We Distribute

Federated End-to-End Encrypted Messaging is Coming Soon One of the Social Web Foundation's initiatives for improving ActivityPub will soon be a reality for the network.

Huge progress has been made on implementing End-To-End Encryption in #ActivityPub, thanks to efforts by The Social Web Foundation, Bonfire, and Emissary.

Reimagining Fediverse Advocacy Tackling the biggest problem of network effects: bringing people here.

Some thoughts on #Fediverse advocacy as it stands today, and some of the bold ways we could really move the needle on growing this network. Lots of interesting case studies.

January 30th, 2026: New Frontiers Welcome back! We've been on a break for the past few months, but with the new year, we're doubling down on our efforts to keep the Fediverse informed on the latest developments of the space. We've got...

The latest issue of our newsletter, Relay, is out!

Jazzed for the conference and the ATProto x science side event we're co-organizing with @tgoerke.bsky.social 🚀

Save the date! 📆

Also - ideas for cool speakers or projects in the ATProto science space are most welcome! Feel free to share here/DM/email

I hear and see your concerns. Over the weekend, a couple users hosted on Blacksky's PDS were banned from the Bluesky app and thus the Bluesky API servers. This was a weakness of our system I've been aware of and hoped we had more time to address before any kind of public incident. 1/11

Tumblr is great, for the most part! However, the initial announcement of open sourcing Tumblr and moving it to the Fediverse appears to be significantly delayed. Wafrn is an attempt to build something similar from first principles.

Wafrn is for People Who Miss Tumblr’s Chaotic Energy What started as a Tumblr-inspired publishing platform has taken on a life of its own within the Fediverse, evolving into something far more wild.

For those seeking out a federated and open alternative to Tumblr, Wafrn is looking extremely promising.

Great suggestion, we found a lot of gems!

Added you!

We've been working to build up a list to keep track of people and projects within the ATproto ecosystem. If there's anyone we've missed, let us know!

Taking AT to the IETF | Bluesky Last week we posted two drafts to the IETF Data Tracker. This is the first major step towards standardizing parts of AT in an effort to establish long-term governance for the protocol.

very excited to share this update about bringing AT to the IETF!

last week we uploaded two drafts to the IETF datatracker and today we heard that we’re approved to host a Birds of a Feather at IETF 124 (the formal meeting towards establishing a working group)

Boilerplate Pitch to Publications We know that Bluesky has better click-through rates than any other social media platform, and that publishing independence from platforms is more important now than ever. To that effect, advocating fo...

Tynan @tynanpurdy.com is wanting to have a set of resources to send to local publications & journalists about posting to Bluesky.

Looking for resources & articles about success stories and getting started. Get involved and share in the forum here discourse.atprotocol.community/t/boilerplat...

The problem with banning someone who hasn't broken any policies is that the evilest people in the world may own this platform in the future and they can use that in the other direction and point to the OG builders actions and I swear we've seen this before am I in a timeloop

GitHub - whyrusleeping/konbini Contribute to whyrusleeping/konbini development by creating an account on GitHub.

A little proof of concept I've been working on, it's a version of Bluesky that you can run locally, even on your laptop, that pulls just the data you care about from the firehose, indexes it, and provides you an interface to view and interact with posts.

The video version of our latest episode is now on #PeerTube! We chatted with @quillmatiq.com and @snarfed.org about A New Social, what they're working on, and some interesting side conversations about where the Fediverse is heading!

September 7th: Rising Tides Here's this week's roundup of things happening across the Social Web. Governance changes, questions of decentralization, and some new developments in the field.

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.

FediForum special event next week!

Join us for an hour with Robert W. Gehl, who wrote a great new book about the Fediverse: "Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the struggle for democratic social media."

Come and hear excerpts from the book, and ask questions! We read […]

Social Web Foundation is Betting Big on Client-to-Server API Nonprofit organization Social Web Foundation is quietly focusing on building tools, libraries, and prototypes to demonstrate what ActivityPub C2S could do.

The Social Web Foundation has been experimenting with the lesser-known other half of the ActivityPub protocol. Here's what they're up to.

On a brighter note, I do think it's really cool that this conversation about decentralized protocols is decentralized at the protocol layer and still accessible across networks

If you @-mention @henryzoo.com it will print to his printer.

#ATProto_NYC

August 22rd, 2025: Something Brewing Please be gentle. This is our first time doing this kind of thing. Welcome to our first issue of Relay.

The first issue of our Social Web newsletter, Relay, is out. Take a look!

Welcome to Relay This is just a brief introduction to what Relay is, what we're planning to do, and what we hope to accomplish.

We're trying something new, and starting a newsletter that adds more voices to the coverage of the Social Web. Check out Relay!

CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse A new, open source, self-hostable fundraising system for the Fediverse has been released. The project is very young, but there's a huge amount of promise.

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 evaluating whether to launch a crowdfunding campaign to support our organization. Right now, almost everything we do is created, produced, and edited by one guy, @deadsuperhero.com.

If you're interested, feel free to fill out this survey:
cloud.wedistribute.org/apps/forms/s...

Is Meta Scraping the Fediverse for AI? Is a large corporate entity scraping a community-run open social network to train AI models for profit?

Is a large corporate entity scraping a community-run open social network to train AI models for profit? Dropsite News claims to have received a leak, and the list contains a significant amount of #Fediverse instances.

It was a huge honor to be able to host a panel and interview some really incredible people at FediCon. I got the privilege to interview some incredibly thoughtful people that I admire and look up to.

If you like this, check out @wedistribute.org.

Big Updates Are Coming to Loops Loops, the open source Tiktok alternative for the Fediverse, is continuing to evolve. Here's what's new for the video platform.

There's a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline for the open source federated 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.

Infrastructure for Interdependence: Building technology in service of collective power [This document serves as a memo for investors]

What We're Building.