The intersection of the Web and Social has been nothing short of fascinating to me, which is why I’ve been so driven towards the development of the Fediverse and the broader Social Web. Ever since we launched We Distribute over a decade ago, we’ve been trying to push the boundaries of what’s currently possible in this space. Why can’t a news publication also be its own social node? Why can’t the place where you read an article also carry social media interactions? Why not just follow a website, just as easily as you could follow a Facebook page?

As we’ve continued to experiment in service of answering these questions, we’ve seen a lot of cool technology come into this space. It’s evolving, and a lot of amazing efforts are starting to bear fruit for the first time.

Not too long ago, we saw a need. We knew that our next major step was to collaborate with a project that really understood what kinds of things we wanted to solve. This is an opportunity.

The Problem

Discovery in a decentralized system really, really sucks, especially at scale. When the network was small, it was way easier to keep a pulse of everything going on. Nowadays, it’s a lot harder to figure out what new projects are emerging, and that’s ignoring all of the interesting cultural projects happening, too. It’s not that there’s a shortage of noteworthy things happening here, it’s that too much of it gets lost in the ether before anyone finds out about it.

What is Fedizen?

Fedizen is a collaborative effort between ourselves and the Bonfire team to build a new kind of Fediverse instance, one built specifically for the network and the communities growing around it. It combines ActivityPub federation with curated aggregation to create a network-wide community portal.

In a nutshell, Fedizen is almost like a grassroots approach to building Yahoo, but designed specifically to serve the space. It’s an effort to collect all of the news coverage, community opinions, development blogs, events, and media, and put it into one place that’s easy to find, easy to filter, and adjusts based on what you’re most interested in within this space.

Whether you’re looking for a conference, want to join a community that suits your interests, want to see events that are happening near you, or simply hoping to hear some music by people in this space, we’re hoping to provide that with Fedizen. We believe that this is a great way to build solidarity, heighten community voices, and make network discovery that much easier for the people invested in it the most.

Why Bonfire?

In seeking out the right foundation for us to build on, we knew we wanted to leverage something that was modular, flexible, and capable of providing what we need. To us, Bonfire is less like a traditional platform, and more like a framework for building federated communities. In addition to being extremely flexible, many of its core features allow us to do some really interesting things:

• Custom Feeds – Bonfire offers an incredibly flexible feed builder, allowing people to filter by activities, content types,
• Activity Support – Bonfire is capable of storing totally unfamiliar activities, and gives devs the power to represent it any way they wish.
• Easy to Extend – you can completely replace every part of Bonfire, if you really wanted to.
• Communal Infrastructure – we can pull content from any corner of the network, from Bandwagon tracks to Mobilizon events to Loops videos. We can put it all in a place that’s easy to find, and easy to access. With FASP support, we could even help connected instances in the network find it through their own search infrastructure.

This all sounds like a pipe dream, maybe, but we’re convinced that this is a worthy vision worth pursuing.

These Are Still Early Days

We’re still early on in the development process of Fedizen, figuring out the requirements and design work necessary to build what we’re envisioning.

In the interest of transparency, we have set up a dedicated group to cover our development efforts and solicit feedback from the community. An upcoming Bonfire release will bring in full federation capabilities, allowing you to take part from whatever point in the network you feel most comfortable. In the near future, we will also be opening the floodgates for general signups. But if you want to get in early and try things out, we’re happy to offer an invite.