Nearly one year and one month ago, We Distribute was relaunched under a "Go Big or Go Home" mentality. The project had lay dormant for a few years, changed hands briefly, and was dangerously close to fizzling out completely.

A lot had happened in a short amount of time, and we're growing like crazy. None of this would have been possible without the amazing community support we've received. We've published over 140 articles, launched a podcast, and have reported groundbreaking news that has influenced the space for the better.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes, and we want to share an overview of what we're doing, and things we're trying. A lot of this stuff is a first attempt, and we're learning a lot in the process.

We're ecstatic to announce that We Distribute has its first bronze sponsor, Prometheus Systems, a hosting company dedicated to decentralized communication apps as a service. This is a big first for us, and we'll be talking with them about how we can both help each other out in pursuing our goals.

As a project, our team is continuing to grow. We Distribute has taken on 6 volunteer writers and an editor. For most of our project's history, writing has been solely done by Sean Tilley. In order to grow and become more consistent in our output, we are changing how we work to operate as a distributed team.

Check out our lineup!

The OG founder of We Distribute, Sean is a long-term Fediverse veteran who did community management for Diaspora. Over the years, he has investigated, experimented with, and reported on the cutting edge of Fediverse platforms and decentralized communication systems.

Damon joined We Distribute early last year as the publication came back on line, and was key in orchestrating the launch of Decentered. He is officially now a co-host on the podcast, an official cofounder for We Distribute, and helps steer our day-to-day strategy.

Anuj is a software engineer and writer comlng from Flipboard. He writes a fantastic newsletter called Human Generated Content, and his passion for writing about emerging technology drew our attention to him.

Sean Massa is a Senior Engineering Manager at Vercel, and has 17 years of experience in the industry. Sean joins us as an additional editor, to assist in the process of polishing our articles to a shine.

Ændra is a journalist with a background in data visualization, and has done work for Financial Times. One of her side projects is a XBlock, content labeler for Bluesky that checks to see if posts contain a screenshot, and filters them out of the timeline.

Shreyan is a self-professed "technology geek that likes to play with computers". He joins us from the Bluesky user community, and has written deep-dives on the internals of the AT Protocol.

Sam runs Ethical Revolution, a blog and guide site that focuses on ethical living and technology. He will be helping us with our popular Mixtape articles, which are short playlists designed to promote musicians in the Fediverse.

We're currently working to take We Distribute to the next level. Our organization has registered as a Non-Profit corporation in Arizona, and we're doing some heavy lifting to figure out the next steps for incorporating as a 501c3 Charity in the United States. Our hope is to secure funding, cover infrastructure and development costs, and pay our writers for their work.

It's a long road with a lot of paperwork and process involved, but we're doing our best to start with a best foot forward.

We are partnering with Scott Kellum, an experienced designer who has worked on SB Nation and Vox Media. Scott is the founder of Typetura, and has a fantastic insight into typography, color, and form.

Our redesign is necessary as part of our evolution as a brand, a project, and a company. There's still a lot to figure out with how our design will take form, but we are making great progress.

As part of our redesign, we are embarking on three initiatives that we feel are a key part of who we are, and what we do. These are internal initiatives that have been promoted, and well underway.

One of the biggest things we've noticed is a general lack of an actively developed icon theme for Fediverse projects. FontAwesome has a Mastodon icon, and ForkAwesome added a bunch of projects, but it hasn't been updated in ages.

For the purposes of our own site, we have launched Decentralized Social Icons, an initiative to package the SVG logos of many different Social Web projects into a singular icon font, free for anyone to use! It's not quite at a stable 1.0 release yet, but we hope to make a formal announcement in the coming weeks.

We spend a lot of time managing our various social media accounts. Last time we checked, We Distribute sported 14 different accounts across the Web. That's a lot!

Because our publication is on WordPress and uses ActivityPub, we've been thinking about ways to make our publication more native to the Fediverse. Right now, @[email protected] primarily shares articles. Using some innovative plugins, we are exploring the possibility of using We Distribute itself as the main place that we post everything from: articles, statuses, polls, podcasts, you name it.

Our first step into this initiative is to explore ways to make this work on the frontend. Sean Tilley is currently conducting a theme experiment called Micron, which incorporates microblogging statuses into WordPress alongside Articles and other forms of content. We hope to take the lessons learned from this project, and incorporate it into our new theme to build our own StoryStream-like experience.

This effort has been a long-time coming, and is mostly complete on the data side. We Distribute uses a lot of different kinds of tags for grouping things together.

The ultimate goal that we hope to build are Hubs. Basically, they're custom landing pages that act like a dedicated portal to everything that's related. You can take a wide view, and see everything that's happening on a given network, like the Fediverse. Alternatively, you can drill down to individual platforms and apps to see news, podcast episodes, reviews, and guides specifically related to those things.

There's still a lot of design work to be done for Hubs, but our hope is to make discovery of our own content easier for people, and give them deeper insight into what's going on with the things they care about most.

The second season of our podcast is in production, and in the process of being recorded. We have a fantastic lineup planned, and can't wait to get them out! Planned guests include Evan Prodromou, Evan "Rabble" Henshaw-Plath, Maxwell Salzberg, Christine Lemmer-Webber, Daniel Supernault, and more.

That about wraps things up for this update, thanks for supporting us, and we'll tune in next time.