itself is typically absent from diversity initiatives or community leadership roles. There are also very few trainers in the community who are trans* or work with trans* communities."
PeerTube is based on the open communication protocol ActivityPub ("What is ActivityPub"), which allows a video platform to connect not just with other PeerTube platforms, but with all social networks and other media instances based on the same protocol. The technosocial agreement behind this is called federation, which is characteristic of the ''fediverse'':<ref>The word ‘fediverse’ is a lexicon blend of federation and universe, “Fediverse”, in Wikipedia, last modified May 27, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse.</ref> a decentralized network of currently around 50 different types of social media such as Mastodon (microblogging), Mobilizon (event management), Funkwhale (sound/audio hosting) or Pixelfed (image hosting).<ref>An easy way to explain federated media is through the concept of email providers, https://docs.joinmastodon.org/#federation.</ref> Through federation, content such as microblogging or files (images, documents, videos) that are hosted on one instance can be accessible from another. All instances within the fediverse are maintained by a collective or individual sysadmins, who can open their infrastructures to a community of participants according to their politics of invitation (e.g. open access or invite-only) and who can adopt or fork<ref>In FLOSS environments, forking describes the copying, modification and development of a software in a way that differs from the previous creators’ or the maintainers’ projects and is often accompanied by a splitting of communities.</ref> the software, propose a code of conduct or make design choices for their instance.
(Norman Shamas & Anonymous Trans* Activists 52)
[[File:How-the-Fediverse-connects.png|alt=How The Fediverse Connects|thumb|480px|Figure 1: The diagram shows three different communication protocols (ActivityPub, Zot, Diaspora, etc), and how each protocol allows the interoperability of the software that makes use of that protocol (Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, Diaspora, Hubzilla, etc). The image shows that software can have more than one protocol embedded into the code, allowingws a larger network interoperability.<ref>How the Fediverse connects, image creators Imke Senst, Mike Kuketz, licenses Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, https://social.tchncs.de/@kuketzblog/107045136773063674.</ref>]]


However, in federated social media sysadmins and moderators have per default access to unencrypted databases and graphs of interactions (Jamie Lewis). This is why Sarah Jamie Lewis and others have demanded for a distribution of powers, such as a privacy preserving persistence layer removed from any specific application.
The concept of federation originally derives from a political theory of networks in which power, resources and responsibilities are shared between actors, thus circumventing the centralization of authority (Mansoux and Roscam Abbing). When this is implemented within alternative social networks, Robert Gehl and Diana Zulli have argued that it can maintain the local autonomy of all instances while at the same time strengthening the collective commitment to an ethical code fostering connection and exchange. They have linked the politics behind federated social media to the concept of the covenant, a federalist political theory developed by Daniel Elazar (Gehl and Zulli 3). A covenant is an agreement to (self-) governance by a group of people, and it is based on shared ethical choices.<ref>Convenantal federation is distinguished from contract federation, which is based on legal texts and institutional laws.</ref> Participants’ consent is actively and continuously negotiated, which means in the case of the fediverse that instances can freely choose to either leave or join the fediverse by federating with other instances (Gehl and Zulli 4). This capacity for consensual engagement and autonomous boundary setting aligns with feminist servers’ technofeminist desire for autonomous infrastructures and choosing our own dependencies. Not only does PeerTube software as part of FLOSS allow us to create a safe/r space on our machines, but the application of an open protocol such as ActivityPub also establishes a technosocial base that effectively enables growing bonds among different feminist communities. Here connection  becomes a consensual choice, not a forced commitment or a default that is hard to reverse. Even after federating with each other, connections can be dissolved (‘defederated’) at any time – for example in the case of irreconcilable safety needs or in the face of diverging values – leaving instances with the ability to self-determine and negotiate their boundaries according to their needs. Their ability to consent is tied to the formation of non-hierarchical bonds that presuppose the absence of undesired dependencies or power relations.
“You need that first persistence layer to be communal and privacy preserving to prevent any entity being in a position do something like all the DMs on this instance are readable by whoever admins it”.<ref>Sarah Jamie Lewis, https://pseudorandom.resistant.tech/federation-is-the-worst-of-all-worlds.html</ref>
Moreover technical contributions federated social media remain still within the reach of a specific group of developers who are either crowd or state funded like the case of PeerTube, or have the privilege of free time to devote.  
360 Degrees of Proximities, is an ongoing experimentation with the (im)possibilities of feminist federating. It can be understood as the interplay between social and artistic embodiment and a technological protocol that allows content to be streamed, accessed and exchanged between servers. But while the idea behind the social networking protocol is to establish as many connections as possible, feminist federating is hesitant and only interested to federate with other nodes that share our queering strategies of technopolitics.  


=== Outro ===
PeerTube has an opt-in federation style, meaning that after a new installation of the PeerTube software, the instance is neither followed by nor following other instances and is therefore only hosting its own inhabitants and contents. In order to federate, the administrators of the instance accept so-called ‘follow requests’, and follow other instances with whom they would like to share content.<ref>This is different from Mastodon, where a kind of convenant is in place. Here, instances are federated per default with other instances which commit to a shared set of rules such as moderation against racism, sexism, trans- and homophobia or daily backups of all data and posts. Accessed May 26, 2023, https://joinmastodon.org/covenant.</ref> After the initial setup of PeerTube, Systerserver’s community started to look for instances with whom to federate and share their content, but realized that there were hardly any queer or feminist platforms around. Considering that PeerTube and even the fediverse are not widely known and due to their closeness to the cis male-dominated FLOSS communities and the demanding prerequisites for the installation and maintenance, this is not very surprising. However, it has consequences for the feminist appropriation of the principles and technosocial protocols of federation. In order for Systerserver to federate its platform, it is necessary to take on an empowering and pedagogical approach, transcending the retrospective logic of ‘connecting’ something that already exists by growing relational networks of solidarity and care into supporting the making of video infrastructures embedded in other localities.
As a collaborative effort to think and speak about some of the technopolitical intricacies of caring for machines and bodies in the context of feminist servers this text can only be an articulative
 
exercise. It will accompany but never capture or represent what it is that some of us31 are doing or how some of us find meaning in what it is we are doing.  
Looking into this kind of resonance with other communities, Systerserver started to facilitate and participate in setting up two new video platforms:<ref>Systerserver received financial support for this undertaking as part of the 360 Degrees of Proximities project by the Dutch Creative Industries Funds.</ref> one at Ca la Dona, a feminist community center in Barcelona and one with Broken House, the Berlin-based community tool with which Systerserver had already collaborated in the form of a residency when first setting up the PeerTube platform. The installation and federating processes are part of two week-long programs, each carried out together with the local communities.<ref>For more details about the collaboration, see https://mur.at/project/syster360/.</ref> Once the platforms are up and federated, they aggregate the content of each community’s platform through the web interface of the other platforms. However, this is only one of the ways in which critical connections between feminist and queer communities can manifest themselves within a feminist federation. Another important aspect is the facilitation of networks of solidarity and care among the participants. These kinds of networks can grow by meeting each other and forming relationships that can facilitate the exchange of knowledges, support, advice and resources. In doing so, this can result in the formation of a covenant of platforms who agree to federate with each other alongside certain core values or upon a shared code of conduct.
Instead it becomes part of our collective processes of developing and sharing knowledge and skills around feminist peer production(Toupin) and free software, technopolitical tools for organizing and feminist pedagogies. It also allows to document and reflect our practice and to speculate and make space for questions and articulations that might guide our further practice.
 
Understood from a lence of maintenance and care feminist sysadmin work becomes more than the configuration of hardware and machines for feminist ends. It is in itself a resistant practice of radical disentanglement, of choosing to dissolve the dependencies on cis male sysadmins and capitalist tech corporations that run the systems and the software for us and under their own terms (Wajcman).
Supporting local communities in the endeavors of building up their own technopolitical infrastructures comes with the challenges of meeting other spatial and cultural realities as well as getting to know about different needs tied to the context and motivations behind building a video platform. In the case of Ca la Dona, the local community and space was able to reactivate old hardware (rack servers) donated to the space and install their PeerTube instance on an in-house server.<ref>In house server means that is physically located in a space vs a cloud server, accessed June 3, 2023, https://www.techsafety.org/inhouse-vs-cloud.</ref> However, issues arose with regard to the excessive energy consumption of the old hardware and the lack of a stable network interface to the outside. In the case of Broken House, which is the coming collaboration, challenges that lie ahead range from choosing a hosting provider for renting a server, to ensuring that the local community can establish connections with people who are motivated to learn and support with administering the server.
Feminist servers support us in our needs and amidst the “ruins of capitalism”(Tsing) and make space for ways of relating differently to each other and (with) technology. In experimenting and engaging with modes of feminist federating, we aim to take these ways a little more public. Feminist federating is an attempt in technofeminist world-building, a collective effort to create and maintain affective infrastructures in congruence with feminist values around grassroot politics, radical democracy or anarchisms, self-organisation, shared responsibilities, care and sustainability.
 
[[File:Looking at servers.jpg|alt=Looking at rack servers at Ca La Dona, Barcelona|thumb|400px|Figure 2: Going through the donated rack servers to choose one for reformatting and installing Linux Operating System and PeerTube, during the first day of our week-long worksession at Ca la Dona.]]
[[File:Media caladona domain.jpg|alt=media.caladona.org (https://media.caladona.org/)|thumb|400px|Figure 3: The internet provider of Ca la Dona only assigns static IP with a high monthly rate. Therefore, other technical configurations need to be explored to ensure that the space has a static IP address that can be mapped to the domain name collectively chosen during the monthly assembly: media.caladona.org.]]
 
While adapting PeerTube software to our community needs, we faced two shortfalls: one was the lack of group accounts, and the other the unchecked power of administrators and moderators over the inhabitants’ data and invitation to federate. Group accounts are valuable to communities, especially the most vulnerable ones such as feminist, queer and trans communities, as it enhances anonymity within a group and reduces toxic attacks directed to single persons. ActivityPub has yet to implement accounts for a group of people.<ref>Looking into the development history from OStatus and its implementation in previous decentralized social networks, the group feature was dropped in 2013. From a user’s comment in the pump.io social network code repository we read:
 
“This is a major drawback since the migration. We were using the ‘koumbitstatus’ group to do status updates for our network in a decentralised way, on some servers outside of our main infrastructure. This functionality is now completely gone.
 
While I think now that we shouldn’t have relied on identi.ca for that service, I was expecting the ‘federation’ bit to survive the migration: I post those notices from my home statusnet server, and the fact that those don't communicate at all anymore makes this a very difficult migration. This will clearly make us hesitant in using pump.io or any other federated protocol (as opposed to say: a simple html page with rss feeds) to post our updates.”
 
Accessed on May 28, 2023, https://github.com/pump-io/pump.io/issues/299.</ref> Christine Lemmer-Webber, lead author of ActivityPub protocol, notes “that the team predominantly identified as queer, which led to features that help users and administrators protect against ‘undesired interaction’.”<ref>In January 2018, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the ActivityPub standard as a recommendation.</ref>  However ActivityPub and PeerTube are still centered around individual creators and do not yet support group accounts or community video channels, even though the community has been asking for this since 2018.<ref>The request for group accounts has been open on the GitHub code repository of PeerTube since 2018, and there is a long thread of users requesting this feature. In one of the comments we read: "IMHO it would be a good thing to promote collaborative creation. It would be another way to offer something different from Youtube (which is centered on individuals)." Accessed on May 28, 2023, https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/699.</ref>
 
In his book ''Platform Socialism'', James Muldoon suggests that we should shift our concerns from “privacy, data and size”, and claim the “power, ownership and control” over our digital media (Muldoon 2). Whereas in the case of federated social networks there is an empowering dimension at play as activists start to collectively govern part of the infrastructure, there is an asymmetric power balance between inhabitants and administrators/moderators when it comes to owning our data. Fediverse allows for a social design of privacy by putting effort into providing finer moderation tools (Mansoux and Roscam Abbing 132-33), such as visibility preferences for posts and defederation by blocking other instances. However, by default sysadmins and moderators have access to unencrypted user messages and databases as well as graphs of interactions (Budington). This is why Sarah Jamie Lewis has called for a distribution of powers, such as a privacy preserving persistence layer removed from any specific application:
 
<blockquote>You need that first persistence layer to be communal and privacy preserving to prevent any entity being in a position do something like all the DMs on this instance are readable by whoever admins it. –  Sarah Jamie Lewis</blockquote>
 
Recent technological developments of encrypted social networks (a hybrid of federation and peer-2-peer) have emerged and are in the making.<ref>See Bluesky (https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol) and Manyverse (https://www.manyver.se/).</ref> However, technical contributions in federated social networks remain dominated by a specific group of developers, still missing out in terms of gender and ethnic diversity.<ref>Looking at the forum of ActivityPub, most people who have profile pictures and are the most active seem to be white men, https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/.</ref> This may account for why the design of the more widespread federated social networks falls short in aspects of privacy and group accounts, whose importance for community safety have not been addressed yet.
 
From where we stand now and according to the resources available to us, we choose to focus on the social and technopolitical aspects of caring for our infrastructures and growing into a feminist federation, rather than on the development of the software itself. This means that we make do with the existing open protocol of ActivityPub and the PeerTube software, which we can adopt in accordance with our basic needs for free software, autonomous safe/r spaces and the possibilities for sustainably growing our affective infrastructures. Nevertheless, we also engage in a closer investigation of the development and debates of and around PeerTube and ActivityPub and their open source communities, such as in writing this text.
 
== Outro: How not to scale but resonate ==
The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has criticized the prevalent conceptualization of ‘scalability’ by pointing out how projects of scale are often implicated in extractivist, colonialist and exploitative modes of production. She defines scalability as characteristic of something that can expand without transforming and is therefore prone to rendering surrounding landscape and nature (including humans) into mere resources (Tsing “Nonscalability” 507). Thus the idea of scalability is not compatible and even in conflict with the situated, power-sensitive and non-exploitative approaches that characterize feminist servers. And while the values of feminist servers lie precisely in their nonscalable qualities, accounting for the embodied needs of people, landscapes and machines, this does not make them isolated ‘niche’ phenomena. Instead feminist servers since the beginnings have set out to explore nonscalable ways of forming networks of solidarity and care among themselves and beyond. Among those, this text has explored the beginnings of a feminist federation as one possible mode of reaching out and growing – not in the distorted sense of infinite progress, but in sustainable and careful ways. In the face of both structural and particular precarities, this implies getting to know and strengthening each others’ communities in the process of federating and creating fruitful ways of exchange and mutual support. The roles that Systerserver takes in facilitating local communities before, during and after the installation of PeerTube, are part of a collective learning process, which informs our feminist pedagogies.
 
This shared effort may at some point result in a covenant with a more explicitly shared set of values articulated from within the feminist federation and in collaboration with all the communities that participate in it. It will reflect a process of learning to maintain feminist infrastructures according to the local needs and context from which each community comes together. This is what we may call the resonance of queer and feminist voices, facilitating and hearing each other out in order to find common ground in recognizing the differences. We do this by engaging in political debates and by establishing critical connections with allies, continuing our efforts of caring for our feminist digital infrastructures now and in the long run. Systerserver’s ongoing experimentation with the possibilities of a feminist federation can be understood as the interplay between a social and artistic embodiment of a technological protocol that allows content to be streamed, accessed and exchanged between servers. But while the idea behind most social networking protocols is to establish as many connections as possible, feminist federation embraces a more hesitant and critical mode of connecting, and is only interested in federating with others who share our approach of queering technopolitics.
 
As a collaborative effort to think and speak about some of the intricacies of caring for machines and bodies in the context of feminist servers, this text can only be an articulative exercise. It will accompany but never capture or represent what it is that some of us are doing or how some of us find meaning in what it is we are doing. Instead it becomes part of our collective processes of developing and sharing knowledge and skills around feminist appropriations of free software, technopolitical tools for organizing, and feminist pedagogies. Feminist servers adopt the ideas of FLOSS and other tech communities where disempowered users can become (code) contributors, system admins and hackers by choosing their own dependencies and enabling communities into becoming infrastructure makers and maintainers. In experimenting and engaging with modes of feminist federation, we aim to reach out and share our knowledges, thereby becoming a little more visible. Doing so also allowed us to document and reflect on our practice and to speculate and make space for questions and articulations that might guide further paths and developments. Feminist servers and modes of federation can support us in our needs and amidst the “ruins of capitalism” (Tsing, “End of the World”). They make space for ways of relating differently to each other and (with) technology.
 
== Acknowledgements ==
The following sysadmins from a network of feminist servers contributed to the collaborative writing process and previously published versions: ooooo - transuniversal constellation, vo ezn - sound && infrastructure artist, Mara Karagianni - artist and software developer, nate wessalowski - technofeminist researcher and doctoral student.
 
English correction by Aileen Derieg.
 
Authors and contributors form part of a wider ecosystem of techno-/ cyberfeminists, sysadmins and allies, mostly across Europe and Abya Yala, South America.
 
Many thanks to the organizers and reviewers of Minor Tech in giving us the chance to articulate our praxis.
 
==Notes==
<references />
 
== Works cited ==
<div class="workscited">
''A Feminist Server Manifesto.'' 2014, https://areyoubeingserved.constantvzw.org/Summit_afterlife.xhtml. Accessed 8 June 2023.
 
anarchaserver.org. Accessed 8 June 2023.
 
''A Wishlist for Trans*Feminist Servers''. 2022, https://etherpad.mur.at/p/tfs.
 
Berlant, Lauren. "The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times". ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'' 34, no. 3 (June 2016): 393–419. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989.
 
Bosu, Amiangshu, and Kazi Zakia Sultana. ‘Diversity and Inclusion in Open Source Software (OSS) Projects: Where Do We Stand?’ In ''2019 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)'', 1–11. Porto de Galinhas, Recife, Brazil: IEEE, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1109/ESEM.2019.8870179.
 
Budington, Bill. ‘Is Mastodon Private and Secure? Let’s Take a Look’. ''Electronic Frontier Foundation'', 16 November 2022. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/mastodon-private-and-secure-lets-take-look.
 
broken_house account, https://tube.systerserver.net/a/broken_house/video-channels. Accessed 8 June 2023.
 
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———. "Der Server ist das Lagerfeuer. Feministische Infrastrukturkritik, Gemeinschaftlichkeit und das kulturelle Paradigma von Zirkulation in Digitaler Infrastruktur". preprint, 2021.
 
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———. "Feministische Infrastruktur aufbauen: Helplines zum Umgang mit geschlechtsspezifischer Gewalt im Internet". In ''Technopolitiken der Sorge'', edited by Christoph Brunner, Grit Lange, and nate wessalowski. transversal, 2023.
 
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———. ''The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins''. Princeton University Press, 2015.
 
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</div>
 
[[Category:5000 words]]

Latest revision as of 10:27, 2 September 2023

nate wessalowski
& Mara Karagianni

From Feminist Servers to Feminist Federation

From Feminist Servers to Feminist Federation

Abstract

Situated within the technofeminist care practices of feminist servers, this text explores the possibilities of feminist federation. Speaking from our collective practice of system administration, we start by introducing Systerserver, laying out the feminist pedagogies that inform our practice of learning and doing together with technologies and the politics of maintenance and care. We then revisit the identity politics of feminist servers as more than safe/r spaces in the cis-male-dominated domain of free/libre and open source software communities. Finally, we reflect on our experiences of building and federating a feminist video platform with the PeerTube software on Systerserver. Facing the techno-social challenges around the protocol of federation and adapting the software alongside our federating practice, we focus on sustainable and care-oriented alternatives to ‘scaling up’ the affective infrastructures of our feminist servers.

We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass'. It's always about critical connections. – Grace Lee Boggs


Introduction

In this text we adopt practices of weaving feminist networks of solidarity and care[1] in the age of hybrid on- and offline world-making (Haraway 35f). More specifically, we investigate the possibilities of growing into a feminist federation, which accompany the continuation of a feminist video platform project based on the PeerTube software (tube.systerserver.net). The idea of installing, maintaining and adapting PeerTube in order to build a feminist video platform emerged from the closely knit collaboration of three feminist servers: Anarchaserver (anarchaserver.org) Systerserver (systerserver.net) and Leverburns (terminal.leverburns.blue). Each of these servers maintains free and open source software that supports different ways of technopolitical organizing, from media cloud hosting and tools for the creation of polls, to web hosting for archived cyber-/ technofeminist websites. While some of the sysadmins involved in the installation of PeerTube are or have been involved with two or even all three feminist servers, Anarchaserver and Leverburns mainly supported the project with their tools, while the PeerTube platform was realized through and on Systerserver. For this reason, we focus on the practices around Systerserver and the group of system administrators (sysadmins) actively involved in the PeerTube project. The authors and contributors to this text are women, trans and non-binary people currently part of Systerserver and with different geolocations in Europe. Systerserver organizes mainly through self-hosted mailing lists,[2] video calls and other tools that enable shared working sessions and occasional meetings in person during feminist hacking or other, project-related events.

The video platform was set up with the support of a Belgian art fund received in 2021, not as a permanent infrastructure but as an experimental process for sharing artistic videos and live streaming. A year later, when the funded period came to an end, two things became clear: although there was a need from video-makers[3] to host their art and content in feminist and community-based environments, we didn’t want to become yet another centralized service infrastructure. Instead, awarded with another grant by a Dutch design fund, we set out to enable other collectives to host their own infrastructures and become part ofz an emerging feminist federation of video platforms.

The process of writing about the possibilities of feminist federation started with Systerserver’s participation in the Minor Tech workshop,[4] where questions around scalability were discussed and researched. ‘Scalability’ is more than just a descriptive category: it has also been infused with the ethical obligation to facilitate participation (Sterne VII), namely to involve as many people as possible, if not to ‘change the world’. In this sense small scale projects are measured by their potential to finally and eventually ‘grow up’ and ‘become major’. Projects or collectives such as feminist servers, which are understood to be ‘niche’ or ‘small scale’, typically involve a limited number of people, known only within certain counterpublics (Travers) or circles of friends. They are not geared towards profit, nor efficiency, and often work with a (trans)local embeddedness, where geographies and cultures come together in virtual and physical spaces, and therefore they cannot be easily replicated. Starting from our practice of system administration and the embodied experiences of collectively building a feminist video platform, we turn to explore the process ‘from feminist servers to feminist federation’. Based on a technofeminist understanding of the political and gendered aspects of technology, we ask how technologies and protocols of decentralized social media networking and federation[5] can facilitate this process. What are the challenges of forming and growing into a feminist federation?

Feminist Servers

Feminist servers are infrastructures for nourishing communities of feminists with an interest in technologies or a digitally mediated, art and/or activist, praxis. They are an embedded techno-social practice, a critical intervention into the human-machine dichotomies, and protagonists of a speculative fiction calling for a feminist internet (spideralex, “Internet Féministe”; Toupin/spideralex). Due to their ‘techno-nature’ they are highly connective, interlinking and forming temporary networks of care and solidarity to exchange knowledge and tools, learn together and become involved with each others’ infrastructure projects.[6] The genealogies of feminist servers are not easy to trace as they form ties and intersections with various movements such as cyber- techno- and trans hack feminisms, women-in-tech initiatives, academic fields around network, media and publishing, autonomous tech collectives and network activism, digital commons enthusiasts, the hacker, self-hosting, free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) movements, Do-it-yourself/together (DIY/T) culture, and feminist cybersecurity and self-defense. The motivations behind the formation of feminist servers often stem from the need for spaces in which lesbians, women, non-binary and trans persons, disidentes de género (gender dissidents), and queers can share knowledge about technology and organize themselves.[7]

Systerserver is one of the earliest known feminist server collectives. The server was launched in 2005 as an initiative of the GenderChanger Academy (Mauro-Flude/Akama 51) founded and composed by a group of women involved in a squatted Internet Cafe/ Hackerspace in Amsterdam (ASCII) during the late 90s (Derieg). GenderChanger Academy was formed, in early 2000s, to “get more women involved in technology”(Genderchangers) by initiating tech skill-sharing workshops.[8] In 2002 the first Eclectic Tech Carnival (/etc) took place – a new format derived from the Amsterdam affiliated network that would enable skill-sharing sessions, workshops and discussions in the shape of self-organized hack meetings across Europe from Croatia to Greece to Serbia, Austria, Romania and Italy.[9] During these mostly annual meetings, Systerserver – while often dormant throughout the rest of the year – was activated as a supportive infrastructure for hosting websites, organizing, learning and archiving. When the frequency of the /etc meetings slowed down – partly due to a crisis in identity politics and remediation of trans-hostility and the inclusion of trans persons – new strategies to keep the server active were sought out. By that time, many people had been involved with Systerserver and most of those who had launched the server were no longer actively participating. In 2021 the current group of sysadmins applied for funds to develop a feminist video platform, in order to sustain the feminist server project and the community around it.

Even though in the context of feminist servers a ‘server’ is not a purely technical term, virtual and physical machines are integral to the techno-social practices which constitute feminist servers. The technical infrastructures of Systerserver, Anarchaserver and Lever Burns are either located within shared activist networks on virtual servers, someone’s home or, in the case of Systerserver at mur.at, within a net culture initiative that has a data room. Some of the servers are stable enough to distribute their services, and this allows the servers to depend on each other, sharing their tools while fostering webs of commitment, responsibility and care.

In resonance with other writings on the subject of feminist servers, (spideralex, “internet féministe”, Niederberger, “Feminist Server”, “Der Server ist das Lagerfeuer”, Mauro-Flude/Akama, “A Feminist Server Stack”, Kleesattel) the following passages trace important aspects of the feminist pedagogies that inform the practices of maintaining a server and building a feminist video platform through Systerserver.

Making (safe/r) spaces for feminist and queer communities

The idea of a feminist server is sometimes linked to the concept of safe/r spaces,[10] which actively oppose patterns of discrimination, taking intersectional safety needs and trust into account. Feminist servers can become safe/r spaces for queer, trans and women-identified persons who experience patriarchal oppressions and violence, especially in the cis male-dominated realm of information technology and digital infrastructures. Most of the time, feminist servers stay intimate, known to small circles of friends and allies with no explicit or formalized politics of invitation. However, with the PeerTube platform Systerserver opened their affective infrastructure to seek out critical connections with other feminists and collectives with a shared interest in self-managed digital infrastructures away from the exposure to harassment, exploitation and censorship inherent to mainstream platforms.[11] During these residencies, we entered into an exchange with the technopolitical desires, vulnerabilities and accessibility needs of different modes of inhabiting our feminist video platform. Together with Broken House (broken_house account), a community tool for sex-positive artists and porn makers in Berlin, we realized an unlisted and invite-only 24-hours streaming event that showcased a collage of post-porn art, archival material and video clips. The artists felt comfortable hosting a sensitive event on a feminist server, because knowing the people behind the machine, and knowing that the streaming remains unlisted, established a shared trust. Another residency with the design research collective for disability justice MELT (meltionary.com) resulted in an illustrated video about a project called ACCESS SERVER, which included sign language and was published as multiple versions of one video, each with a different set of subtitles.

Feminist critique of FLOSS: Choosing our dependencies[12]

The PeerTube software that we installed on Systerserver is free software for the creation of video and streaming platforms, which is maintained and developed by the French non-profit Framasoft initiative. PeerTube forms part of FLOSS, an umbrella term for free and open source software such as the Linux kernel, Firefox web browser, NextCloud or Signal Messenger. Freedoms are granted through licenses such as the GPL (General Public License) or, in the case of PeerTube, Affero GPL.[13] By circumventing existing proprietary copyright regimes, this allows everyone with the necessary skills to run, study, improve and distribute the software. Feminist servers – whenever we can – run and adapt free and open source software with regards to our specific and embodied needs. Free software aligns politically with feminist servers’ core values, such as sharing knowledge, empowering each other and working against power hierarchies based on gatekeeping, access to resources, tools and knowledge, as it allows them to run the software for themselves and on their machines (see also Snelting/spideralex 4, with reference to Laurence Rassel, Niederberger, “Der Server ist das Lagerfeuer” 7f). This is a form of emancipation from centralized or autonomous tech infrastructures, which are often administered by cis men, which thus challenges the historical attribution of femininity as something in opposition to technology, and the power awarded through technological proficiency (Travers 225, citing Cockburn). Free software therefore allows for bypassing the power monopolies held by tech corporations under the matrix of patriarchal techno domination. Despite continuous efforts to address the diversity of identities in FLOSS development,[14] however, only around 10 percent of contributions in FLOSS stem from women (Bosu/Sultana). These injustices are rooted in interrelated causes that form access barriers, such as sexist bias (Terrell/ Kofink/ Middleton/ Rainear/Murphy-Hill/ Parnin/ Stallings) and toxic behavior paired with the refusal to acknowledge forms of discrimination (‘gender blindness’) given the supposedly open nature of FLOSS projects (Nafus). Feminists have also pointed to factors such as the unequal distribution of care work and unequal wages resulting in an imbalance regarding free time for contributing volunteer work. Many digital infrastructure projects, even though in theory open for anyone to participate, are therefore prone to reinforcing mechanisms of exclusion and power hierarchies alongside intersectional patterns of marginalization (Dunbar-Hester 3f).

Maintenance as Care

Computer science and IT industry culture has tried to distinguish between software development as creative work in contrast to the tedious labor of software maintenance (Hilfling Ritasdatter 156f).[15] This distinction also applies to sysadmin work, which is mostly about maintaining, repairing and updating infrastructure and thus shares many characteristics with invisiblized, racialized and feminized care work (Tronto 112-114). The problems of devaluation are rooted within the intricacies of the server-client relationship, as well as the ‘software as service’ or cloud paradigm. The questions “Who is serving whom? Who is serving what? What is serving whom?” lie therefore at the center of the critical practice around feminist servers, which “radically question the conditions for serving and service; they experiment with changing client-server, user-device and guest-host-ghost relations where they can.” (Transfeminist Wishlist).

Practices of care and maintenance within feminist servers must be understood as negotiations of collective responsibility. One important agreement for Systerserver is the no-pressure policy, which allows its sysadmins to participate according to their availabilities and thereby extends the principle of care towards themselves by taking into account the different intersectional precarities that define their situation. Contributions to the maintenance of the machine, and to the social relations around it, entail security upgrades, hardware replacements, backups, data migrations, and attentive documentation. In the case of the Systerserver video platform, this includes adapting the software to the needs of its community and specific use cases, curating new accounts, updating the platform’s code of conduct and communicating changes to the inhabitants of the platform. Nonetheless, the attitude of feminist servers’ work does not comply with the superimposed specters of seamlessness, infinite resources and the nonstop availability of computing.[16]

Affective Infrastructures

Feminist servers are often described in terms of digital, material and discursive or speculative infrastructures, which ties in many of the above mentioned aspects around making space, looking into issues of safety, trust, access and questions of being served, as well as maintenance and care (Niederberger, “Feminist Server”). Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant writes that “the question of politics becomes identical with the reinvention of infrastructures for managing the unevenness, ambivalence, violence, and ordinary contingency of contemporary existence.” (Berlant 394) To her, building and maintaining infrastructures is a way of doing (techno) politics, as infrastructures shape and organize the social relations that form around them. While critiquing the dismissal of the material nature of ‘cyberspace’, an infrastructural approach can sometimes tilt into prioritizing the technical over the social aspects. This is why some of us understand feminist servers in terms of affective infrastructure, foregrounding acts of community-based maintenance and affective labor. Everyday and mundane repair necessary for when things break down, can – in small and multiple increments – lead to larger changes in knowledge production (Hilfling 168 with reference to Graham and Thrift)

Affective infrastructures suggest a different relation to tools and data, an “added layer of intimacy” (Motskobili 9) based on the collective practice of hosting and adapting software to meet our needs and desires. In reference to the histories of queer resistance and the re-appropriation of the ‘pink triangle’ (Jensen) by the queer community, Systerserver’s video platform adapted the pink triangle as a deconstructed PeerTube logo: one of its tactics of designing a queer-friendly interface. This also changes the practices of engaging with the infrastructures as a “space that we want to inhabit, as inhabitants, where we make a contribution, nurturing a safe space and a place for creativity and experimentation, a place for hacking heteronormativity and patriarchy.” (Snelting/spideralex 5)

Feminist Federation

After the first phase of the PeerTube platform was implemented on Systerserver and a curated period of try-outs had come to an end, questions regarding the continuation and maintenance of the video platform as well as long-term availability arose. While the response from the resident artists and collectives was very encouraging, growing Systerserver’s video platform into a more visible instance[17] did not align with the sysadmin’s capacities, resources, and interests. Thus, instead of taking up more responsibility as a ‘single point of service’ and adopting the naturalized logic of ‘scaling up’, Systerserver decided to explore a different path to nurturing feminist communities: the formation of a feminist federation. This is an ongoing process that, at the time of writing, has just started to unfold. This text can thus only provide a preliminary outline of what a feminist federation on the basis of the PeerTube software might eventually grow into.

PeerTube is based on the open communication protocol ActivityPub ("What is ActivityPub"), which allows a video platform to connect not just with other PeerTube platforms, but with all social networks and other media instances based on the same protocol. The technosocial agreement behind this is called federation, which is characteristic of the fediverse:[18] a decentralized network of currently around 50 different types of social media such as Mastodon (microblogging), Mobilizon (event management), Funkwhale (sound/audio hosting) or Pixelfed (image hosting).[19] Through federation, content such as microblogging or files (images, documents, videos) that are hosted on one instance can be accessible from another. All instances within the fediverse are maintained by a collective or individual sysadmins, who can open their infrastructures to a community of participants according to their politics of invitation (e.g. open access or invite-only) and who can adopt or fork[20] the software, propose a code of conduct or make design choices for their instance.

How The Fediverse Connects
Figure 1: The diagram shows three different communication protocols (ActivityPub, Zot, Diaspora, etc), and how each protocol allows the interoperability of the software that makes use of that protocol (Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, Diaspora, Hubzilla, etc). The image shows that software can have more than one protocol embedded into the code, allowingws a larger network interoperability.[21]

The concept of federation originally derives from a political theory of networks in which power, resources and responsibilities are shared between actors, thus circumventing the centralization of authority (Mansoux and Roscam Abbing). When this is implemented within alternative social networks, Robert Gehl and Diana Zulli have argued that it can maintain the local autonomy of all instances while at the same time strengthening the collective commitment to an ethical code fostering connection and exchange. They have linked the politics behind federated social media to the concept of the covenant, a federalist political theory developed by Daniel Elazar (Gehl and Zulli 3). A covenant is an agreement to (self-) governance by a group of people, and it is based on shared ethical choices.[22] Participants’ consent is actively and continuously negotiated, which means in the case of the fediverse that instances can freely choose to either leave or join the fediverse by federating with other instances (Gehl and Zulli 4). This capacity for consensual engagement and autonomous boundary setting aligns with feminist servers’ technofeminist desire for autonomous infrastructures and choosing our own dependencies. Not only does PeerTube software as part of FLOSS allow us to create a safe/r space on our machines, but the application of an open protocol such as ActivityPub also establishes a technosocial base that effectively enables growing bonds among different feminist communities. Here connection becomes a consensual choice, not a forced commitment or a default that is hard to reverse. Even after federating with each other, connections can be dissolved (‘defederated’) at any time – for example in the case of irreconcilable safety needs or in the face of diverging values – leaving instances with the ability to self-determine and negotiate their boundaries according to their needs. Their ability to consent is tied to the formation of non-hierarchical bonds that presuppose the absence of undesired dependencies or power relations.

PeerTube has an opt-in federation style, meaning that after a new installation of the PeerTube software, the instance is neither followed by nor following other instances and is therefore only hosting its own inhabitants and contents. In order to federate, the administrators of the instance accept so-called ‘follow requests’, and follow other instances with whom they would like to share content.[23] After the initial setup of PeerTube, Systerserver’s community started to look for instances with whom to federate and share their content, but realized that there were hardly any queer or feminist platforms around. Considering that PeerTube and even the fediverse are not widely known and due to their closeness to the cis male-dominated FLOSS communities and the demanding prerequisites for the installation and maintenance, this is not very surprising. However, it has consequences for the feminist appropriation of the principles and technosocial protocols of federation. In order for Systerserver to federate its platform, it is necessary to take on an empowering and pedagogical approach, transcending the retrospective logic of ‘connecting’ something that already exists by growing relational networks of solidarity and care into supporting the making of video infrastructures embedded in other localities.

Looking into this kind of resonance with other communities, Systerserver started to facilitate and participate in setting up two new video platforms:[24] one at Ca la Dona, a feminist community center in Barcelona and one with Broken House, the Berlin-based community tool with which Systerserver had already collaborated in the form of a residency when first setting up the PeerTube platform. The installation and federating processes are part of two week-long programs, each carried out together with the local communities.[25] Once the platforms are up and federated, they aggregate the content of each community’s platform through the web interface of the other platforms. However, this is only one of the ways in which critical connections between feminist and queer communities can manifest themselves within a feminist federation. Another important aspect is the facilitation of networks of solidarity and care among the participants. These kinds of networks can grow by meeting each other and forming relationships that can facilitate the exchange of knowledges, support, advice and resources. In doing so, this can result in the formation of a covenant of platforms who agree to federate with each other alongside certain core values or upon a shared code of conduct.

Supporting local communities in the endeavors of building up their own technopolitical infrastructures comes with the challenges of meeting other spatial and cultural realities as well as getting to know about different needs tied to the context and motivations behind building a video platform. In the case of Ca la Dona, the local community and space was able to reactivate old hardware (rack servers) donated to the space and install their PeerTube instance on an in-house server.[26] However, issues arose with regard to the excessive energy consumption of the old hardware and the lack of a stable network interface to the outside. In the case of Broken House, which is the coming collaboration, challenges that lie ahead range from choosing a hosting provider for renting a server, to ensuring that the local community can establish connections with people who are motivated to learn and support with administering the server.

Looking at rack servers at Ca La Dona, Barcelona
Figure 2: Going through the donated rack servers to choose one for reformatting and installing Linux Operating System and PeerTube, during the first day of our week-long worksession at Ca la Dona.
media.caladona.org (https://media.caladona.org/)
Figure 3: The internet provider of Ca la Dona only assigns static IP with a high monthly rate. Therefore, other technical configurations need to be explored to ensure that the space has a static IP address that can be mapped to the domain name collectively chosen during the monthly assembly: media.caladona.org.

While adapting PeerTube software to our community needs, we faced two shortfalls: one was the lack of group accounts, and the other the unchecked power of administrators and moderators over the inhabitants’ data and invitation to federate. Group accounts are valuable to communities, especially the most vulnerable ones such as feminist, queer and trans communities, as it enhances anonymity within a group and reduces toxic attacks directed to single persons. ActivityPub has yet to implement accounts for a group of people.[27] Christine Lemmer-Webber, lead author of ActivityPub protocol, notes “that the team predominantly identified as queer, which led to features that help users and administrators protect against ‘undesired interaction’.”[28] However ActivityPub and PeerTube are still centered around individual creators and do not yet support group accounts or community video channels, even though the community has been asking for this since 2018.[29]

In his book Platform Socialism, James Muldoon suggests that we should shift our concerns from “privacy, data and size”, and claim the “power, ownership and control” over our digital media (Muldoon 2). Whereas in the case of federated social networks there is an empowering dimension at play as activists start to collectively govern part of the infrastructure, there is an asymmetric power balance between inhabitants and administrators/moderators when it comes to owning our data. Fediverse allows for a social design of privacy by putting effort into providing finer moderation tools (Mansoux and Roscam Abbing 132-33), such as visibility preferences for posts and defederation by blocking other instances. However, by default sysadmins and moderators have access to unencrypted user messages and databases as well as graphs of interactions (Budington). This is why Sarah Jamie Lewis has called for a distribution of powers, such as a privacy preserving persistence layer removed from any specific application:

You need that first persistence layer to be communal and privacy preserving to prevent any entity being in a position do something like all the DMs on this instance are readable by whoever admins it. – Sarah Jamie Lewis

Recent technological developments of encrypted social networks (a hybrid of federation and peer-2-peer) have emerged and are in the making.[30] However, technical contributions in federated social networks remain dominated by a specific group of developers, still missing out in terms of gender and ethnic diversity.[31] This may account for why the design of the more widespread federated social networks falls short in aspects of privacy and group accounts, whose importance for community safety have not been addressed yet.

From where we stand now and according to the resources available to us, we choose to focus on the social and technopolitical aspects of caring for our infrastructures and growing into a feminist federation, rather than on the development of the software itself. This means that we make do with the existing open protocol of ActivityPub and the PeerTube software, which we can adopt in accordance with our basic needs for free software, autonomous safe/r spaces and the possibilities for sustainably growing our affective infrastructures. Nevertheless, we also engage in a closer investigation of the development and debates of and around PeerTube and ActivityPub and their open source communities, such as in writing this text.

Outro: How not to scale but resonate

The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has criticized the prevalent conceptualization of ‘scalability’ by pointing out how projects of scale are often implicated in extractivist, colonialist and exploitative modes of production. She defines scalability as characteristic of something that can expand without transforming and is therefore prone to rendering surrounding landscape and nature (including humans) into mere resources (Tsing “Nonscalability” 507). Thus the idea of scalability is not compatible and even in conflict with the situated, power-sensitive and non-exploitative approaches that characterize feminist servers. And while the values of feminist servers lie precisely in their nonscalable qualities, accounting for the embodied needs of people, landscapes and machines, this does not make them isolated ‘niche’ phenomena. Instead feminist servers since the beginnings have set out to explore nonscalable ways of forming networks of solidarity and care among themselves and beyond. Among those, this text has explored the beginnings of a feminist federation as one possible mode of reaching out and growing – not in the distorted sense of infinite progress, but in sustainable and careful ways. In the face of both structural and particular precarities, this implies getting to know and strengthening each others’ communities in the process of federating and creating fruitful ways of exchange and mutual support. The roles that Systerserver takes in facilitating local communities before, during and after the installation of PeerTube, are part of a collective learning process, which informs our feminist pedagogies.

This shared effort may at some point result in a covenant with a more explicitly shared set of values articulated from within the feminist federation and in collaboration with all the communities that participate in it. It will reflect a process of learning to maintain feminist infrastructures according to the local needs and context from which each community comes together. This is what we may call the resonance of queer and feminist voices, facilitating and hearing each other out in order to find common ground in recognizing the differences. We do this by engaging in political debates and by establishing critical connections with allies, continuing our efforts of caring for our feminist digital infrastructures now and in the long run. Systerserver’s ongoing experimentation with the possibilities of a feminist federation can be understood as the interplay between a social and artistic embodiment of a technological protocol that allows content to be streamed, accessed and exchanged between servers. But while the idea behind most social networking protocols is to establish as many connections as possible, feminist federation embraces a more hesitant and critical mode of connecting, and is only interested in federating with others who share our approach of queering technopolitics.

As a collaborative effort to think and speak about some of the intricacies of caring for machines and bodies in the context of feminist servers, this text can only be an articulative exercise. It will accompany but never capture or represent what it is that some of us are doing or how some of us find meaning in what it is we are doing. Instead it becomes part of our collective processes of developing and sharing knowledge and skills around feminist appropriations of free software, technopolitical tools for organizing, and feminist pedagogies. Feminist servers adopt the ideas of FLOSS and other tech communities where disempowered users can become (code) contributors, system admins and hackers by choosing their own dependencies and enabling communities into becoming infrastructure makers and maintainers. In experimenting and engaging with modes of feminist federation, we aim to reach out and share our knowledges, thereby becoming a little more visible. Doing so also allowed us to document and reflect on our practice and to speculate and make space for questions and articulations that might guide further paths and developments. Feminist servers and modes of federation can support us in our needs and amidst the “ruins of capitalism” (Tsing, “End of the World”). They make space for ways of relating differently to each other and (with) technology.

Acknowledgements

The following sysadmins from a network of feminist servers contributed to the collaborative writing process and previously published versions: ooooo - transuniversal constellation, vo ezn - sound && infrastructure artist, Mara Karagianni - artist and software developer, nate wessalowski - technofeminist researcher and doctoral student.

English correction by Aileen Derieg.

Authors and contributors form part of a wider ecosystem of techno-/ cyberfeminists, sysadmins and allies, mostly across Europe and Abya Yala, South America.

Many thanks to the organizers and reviewers of Minor Tech in giving us the chance to articulate our praxis.

Notes

  1. Formulation following spideralex, "Feministische Infrastruktur" 59.
  2. The following lists are part of the extensive network of feminist servers: Adminsysters, https://lists.genderchangers.org/mailman/listinfo/adminsysters; Eclectic Tech Carnival, https://lists.eclectictechcarnival.org/mailman/listinfo/etc-int; Femservers, https://lists.systerserver.net/mailman3/lists/femservers.lists.systerserver.net/.
  3. Videomakers had gotten in touch with Systerserver’s video platform via the residencies and the TransHackFeminism Covergence, https://zoiahorn.anarchaserver.org/thf2022/bienvenides-a-la-convergencia-transhackfeminista-2022/.
  4. Minor Tech workshop facilitated by Transmediale 2023, https://aprja.net//announcement/view/1034.
  5. Overview of software and protocols for distributed and decentralized social networking, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking.
  6. For an extensive list of feminst servers, see https://alexandria.anarchaserver.org/index.php/You_can_check_some_of_their_services_in_this_section.
  7. While some feminist infrastructure projects are open to feminists of all genders, most of them - like Systerserver - are shaped by a separatist approach that excludes cis men from participating. We do this in order to create spaces where we don’t have to constantly worry about being gendered as ‘other to men’. Many of the ways we relate to and behave around cis men are deeply rooted in our cultural memories: counteracting male violences or carelessness, feeling pressured into proving to be ‘as good as men’, falling back into patterns of serving or pleasing men or just not taking the space due to fear of pushback. Excluding cis men is of course not a sufficient criteria for creating spaces without patriarchal violence but our experiences have taught us that it can be very liberating. Besides, cis men have many opportunities to engage in mixed/all gender tech related activism.
  8. The adapter they are named after is a device that changes the ascribed ‘orientation’ of a port – both stressing the always gendered aspects of technology as well as the urgent need to reverse and counteract the cis male domination of technological domains.
  9. More information about the /etc and past events see https://eclectictechcarnival.org/ETC2019/archive/.
  10. The concept of safe/r spaces dates back to the heyday of the second wave of feminism when lesbians, trans people and women started organizing within and through woman only spaces. It has since been adopted to online spaces, see Katrin Kämpf, “Safe Spaces”.
  11. About video monetization and censorship on YouTube, see Mara Karagianni, “Software as Dispute Resolution System: Design, Effect and Cultural Monetization”.
  12. Formulation following “A Feminist Server Manifesto”.
  13. Affero GPL has an extra provision that addresses the use of software over a computer network (such as a web application), and requires the full source code be accessible to any network user of the AGPL-licensed software. “Affero General Public License”. In Wikipedia, accessed June 4, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License.
  14. See, e.g., the artist project “Read The Feminist Manual” about gender discrimination in FLOSS, an online governance research organized by the Media Enterprise Design Lab of Boulder University of Colorado, accessed on May 21, 2023, https://excavations.digital/projects/read-feminist-manual/.
  15. In chapter III on Maintenance, Hilfling Ritasdatter critically contests the differences between unproductive labor, which sustains life, and creative work that produces and changes the world, as those have been articulated by various political theorists such as Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (Hilfling Ritasdatter 149), See also the distinction between development and maintenance in the “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” from 1969 by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, talked about in the context of feminist servers by Ines Kleesattel, 184f.
  16. See also "A Feminist Server Manifesto" where it states that “A feminist server... tries hard not to apologize when she is sometimes not available.”
  17. Instance is the term for a particular installation of a software on a server.
  18. The word ‘fediverse’ is a lexicon blend of federation and universe, “Fediverse”, in Wikipedia, last modified May 27, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse.
  19. An easy way to explain federated media is through the concept of email providers, https://docs.joinmastodon.org/#federation.
  20. In FLOSS environments, forking describes the copying, modification and development of a software in a way that differs from the previous creators’ or the maintainers’ projects and is often accompanied by a splitting of communities.
  21. How the Fediverse connects, image creators Imke Senst, Mike Kuketz, licenses Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, https://social.tchncs.de/@kuketzblog/107045136773063674.
  22. Convenantal federation is distinguished from contract federation, which is based on legal texts and institutional laws.
  23. This is different from Mastodon, where a kind of convenant is in place. Here, instances are federated per default with other instances which commit to a shared set of rules such as moderation against racism, sexism, trans- and homophobia or daily backups of all data and posts. Accessed May 26, 2023, https://joinmastodon.org/covenant.
  24. Systerserver received financial support for this undertaking as part of the 360 Degrees of Proximities project by the Dutch Creative Industries Funds.
  25. For more details about the collaboration, see https://mur.at/project/syster360/.
  26. In house server means that is physically located in a space vs a cloud server, accessed June 3, 2023, https://www.techsafety.org/inhouse-vs-cloud.
  27. Looking into the development history from OStatus and its implementation in previous decentralized social networks, the group feature was dropped in 2013. From a user’s comment in the pump.io social network code repository we read: “This is a major drawback since the migration. We were using the ‘koumbitstatus’ group to do status updates for our network in a decentralised way, on some servers outside of our main infrastructure. This functionality is now completely gone. While I think now that we shouldn’t have relied on identi.ca for that service, I was expecting the ‘federation’ bit to survive the migration: I post those notices from my home statusnet server, and the fact that those don't communicate at all anymore makes this a very difficult migration. This will clearly make us hesitant in using pump.io or any other federated protocol (as opposed to say: a simple html page with rss feeds) to post our updates.” Accessed on May 28, 2023, https://github.com/pump-io/pump.io/issues/299.
  28. In January 2018, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the ActivityPub standard as a recommendation.
  29. The request for group accounts has been open on the GitHub code repository of PeerTube since 2018, and there is a long thread of users requesting this feature. In one of the comments we read: "IMHO it would be a good thing to promote collaborative creation. It would be another way to offer something different from Youtube (which is centered on individuals)." Accessed on May 28, 2023, https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/699.
  30. See Bluesky (https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol) and Manyverse (https://www.manyver.se/).
  31. Looking at the forum of ActivityPub, most people who have profile pictures and are the most active seem to be white men, https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/.

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