My Hopes for We Distribute
For the past few years, I've been running a tech blog focused on the Fediverse. It's evolving into a bonfide news organization.
For the past few years, I've been running my own little blog dedicated to decentralized communication tech, We Distribute. For most of its history, this side project has been a quaint little thing where I blogged about cool Fediverse projects I like.
First: Why is it called that?
The name We Distribute is something of a stupid pun. It takes the Marxist concept of redistribution of wealth, and reshapes it into a personal motto: we, the members of a decentralized network, are helping it grow. We bring in more people, who add new nodes, who create connections and pass data around with the rest of the network. It's a term of action: We Distribute, collectively, together.
I told you, it was stupid. But, the name stuck, and I kind of like it enough that I have no plans to change it.
Foundational Concepts
When I initially started this thing, there were a couple details that were important to me, that I felt were worth pursuing.
No Tracking, No Ads, No Auto-Loading Videos, No Pop-Ups
Modern news sites are often pretty horrible. A quick visit to a CNN article or a niche tech blog can cause the reader to fight against their web browser as ads plaster the screen, readability gets interrupted by banners, pop-ups and cookie consent banners cover things up further, and some half-related video plays in the background.
Ads can be a pretty solid stream of revenue, and a number of sites do it pretty well. Still: with most privacy-conscious people blocking ads, and the invasive practices of surveillance capitalism to contend with, I decided that these things were non-starters. We Distribute has forgone any kind of advertising money. We use very basic analytics just to know when articles get viewed or podcasts get downloaded, but it's all anonymous. We have no interest in spying on our readers, or using a bunch of weird metrics to prioritize random bullshit.
Everything is Federated
Historically, this project has served as a personal exploration of what's possible within the Fediverse. Since very early days, the entire publication, and all subsequent interactions, were federated.
It was fundamentally important that this publication was part of the network that it reported on. The blog has an Actor, articles are posts pushed over ActivityPub, and comments are notes that federate in from across the network.
Left: an article as displayed on Mastodon. Right: replies from the Fediverse rendered as comments.
It's never been perfect, and I don't think the time for federated blogging has quite reached its peak on this network yet. Regardless: We Distribute is one of the oldest attempts to use federation for journalism in a manner native to the network. The only older effort that I can think of is perhaps IndyMedia.
The Reboot
Sometime last year (I think?), the site went through a major reboot. After several years of burnout, puttering around, and feeling bad about not doing enough, I decided to double down. I committed myself to regularly publishing articles several times a week, and I made the following changes:
- Subject Matter - I decided not to just focus on the tech-focused, product review-centric approach I used in the past. I wanted to talk about culture, people, controversies, and the really ugly stuff, too. Writing about "easy subjects" made me feel too much like a cheerleader.
- Writing Style - instead of trying to introduce every object in the known universe when describing a new app or concept, I focused on making articles easier to read and understand. There's still a lot of technical writing, but I try to lay things out in a way that anybody who's interested could easily grasp what I'm talking about.
- Update Frequency - at the bare minimum, the site would get at least one article published per week. Barring personal health issues now and then, I've been able to commit to that!
Launching
As part of the reboot, I spent a lot of time preparing a bunch of pieces I thought were interesting ahead of time. Here's what our front page looked like that day.
The reboot has been fairly successful, as we tend to have a somewhat consistent readership across the network. Here's a couple of big hard-hitting pieces that I pushed out over the last year:
Sean Tilley
Sean Tilley
Sean Tilley
Sean Tilley
These topics were not always super fun to report on, but we made a lot of progress in reporting the current issues and discourse, even when people told us not to. Several of these pieces ended up being major topics of discussion at the last FediForum, which felt like a major accomplishment.
Starting a Podcast
About a month into the reboot, a reader reached out to me. In his email, he mentioned that he really liked what We Distribute and The Fediverse Report were doing, and that we should meet and try to work together. This is how I met Damon, who is now my co-founder, and Laurens, a regular collaborator. We found that we're on the same page about a lot of things, and have become good friends. We hang out in our Matrix chat every day.
After a couple of meetings, we landed on creating a podcast together. We didn't exactly know what the format was going to look like, or how things were going to work, but we wanted to create a relaxed, stress-free atmosphere for our guests.
In addition to sharing their background and what they were about, we wanted to talk about hopes and dreams. We also wanted to be able to crack jokes and laugh together.
This is how Decentered was born.
As of this writing, we've produced 8 episodes, and syndicated them to a bunch of different places: Apple Podcasts, YouTube Podcasts, Spotify, Truefans, PeerTube, and Podcast Index. At this point, you can listen in from pretty much any podcast app or catalogue. We very much want to lean into the ethos of "Available wherever you get your podcasts."
Every interview is a banger; we haven't had a single bad guest. Every session features someone building something for the network, whether it's a platform, an organization, or a social initiative. It still has a small following, much smaller than, say, Dot Social, but it's something that we've worked hard on. I'm proud of what we've made.
The Future
Things are looking pretty good for the site at the moment: we're regularly writing and publishing pieces, growing our team, and increasing our coverage to Bluesky and Nostr.
Rebrand & Redesign
We've been using an off-the-shelf WordPress theme for a while, and our visual style and identity aren't particularly strong yet. We want to hire a designer, and work with them on a a number of cool ideas we've had about where to take the platform. We have a handful of mockups and concepts about what this could look like, and where things could go, creating an intersection between traditional online media and the open federated Social Web.
I will likely be paying a substantial amount out of pocket to make this happen.
Partnerships
For the short term, our publication is taking part in Nos Social's Journalism Accelerator Program. It's a fantastic opportunity for us to gain a greater presence in the Nostr community, and also discover the parts of it that aren't just focused on Bitcoin. There's some really interesting concepts in that space, and I think the Fediverse could benefit by learning about them.
For article syndication, we're working with Flipboard and Newsmast to help push our work out to new audiences. Ironically, news distribution is kind of a tough nut to crack for us, so we're exploring different ways to get our work out there.
Expanding the Team
I'll be honest, the biggest headache I've had with this whole journey is that I write about 98% of the content on the site. This is partially because I live and breathe the subject material, but I also historically have difficulty relinquishing control. In addition to writing, I perform content planning, social media management, podcast editing, outreach, media production, and distribution.
I would be lying if I said I wasn't feeling burnt out at times.
Right now, we're dipping our toes in the water with adding new team members. We recently brought on Anuj Ahooja, who writes fantastic pieces on his own site at Augment.Ink. In bringing him on board, I've forced myself to set some basic processes in place, and be receptive to feedback. This includes a greater focus on content planning, weekly communication, and brainstorming sessions to come up with new ground to cover.
If you're interested in helping out, we have a basic job board. Currently, each role is an unpaid volunteer position, but we want to develop long-term working relationships, and get to a place where we can fairly compensate people. This next section will explain where we're thinking of going.
Incorporation and Fundraising
This has been my biggest headache so far, mostly due to inexperience. I've also dragged my feet a little bit, but hope to catch up now that I have more free time. In short: I am founding a non-profit corporation called We Distribute Media. This serves as the umbrella entity that can perform fundraising, pay for services, and most importantly: compensate people for their work. My hope is that eventually, we can all move from volunteers to freelancers to employees.
We're incorporated as a Non-Profit Corporation in Arizona. This is a good start, but now we have to do the harder part of registering as a 501c3 Non-Profit Charity in the United States, through the Internal Revenue Service. This is a far more nebulous process where we have to elect a board, hold a meeting, craft formal bylines and articles, and jump through hoops. It's hard and it sucks, but I'm determined to complete this process before July 2024.
The reason we're choosing this route is because we want to run a newsroom that isn't beholden to shareholders or VC firms, that can continue pursuing our mission statement long after the founding members have gone.
Fundraising Models
For fundraising, we run very bare-bones pages for Patreon and OpenCollective. Every article on our site promotes them, and our podcast plugs them at the end of every episode. Sadly, the donations for now are quite low, which means we have to tweak our strategy a lot. Moving forward, it might make sense to solicit larger sponsorships through companies, as well as apply for grants through something like The Knight Foundation.
Paid Content
Another concept we've been kicking around is Premium Subscriptions for special articles. We want to do it in a way where it doesn't eat into the front page or restrict people to much. The best I can come up with right now is:
- Premium Articles are deep-dive narrative stories, rather than the shorter news pieces we publish.
- Premium Articles transform into regular articles after 3 months pass.
- Free users can read 3 free Premium Articles a month.
It's not a proven concept yet, and we haven't written any pieces that fit this description. We want to avoid a situation where every other article on the site is behind a paywall, though.
In Conclusion
This has been my journey in building my own ethical news and media organization. There's still a lot to do to get this thing to a healthy place, but I have a lot of ideas.
My goal with this thing can be summed up as follows:
- We want to be a "real" news publication, with a corporate structure and compensation model that can fairly pay people.
- We want to cover a variety of formats: News, Reviews, Culture Pieces, and Guides
- We want to syndicate our news to various news hubs.
- We want to get to a place where we pay people full-time to work with us.
My hope is that, somewhere down the road, I might be able to do this full-time with some of the awesome and passionate people I've met in the space.
