A quick and general update before we adjourn for the holidays

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Everyone here is crazy busy right now, but work moves forward on addressing some of the questions and solutions posed here in the comm.

oulfis reports that the distributed_fandom Discord has 109 people now, a lot of energy, and although folks ARE talking about what will need centralized hubs, etc., it's not 100% distributed all the time.

pearwaldorf, who last reported on progress here, says that there's lots and lots of stuff happening re: Hubzilla on the Discord server, but it's more likely, at this point, to interest only those who want to get involved in development or project management. There's not been a public test server announcement yet. But they have been in touch with everyone who has volunteered to help or who want to be getting project updates (basically, Discord).

As noted in pearwaldorf's last post, if you're interested in following those discussions, you can message fandom-after for the link.

Comments

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I'm just adding a comment here because there are a couple threads that this post isn't addressing that should probably also be updated. We're got a lot of enthusiastic work going on distributed/federated solutions, as per above, which has pretty much taken up the P2P discussion at its intersection with security and ownership concerns.

OTW:On the question of partnership to create a social media expansion, they've been pretty clear that while hosting more material is in the long range plan, there is no intention to expand their services beyond those of archiving and legal defense of fandom issues. So this appears to be a dead end, although OTW remains a role model in some areas.

While some posters in the OTW thread here have questioned whether their lawyers could be of use in these discussions, pearwaldorf has reported that FFANO3 anon is compiling a list of legal questions that are planned to go to an EFF attorney. That's in progress and we are awaiting an update on that, including whether contributions will be needed to pay for this consultation.

Dreamwidth: While the thread talks around several issues pro/con the Dreamwidth actual code and the DW model, no actual partnership approach has been made that we've heard back on. Anyone have anything more updated on this?

An important subtopic of this appears to be the issue of reblogs and post ownership. This has blown up recently on Pillowfort, where the official stance supports OP ownership and creative attempts are being made every day to suggest ways to turn that back into the tumblr model where reblogs permitted direct addition/editing to posts made by others. That conversation, typically untagged (*sigh*) can mostly be found scattered across multiple individual posts in the BetaUsers comm. Here on DW, denise has expressed ambivalence on a number of aspects and seems to be saying that while its implementation might be taken up in future if the userbase demands it, there are no current plans to do so.

Rolling our own: So far we've got some good general thoughts, but nothing seems to be under active pursuit. There's been some examination here and here of existing alternatives, including some new ones under development, but none of them specifically address durability/non-commercial status. Feel free to continue adding to those conversations as new alternatives show up, since we have short-term needs for hosting irrespective of what longer-term prospects we develop.