Over the past year, we’ve been looking at how to solve a really specific niche problem. We’ve been building dedicated news hubs on our site for various platforms, and thought it would be nice to store icons for all sorts of different platforms, apps, and protocols. That way, when you look at any given article, you can see what’s affiliated with it:

As a bonus, each of these special links goes into a dedicated news hub. There’s still a lot of design work to be done here, but the benefit is that our readers will be able to find their way towards individual platforms with details, news, and guides one a one-by-one basis.

Here’s the thing: there’s a lot of projects. Depending on who you ask, the space has somewhere around 151 different platforms in varying states of development. That’s not counting the projects that don’t strictly use ActivityPub, OStatus, Zot, ATproto, Nostr, or the countless medley of other protocols out there.

Unfortunately, the process has been far from straightforward: Mastodon is one of the few fediverse platforms included in Font Awesome, and the Fediverse-friendly Fork Awesome has been dormant for a lohng time. With no specific project or infrastructure to lean on, the obvious answer was to start our own.

Decentralized Social Icons

The process for creating this icon set took a lot of trial and error. What do we do, if we can’t find an SVG from a project? How does a set of trademarked icons respect licenses and Copyright attributions, when a different person worked on each one? How do we assemble it together, and fix errors made in the process?

We ended up making use of IcoMoon, which is a wonderful introductory tool for assembling icon sets. For icons that we could only find in a raster format, we created high-contrast versions in an editor before applying a vector conversion process for each file. When it came to figuring out attribution, one of our contributors suggested REUSE compliance, in which every file has a license header detailing. That way, we can properly assign Copyright and license on a file-by-file basis.

Why Do All This?

Our goal is to provide infrastructure for not only just Fediverse projects, but any project that’s working towards a goal of decentralized communication. That’s why we’ve included logos for Matrix, Element, XMPP, and Nostr, as we intend to expand our scope to cover many different kinds of developments. We’ve put together a basic process for submitting new icons, and hope to eventually get tooling in place to automate the generation of new releases.

If you’re interested in this project and want to help, please drop us a line!