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COMPOST: Exploring artist-centric development through Distributed Press

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COMPOST: Exploring artist-centric development through Distributed Press
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Towards a decentralized and interdependent publishing ecology
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In a few weeks we are launching COMPOST, a magazine about the digital commons. Each issue serves as a collective lab, where we test and validate novel approaches to content production, distribution, and monetization, with a unique cohort of contributors every quarter. Through subsequent issues of COMPOST, our learnings and code will be published to the commons as Distributed Press. Along with inspiring creators and readers with our magazine, our objective is to develop better open-source tools for decentralized publishing to catalyze an interdependent ecology of publishing projects. In our talk, we will present the organizational and technical scaffolding of COMPOST and Distributed Press. We will share our learnings from the first issue working directly with writers and artists to inform features and user experience of our tool. We will present how Distributed Press will help publish works to the DWeb (IPFS, Hypercore, Scuttlebutt), enable monetization, add a disintermediated social layer to publishing, and verify content, in a manner aligned with our values. Finally, we will talk about radical practices that ensure decentralization extends into governance, decision making, and community building.
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Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
Hi and welcome to our talk compost exploring artistic centric development through distributed press and towards a decentralized and interdependent published publishing ecology. So my name is Mai Ishikawa Sutton. I'm here with my team members, Ben and
Udit. We're here to present our work on two related projects compost and distributed press. Compost is a magazine about the digital commons, where we share art stories and reflections about people building the Internet as a shared resource. And its sister project is distributed press, which is an open source
publishing tool that enables compost magazine and other future magazines like it to So Ben and I were involved in Dwebcamp in 2019, which was an event convened by the Internet Archive bringing together hundreds of people
from around the world who are building decentralized web projects. And so that involves people like community networks, Dweb protocols, Dweb tools, and the like. And while we were working on it, we were publishing articles from participants
from this camp to talk about their experiences and thoughts and ideas about Dweb. And we were publishing to Medium.
It seemed to be the most accessible place to do that, and it just didn't feel right. I am continuing to be involved with the Internet Archive on Dweb projects, and I've continued to publish pieces like this one to Medium, but as a corporate centralized platform that really doesn't give a lot of agency and control to authors.
It just hasn't been the best platform for Dweb ideas. So Ben and I were talking even before Dwebcamp about what would be a good alternative to this. Maybe we can build something for the Dweb to publish. So that launched us into conversations. Udit and the two of us started to collaborate and think about what
we need to do next to really do this right. And so we decided to interview people in these spaces to make sure that we were going the right direction. That led us to interview people like those building Arena, the people behind Brickhouse Co-op, the Disco Project, and others who are working on
those. So from those interviews, what we heard were five main issues. The first one was that we
wanted to make sure that creators had a stake in building the tools that they were using to publish. Many of the tools that we have issues with, like Medium, come from the VC side, from technologists thinking about what is good for creators, and what ends up happening is the tool doesn't work
great for them. So we wanted to make sure that both from the beginning and through the development process, we were building tools that creators and writers wanted to use that they were driving in the production development. The second piece was to make creative work less atomizing. That means addressing
issues where making things just feels less like you're having to fend for yourself. So a common issue is with things like Patreon, having to do a lot of self-branding and self-promotion, having to do editing, creating your
voice, finding a way to make a living through all of this. It's just very individualizing and we wanted to find a way to address that issue. The third piece was that the Dweb space is pretty homogenous, not just in terms of demographic, but also in terms of the viewpoint in addressing issues of centralization.
And we wanted to find a way that we could have other people, creators and artists, and people who from all parts of the world from different perspectives, feed into this idea of creating alternative decentralized tools and platforms. The fourth issue was to decrease fragmentation in the Dweb space, seeing that many Dweb projects, which are
really amazing and awesome, they are also not directly competing with each other, but aren't working well together. And so we wanted to create a tool that would build a bridge and sort of be
glue between these different protocols so that you don't have to pick and choose different protocols. You can actually sort of look at the ecosystem more in a, what's the word, coexisting codependent, interdependent way. And the fifth issue, which is a longer view with this project, is to create tools that would tackle misinformation and censorship. We
think that a really important part of the Dweb or an aspirational hope for the Dweb movement is that by having ways to publish, to host things in ways that don't rely on centralized corporate platforms, you can have new ways of sharing information, you can
have new ways of moderating that is trustful, that is community driven, and also battle censorship by having less choke points so that both government, state points of censorship or corporate points of censorship can't choke creators and writers and journalists.
So we realized that the only way to build the tools that really met the needs of the creators that we were talking to was to work directly with them, to work directly with the authors and publishers publishing to the web.
This is why we are launching both a magazine and a tool. Both of these are projects that are happening in parallel, and each one of these informs and feeds into the other. So the magazine influences the tool and the tool influences the magazine.
In fall of 2020, we received funding from Ground for the Web to put together two issues of Compost Magazine. And in November of 2020, we put out a call for pitches. We received 120-plus submissions for the first issue, of
which we chose 10 submissions to include in the first issue. This issue is launching in late February or March 2021. So since then, since November 2020, we've been working with this cohort, this first issue cohort, and each of these
issues we're kind of treating as a lab. And what does this lab do? It's a lab for us to sort of develop tools and methods and best practices around distributed publishing, monetization, and sort of promotion on the web and dweb. Digital Commons is the theme of this magazine. So the issues that we're talking about in
this magazine are around the Digital Commons, about building the internet as a shared resource, but it's also our practice. It's the way we're thinking about our tools and technologies, how we're collaborating. Another point about this lab is that we're hoping that this is going to lower the barriers for new creators to publish to the dweb.
So we're trying to think of this as a way to create new entry points for publishing to the dweb. And throughout all of this, we're hoping to create an environment that's very supportive, tackle some of the issues such as the one that Mai talked about, about creative work being extremely isolating and atomizing.
So we want to create these spaces that are supportive. We're hosting regular sessions for peer feedback, spaces where we can make decisions collectively about this magazine, how we're distributing and promoting together, and be transparent about compensation and the direction of this magazine. And part of this is that
we're thinking about distribution, not just in terms of the technology, but also in trying to create this horizontal space where we're collaborating, making decisions together, and governing this project together in a sort of decentralized way. So in terms of roadmap and timeline for this magazine,
in 2019, 2020, a lot of the work that we were doing was interviewing people, trying to understand and map out the space. In November, we did our call for pitches. Since November, December, January, we've been working on developing this first issue we're going to be launching in February, March.
Second issue is going to happen after that. And then hopefully, our plan is to start looking into establishing a more sort of formal cooperative entity towards the end of 2021. So that was the compost component of the project, the magazine. Now I want to shift our attention to the
distributed press components, which is the publishing tool that allows us to publish to both the web and the web. So first of all, why do we want yet another tool? Don't we have a lot of tools ready to publish things to the web? Well, in the current web, audience networks and creative content exists often in a handful of dominant platforms such as Medium and Facebook.
This monster is a representation of the state of the web. You can see that there are a couple siloed regions where both content and audiences are trapped inside.
Meanwhile, some of us outside live in the open web, but we're unable to talk to our friends or access content inside these platform bubbles. So what if there's a way to open up these networks, host the content on a common social space where everyone has access to?
So that's what distributed press is trying to do is a server that has access to both the web and the decentralized web. And it also runs something called distributed press API. So a project can publish, say, its website using the distributed press API.
And what the server will do is host the project website on the web and also access the seed to D web networks such as Hypercoin, IPFS. It will also serve the distributed press API on both the web and the D web. So even if the server goes down, the content still lives on in the decentralized networks.
So here you see a screenshot of the upgrade board browser. We're looking at a website, but you may notice that in the address bar is not a familiar HTTP or HTTPS. It's using the hyper protocol, which means this content is being browsed on the hyper core network.
Here, similarly, we're looking at the same content on the IPFS network using a local IPFS instance running on my computer. And this is in Firefox. And on the right, we're using a mobile browser, Opera for Android, to browse a particular version of this website.
So we're able to archive specific versions in the history of some web contents. Distributed press is essentially a transient data store. It publishes the web content and the API responses and hosts them on the web.
But then there's a pinning service that runs in the background that takes this content and seed them on the hyper core and IPFS networks. So what this means is even if the server goes down, people can still access that same content on these decentralized networks. Here's one example API that Compose uses to show its finances.
And it's called the monetization API. It lists the balances of our accounts. You can access it through HTTPS, hyper and IPNS much the same way, like using the same path. And this is an example of the API response. You can see that Compose is monetizing using Open Collective and Gitcoin.
You see that there's a Canadian dollar balance in Open Collective and a balance in DAI in the Gitcoin account. And at the bottom, you see a timestamp. This is refreshed every 15 seconds or no, actually every 15 minutes.
So you get almost real time information on these APIs, even though they're using a web protocol. So what's the roadmap? Right now we have the publication and monetization side implemented, which means publishing the website onto the Dweb.
And then also fetching the real time monetization data and then publishing those as well. The next step would be to think on content and identity. This is really important because it allows us to publish plain text content or markdown content to platforms like Secure Scuttlebutt or Aether.
These are platforms that people spend time on, but they don't render HTML. So markdown based content would be really useful. But when people start consuming content on the platform or tools of their choice, it's useful to ensure that those contents are not tampered with, that they are the authentic content signed by the original creators.
So this ensures authenticity using modern cryptography. And also editors can sign these content as well to ensure the quality of reputation behind that content. So these would be the APIs to serve these use cases.
And the last part is the social layer. How can we ensure that the audiences are not locked into platform bubbles? We already have standards for this called Web Mentions and Microformats, but this time we're going to publish them onto the Dweb. So we don't rely on centralized relay services to allow people to carry out digital social interactions.
And if you're interested in this project, please email us at hello at compost digital or find us on Twitter or Mastodon. Thanks.
Looks like we're live.
Hello everyone, welcome to the q&a for compost and distributed press. I don't really see any question in the, in the public room yet. So, Ben would attend my Do you want to just talk more about it for now, or I can bring up my own questions.
Ben and you guys are still muted. Hi everybody.
This is Uday here. Thanks for joining our talk. We're happy to take any questions. But in terms of progress, we're about to launch this first issue of this magazine in on, we're thinking March 5th is our current timeline. Things are going pretty well. We have 10 contributors who we've been working with for the last month and a half.
Ben can speak more to the technical side. Ben, do you want to talk about some of the progress in publishing? Sure.
So yeah, over the last couple months, we've been building a way to publish static websites easily, we can integrate it into the CI flow. And every time someone push some code, it can generate the static website and get uploaded to not only a HTTP server, but also also gets pinned on to IPFS and hyper core.
On that side, I think one of the things that's been difficult in the past to do this sort of D web publishing is we end up losing the seed server.
So if we publish something on IPFS, then I turn off my computer, the seed is gone. So right now we have the distributor press server acting as a seed, but in the long run, we want to do more remote pinning onto each other's instances to get that content like solidly on the web, on the D web networks themselves.
And then I'm also thinking about how to get content into where people
are discussing contents, such as secure scuttlebutt, ether, where the social interactions happen. And right now it's hard to share something from the web or from the D web into those spaces because you basically have to put the link instead of the actual content because the
content themselves are usually in HTML, whereas the formats that these tools, these apps take are marked down. So the next step would be to start having a share function that you can take the plain text or markdown text to stick it straight into these networks.
Are there any questions about distributor press? Where it is now? Is it usable? Status? I'm going to pause and give some time for questions.
I do have a related question. Is the code available right now or is it going to be available soon? It is available. I can post the link to the GitHub. We also run a, I guess we can call it like alpha instance. So if someone wants to try it, we can generate an API key for the sub domain and
you can try it, but obviously it's like two months old code that's early stage. So we also have a matrix room where actually the two organizations already collaborating with us to try it out.
So there's like some active tinkering going on all the time in another matrix room. I can definitely send that information in the chat. Nice. And we do have a question from Doug asking how people can contribute and they want to set it up themselves.
The code base, the code base is open. So definitely you can contribute in that way. Another way to contribute is to help out in the dependency projects because through working on this, we also discover a lot of bugs on both the web browsers and also the web publishing tools in general.
Like specifically where we have been working with pinning on IPFS and Hypercore. So there are some things on these platforms that sometimes don't work well, so they're fined into tickets.
Just engaging in those discussions and if you're from some of these communities, bring the issues back to those communities and fix the dependency problems would also really be helpful. And then we also want more discussion on like, how do people want to use this? Like there's the content API and social API that's still being spacked out.
What I mean is, well, if I want to share an article from a HTML page, but I want to share it with markdown. What does that bundle need to look like? It needs to have signatures, it needs to have author information, maybe bio information. So I
think that schema needs to be specced out. So I'm really happy to get into those discussions. Let me read this question again, because it's something about Sketalbot. I want to set up a decentralized hub in my community to get people exploring Sketalbot and would love to also establish something like this to encourage folks in my community to create and publish stuff.
Yeah, definitely. I think we should chat in the matrix room. Yeah, I think one of the problems that the D-web space is growing up and it needs
more content in that space. So people have reasons to stay in that space and specifically more diverse content. We want to partner with content publishers and just get more different types of people writing into the D-web. While we wait for more questions, one follow up to that. So in traditional publishing, there's normally some well-established feedback mechanism.
You can hear from your readers whether through comments in the article itself or letters to the editors, although we know how bad the comments can be sometimes.
What's the equivalent you see for compost? Is that a way to have some official discussion that's privacy aware? Yeah, that's a really good question. So we have an idea of how to do that using web mentions and micro formats.
So things are already in use in the D-web, but historically you rely on some relay service or like your own self-hosted server to catch those messages. But if the server goes down, service goes down and lose the history, what we're thinking to do is get
a D-web address, like a hyper core IPFS address and serve that as kind of like a drop box. So the relay service would take those messages and stick them into the box and then your website would parse that. So even if the distributed press instance that you use goes down, you still have all that history on the D-web.
And this is a way to facilitate like kind of a global conversation. But obviously, as you pointed out, a lot of these like YouTube comments, they end up being this big global argument about nothing.
I think small networks yield better discussions. I really want to talk to my friends and family, not the random stranger on the internet. That's why if there's a way to seep the entire verifiable content into Scuttlebutt and let people have the discussion with their first hop and second hop friends,
and it's also up to them whether to send that what mentioned back into the global discussion. So enable the reader to choose to have a private or public conversation about some content. I think that's what we want to enable.
Anything in mind and Udit wants to add to this? Yeah, I would just add that because this sort of social layer that Ben is talking about doesn't exist right now, one of the things that we want to do is to have more sort of synchronous conversations about the content that's going to be published in the first and second issue.
So in fact, one of the goals is to sort of crowdfund micro conferences around particular topics that people want to participate in that discussion.
So that's actually where the monetization piece that Ben was talking about in the magazine comes in. So we'll have a few of these goals, monetization goals, some of them would be around hosting a synchronous conversation around topics.
Related to monetization. Is there any mechanism for, you know, like if, if there are some legal requirements or some taxation schemes
that you know like the, either the person being paid or the, or the magazine itself is responsible for. Is that handled in the API, somehow or is it basically, you just have to figure it out today.
Sorry, I missed, is what handled in the API? Oh, if there's any taxation requirements, both for the magazine or for contributors. So right now the monetization API, it does something very simple. It takes the, based on your configuration of what the, what your accounts are, it goes to look at the open collective public API to get the balance.
And then it does the same for an Ethereum address. In the long term, we might do some receive verification stuff on web monetization.
But right now it's very simple. It doesn't do very complex calculations. Well, I mean, it converts like everything to the, to us, to like a balance for you. So the main point is to do some dynamic, like, like more real time content on the website, even on web protocols.
So you can browse this on IPFS and still see like a real time balance. And then we want to, in compost, do some fundraising, like crowdfunding in magazine. But the more complex stuff hasn't been spec'd out yet for the monetization API.
I just muted myself, obviously. While we wait for more questions, can we talk about what's in the inaugural issue?
You mentioned there are 10 articles. Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit. There are a lot of the articles are from sort of non technical people who've had interesting experiences, community driven experiences on the internet.
So there's, for example, there's a piece on this person who kind of like redefined identity through like their experience on a small forum that they were a part of.
There's another piece that's about the relationship between like the material aspect of technology and some of the sort of politics of technologies as well.
So it's about lithium and the politics of lithium. There's another piece that's more creative, which imagines the internet as a, if it was run by sort of
animals. So there's like a lot of sort of like playful fun pieces and some that are more serious. We're trying to be pretty diverse with those sort of pieces we're going to have for this issue. There's a number of like art pieces as well. So one person has made stickers.
For this piece for this issue. There's some short stories as well.
Do you see every individual issue having different themes, like is there some.
Yeah. Yeah, so each issue has is going to have a different theme. This issue was the title of this issue is called fertile fertile grounds because we were, it was, it was a lot about who we're trying to think about, you know, what is the sort of fertility in the old
web, what are the things that we kind of want to bring into, like this feature web that we want to see. And so a lot of the conversations that we're trying to have through this first issue is looking back reflecting on what we have taken stock of it and seeing you know what needs to change what needs to evolve when what we want to kind of grow.
And, you know, the different contributors have interpreted that theme in different ways and it's very exciting, because we also have a lot of contributors not from the West we have I think three contributors from, from, from the global
south to really interesting pieces from India where people are building community networks, like on the ground and Google spaces. Which are, you know, kind of give like a different perspective on the state of the web.
Oh, looks like my had a reply. If one of you want to read it out. Yeah, my audio is not working but I can read it out. So my says, our aim was to find and elevate new perspectives by what it means to live our lives on the internet, even though it's become so centralized and corporatized we can still have authentic fun, maybe even fulfilling
experiences there. We want to share those stories to examine how we can take those types of experiences to the new D webs of the future. Yeah, looks like she's typing something else so we can wait a bit.
Really good question. Just a comment. When I first hear the name I think of solar punk, really, and how in in those communities, it seems that a lot of people are really interested in, you know, communal, communal agriculture.
Yeah, I mean, that's really centralized like now like, I think we definitely have sold upon fives in the work that we're doing even in the artwork and 15 that you'll see when it, when it's published. In fact, the name compost is like I think draws from that kind of those sort of metaphors as well of regeneration renewal.
But it also stands for comments post. So, this is, yeah, it's like a bit of an overloaded term.
I'm going to let my finished typing. My saying and not just write about, but create more of those authentic experiences through the process of publishing compost Yeah, this is actually a really big part of the work that we're doing.
We're spending a lot of time in sort of workshop mode with authors and creators, trying to understand what are some of our own. You know some of the own assumptions that we've made about what it means to have. What's a good process around publishing and what are the actual needs of creators and authors is the publishing and mutual creative support economic solidarity.
That's often so absent in creative work on the internet. That's something that we're trying to like, think through. Yeah, from the beginning we knew that digital publishing is a very broad problem, or there
are like so many issues in how platforms are acting today in the in the publishing world.
There's like the content hosting part, like if you imagine like media, YouTube, any big content platform, they're hosting the content. They're also directly in control of the monetization and also the social network that's like basically the audience identity in that network.
So they're like these three key pieces that are kind of centralized in one platform. We're thinking, how can we meaningfully address these with the web technology? And we really don't have all the answers, but after talking with a bunch of people, we have some ways of getting started.
So that's why we started with the content hosting, basically the distribution of that content and where that content is physically on the server. And that's what our current API does, the publishing part.
And then we're starting to get into this intermediated monetization and also like having many ways to monetize. But here is where we are getting more guidance from authors. So we have these tools that are available in the position of content creator.
How would you utilize these tools to monetize your work and create a likelihood out of online publishing? I think that the way that we're structuring the magazine issues is also we're thinking each one is a lab.
So the issue one itself is a lab. We are going through this lab together, discussing the tensions between different ways of monetizing, different ways of promoting the magazine. And questions like, hey, do I really want things on the web?
Do I really want my things to be permanent and immutable and versioned and archived forever? So getting some of these answers from people who are doing the content creation work, I think that's really important in guiding how we build the products.
Looks like Mai has some more comments about economic solidarity. Yeah. So Mai says compost is a seed or what we call a lab.
Well, each issue is kind of a lab to explore how economic solidarity can be practiced and even between people who live all over the world. Speaking to what Ben mentioned earlier about how everything that's published is immutable.
Does that basically add more friction to the editing process in that people are a bit more careful about making sure the final version is really, really solid? Yeah, I think it has some implications. Early on in the call for pitches, we really emphasized the need for a CC license.
Just because we put something out, there's literally no way we can prevent it from getting used by people or stopping it from propagating, for example. Does it create more friction in the editorial process?
Were there cases where people were like, huh, maybe I shouldn't say this? No, I think people are definitely more careful of what they want to say. Before going into this process, I thought that it would put a sort of chilling effect on
the kinds of things people would want to say, because they'd be worried about their reputation over time. I didn't actually see that at all. People have said what they wanted to say and have been quite frank and open and represented their views pretty clearly. I think part of that is also providing a sort of supportive, that has to happen in a cultural way too.
It's like providing a space where people feel like they can say what they want to say. Yeah, I also want to emphasize one big part of Compost that's different from, say, Substack.
We're really emphasizing a collective publication, rather than a kind of like an Uber for experience, where people can just individually use a service to reach the audience.
The main reason is we think quality content comes from proper editorial support, illustrative support, and just having all the traditional functions of a magazine. This part, this human part, has been difficult to do in the online space when people
are kind of scattered all over the world, even though they share the same goals and values. We're also prototyping this process of having a collectively successful publication with 10 people.
I've seen some interesting experiments where publications are run as a reader-owned collective. It's a cooperative and the readers basically can choose to pay a monthly fee and then upvote the topics or the articles they want published.
How do you see magazines like Compost being funded in the long run? If someone like me, basically, I'm not a good writer, but I really like reading about these things, can I join somehow and help fund it?
Yeah, so I mean, right now we have, the way we monetize is through, you can get a subscription to Open Collective, or we also monetize through web monetization, which basically means you get a coil account. And then when you're on the website, there's a certain amount of money that we get for the amount of time you spend on the page itself.
In terms of being a legal cooperative, we're not one yet. We're being fiscally hosted by another cooperative, Haifa Worker Cooperative in Canada, that Ben and I are a member of.
In terms of how the cooperative structure works, we have a few ideas, but we're not quite certain if it's going to be a consumer co-op or owned by readers, versus more like worker co-op style where it's owned by the writers and authors and contributors, the people who are kind of creating the content.
Currently, our main goal was to be more creator-centric and artist-centric, so that's the direction we've been taking so far. And also, I think the way we're thinking about this, there's a bit
of fluidity between who we consider writers and authors, sorry, authors and readers, right? I think over time, I would like to see a lot of authors come into our fold
to one issue and then become readers who might not want to be involved in future issues. So that's like a tension that we're trying to play with, understanding how much people want to be involved in each issue and they want to go out and not be part of it in the future if they don't feel like it's important for them anymore, or their life is taking them to a different trajectory.
There are co-ops that do both, right? There are co-ops that basically give different stakeholders different kinds of voices. Yes, yeah. And that sort of tuning and balance is something that we kind of want to experiment with before we formally incorporate as a co-op.
Yeah, it's a really interesting issue in the cooperative space too. As someone who is a reader, there are different tiers of readers who sometimes want to financially support the publication or the cooperative.
Others want to have more of a say in the direction, the roadmap, but some people just don't want to be so involved, right? I like what you're doing, but I don't want to be spending an hour every week to drive the future direction of this. So just thinking about how to allow for input, engage meaningfully with ways that the audience wants to engage.
I think that's one thing that we want coming out of this experiment.
Yeah, I could imagine a lot of people are burned out by online meetings, especially in the past year. Oh, it looks like we have a question coming up. While waiting, if people want to help promote the upcoming issue, how do we do that?
Well, we have Twitter. We're going to be tweeting pretty regularly about our updates, so if people want to retweet and share.
So we're at CompostMag on Twitter, and we also are on Mastodon. Mike, can you remind us what the Mastodon is? Yeah, at Compost, at social.coop. And yeah, just follow us on our website. We have a mailing list that you can subscribe to, too.
We'll update everybody on future issues and call for pictures there as well. Do you have any posters people can download and print out, maybe? So yeah, in the first issue, there will be some artwork that is for printing, so if people want to print stickers.
And there's a nice cover page that's been designed as well, which is like poster style. Really cool. Okay, Pat Kahn has a comment. I'm going to read it out. Pareto Principal at work, he wonders how much, how important is it for lurkers to have some ownership, since most citizens are lurkers in democracy.
And the question is, yeah, what, what are your thoughts on the roles of lurkers in this project?
I can't say I've thought of that before. Who's, I mean, I'm not quite sure who a lurker would be in this context, like somebody who's not, who's like just following along on the outside.
I think they, you know, I guess they can be readers. And, yeah, I don't know, actually, I'm not sure if you can answer that question. Yeah, I guess like if people are readers and also commenting.
I don't know, commenting puts people past the threshold of being a lurker. Like, in a chat, if I'm just lurking, I'm just reading. But the moment I start participating, I'm no longer a lurker, right? So I'm not sure.
Yeah, Dorr commented saying it's part of reimagining the line between readers and authors. I guess you two kind of touched on it earlier, saying even between readers and, oh yeah, he said exactly the same thing earlier.
That, that makes me think of one thing that we discussed earlier. How is your, what's that line between a author and a reader in a community of a publication?
Because if someone is, someone is like very invested in a conversation, in comments, like there's a piece that you really like and you start engaging in that conversation, your conversation becomes part of the content. So you're actively contributing to the whole knowledge base or the creative work in that community.
So what is the right way to engage? Is it, if people are talking a lot about an issue, maybe we should be able to do a crowdfunding and have a follow up session with the commenter.
Or like there are these ways of making that line less, less hard, but basically allow conversation to evolve. Yeah, Mai is adding that, you know, commenting is also in a sense a form of labor that can create more value, generate more value on the piece.
And Mai is saying it might be fun to sort of find ways to tip commenters as well.
Yeah, we, we talk about how, you know, like this is a nice alternative to centralized models like Medium and Facebook. But one thing that Medium does really well that I would love to see copied is how you can comment in the article, specifically highlighting certain parts, and that would be super cool to see in a distributed platform.
I do get that sometimes comments are even more valuable than the post itself. Yeah, Ben, do you have thoughts about that using web mentions? Yeah, I think web mentions is a way that I think we can implement the
standard interactions, like likes, shares, references, like retweets, that sort of interaction on the web.
But by, with the permission of the reader, share that comment into a centralized place that's only controlled by the author of the magazine itself.
Yeah, I think, I think the interaction is important because on the centralized web, on Medium, authors probably rely a lot on the metrics. Like how many people are reading, how many people are clapping, how many people are talking about
their piece to kind of adjust whether they're fitting their audience to their content for the audience. And publishing on the B web doesn't have that. And we need some way of re-implementing, but it's not really just re-implementing, it's also re-imagining that mechanism, how do people get feedback.
Actually, monetization is a good way to get feedback. The people subscribing and paying money for your work is a very concrete way of like people valuing your work and that's good feedback.
Dost mentioning in the chat about doing exquisite copse style art projects, and perhaps can be part of the Compose magazine.
Yeah, this is something that I'm personally quite excited about, is just seeing like what is the sort of affordance of a decentralized magazine for even creative, like for creation, for the creative side of things as well. So, you know, can we have people working together simultaneously to create
something where they haven't seen, you know, have not been seeing each other.