Toward a Minor Tech:FeministServers5000

Feminist federating

'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

Authors: mara karagianni, ooooo, nate wessalowski, vo ezn

Abstract [yet to follow]

Intro

The following essay is concerned with practices of weaving feminist networks of solidarity and care 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. 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 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. 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, Systerserver and Leverburns. 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. 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." (Motskobili)

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 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. 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 facilitate this endeavor and what then, would feminst federating look like?

Inhabiting affective infrastructures

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. 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 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 and participation are tied to the invitation and identity politics of feminist servers. In the case of the femservers mailingslist 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. 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. 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. 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 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)

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:

"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." (Motskobili)

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, and defined a set of shared guidelines and terms of use. With our platform 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, 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 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.

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 (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? 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.

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. 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. 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."

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.

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. 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. 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”. 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." 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:

"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." (Norman Shamas & Anonymous Trans* Activists 52)

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. “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”. 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

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. 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). 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.