I quite honestly never imagined the two things in the same sentence, but here we are.
For those who don't know what's putting them together here's some background. On Friday, May 28th, a tweet went out from the official Ravelry account. I'll quote it here for you:
If you are a fiber artist who has interest or experience in decentralization, please take a look at the manifesto in my Rav profile (ravelry.com/people/cassidy) & get in touch if it lights you up!
I know that there must be folks out there & I'd like to make some connections -- Cass
Not an overly exciting tweet, although it seems Jessica's assurances that Cassidy wouldn't be communicating over official channels any longer have come to an end. That's actually the least worrisome part if the whole thing.
This tweet welcomes engagement from fiber artists. Ironically questions about the tweet and/or the manifesto in the For The Love of Ravelry (FTLoR) forum were locked and individuals were told that Cassidy wouldn't be responding in the forums. Good to know information requests are still on lockdown in the Big Six!
An aside: a crafter on Twitter who posted a question about the manifesto in FTLoR not only had her thread locked and archived, but was also banned from the Big Six (!) and removed from all of her other groups! Can you say overkill?! Like wow, don't ask for information of the wrong type because you'll be isolated in a snap.
Ok, so what is an NFT and where do they come into this?
This is one of the best explanations of NFTs, or Non Fungible Tokens, that I've read: 🔗link to BBC article on NFTs.
Or as Twitter account DaveTheScwede replied to George Takei:
A pyramid scheme built expressly to steal from artists and basically sell things that A] Aren't yours B] Never were yours C] You have no right to sell
It's in Cassidy's manifesto on her Ravelry profile, which she linked to in the tweet. Now there are a lot of people who've deleted their Ravelry accounts or can't safely access the site due to all of the effects of NuRav, so disaster_march copied the manifesto into a document and screenshot it to safely share it on Twitter so that anyone who wanted to read it could. I've retyped it here for you rather than trying to alt caption the screenshots:
a manifesto
The initial spark that lit Ravelry was the idea our community needed an index, a database, to tie together all of the projects and patterns that people have shared and spread across the Internet and social media.
Ravelry was developed with this idea at its core. We work hard to be responsible stewards of the community’s data and we walk a line between limiting contamination from commerce/money and trying to help small designers and yarnies be successful. We are filling a void but we aren’t the end of the story.
It’s just a start. It’s not enough. The community needs an independent, not for-profit, decentralized, community owneddatabase of patterns, yarns, and their connections to projects. Rav should be just one of many interfaces to this API and one of many ways of searching patterns and yarns, creating projects and stash that are linked to this database, and so on. The data that forms the heart of Ravelry was contributed by everyone and it belongs to everyone. We need to build this and we can’t do this alone.
We’ve intentionally kept the company/team small and limited commercialization and the amount of money and resources that we consume.
I’m proud that we’ve kept space for this community to own its own infrastructure, prioritize its own needs, and connect designers to makers without being exploited by an intermediary.
The yarn community’s digital history and future infrastructure should not be controlled by a for-profit entity.
The need to create a liquid market of human attention influences the architecture of the web … We’ve lived for so long in an online social universe built for advertising that it is difficult to imagine what an alternative might look like.
hi nerds!
Did you know that all of Ravelry’s pattern and yarn data, advanced search, and more is available via the Ravelry API? https://ravelry.com/api
If you work in yarn tech - say hello! We are not competitive and will happily support and work together with anyone in this space. I would love assist in fostering an open and supportive ecosystem of businesses any way I can.
Ravelry’s backend is built with MySQL, Redis, Ruby and Manticore Search.
As the crypto ecosystem matures, might we be able to use NFTs to create “ownership” of digital patterns that is not tied to a platform? Points of sale like Ravelry could provide buyers with the downloads as well as a token, blessed by the designer, that could be used to transfer or exercise ownership of a digital pattern across a variety of platforms and formats.
links
- 10 Years of Ravelry (2017)
- 4,000,000 - some fun visualizations (2014)
- How Does Ravelry Make Money? (2012, a bit dated)
So there you have it. It starts off pretty good actually. A decentralized database sounds like a dream after so many of us have been effectively shutout of the largest one for the knitting and crochet community; oh the irony. It burns.
But then NFTs are mentioned.
If you've talked to any artists lately, the subject of NFTs has probably come up. And most are not in favor of them. For all the money being "made" by them the actual artist is usually not the person getting any of it. So, what would be different in the case of patterns? Probably not a thing. Someone pointed out on Twitter that the designer might get the original $5, but it would be the one posting it as an NFT that would collect all the $5 payments afterward. This is worse for a designer than the websites (many of these are from Eastern European countries that have very different ideas about copyright) that post paid patterns for free. They're making money from the ads on the site, which is no different than most websites, rather than the patterns.
The other worrisome aspect of NFTs is the substantial waste of resources they are. These things suck down energy, making them incredibly eco-non friendly. I read some tweets by kariebookish for an idea of how much energy we're talking about:
But NFTs use a massive amount of energy. And it's not just a one-off. Every time you sell on an NFT (like you'd sell on a painting, say), there's another power surge. Meh, you say?
And:
I forgot to put ALT text on image above. So, let me type it out.
The sale of ONE (1) NFT used as much energy as an artist's studio used in TWO (2) years.
And remember every time an NFT is sold on, that's another two (2) years' worth of energy.
And then she gave the link to this article from Wired.com: 🔗NFTs are hot. So is their effect on Earth's climate
Many of Knitting Twitter's regular voices are more than a bit dismayed at what could be Ravelry's next avenue of reinvention. There have been several requests for help in how to download pattern libraries. Whether this is the precursor to another exodus of crafters leaving the site or not, if they're either bit smart they'll pay attention to all of those quote tweets. But then if it was about business smarts, would they have alienated so many crafters by not rolling back NuRav and failing to take the accessibility help that was offered last year?
One thing's for certain, we in the fiber craft community are going to continue to feel waves from Ravelry for a longtime to come, no matter why those waves are happening.
Next post I'll be showing off my latest FO. You can get a sneak peek by going over to my notebook blog (link in the sidebar).
Yours in yarn and way too much technospeak for my brain,
Síle
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