August 22rd, 2025: Something Brewing
Welcome to Relay, the new weekly newsletter from We Distribute! Here, we attempt to round up the latest news, think pieces, and interesting finds from around the Social Web. This is a new experiment for us, but the goal is to help provide quick links and information about stuff you might've missed, that we might not have had the time to cover.
From We Distribute
First, let's focus on some of the things we've been working on with our publication. Think of this as a quick way to catch up, before venturing out into the rest of the network!
News Updates
Here's a quick summaries of articles we wrote over the past week that you may have missed. The big sea changes we're noticing involve monetization and payments, Meta scraping the Social Web to train their AI models, and some welcome updates to platforms in the space.
CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse
A new, open source, self-hostable fundraising system for the Fediverse has been released. The project is very young, but there’s a huge amount of promise.
We DistributeSean Tilley
We DistributeSean Tilley
The Decentered Podcast
In case you weren't aware, we run our own in-house podcast show called The Decentered Podcast, where we interview people from across different branches of The Social Web to talk about interesting things they're working on. We focus on their background and experience, how they came into the space, what their doing, and their visions for the future.
S2E3 – Rabble from Nos.Social
Today, our podcast features an interview with an Internet OG: Evan Henshaw-Plath, aka Rabble. We talk about Twitter, Secure Scuttlebutt, and the evolution of Nostr!
We had the great pleasure to interview Evan Henshaw-Plath from Nos.Social, who has an extensive background involving the intersection of activism and technology. It's a fascinating conversation that delves into the early era of online social media, and the evolution of decentralized communication networks.
Around the Network
Every week, we search the Fediverse far and wide to find interesting things written within the community. This space serves as a bird's eye view as to what's going on, what people are thinking about, and cool things people are working on in their spare time.
FediCon-Related
With the wrap-up for the first ever FediCon in-person event, a lot of members of the Fediverse community went to work, sharing their thoughts, experiences, and ideas about how to move the network forward. Additionally, almost all of the talks have finished the editing and encoding process, and are now available on PeerTube.
Patches, paths & The Matrix: FediCon thoughts Part I
The after hours Fediverse session at FOSDEM 2025 was held at HSBXL - Hackerspace Brussels. A cool, cyberpunk hangout. Wires everywhere, old computers, a fridge full of beer, Belgian goth-punks, and an old fashioned telephone receiver, hanging by its wire from the ceiling. We were in The Matrix.* In one
deadsuperheroSean Tilley
jaz-michael kingFollow this Blog on Fediverse
Kuba Suder
Trust & Safety
IFTAS BlogFollow
Mark W.ritesMark Wyner
FORbetterSaskia
The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess
New Developments
ActivityPub for WordPressMatthias Pfefferle
A New SocialRyan Barrett
New Apps and Projects
There's always really cool things in development that most people don't know about. We don't always have time to get into detail about every project or application. However, we still want to take the time to share these treasures with you.
- DiveDB is an ActivityPub-powered platform for sharing data from undersea divers. The fact that this even exists blows my mind.
- Wanderer is a self-hosted privacy-first trail database for hikers to record their trail routes, and share it with friends through ActivityPub. You can import existing data from Strava and Komoot!
- Manyfold is an open source and federated alternative to Thingiverse, an online hub of STL files used for 3D printing.
- Bridge Browser is a fork of Mozilla Firefox that aims to bring Fediverse integration into the browser experience. Currently, it integrates with Mastodon and Lemmy.
- The Social Web Foundation has been developing some ongoing services and projects intended to bolster new capabilities in ActivityPub platforms. These include ap-components, a Web Components collection for showing ActivityPub Objects in the browser, Places.Pub, an effort to bridge OpenStreetMap location data to ActivityPub objects, a GeoSocial Activities client that uses Places.Pub, and an early draft for Messaging Layer Security over the ActivityPub protocol.
That's it for this week! Thanks for joining us, and we'll catch you within the next seven days.
Before you go!
We Distribute Media is a very small nonprofit operation. We've been able to get by, but our organization depends on small recurring donations to keep the lights on.
Please take a look at our OpenCollective Campaign, and consider how you might help compensate the volunteers that help keep We Distribute going.
Bridging identity with account links
One of the most common questions we get here is, “can you help me connect all my different accounts?” You’re on Bluesky, and Instagram, and Mastodon, you make a video series on YouTube, you have a blog, sometimes you post on Reddit, and a while back …Ryan Barrett (A New Social)
CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse
More developments are happening on the front to provide payment and monetization options for the Social Web. Over the past few years, there have been interesting experiments in making this possible. Mitra, notably, pioneered subscription payments by utilizing Monero. Bandwagon has also built on the concept by instead relying on integrations with traditional payment networks, starting with Stripe and PayPal. The short-lived SubClub implemented private feeds for paid access.Introducing CrowdBucks
CrowdBucks is a new effort developed by Charles Iliya Krempeaux, better known by his online moniker, Reiver. It builds on some of the ideas previous implementations have tried, and aims to make the process as smooth and simple as possible.“The long-term vision that CrowdBucks is a part of is to create a payments layer for the Fediverse,” Reiver explains, “obviously, it’s not the only part, there will be other projects later.”
Source: CrowdBucks
Signing Up
Instead of forcing users to create yet another account, CrowdBucks does something really smart: you can just sign in with an existing Fediverse account.
At the moment, sign-in is limited to just Mastodon, but the plan is to gradually support a number of different platforms. Since a lot of Fediverse software implements part of the Mastodon API, I attempted to log in with both Akkoma and WordPress, but neither one seems to work yet. We opted to use a tried-and-true community instance.
After doing the Authorization dance, CrowdBucks directs users to a simple dashboard, where they are prompted to do basic setup for their page. Fediverse integration automatically pulls in profile details, including the username, avatar, header, and handle, although most of the public-facing details can be customized.
Getting Set Up
The first thing to do with your account is to set fundraising goals and donation tiers. The flow feels reminiscent of something like Kickstarter or Patreon, where rewards can be spelled out as something symbolic, something digital, or even something tangible.You can view our demo account here. Please, don’t actually donate to this.
Donations and Payments
Support tiers can be set up with any monthly denomination, and these get prominently displayed on your CrowdBucks page. Donors can use their CrowdBucks accounts to find a page, select a tier, and support creators and projects easily.
When a person pledges towards a Tier, they’re automatically taken to a checkout page. For the time being, the only supported Payment Processor is Stripe. Reiver has explained that this is because Stripe was easiest to implement, but the team intends to also add support for PayPal and other providers, as well as support for standards such as Web Monetization and OpenPayments.
Quick Demo
CrowdBucks was initially revealed in a brief demo at FediCon a few weeks ago, which was recorded and added alongside the FediCon Talks on PeerTube. It’s a useful insight into where Reiver is coming from, what’s being built, and ideas of what CrowdBucks could be used for.spectra.video/videos/embed/5bp…
Open Source and Self-Hostable
“Anyone will be able to set up their own CrowdBucks server,” Reiver explains, “just like anyone can set up their own Mastodon server.”The CrowdBucks project itself is licensed under the GNU AGPL, with source code readily available. The CrowdBucks.fund site is simply operated as a flagship instance, but the goal is to allow anyone to host their own version as part of their operational infrastructure.
“We want CrowdBucks to help pay server bills, to support developers building Fedi software, and to fund creators on the Fediverse. The whole thing is designed to be native to the Fediverse.”
Future Plans
While the project itself is still fairly young, the team is actively thinking about how to improve. One area CrowdBucks is already exploring involves the ability for the app to post to the Fediverse on the behalf of fundraisers, for example, to give credit to supporters. Another possibility might involve collaborating with Emissary to standardize pieces involving payments and private access.This is an exciting endeavor, and might be one of the most polished attempts yet to make payments possible on the Social Web. Hopefully, existing projects will get involved, and hash out the details on how to make this as open and interoperable as possible.
sub.club Emerges to Offer Paid Fediverse Subscriptions
Historically speaking, the act of financially supporting creatives on the Fediverse has always been something of a pain point. The network lacks a meaningful payment layer, and most of the network’s iSean Tilley (We Distribute)
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