Wow, wild! It's been incredible seeing how quickly NodeBB has been getting updates. You're hard to keep up with!

Hi everybody,

You may have stumbled onto this page, either through a new URL or through a post federating out to the wider network, and wondered "What the hell, why is a niche news publication launching a forum in 2025?"

The short answer to this is simple: our publication has been at the forefront of experimenting with decentralized publishing and community-building. This latest experiment involves us dipping our toes into the water and testing out an integration with the Threadiverse - that is to say, group conversation platforms such as Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and a growing amount of other capable platforms that can all federate and talk to each other.

How We're Doing This

We've adopted NodeBB, mainly because of its native adoption of ActivityPub, but also because it seems like damned good forum software. We want to try to blur the lines between local, old-fashioned message board, and integrated communities across vast networks. Some of these experiments will involve using ActivityPub to pipe content from other places, such as our Podcast, our news publication, and a variety of other places.

We're interested in building a fun and supportive space for people working on the next generation of decentralized communication apps, platforms, and frameworks, and we're excited to see what comes of this.

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:

1. Try to support and upgrade a vast body of information on an existing community wiki project.
2. 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.

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!

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!

Yep, looks great!

@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.

@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?

This is an older video by Noel De Martin, a developer in the Solid space who has been building web applications on Solid technologies for years now. I think he does a great job with presenting the key concepts of Solid in a way that's mostly visual, and doesn't feel too obstrusive. This was the video that really helped the idea of Solid "click" for me, after years of struggling to understand it.

@eeeee Honestly, it only took me a few hours to configure. The biggest points of confusion were the initial setup for MongoDB, as that's a bit unfamiliar to me. Overall, it wasn't too difficult to set up.

And which mail service do you use to send out the 'confirmation emails'?

I actually took the cheap option and just used SendGrid, with a manual configuration for the SMTP integration. It took a little bit of fiddling around to get everything working, but it was important to me to get this right, before launching the community.

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.

Really great talk! I think he did a really good job of introducing the concept of Solid with ActivityPub together, and why this combination would be desirable for people.

Super excited to see the future of this project, I would love to see frontends from popular Fediverse servers ported over to ActivityPods app architecture.

@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!

Hey, great question!

Nostr is another open communication protocol, like ActivityPub. It's short for: "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted Over Relays". The key differences with Nostr are two things:

1. Instead of an inbox/outbox model, Nostr relies on relays and clients. Basically, you register a keypair representing your online identity, and you use a secret key (known as NSec) to log in through a client. The client then loads interactions directed at you through a relay, and your interactions then get posted out from the client back to the relay.

2. Pretty much all interactions with the Nostr network are done through rich client applications. You don't really log into an instance, in the traditional sense, you just have a full-featured app do all of the interaction part for you. It's common to have a private wallet as a browser extension for handling app authentication, as opposed to OAuth built in to a server instance.

It's kind of hard to measure the overall userbase of the Nostr network. I would estimate that it's much smaller than Bluesky or the Fediverse, but it has an active developer ecosystem and user community.

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

@nutomic@lemmy.ml Thanks for this! We've been considering trying out Ibis, maybe this would be a good chance to review it and report back to you on what the platform's current affordances are, and what we feel like might be missing. Obviously, you don't necessarily want to replicate MediaWiki, but it might be good to see what ideas are worth bringing over.