Due to the ongoing strain of trying to write, edit, and publish articles on a consistent basis, and a handful of personal obligations of our founders, We Distribute is officially on temporary hiatus.
This is not the end of our publication or our project, but we need to step back for a while and regroup, if the project hopes to survive.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/10/on-hiatus/
Earlier this month, the Mastodon project announced a new initiative funded by NGI Search: #Fediverse Discovery Providers! The goal is to build a resource framework for different kinds of services that can work with potentially any instance or platform.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/fediverse-discovery-providers/
We have to give a huge shout-out and thank you to Scott Kellum and his company, Typetura, for their amazing work with our redesign. We're excited to see what comes next!
https://typetura.com/blog/we-distribute/
Mozilla has decided to shut down their #Mastodon instance, after laying off the majority of the project's team earlier this year. The company is instead focusing on AI for the foreseeable future. #Fediverse
https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/mozilla-social-shutting-down/
In the development and building of a shared, open, collaborative network, efforts have come and gone over the years for the #Fediverse. We dig into the history, various attempts, and some of the ideas people have had.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/history-fediverse-symbol/
As the #Fediverse continues to grow, people are looking to build new experiences that change what's possible on the network today.
#Flohmarkt is a nascent project intended for selling personal items, and may be the first attempt of its kind here.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flohmarkt-federated-market/
We want to start actively promoting #Nostr events on our site. These include game jams, hackathons, art collabs, unconferences, live listens, and webinars.
We're currently looking at using an events calendar on our site, with the goal of integrating it with the greater Social Web. This includes ActivityPub, Bluesky, and Nostr.
If you're an event organizer, and would like to have something included on our calendar, give us a shout!
That's a cool idea! I think WordPress integration with Nostr still leaves a lot to be desired, but it may be something we try after getting ActivityPub working fully.
Ideally, we want to be able to integrate with multiple networks and protocols. In the short term, we may likely rely on a POSSE method of doing that.
Check it out! Flipboard has officially announced a new milestone in their embrace of the #Fediverse - now, any Flipboard user can follow a Fediverse account in their feed. We're one step closer to greater publishing and curation across the network!
https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flipboard-fediverse-following/
Within the last few years, publishing within the #Fediverse has started to take off. This week's opinion piece focuses on some of the current hurdles this network has, when it comes to user experience, and proposes ideas and a vision of what's possible.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/fediverse-publishing/
For what it's worth, this is a use case that #Nostr supports really, really well. We're not here to state that one is better than the other, just that long-form content is starting to show up more on federated and decentralized networks, and we ought to experiment with different ways to support that.
We have a small gift for you today: over the past 8 months, we've been building an icon library for various decentralized social platforms and protocols within the space. It's an ongoing effort, and we're happy to release our initial version today. It's like Font Awesome, but for the Social Web!
https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/decentralized-social-icons/
Yeah, we'll likely include a few alternate icons to choose in the future. The Fediverse is kind of the same way.
We're always interested in recommendations for new logos, and added some code today to make it super easy to generate new versions of the icon set.
This is simply a reminder: We Distribute is a nonprofit organization that currently runs on donations. Our lead writer has been writing and running this site for free for years. He's now a full-time student.
If you could help support us during this time, it would mean a lot. ♥️
https://opencollective.com/wedistribute
The author of "Protocols, Not Platforms", Techdirt's Mike Masnick, has joined the #Bluesky board of directors. His goal is to help the organization stay true to their original vision.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/mike-masnick-joins-bluesky/
While there's something to be said about the value of converging on existing efforts, shoring up support, and strengthening existing communities, each project brings different things to the table that are valuable.
Sometimes, these things only get as far as being experiments. nostr:nprofile1qqs8d3c64cayj8canmky0jap0c3fekjpzwsthdhx4cthd4my8c5u47spzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43z7qg5waehxw309aex2mrp0yhxgctdw4eju6t0qy3hwumn8ghj7urjdau8jtt90pcx2unfd4jkuapwdah8yetwv3jhytnrdaks0duay6 mentioned to us in an interview that he has a list of like 90 different protocols / projects. The nature of decenteralized communication is itself decenteralized.
We're in the process of writing a big article that compares the strengths and weaknesses of ActivityPub, Nostr, and AT Proto, and are convinced that each comes with ideas the others should consider.
The #MastodonForHarris campaign has raised close to $500,000 within two weeks of being live. It is probably the largest attempt for political organizing on the #Fediverse, and may provide a playbook for other efforts going forward.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/mastodon-for-harris/
Come hang out with us on our #Matrix space! We have a really chill and friendly community of users, designers, builders, and writers who are deeply invested in helping the #Fediverse and the wider #SocialWeb succeed.
https://matrix.to/#/#wedistribute:matrix.org
We apologize for the lack of updates. Our Chief Editor, nostr:nprofile1qqs0k30estfycmw64mgp9c5vy52t5us85zxdwwx49cn6tmmgyan8jqqpzemhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejz7qgmwaehxw309aex2mrp0yhxummnw3e8qmr9vfejucm0d5hsz9thwden5te0dehhxarj9ehhsarj9ejx2a3048vxfe, has been recovering from burnout for the past few weeks, and hasn't been able to get anything published. He's recovering, and continuing to work on new pieces.
We have a ton of great articles being written, and hope to return to our regular schedule very soon!
Today, we're sitting down to interview @rabble for the #Decentered podcast! We're really excited to talk about #Nostr, his experience with building Nos and Planetary, and learn more about his personal story and vision for what is being built here and now.
For the latest episode of our #Decentered podcast, we sat down and chatted with Jesse Karmani, who is building Frequency: a federated, private photo-sharing app for friends.
She has some really wonderful ideas, and has put a lot of thought into building the right kind of experience.
https://wedistribute.org/podcast/frequency-jesse-karmani/
Regarding the Private DM's, we had to issue a retraction. Fediverse clients only started adopting federated edits relatively recently. Prior to that, people relied on "Delete & Redraft", which attempts to send a delete that may or may not go through, and hand the user the content for editing.
In this case, the DM was actually a Public post that accidentally had the wrong scope applied. The time and content matched up perfectly, and the delete request did not correctly remove the content from mastodon.social's cache. When Maven ingested posts, they did so from a public firehose endpoint for that server, rather than use federation as intended.
Due to new info by the admin involved, we are formally issuing a retraction.
Maven did not, in fact, leak Private Mentions and make them public. What was mirrored ended up being a cached copy of a public post that was sent in error, then deleted under the infamous "Delete and Redraft" function.
The article has been updated to reflect this, front and center.
The weird thing about the Business Insider article is that everything that was said about fiatjiaf's political views already existed out in the open. There was no need to reveal his identity out of the blue.
One thing that's irritating as a double standard is that some groups of people state that they're completely against doxxing, except when it happens to someone they're fundamentally opposed to.
Just because you don't like someone's politics doesn't mean that doxxing them is acceptable.
Hmmm... although we're able to log in to our #Akkoma account through @Openvibe, it looks like our timeline doesn't populate, and we can't post anything. 🤔
Akkoma supports the Mastodon APIs, but it's still a different platform with slightly different needs. We'll try opening a bug report with details.
It would be really cool to be able to post to two networks from one mobile app, though. We would love to review Openvibe with our own platform whenever that becomes possible!
There's a lot of really good mobile clients for #Nostr, but the Web clients we've tried so far have left us wanting. For those of you who use Nostr on Web, what are your go-to clients?
It's a fascinating opportunity, especially as we continue to delve further into the network and learn about it.
Our hope is to tap into a variety of federated and peer-to-peer networks, and help people learn about everything that's going on.
Y'all need to find some retrocomputing nerds to write Nostr clients. It's one of the best things to happen to the Mastodon community.
It might seem like a gimmick, but being able to get ancient computers to work with your network is a great way to offer a variety of access options.
https://wedistribute.org/2023/07/mastodon-retro-clients/
How do you get those nice, simple addresses on your Nostr profile, instead of the NPub Key? We're here to walk you through it with NIP-05.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/05/nostr-nip-05/
I mean, it's a bridge built by someone who is pretty controversial for building Fediverse instances that allowed hate speech, harassment, and right-wing propaganda.
A lot of Fediverse users listed on Mostr are not there consensually, and many people actively block that bridge.
The Trust and Safety work that's being done with efforts like @Tagr-bot and @Reportinator are super, super interesting.
Federated and peer-to-peer networks are growing at a breakneck pace, which is great! Being able to curate and control your own experience in those spaces is fundamentally important, and helps people filter out the garbage they don't want to deal with.
A brief #introduction: we're a nonprofit news publication dedicated to federated, decentralized, and peer-to-peer communication technologies. A big focus for us involves three things: digital sovereignty, user empowerment, and the future of the Internet.
We talk about the #Fediverse, as well as #Nostr and #Bluesky, and showcase both the emerging technologies of the space, along with the people who use it every day.
https://nostree.me/npub1w9wuqc3s6lr25c4sgj52werj3tngvt43qrccqrher4wvn7tjm32s2ck403
In light of the announcement of Mastodon’s US-based 501c3 Non-Profit, and the reveal of that organization’s board members, there has been backlash from members of the Mastodon community. Some people are even saying that this is the last straw, it’s time for a hard fork of the project! Before I dig in, I would like …
https://wedistribute.org/2024/05/forking-mastodon/
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