Session: Reporting on Fediverse Development

Convener: Sean Tilley (@deadsuperhero@firefish.social)

Notes

Independent bloggers / publications exist that report on development of Fediverse apps and platforms! We also report on the social aspect, which is occasionally thorny and difficult.

Known publications:

• We Distribute (https://wedistribute.org)

• The Fediverse Report (https://fediversereport.com/)

We talk about some of what we’ve been doing, things we’ve tried, and some of the challenges.

We Distribute

• Originally a Hubzilla channel designed to share news on Friendica / Diaspora / Hubzilla development

• Pivoted to WordPress with the development of an ActivityPub plugin called Pterotype, which was later abandoned.

• Supported by Feneas (Federated Network Association ry) for a while

• Mostly been an independent effort where Sean writes most of the articles.

• Revived in 2023 after a long hiatus

• Experiments with reporting on all things Fediverse, on the Fediverse itself. The blog is ActivityPub-powered and can be followed (@news@wedistribute.org)

• Uses a POSSE model for posting - we have accounts on Mastodon

The Fediverse Report

• A newsletter developed by Laurens Hof

• Largely operates as a linkblog with occasional long-form articles

• Often an essential resource for We Distribute to find new topics to cover, great for discovery.

What do we write about?

• News (Tech, Culture, Media)

• Interviews

• Reviews

• Guides

• The Mixtape - playlists of fediverse musicians found via RadioFreeFedi

Challenges

• Running a Volunteer Organization is Hard! You need to give writers incentive.

• What audience are we writing for? Deciding on this defines the nature of your content.

• The Space is expanding so rapidly, there’s so much to report on

• Lack of a revenue model - no ads, no selling of data, primarily have to rely on donations.

• Lots of engagement within the Fediverse, very limited engagement outside of it.

• It’s hard to find a balance between technical developments and cultural ones.

• It’s difficult to write controversial pieces when the authors are highly integrated into that social space.

• For every article that we write, there’s a tremendous amount of research that has to go into it - spelunking through wiki entries, documentation, feature demos, status updates, and other sources.

• As a community publication, the potential for burnout is incredibly high when too much is expected of one person.

Ideas - How can things be better?

• Accepting that journalism is a difficult beast, and that a clear delineation needs to exist between opinion pieces and reporting of the facts.

• Tighter collaboration between contributors running these kinds of publications, possibly merging together to create a greater organization.

• Better highlighting / promotion of places to donate

• Working to better appeal to newcomers and people from outside of the space

• Serving as a resource to established publications to better understand the Fediverse

• Build up research internally to save time?