About COMPOST and Distributed Press
COMPOST is a magazine about the digital commons. But we also see it as a process to metabolize and renew our relationships with the Web, to imagine and build interdependent, equitable, and solidarity-based systems of communication and knowledge sharing.
We wish to:
- Publish a digital magazine that curates works of art, reflections, and experiments about building the Web as a shared resource and commons with active stewards
- Pilot and experiment with ways to create sustainable livelihoods for creators, raise standards for content quality, and improve public discourse
While current publishing platforms harness the power of networks to trap and atomize authors on their platforms, we seek collective success by giving creators control over their method and tools of publication while sharing in the financial success of our endeavour.
Our eventual goal is to develop an author-owned publishing co-operative. However, we expect to only incorporate our co-operative entity by 2022. Before that, we will experiment with and establish our revenue models and governance processes. While being a non-legal entity, COMPOST magazine is hosted by Hypha Worker Co-operative.
Along with our magazine (COMPOST), our work involves researching and developing better tools for publishing. This aspect of our project, called "Distributed Press", is actively being developed right now. The immediate goals of Distributed Press are to publish COMPOST magazine to DWeb and p2p ecosystems including Hypercore and IPFS (Interplanetary File System), with plans to include SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt) in the near future.
Put simply, COMPOST is a magazine while Distributed Press is a publishing tool.
We view COMPOST magazine as a "reference use case" for Distributed Press, and would love to support other magazines with Distributed Press as well. For now, the line between Distributed Press and COMPOST is blurred, but we expect that these projects will become more distinct as they mature.
Our founding team members are @maisutton, @benhylau, and @uditvira.
Our projects are hosted by Hypha Worker Co-operative.
We are a 2020 mid-level grantee of Grant for the Web.
Our collaborators include Benny Lichtner and Made By Super.
Wiki content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
We have a Code of Conduct that allows us to do our best work together.