Welcome to the new We Distribute!
We Distribute is my years-long-in-the-making project to document and write about free software, decentralization and federated social technologies. It has taken many forms over the years, ranging from small news bulletins talking about what a given project was doing, to detailed overviews of how these different systems actually work, and interviews with the people who are building them.
This status is a statement of intent to bring this project into its next phase: a media publication focused on bringing news about these things directly to the fediverse itself. How, you may ask?
Firstly, We Distribute is moving off of Medium.com, and opt instead to self-host using only Free Software. Our site doesn’t serve ads, doesn’t use paywalls, and doesn’t limit how many articles you can read. We don’t collect personal data on you, and we give every article away for free under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution Share-Alike license.
Secondly, our publication feeds directly into the fediverse. We’re using the ActivityPub protocol to talk to the federated social web. What this means is that if you have an account in the fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, Hubzilla, and a growing list), you will be able to subscribe to this site (blog@wedistribute.org) and comment on our articles through your social stream reading applications of choice.
All you have to do is subscribe to blog@wedistribute.org using your fediverse client of choice.
There are currently some kinks in federating with certain kinds of platforms, but we’re doing our best to work them out. Articles that exist before today will not be able to federate because they are older, and existed before our federation plugin was implemented (Pterotype doesn’t appear to like content made prior to itself being activated).
We’re working hard to prepare for a new and improved writing cycle, which means more quality article in less turnaround time. This will include:
- News
- Interviews
- Reviews
- Demos
- Opinion Pieces
We’re excited about starting off March 2019 strong. Please keep an eye on this space as we continue to grow and develop!
