NFTs... and Knitting Patterns??

 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.

quote from “Subprime Attention Crisis” by Tim Hwang

 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

Addendum: I have just read two excellent blogposts, one by Victoria Marchant breaking down the technospeak, and the other by Kathleen Sperling showing how Ravelry's own terms of service for using their API makes the manifesto impossible.

The Countdown Is On

"Which countdown?" you may be asking.

The Countdown of all Countdowns in the Fiber World: The Countdown to Classic Rav being No-More. After March 31st, Classic Rav goes away and with it a number of people's ability to access the site even remotely safely.

Yes, yes, I know there a lot of crafters not effected by Nu Rav in any way and they'll for the most part merrily roll along as if nothing's changed. Plenty of people have been doing just that since last June; in five days ago it was nine months since the sneak attack... I mean, launch of Nu Rav.

Nine months without bringing in an accessibility consultant, even though there were qualified individuals who volunteered to help. Nine months of locked threads. Nine months of "Please contact us through email" that never gets answers. Nine months of lost revenues for designers unable to access their accounts. Nine months of crafters essentially locked-out of their libraries of pdf patterns that they spent time and money putting together. Nine months of being gaslit, of being told it's just an over reaction to the website update and people will get over it. Nine months since people had seizures, and/or the starts of migraines that have literally lasted over 200 days. Heck, nine months of migraines, eye strain, tension headaches, etc lasting on average a week in order for people to get their shops closed, or libraries downloaded, or projects and stash information transferred elsewhere.

So what has occurred in nine months? The animation that originally played on the login screen that prevented many from even getting onto the site after the Nu Rav launch, was first slowed and then stopped with an option to play it if the individual chooses. There has been tweaking of the original Nu Rav to have options to turn off the problematic drop shadows and there are now two options for viewing the site in Nu Rav, Herdwick and Merino modes. You can now add a Spotify link into your profile, great for podcasters! Of course it does nothing for those podcasters that can't even login, but you know, nothing important. (*Extremely heavy sarcasm*) It's my understanding a dark mode is currently in testing. 

You may be asking, "Where's the accessibility consultant TPTB said they were looking into?" Can't answer that as there's been not one peep about it since Jessica, one of the co-founders, said they were looking into it in her blogpost of July 30, 2020. Not one peep has been heard on this in over 7 months. We've heard all about wonderful sales numbers. (May I just add that of course sales were up last June over the previous June when they had to close the site to protect users from the inundation of backlash due to the Turd ban. Kind of a no-brainer that sales in a normal month of almost complete calm are going to be better than that contentious month.) 

Perhaps it's because of the uproar of June 2019 that TPTB decided to play hardball with anyone bringing up the accessibility issues in the Big 6. Threads locked and archived almost as soon as they appeared questioning if anyone else noticed getting headaches, or worse. "We value your feedback! Please post only in the designated thread", a thread that was locked and unlocked daily, meaning if you were experiencing issues outside of North American Eastern time zone business hours, too bad for you. And then even those threads disappeared and questions about their absence resulted in more locked and archived threads. Keep the majority of users from hearing about the problem and eventually the problem will get tired and go away, appears to be the modus operandi here. It's another way of gaslighting those experiencing problems too. Because many people coming across discussions of the  issues on other social media are quick to defend Rav and the TPTB, not realizing just how long this has been ongoing. Just today I had someone say that they didn't know what the issue was so it's possible that TPTB aren't aware of it either, had anyone tried reaching out to them? I'm grateful someone was able to answer and point the questioner to the myriad of data compiled by the ever organized Kathleen over at WIP Insanity. 

Which is precisely where I'm suggesting you head for further information. She has a much better breakdown of what's happened, what hasn't happened, and links to what might actually explain what went so terribly wrong. I mean besides ignoring the problems reported by beta testers of Nu Rav in the first place, because that might've led to a much better outcome for a lot of people. For a complete overview of everything head over here to the blogpost of updated information. If you're looking for what has been done/fixed, you'll want this page.   

Here we are on the 21st of March with ten days left before the end of Classic Rav. I doubt any of us thought this would be the future. Heck a year ago we were just really starting to process what the pandemic might be leading to. Rav exploding and making me and many others sick (thankfully "only" a two day migraine with nausea; I do not have any history with migraines other than when living in an apartment with a mold problem that I didn't know about. Talk about being blindsided.), that in July I would close my Rav shop, which I long credited with helping me transition to being a "real designer", and embarked on a journey with this blog/site and Payhip to sell my patterns Off-Rav. Nope, didn't see any of that happening. And yet, here we sit on the 21st of March with a mere ten days remaining of Classic Rav.

10... 

Preparing to Leave

As many of you know, so-called Classic Rav ceases to exist at the end of this month. And I, like many others, am leaving as close to then as possible. It will still look like I'm there as I'll be keeping my account open in order to maintain control of my pattern listings. However that will be the only activity my account will see after March 31st.

Now that creates a whole bunch of headaches after being active on the site for so many years (I joined in September of 2009; before the site reached half a million members!) I've logged projects and stash, even projects I made before Rav existed! Some of the projects have photos that don't exist elsewhere! 

In order to keep all of my photos and notes from my older projects, plus my new ones, I've started a second blog. It will only have projects on it, no rambles off into dance or whatever else. Unless for some reason I noted it in the project notes. And believe me my notes can be quite interesting if not downright odd at times!

I've added a link in the sidebar of this blog to the new blog, which I've named Síle's Yarning Notebook🔗. I'm going oldest to newest, more or less, so there's some rarely seen projects of mine coming to light right now if you'd like to take a looksee. I have a feeling we may see a resurgence in yarn blogs (knitting, crocheting, weaving, spinning) in the coming months as crafters set up new online spaces to keep their projects organized.

So far, (8 projects in) everything has been from books, leaflets, or ball bands, which I've been noting with the pattern information but when I get to online patterns I will be including Off-Rav links for everyone's interest and safety where possible. If it's a pattern only on Rav, I'll be making that clear as well without a link.

So there you have my latest project!

Oh, speaking of things I've learned to do because of needing to set up my own spot here on the interwebs due to Those People Too Bullheaded (see what I did there? TPTB hee hee), if you look at my patterns tab, you'll see that instead of a big long line on one side my pattern photos are all in a nice grouping. I learned where to paste bits of code and how to add the right links in the right spots to make them do that yesterday. :) I'm quite pleased with myself over that. If anyone else is in need of an easy to follow guide for making a clickable gallery, you can find it here: xomisse.com 🔗

Silver (the elder of my furry nieces) is squawking at me in that near bird-like tone of hers that usually means she's done something to Jakey, so I better make sure he's alright lol

Yours in yarn and old project photos,

Síle

The Latest from R*velry

I promised I'd be writing a post about Ravelry and it's taken me some time to wrap my head around things enough to write it out.

On September 29th (Oh gee, another Tuesday announcement; I digress), Ravelry announced that March 31, 2021 would the end of "Classic Rav", and in their happy happy joy joy manner told us there's a new settings option in NuRav.

That would be nice except there are plenty of people saying that neither of the options (named for sheep breeds; isn't that precious?) of NuRav works for them. I haven't heard if either of these works with screenreaders. I know that "Herdwick" mode is no less nauseating for me than "Merino". But after March 31 I, and many others, won't have the option of avoiding them both.

At least we have a deadline for getting our information off. I guess that's a blessing. I will be keeping my stripped account in place after the deadline. Hopefully I'll be able to keep entering pattern pages in the database despite everything. My latest goings on will be here and on my Instagram and Twitter accounts (links in the sidebar).

After that bit of bitter medicine, yesterday's Ravelry blog announcement (Not on a Tuesday! Is that allowed?! I digress, again) just solidified that they're moving full steam ahead. Goody goody gosh! You can now imbed Spotify playlists in your profile and forum posts. And it's been being pointed out on twitter that that's a pretty good slap in the face for those podcasters who aren't able to use the frigging site!

I just don't even know what to say anymore. No, that's not quite true. I do know one thing to say: I'm glad I closed my Ravelry shop in July. 

So that's the latest on the Ravelry front.

My next post should be a return to happier things, like a finished project ;) I have 30 rows left to knit on the body of my Harvest cardigan, then I'll return to the pockets. I should have a new sweater to show off in Town when I'm there early next week.

Yours in yarn and (almost) a new sweater,

Síle

Processing

Today is a day for processing things. For one thing, it's hot and humid again, and not being overly active means not breaking into a sweat too often. For another, thinking can be done while I knit.

The letter signed by nearly 400 current and former Ravelry designers was delivered to them on Tuesday, and a response came back less than 24 hours later. Considering the track record of response times during this situation, that was near miraculous.

Sadly, while many of us hoped for better results, their answer was unsurprising. I screenshot the Instagram post by Sarah, who was one of the main organizers of the letter. (Kudos to her for that! It was no small undertaking.) So here you go:



Because the post is too long to fit in an alt text caption, I have typed it here:

"sarahmgoodwindesigns Wednesday update for the Designer's Open Letter on Ravelry Accessibility. Do you want to know the good news or the bad news first? Let's do the good news: we got a response from Mary Heather late yesterday afternoon (sorry, too wiped out to update last night!)
yarn ball emoji

So the bad news: (quoting response in full because it pertains to everyone who participated) "Thank you for writing with your concerns and care. I shared your letter with Jessica and we discussed it this morning. We hope that Jessica's letter last week addressed these concerns and helped share our thoughts behind our decisions and our next steps. We will be following up with continued updates on our blog and look forward to continuing this work. Best regards, Mary Heather (and Jessica)."

yarn ball emoji

I know many of you poured your hearts into this and I don't want to tell you how to feel about it. I thought I'd check in here with everyone before deciding if a follow up would be at all productive? Tell me what you think? Also, tell THEM what you think (email: contact-us@ravelry.com)

yarn ball emoji 

Personally, I find that laughably dismissive & willfully obtuse. For one thing, it's still unclear whether they believe the people who have had neurological symptoms (migraines, seizures, etc) due to the website (or tilting towards super problematic claims of mass hysteria). They've apologized for causing "anxiety" and "issues", but are committed to keeping a website which has triggered seizures for multiple users as the default. That's... not really something you can successfully put a positive spin on.

yarn ball emoji"

Basically, "We gave at the office, now go away." Several of us have commented that there's really no point in a follow up letter. Willful obtuseness won't respond any differently. No amount of beating our collective head against a wall can change that.

For myself, I feel my removal of my patterns from sale on Ravelry is more than justified. I was wondering if I'd done the right thing. Yeah, no. No more wondering in that direction. I'm maintaining my account to have control of my pattern listings and to participate in one group in particular where I play a fair sized role. And even that is a lot less checking in than I used to do. This is to say if anyone messages me there about my patterns, or anything else, I will answer you, just not as quickly as I would've before.

Today as I knit, I'm processing what was, what could've been, what is, and what will come. Some of that is very different than what I pictured in early June. I may be processing for awhile.

Til next time,

Síle

Community Matters

Where to even begin?! These last two days have been an absolute rollercoaster. I believe it was in "Alice in Wonderland" (Disney cartoon/movie, not the book) that someone said: "Start at the beginning and when you come to the end, well, stop." Here goes!

Yesterday afternoon, I saw KatieBea* tweet a screenshot of an email that they'd received from Cassidy. I then saw someone else tweet a screenshot of a very similar email from Cassidy. Needless to say these created a lot of buzz, and for quite good reason! Telling people who've contacted you with feedback on accessibility that they need to consider sources before spreading lies is a mighty big load of bullshit. I quote retweeted the first person's tweet with my own take on this, and yes, I did use the word bullshit to describe it. But here, read it yourself: 

Now this afternoon, Jessica, aka Ravelry's other cofounder, made a new blogpost. And not from an only-accessible-if-you-can-log-into-Rav channel! She actually addressed yesterday's emails from Cassidy and several other points. Some are hoping this spells a new more communicative response. Others have said it's a case of "too little, too late", which for the record I don't blame them for saying. It's been 6 weeks and this is the first real point of actual communication we've seen. 

And at least one person who received an email yesterday has gotten an apology today. I, for one, want to see a public apology made to KatieBea for the targeted bullshit she's been on the receiving end of since this all broke open. 

Where does this leave us? I'm glad to see an actual response instead of another pompom waving for one thing. But there are still issues with the migraines/seizures/screenreaders not able to access the site not being afforded more, or even equal, weight with people not liking the twee icons (And for the record, one can be on both sides of that comparison very easily waves both hands in the air). Quite honestly, I don't know where this leaves us. I had planned to close my Ravelry shop today after seeing the portion of Cassidy's letter to KatieBea. Jessica's blogpost is gave me a brief pause. All of my patterns are in my Payhip shop, including my 3 free ones. Love Crafts has all of my paid patterns and one of my free ones. I had set Ravelry to only be hosting my paid patterns a week or so ago. Now they're listed in the database but they aren't open to Ravelry sales. I just can't with everything. 

I will continue to work on getting my patterns integrated with this blog and I will continue with my designs. Ravelry may have afforded me the chance to start designing and getting my patterns seen but I control how and if I continue. And I really want to continue. This blog serves as my hub; links to any social media I use and any platform where my patterns are found will remain here, although they might move to a different setup than being in the sidebar.

My hope is that this post explains what has been happening and where my decisions are coming from. I like being honest with people. As always, you can respond by comment or email if you prefer; I value your input.

I'm really hoping my next post will be a fun one!

Til next time,

Síle

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