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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.

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Hi 👋

We’re still alive, just kind of on a hiatus for the moment. We want to get things going again soon, what cool developments have you seen happening in the recently?

Social Web Foundation is Betting Big on Client-to-Server API

From the outside looking in, it can sometimes feel unclear as to what steps the Social Web Foundation is taking to achieve its goals. The non-profit organization’s About Page states lofty ambitions, such as bringing together implementers to build tools, policies, and protocols to advance the Fediverse. The Projects Page ...

CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse

More developments are happening on the front to provide payment and monetization options for the Social Web. Over the past few years, there have been interesting experiments in making this possible. Mitra, notably, pioneered subscription payments by utilizing Monero. Bandwagon has also built on the concept by instead relying on ...

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We Distribute Will Be at FediCon!

FediCon is a new conference in Vancouver, Canada, taking place on August 1st and 2nd, 2025. So far, there’s an impressive lineup of attendees and speakers!

Sean Tilley and Damon Outlaw are making an effort to get to Canada, and we hope to host an IRL panel there!

For more information, check out the FediCon site: https://fedicon.ca/

https://i0.wp.com/wedistribute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Tusky_1752172166075_FNW8V9HN1U.png?resize=780%2C470&ssl=1

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Saskia Welch from Newsmast joins us to talk about last week’s FediForum event, and we discuss some of the big themes people were talking about!

Bandwagon is Bringing Music Sales to the Fediverse ( wedistribute.org )

Bandwagon, the music-sharing platform built on Emissary, has seen a lot of success over the past few months. The site has grown to a catalogue of over 300 different musicians, spanning a wide range of different sounds and genres. After refining search and discovery features, project lead Ben Pate has decided to focus on ...

Bounce Helps You Switch Networks ( wedistribute.org )

For the last few months, A New Social has been working hard to support and improve Bridgy Fed, a popular tool for connecting different Bluesky and IndieWeb platforms to the Fediverse. While it does some impressive work under the hood, the team behind it is looking at a new tool to help people seamlessly move across networks, ...

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Our FediForum June 2025 Live Coverage

Welcome back! We’re here to talk about all things happening at FediForum for the next three days. Look at the space below to see our updates!

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After a long break, we're back to provide a pre-event commentary for FediForum 2025, which starts tomorrow! Sean and Damon were excited to launch the new season, and provide some insight on the FediForum postponement, collaboration between ActivityPub and AT Proto, and make some predictions for what topics are coming to FediForum this year. Video Version You can watch the video version of this episode on PeerTube below! Show Notes Our delay on this new season took so long that Sean grew […]

FediForum is Back! ( wedistribute.org )

After controversy and the difficult decision to postpone back in March, the FediForum project has put in the hard work to make things right. The organization held multiple town halls, calls with community leaders, soliciting feedback, and establishing a new advisory board consisting of a diverse background. After taking the ...

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Federated Geolocations?

The Social Web Foundation ( Social Web Foundation ) recently launched places.pub, a service that ties OpenStreetMap location data into ActivityPub vocabulary. Maybe this could be used as a building block for a federated FourSquare, or event locations?

places.pub

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Fediverse House videos!

The recorded talks from @Flipboard ‘s event are now available on PeerTube!

Check them out here: https://flipboard.video/c/fediverse.house/videos

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Just a heads up: a number of our older articles have disappeared during an in-depth debugging process. While it’s not the biggest deal, since it’s “yesterday’s news”, we are working to restore our legacy pieces to the site.

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Fireside Fedi Interviews Dansup!

The Fireside Fedi podcast beat us to the punch in interviewing the creator of Pixelfed and Loops. @dansup has an impressive portfolio of Fediverse apps, and it’s interesting to hear about the experiences that brought him to where he is today.

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We’ve been helping some WordPress plugin devs find some hairy bugs. This feed now seems to be properly working! Please excuse our dust. 😁

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😎

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Integration Testing Continues

We’re continuing to dogfood our integration between our WordPress site and the wider network. Currently, we’re using three plugins together to make it work: ActivityPub for WordPress, Friends, and Enable Mastodon Apps.

This trio allows us to use our site’s Actor to post microblogging statuses to the rest of the network, through a plethora of Mastodon clients. We’re still ironing out kinks, filing bug reports, and providing feedback!

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This is a test!

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The weekend is coming up. You’ve been thinking a lot about that online community you want to start. It’s time to launch a Fediverse server!

https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/your-fediverse-server/

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The Fediverse’s premiere Trust & Safety organization is struggling to make ends meet, and needs help with meeting its goals.

https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/iftas-funding-crisis/

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A beloved community radio station featuring only music by Fediverse artists has closed its doors. This is its legacy.

https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/radio-free-fedi-shuts-down/

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In the face of public backlash, a Fediverse developer is forced to shut down a hobby project after people misunderstood what it did.

https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/fedionfire-shutdown/

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@ODD Hey sorry, this is a weird issue we get with our WordPress integration. It seems to be caused by caching. It should clear up in a few minutes, sorry for the inconvenience.

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After years of hardcore development, the Pixelfed project is taking a big next step by seeking crowdfunding dollars on Kickstarter.

https://wedistribute.org/2025/01/pixelfed-kickstarter/

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In order to capitalize on network effects as people shift from old platforms to new ones, we need to think about what’s holding people back.

https://wedistribute.org/2025/01/upward-momentum/

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A popular open source software for forums marks their 4.0 release with ActivityPub support, bringing their message boards to the network.

https://wedistribute.org/2025/01/nodebb-officially-joins-fediverse/

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The Mastodon project is continuing to grow and evolve. As the organization continues to take shape and raise funds, key members of the project have decided to transition several parts of the project to a new Non-Profit organization, to better reflect their ideals.

This new organization will retain ownership of the Mastodon brand and copyright, along with platform components and other assets. […]

https://wedistribute.org/2025/01/mastodon-eu-non-profit/

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Flipboard has unleashed Surf, a new kind of social app that combines a Feed Reader with a Feed Builder, with Social Interactions sprinkled in.

https://wedistribute.org/2024/12/surf-social-browser/

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Loops is a brand new Fediverse platform for short-form video. This guide covers some of the things we do with making Loops Videos.

https://wedistribute.org/2024/12/make-loops-video/

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Meta’s social microblogging platform has enabled a new, fundamentally important feature: the ability to look up and follow profiles from the network.

https://wedistribute.org/2024/12/threads-fediverse-profiles/

Faircamp is a Free Bandcamp Alternative ( wedistribute.org )

In the aftermath of Epic selling Bandcamp to Songtradr, Bandcamp has found itself in a place of instability. Half of the company’s employees were laid off post-acquisition, leading many to speculate over the beloved platform’s future. Most importantly, many artists who depended on the service are left looking for ...

Audon provides fantastic virtual talk spaces for Mastodon ( wedistribute.org )

The Clubhouse / Twitter Spaces craze may have come and gone, but that doesn’t mean the ‘verse can’t have their own version of it. Audon is a simple multi-user voice chat app that’s fun, easy to use, and reliable. Best of all, the app relies on some neat tricks to make the experience seamless. ...

Pixelfed Groups Are Coming to the Fediverse “Very Soon” ( wedistribute.org )

For over two years, Pixelfed’s development of federated groups has continued to take shape. The feature evolved from a simple subscription relay into a fully realized community tool. Groups is fully fleshed-out, and will ship with moderation tools, user permissions, spam detection, and more. ...

Digesting the “Child Safety on Federated Social Media” Report ( wedistribute.org )

Editor’s Note: This article covers an extremely sensitive topic, and includes some screenshots of publicly available status updates that some people may consider disturbing. This content exists solely to give context to different aspects of the situation. None of the images depict gore or pornography. ...

Can the Fediverse Help Stop Bad Internet Bills?

“Red alert! For the last six months, EFF, our supporters, and dozens of other groups have been sounding the alarm about several #BadInternetBills that have been put forward in Congress.We’ve made it clear that these bills are terrible ideas, but Congress is now considering packaging them together — possibly into must-pass ...

The Long Effort to Bring Groups to the Fediverse ( wedistribute.org )

In the early days of the network, there was GNU Social. While the software had a number of quirks, one of its most distinctive features was the capability for group messaging. Just like the now-ubiquitous “@” sign, the platform supported a second symbol – the “!” (pronounced bang) tag. It was great: instead of trying ...