Over the past few months, Damon and I have both dealt with a very annoying headache: the instances we were both on kept shutting down. First, it was Firefish.social, with a gradual degredation in service that never recovered. We moved to Mozilla.social, and loved it for a while, but a combination of bad moderation and Mozilla cutting staff from that project left us with a bad taste.

We were frustrated. Having to switch instances multiple times a year sucks. What we needed was a space that we could take care of all by ourselves.

The more we talked about it, the more we realized that it made sense for us to have our social presence under our own infrastructure. We started weighing our options. What do we want?

Picking the Pieces

We both really loved Firefish. Its design and social experience were among the best we’ve ever seen. We’ve seen a few Misskey forks come and go, though, and felt ambivalent about committing to a platform that might either shut down, or fork again.

We really didn’t want to go with Mastodon. While there are many good things to say about it, the experience just felt too limiting for what we wanted to do.

For our backend, we went with Akkoma. It’s a Pleroma fork, but as far as projects go, it’s healthy and active. It’s a great project based on years of really solid development work.

For our frontend, we went with Mangane. It’s a fork of the controversial Soapbox project, maintained by the fine folks at BDX Town. It adds a lot of polish to the default experience, and brings back some of the features we loved in Misskey systems, like Emoji Reactions!

Setting Policy

We’ve thought a lot about online communities, how they’re governed, and what kinds of policies help encourage a place to grow while remaining inclusive. Damon helped provide a draft for our Terms of Service, based on his own ongoing work in developing Memory, an upcoming social platform.

We modified our Terms of Service to include language against misgendering and deadnaming, and signed the IFTAS pledge to signal our stance on these policies. If you run an instance, we recommend taking the pledge as well!

Finally, we imported the Oliphant T0 blocklist, manually, by hand. We reviewed for ourselves which servers on the list seemed reasonable to keep blocked, and which servers to keep connections open with.

What we’re going for

Our goal with We Distribute Social is to provide a relaxed, fun atmosphere where people can hang out, talk about their hobbies and passions, and keep tabs on the latest developments happening in the space. 

We want to encourage the people building cool things in the space, and share in the joy of discovering awesome new things together. If you’re interested in a hosted account, DM us at: @hello, and we’ll get you set up!

What now?

You can follow our instance at https://social.wedistribute.org, or follow our featured accounts below:

• Main Account: @hello@social.wedistribute.org
• Podcast: @decentered@social.wedistribute.org
• Damon: @damon@social.wedistribute.org
• Laurens: @laurens@social.wedistribute.org
• Sean: @deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org