Distributed Press

Check out COMPOST, a magazine about the digital commons, telling stories about people building the web as a shared resource. COMPOST is published to the web and DWeb using the Distributed Press API.

COMPOST magazine viewed over IPFS on the Brave Browser.

Distributed Press is an open source publishing tool for the World Wide Web and DWeb. It automates publishing and hosting content to the WWW that it seeds to Hypercore and IPFS.

Distributed Press is currently alpha software. This is the list of current projects using the tool.

Domain

Description

one.compost.digital

Website of COMPOST magazine Issue O1

two.compost.digital

Website of COMPOST magazine Issue O2

three.compost.digital

Website of COMPOST magazine Issue O3

hypha.coop

Website of Hypha Worker Co-operative

sutty.ml

Experimental website mirror of Sutty

Our Vision

We are building the Distributed Press — a beginner friendly, open-source publishing tool for the distributed web. Aiming to empower authors, Distributed Press utilizes peer-to-peer and decentralized protocols to amplify free expression worldwide, while exposing sources of misinformation.

We all have a sense of the wide-ranging and complex issues facing publishing today: political censorship, disinformation, walled gardens, and the decline of independent media. Yet the solutions to these challenges remain unclear. Working with authors, audiences, and distributed web communities, we hope to co-develop new tools, in order to make publishing fair, democratic, and dignified for all.

Our approach is to engage and learn from broader communities who actively research the issues outlined above, and those that practice alternative publishing models. With them, we wish to investigate if and how the decentralized web can better serve the publishing ecosystem.

Publish to the DWeb!

GitHub Publishing

You can add Distributed.Press to your existing GitHub Actions publishing flow. This works well if you’re already publishing a static website in a continuous integration to HTTP or even if you’ve been publishing to a single protocol like IPFS. In order to “DWeb-ify” your site, you just need a Distributed.Press instance and to take an extra step to upload your static site folder over HTTPS.

You can find more detailed documentation on our new docs website.

If you’d like to integrate Distributed.Press into other continuous integration environments or are having trouble setting it up yourself, you can reach out to us by email or open an issue on Github.

You can also check out the auto-generated swagger interface.

Sutty CMS Integration

As part of this effort we have been working with Sutty on integrating Distributed.Press into their Content Management System (CMS) and using it to have a graphical front-end for editing sites. Sutty generates static web sites using Jekyll themes and a dynamically generated front-end for themes. With the Sutty CMS, you can use a graphical, user-friendly interface to author posts and customize your site, and then enable their Distributed.Press integration to have Sutty publish your site to IPFS and Hypercore in addition to the HTTP version.

We have a small walk-through on how to publish a site with Sutty in our documentation. We encourage groups seeking more customized themes to reach out to them directly.

Social Inbox for the Decentralized Web

From its inception, Distributed.Press has incorporated existing decentralized web protocols to expand the possibilities of web publishing. It is important for us to incorporate ActivityPub into Distributed.Press given its flexibility and popular use as a social media protocol.

With the Social Inbox enabled on your site, you can:

To see which Fediverse clients are compatible with the Social Inbox, you can follow this Github issue.

Getting Started with the Social Inbox

There are a few ways to try out the Social Inbox:

Project team

We are a project of Hypha Worker Co-op and Sutty. Our project team has experience in the distributed web, community networks, cooperative governance, digital policy, and content publishing.

Sutty CMS Integration Team

Let’s chat!

If anything here interests you, and you want to explore collaborations, get in touch with us at hello [at] distributed.press.