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deadsuperhero

@altcode@community.nodebb.org Hmm, weird. Can see your reply and the screenshot, not totally sure why my response came up as empty on your end?

deadsuperhero

Yep, looks great!

deadsuperhero

@squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de We can read you loud and clear!

deadsuperhero

Our project has existed in some form or another since about 2015. That's a long time. There have been shifts, evolutions, and reboots to our initiative, and we've managed to do some pretty cool stuff over the years.

One of the more challenging areas of maintaining this effort at We Distribute is that we're a really small team doing lots of different jobs at once. As the head of the project, I find myself doing:

Writing / Editing Content
Managing a Content Calendar
Content Distribution and Promotion
Conducting / Recording / Publishing Podcast Episodes (Video and Audio)
Social Media for over a dozen accounts
Outreach
Infrastructure Management
Calls and Meetings
User Donation Management / Accounting
Research
Community Management
Volunteer coordination

That's just what I can think of off the top of my head, right now. There's probably more stuff. I enjoy doing these things, and feel passionate about the space and the project, but it's a lot. The potential for burnout is high.

We've tried to do volunteer outreach a number of times, to varying degrees of success. Working with volunteers who are doing it on their free time is a bit like herding cats,

Our Goals for 2025

In 2024, we registered We Distribute Media as a non-profit corporation in Arizona. We want to take this to the next level, by becoming a US-based 501c3 charity organization. Our hope is to launch a crowdfunding campaign, pursue some grants, and begin paying writers and other contributors. We want to make We Distribute a great community news organization, and we want to increase our output as well as start regularly pushing out new media for both our podcast and other initiatives.

What Are We Looking For

I'll try to keep this short and sweet.

We need help with writing articles. There's so much stuff happening all the time, and it's hard to stay on top of. I'm a full-time student right now, and it's hard to get more than a few articles out per week.
We need help with researching potential stories and situations. The Fediverse is only getting bigger, and we try to straddle Fediverse coverage with Nostr and Bluesky. We could be doing a lot better at this.
We need help with social media management. It's hard to come up with scheduled posts on a whim, and we could really benefit from people who are passionate about showcasing the cultural and technical developments in the space.

If there's any interest in helping us get to that next level in 2025, please reach out to us at: hello@wedistribute.org!

deadsuperhero

The crazy thing about ActivityPub is that there's way more projects out there than you might realize. A seasoned Fedizen might be able to easily think of about a dozen or so platforms in the space, but I wanted to take the time to focus on the more esoteric ones we've come across.

Feel free to share ones you've found!

Ibis - ActivityPub-based Wiki
Transit Fedilerts - a bot system that sends transit notifications.
Corteza - DIY federated Salesforce thing with an AI app building framework.
Dokieli - decentralized publishing with ActivityPub and RDF, may have Solid capabilities?
FitTrackee - self-hosted fitness tracker, ActivityPub support in development.
NeoDB - a review platform for just about everything, some incredible ideas about data integration.

More to come!

deadsuperhero

@simon Thanks for joining, Simon! We're still kind of getting a feel for what this should be, and what categories to feature. We're also playing around with federation and category sync with a few different places, so hopefully this can act as a pretty robust hub for us!

deadsuperhero

@scott@loves.tech Thanks, Scott! We've been thinking about doing a Threadiverse platform for a long time, but the recent introduction of NodeBB kind of feels perfect for what we're looking for. It can talk to Lemmy, PieFed, and Hubzilla, but also retains the look and feel of a message board.

deadsuperhero

@scott@loves.tech Yeah, 100% agreed on all counts. It should be a cross-organizational effort, data-sharing should be encouraged, and there ought to be a decent set of guidelines for how written pages look.

One thought that's been in the back of my mind: while there's some old stalwart platforms like MediaWiki that we could get running, would this effort benefit from a federated wiki platform? One ActivityPub-based effort that I know of is Ibis, which is by the Lemmy dev @nutomic@lemmy.ml.

This might also be a good use of the Fedizen.net domain that I currently own, and have been sitting on.

deadsuperhero

This is just a soft inquiry for now, but I wanted to open up a discussion about public-facing documentation for the Fediverse: whether it's beneficial to have, what form it should take, and to what degree thorough historical and technical information is needed for preservation and reference.

I've been kind of unhappy with where various Fediverse information projects lie currently, such as the Join the Fediverse wiki. To me, there are a few problems with existing efforts:

Inherent Bias - Public resources taking a particular biased stance regarding things like competing technologies, what community values should be defined by, or who gets to be counted as part of the Fediverse based on a wide range of assumptions.
Lack of Organization / Quality Control - Generally, existing community efforts do not pass muster for technical documentation or cultural reference, and instead suffer from poorly-written explanation of what a given platform "is like".
Lack of Resources (People / Information / Etc) - Could probably fall into the previous category, but compounds problems by generally leading to even higher levels of inconsistency / abandonment.

The thing is, I'm of the belief (maybe delusion) that the wider community would benefit from a dedicated wiki detailing project history, cultural developments, technical insights, and functionally unique spaces within the network. It doesn't necessarily have to be a "here's how to do ActivityPub" guide for developers, or a "here's all the platforms and what they are" dictionary for end users, but I think it might be a useful resource for pointing a lot of different people in the right direction.

Two potential paths

The question boils down to this: hosting a wiki is easy. Cultivating and maintaining one is hard. We (We Distribute) might be in a position to do one of two things:

Try to support and upgrade a vast body of information on an existing community wiki project.
Launch our own initiative under the We Distribute umbrella.

I think either one is an initiative worth taking to, but each option has their various benefits and drawbacks. It would be interesting to get insight from the wider community on whether this kind of thing is even wanted or needed, and if so, whether we should spearhead it, or if we should try to improve something that already exists (even if it's bad).

I would love to hear some thoughts from anybody who's interested on the subject.

deadsuperhero

Breaking Changes in Lemmy 1.0

The major breaking changes for version 1.0 are already implemented. However it will still take a lot of work to implement the new features in lemmy-ui, and publish the final release. So this is a good time for developers of Lemmy clients to start adapting the new API, and suggest changes before it gets finalized.

If you use any apps, frontends or bots for Lemmy, please help us out by notifying the developers about this post.

Some interesting developments here. A couple noteworthy points of interest:

Private Communities
Media Filtering (toggle Video or Image on or off when looking at stuff)
Post Scheduling
Image Endpoints (easier and more robust moderation control over image handling)

They have an OpenAPI Reference worth playing around with, but their flagship server hasn't officially updated to the new version because the frontend doesn't support the API changes fully yet.

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Our Goals for 2025

What Are We Looking For

Two potential paths

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