We Distribute is a news site reporting on the future of the Internet. We cover the Fediverse, Bluesky, Nostr, and more. We keep a pulse on the development of these spaces, and the people living in them.
We're currently exploring deeper integrations with #Nostr and other networks for our site. Does anyone know of WordPress plugins or tools for posting kind 30023 (long-form articles)?
We'd like to find a way to share our stuff natively with the Nostr network.
Jay Graber, the CEO of #Bluesky, is stepping down. She's pivoting to a new role at the company, and will stay involved in day-to-day development of the network.
https://wedistribute.org/2026/03/jay-graber-steps-down-as-bluesky-ceo/
Here's this week's issue of Relay, a roundup of things happening across the Social Web. Governance changes, questions of decentralization, and some new developments in the field.
https://newsletter.wedistribute.org/september-7th-rising-tides/
9/7/2025, 1 engagement
The first issue of our Social Web newsletter, Relay, is out. Take a look!
8/22/2025, 1 engagement
After a brief demo at FediCon 2025, a new, open source fundraising system for the #Fediverse has been released to the public. It's native to the network, and you sign in using your own Fediverse account.
We Distribute is currently evaluating whether to launch a crowdfunding campaign to help support our organization. Right now, almost everything we do is created, produced, and edited by one guy,
.
With funding, we would be able to pay regular contributors and hire people to help us produce media on a much more frequent basis.
If you're interested, please feel free to fill out this short survey: https://cloud.wedistribute.org/apps/forms/s/zGt76c6d8xyWCsj73QYrEiC9
8/12/2025, 2 engagements
There's a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline for the #Fediverse alternative to Tiktok and Vine, including a Web UI and a boatload of new features. Let's dive in, and see what's coming in the next release.
https://wedistribute.org/2025/08/big-updates-are-coming-to-loops/
For our latest episode of The Decentered Podcast, we interviewed
! It's an awesome interview that talks about Twitter, Secure Scuttlebutt, and the evolution of #Nostr.
https://wedistribute.org/podcast/s2e3-rabble-from-nos-social/
WordPress is continuing work on their #Fediverse integration, adding new capabilities that lets WordPress users subscribe to people right from the dashboard. Here's why this matters for the future of WordPress on the Social Web.
https://wedistribute.org/2025/07/wordpress-activitypub-v-7-1-0-introduces-following-capabilities/
An open source, self-hostable music platform will soon allow people on the #Fediverse to buy music and support artists. Here's why it's a big deal.
You can check out our daily live coverage of #FediForum here: https://wedistribute.org/2025/06/fediforum-june-2025/
This is not a drill! 🚨
We have launched our second season of The Decentered Podcast, with some pre-event commentary about the upcoming @fediforum event happening tomorrow.
https://wedistribute.org/podcast/fediforum-june-2025/
Give it a listen, #Fediverse!
This is not a drill! 🚨
We have launched our second season of The Decentered Podcast, with some pre-event commentary about the upcoming FediForum event happening tomorrow.
https://wedistribute.org/podcast/fediforum-june-2025/
Give it a listen!
We tested out the new #Fediverse beta in Ghost, and wrote about our initial thoughts. There's a huge amount of potential, and it's already taking great shape.
Coinbase and Farcaster are teaming up, and aim to make a popular crypto wallet into a social client.
Debut article by
!
The Funkwhale music platform is alive and in active development, and they're working on a feature to filter far-right artists off the network. Some #Fediverse self-hosters are divided on letting a third party decide what should be allowed in their library.
The organization behind critical pieces of Trust & Safety infrastructure in the #Fediverse is struggling to make ends meet. Here's what's going on, what the road ahead looks like, and how to help.
Radio Free Fedi was one of the greatest artist projects to ever hit the #Fediverse. With an unprecedented ethos and a fanatical approach to building and supporting the music community, it became an institution. Today, we remember and honor RFF.
https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/radio-free-fedi-shuts-down/
FediOnFire, a #Fediverse project similar to Firesky, has shut down after a misunderstanding led to community backlash.
We live in interesting times. As users migrate en masse from existing social platforms to new networks and apps, we ought to think about how to make the experience of signing up, connecting to friends, and finding the good stuff as solid as humanly possible.
1/23/2025, 2 engagements
With NodeBB's latest release, the forum software introduces ActivityPub support, and can talk to the biggest Reddit alternatives in the #Fediverse.
https://wedistribute.org/2025/01/nodebb-officially-joins-fediverse/
Another day, another non-profit. Mastodon is aiming for an organizational shake-up in 2025, with greater emphasis on stewardship and shifting away from a SABDFL development model.
1/13/2025, 1 engagement
Today, we get into the nitty-gritty details of Surf, a new project by Flipboard ! It's a feed reader with #Fediverse social features, where you can build your own community newsfeeds.
12/24/2024, 6 engagements
Loops is an open source Tiktok alternative for the #Fediverse, from the creator of Pixelfed. We've been experimenting with some tools and techniques for creating Loops videos, with some suggestions on how to get started!
12/13/2024, 3 engagements
Loops aims to be an open #Fediverse alternative to TikTok, Snapchat, and Vine. We take an early look at the app, and talk about what it's like!
11/18/2024, 2 engagements
Due to the ongoing strain of trying to write, edit, and publish articles on a consistent basis, and a handful of personal obligations of our founders, We Distribute is officially on temporary hiatus.
This is not the end of our publication or our project, but we need to step back for a while and regroup, if the project hopes to survive.
10/15/2024, 3 engagements
Earlier this month, the Mastodon project announced a new initiative funded by NGI Search: #Fediverse Discovery Providers! The goal is to build a resource framework for different kinds of services that can work with potentially any instance or platform.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/fediverse-discovery-providers/
Evan Prodromou has officially announced The Social Web Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of #ActivityPub, the #Fediverse, and The Social Web.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/social-web-foundation-launch/
We have to give a huge shout-out and thank you to Scott Kellum and his company, Typetura, for their amazing work with our redesign. We're excited to see what comes next!
9/19/2024, 1 engagement
We have a guest article today, co-written by Heidi Li Feldman and Tim Chambers! They make the case for political organizing in the #Fediverse, as opposed to corporate social media.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/the-revolution-will-be-federated/
Mozilla has decided to shut down their #Mastodon instance, after laying off the majority of the project's team earlier this year. The company is instead focusing on AI for the foreseeable future. #Fediverse
https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/mozilla-social-shutting-down/
#FediForum starts today! Come hang out on this page for our live commentary and news updates: https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/fediforum-september-2024/
In the development and building of a shared, open, collaborative network, efforts have come and gone over the years for the #Fediverse. We dig into the history, various attempts, and some of the ideas people have had.
New logo, who dis? 👀
9/4/2024, 3 engagements
As the #Fediverse continues to grow, people are looking to build new experiences that change what's possible on the network today.
#Flohmarkt is a nascent project intended for selling personal items, and may be the first attempt of its kind here.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flohmarkt-federated-market/
We want to start actively promoting #Nostr events on our site. These include game jams, hackathons, art collabs, unconferences, live listens, and webinars.
We're currently looking at using an events calendar on our site, with the goal of integrating it with the greater Social Web. This includes ActivityPub, Bluesky, and Nostr.
If you're an event organizer, and would like to have something included on our calendar, give us a shout!
Check it out! Flipboard has officially announced a new milestone in their embrace of the #Fediverse - now, any Flipboard user can follow a Fediverse account in their feed. We're one step closer to greater publishing and curation across the network!
https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flipboard-fediverse-following/
Within the last few years, publishing within the #Fediverse has started to take off. This week's opinion piece focuses on some of the current hurdles this network has, when it comes to user experience, and proposes ideas and a vision of what's possible.
We have a small gift for you today: over the past 8 months, we've been building an icon library for various decentralized social platforms and protocols within the space. It's an ongoing effort, and we're happy to release our initial version today. It's like Font Awesome, but for the Social Web!
https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/decentralized-social-icons/
8/7/2024, 4 engagements
This is simply a reminder: We Distribute is a nonprofit organization that currently runs on donations. Our lead writer has been writing and running this site for free for years. He's now a full-time student.
If you could help support us during this time, it would mean a lot. ♥️
The author of "Protocols, Not Platforms", Techdirt's Mike Masnick, has joined the #Bluesky board of directors. His goal is to help the organization stay true to their original vision.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/mike-masnick-joins-bluesky/
The #MastodonForHarris campaign has raised close to $500,000 within two weeks of being live. It is probably the largest attempt for political organizing on the #Fediverse, and may provide a playbook for other efforts going forward.
We posted our very first Progress Report on OpenCollective today, that catches up with what we've been doing the past few months.
We have some big ideas, and talk about where our publication is going.
https://opencollective.com/wedistribute/updates/progress-report-july-2024
7/26/2024, 3 engagements
NeoDB is a review system with some remarkable tricks up its sleeve, and may provide a way forward for decentralized content discovery.
7/24/2024, 2 engagements
Come hang out with us on our #Matrix space! We have a really chill and friendly community of users, designers, builders, and writers who are deeply invested in helping the #Fediverse and the wider #SocialWeb succeed.
Some people think that privacy, openness, and user consent are all at odds with one another. Here's a guide on how to navigate all three as a developer.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/07/fediverse-privacy-and-consent/
7/15/2024, 2 engagements
The development team behind ActivityPods released a new example app that's easy to get up and running, to help developers hit the ground running.
A beloved Lemmy event returns this year, and it's already off to a strong start! There's still plenty of time to participate.
7/12/2024, 2 engagements
In this guide, we go over tips and tricks for dealing with one of PeerTube's biggest headaches: fixing broken videos.
7/11/2024, 2 engagements
Nice! Openvibe now supports Bluesky in addition to Nostr and the Mastodon API! 🥳
7/10/2024, 6 engagements
This looks amazing! So many people focus on recreating existing services, when the trick is to let users pick and choose what form factors they actually want.
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7/5/2024, 2 engagements
Huh, neat! The Mastodon API support in @openvibe now works with our #Akkoma instance. We can now post to ActivityPub and Nostr at the same time.
We apologize for the lack of updates. Our Chief Editor,
, has been recovering from burnout for the past few weeks, and hasn't been able to get anything published. He's recovering, and continuing to work on new pieces.
We have a ton of great articles being written, and hope to return to our regular schedule very soon!
7/3/2024, 13 engagements
Today, we're sitting down to interview
for the #Decentered podcast! We're really excited to talk about #Nostr, his experience with building Nos and Planetary, and learn more about his personal story and vision for what is being built here and now.
6/13/2024, 9 engagements
For the latest episode of our #Decentered podcast, we sat down and chatted with Jesse Karmani, who is building Frequency: a federated, private photo-sharing app for friends.
She has some really wonderful ideas, and has put a lot of thought into building the right kind of experience.
6/13/2024, 4 engagements
A social network founded by a former OpenAI employee was caught importing public posts from Mastodon...and ran AI analysis to add tags to them.
6/12/2024, 8 engagements
The dedicated Trust and Safety organization launched their community platform for moderation support last week. Here's what it does.
The weird thing about the Business Insider article is that everything that was said about fiatjiaf's political views already existed out in the open. There was no need to reveal his identity out of the blue.
6/6/2024, 1 engagement
The widely-known music platform is embracing Nostr, but it's a small demo that's only a taste of what's to come.
6/5/2024, 6 engagements
Hmmm... although we're able to log in to our #Akkoma account through
, it looks like our timeline doesn't populate, and we can't post anything. 🤔
Akkoma supports the Mastodon APIs, but it's still a different platform with slightly different needs. We'll try opening a bug report with details.
There's a lot of really good mobile clients for #Nostr, but the Web clients we've tried so far have left us wanting. For those of you who use Nostr on Web, what are your go-to clients?
How do you get those nice, simple addresses on your Nostr profile, instead of the NPub Key? We're here to walk you through it with NIP-05.
6/1/2024, 4 engagements
5/31/2024, 17 engagements
We are thrilled to be partnering with
as part of their Journalism Accelerator Program! We look forward to bringing our quality news coverage to #Nostr, and hope to report on this network's developments as well!
https://wedistribute.org/2024/05/nos-journalism-accelerator/
It's time to listen and vote in this year's edition of the Fediverse's favorite annual music contest, FediVision!
The pioneer of the AT Protocol introduces a new milestone to their social messaging plans. Encryption and federation are expected in the future.
With Mastodon's recent incorporation as a US 501c3, the question has come up: who are the board members? What do they do? And why were they chosen?
Nostr is another effort to build an open social network on the Web, and it's very different than ActivityPub. Here's how it works.
5/7/2024, 9 engagements
Pretty excited about some of the upcoming stuff we have to talk about regarding all of the development of the #Pixelfed project! Should be doing a mega-post covering everything this week.
The thumbnail is for Sup, an upcoming E2EE messenger for the #Fediverse.
For a long time, open source projects had to make a tough decision: put your development infrastructure on a platform owned by the likes of Microsoft, or do it all yourself. A casualty in all of this: people have to go out of their way to register, just to participate.
With the development of federated code forges, these two problems may soon be a thing of the past.
https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/the-future-of-code-collaboration-might-happen-across-the-entire-web
As more corporate enterprises begin building products into decentralized spaces, a question comes up: how should the people already present react?
Cool, looks like everything is set up now.