#distributed fandom

Update! Summer edition of Fandom gets Closer to the Metal!

By hit_the_books, originally posted in post_tumblr_fandom.

Jan 6th, 2019  

Happy New Year! This week: members of the distributed_fandom Discord have been busy with logo designs; examining the legal angles of this form of fandom; figuring out theme creation and more... Legal verity talked to someone at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law. The aim was to find out about where federated fandom activities stand from a legal footing, with an emphasis on US law. verity is working on documentation that will be able to help those interested in getting more involved. Logos BeautifulLights has been working on sketches for logos/branding. At the moment, general consensus seems to be leaning towards a purple rocketship-esque design, but BeautifulLights would love to hear any other ideas people have. To check out the current designs and say something, head to the #ui-art channel on the distributed_fandom Discord . Hubzilla Registration demitas has had a play with the registration process on Hubzilla, fixing the flow so that users are prompted to create a name/nickname when they register. It's also been tweaked so that Hubzilla would then auto-create the first channel for the user.

Nested comments impertinence has also been working on nested comments for hubzilla, which is a common feature for a lot of sites.

Themes demitas has had a dive into theme creation on Hubzilla again, documenting the process. Want to know more about extending a theme? Head here to the Fandom Federation wiki.

Peertube

impertinence has managed to wrangle together a working instance of Peertube, which you may check out here http://fanvid.stopthatimp.net/.

Don't forget...

To check out post_tumblr_fandom and check out what people have been posting. 

Got something you want mentioned in these updates?

by @beautifullights1

Corporate social media hubs (e.g., FB, twitter, tumblr r.i.p.) are like restaurants. They handle all of the groceries, cooking, serving, building lease + maintenance, advertising, financing, legal, etc. All you have to do is come in and eat! 

But if they suddenly decide to change their ramp into stairs, or put weird art on the walls, or suddenly serve meat in every dish when they used to be vegan, they can do that. All you can do is leave the restaurant and cook for yourself instead....

.....which means that you have to handle all of the groceries, cooking, serving, and washing - in other words, host your own site, pay for it, write the code for it, and manage technical issues on it. 

But not everyone can cook/write their own code, so..........you get a group of friends together to host the site/split the chores! but then fred doesn't have enough time to cook, and ginny moves away, and the group falls apart, as small groups do.....

........so you create an entire community! The same way that places of worship host community dinners, where some people buy food, some people cook food, some people advertise, and some people just come and eat. Some community dinners cost money, others run on donations. 

This is - to my not-very-technical understanding - the way federation works. As long as you can handle the office politics, maintain a steady stream of volunteers/staff, serve food that people like, and put up flyers so they know the dinner is available, you can keep a community dinner/federated fandom hub going strong.

by Hit_the_Books, originally posted at Post_Tumblr_Fandom on Dreamwidth

This week: the more technically minded members of the distributed_fandom Discord have been working on ways to bring multimedia functionality to Hubzilla, plus several other functions. pixelfed is about to get a lot more interesting, and more.

Hubzilla update

Seeing as how this our first issue and some of you may not know this, here’s a short explainer…

What is Hubzilla? Hubzilla has a very detailed description available on its About. Essentially:

“Hubzilla is a free and open source set of web applications and services running on a special kind of web server, called a 'hub', that can connect to other hubs in a decentralised network we like to call ‘the grid’, providing sophisticated communications, identity, and access control services which work together seamlessly across domains and independent websites.”

The applications that can be run through these hubs include:

social networking discussion threads

cloud file storage

calendar and contacts (with CalDAV and CardDAV support)

webpage hosting with a content management system

wiki

Demitas has been working on various aspects of getting Hubzilla to work in a fandom friendly way, via fanzilla, a fandom friendly fork of Hubzilla. This week’s tasks have included:

Wrestling with a web torrent player addon and enabling it to work with more magnet links.

Updating the NSFW addon so that its settings are easier to find.

Plus working on documentation for fanzilla addons.

Meanwhile, impertinence has been trying to make Hubzilla a tad more user friendly, by bringing together an addon that auto-pins apps to the navigation bar. Plus installing PeerTube and Nextcloud to have a public demo available soon.

pixelfed

While not a full member of the Fediverse (though on the way to being so), @alyndra​ has spotted that pixelfed will soon have the ability to import Tumblr blogs. Not in the time for the Tumblr purge deadline (now passed), but if your Tumblr isn’t affected by Tumblr’s nonsense and you want out, you’ve got more and more options being made available.

Got something you want mentioned in these updates?

Head to announcements-roundup in channel on the distributed_fandom Discord and post about it before the end of Saturday each week. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this issue.