I wrote up an article on my personal (Ghost-powered!) blog about some of the work I've been doing to integrate our news publication at We Distribute into the #Fediverse. This is the culmination of years and years of experiments, and we're almost to a point where most of our ideas have been realized.

deadsuperhero

Integrating a News Publication Into the Fediverse

A thorough review of trials, tribulations, and tests to bridge the gap from publishing online to federated social networking.

Bitcoin Bros always say stuff like "Study Bitcoin", but what's there to actually study? Study TempleOS. Study Plan9. Study Apache Khafka. Study ethics and philosophy. Learn lots of details about weird shit written by people with wild ideas. Don't try to act like you're Marcus Aurelius because you bought some cryptocurrency and can say the word blockchain.

Off to the emergency room again. 😓

So, it took longer than expected to get around to this, but I finally wrote about my experience attending #FediverseHouse last week. It was really amazing, and I'm glad I went.

deadsuperhero

You Know What, Meet Your Heroes

This is a brief reflection on my recent experience at Fediverse House in Austin, TX.

Sleep time. 😴 Surgery tomorrow.

As part of an ongoing effort with We Distribute and #Fediverse advocacy, I'm looking at connecting with other journalists currently writing about the Fediverse, Nostr, Bluesky, and other efforts to build a decentralized social Web. I think it may be possible, even beneficial, to create a newswire service spanning our different sites and publications, to help keep everyone reporting on this growing space on the same page.

It's the waning hours of #FediverseHouse. This is probably the best time I've had in years and years. Some hilarious, beautiful, brilliant people, I'm sad that it's almost over, I could spend all my free time hanging out with y'all.

"Every Google Manager's dream is to have an AI bot that can't tell them at Town Halls how stupid they are." -Cory Doctorow #FediverseHouse

I'm going to touch on this in a longer, more thought-out piece, but: the way we treat developers, particularly ones new to this network, is often garbage. We're so quick to blame people over things like consent mechanisms or implementation details that we literally bully them off the network, without ever wondering whether there's more to the story. This actively hurts our ecosystem, to the point that it hurts one of the greatest resources for our network. Have you ever considered that maybe the existing mechanisms are actually incredibly broken, poorly thought-out, and not actually well-surfaced to people in the first place? That there's lots of people that would love certain functionality, but it's never occurred to them that they have to opt-in to use it?

"What would your advice be to fit community-builders moving to the Social Web?" Andy Piper: "Just start using it. Find a platform, try some things out, find your tribe." I kind of agree with this. To some degree, you have to rip off the band-aid, and get involved. However, defining form, convention, and medium are all super important for building distinct communities in the space. The migration of several large Reddit communities to Lemmy were very much a case of matching the existing form of Reddit with the ethos of the Fediverse. #FediverseHouse