nutomic

We Distribute is a community-organized news site which covers the Fediverse. If you like to write about federated social media then you could help to expand their coverage.

See the link above for more details.

Ibis is a federated encyclopedia which uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon or Lemmy. If you want to start a wiki for a TV series, a videogame, or an open source project then Ibis is for you! You can register on an existing instance or install it on your own server. Then you can start editing on the topic of your choice, and connect to other Ibis instances for different topics. Federation ensures that articles get mirrored across many servers, and can be read even if the original instance goes down. Ibis is written in Rust and Webassembly, fully open source to make future enshittification impossible.

This release features a redesigned explore page to browse instances and recently edited articles. Articles now have federated nested comments, as well as more subscription options to get notified about new edits and comments. There are also lots of minor changes and improvements.

Changelog

• New explore page with list of instances which shows the topic, update time and list of recently edited articles
• Implement nested comments for articles
• Users can subscribe to articles, in order to get notified about new edits and comments
• Settings for instance name and topic
• Much better error handling
• Add HTML title tag for all pages
• Icons
• Make diff view readable in dark mode (thanks @Earthgames)
• Basic about page
• Show pending edits which have not federated yet
• Various bug fixes

The next major version 0.3.0 will include federation with Lemmy, Mastodon and other compatible Fediverse platforms. The plan is to treat each Ibis instance as a community, with articles as posts. This way users on Lemmy and compatible platforms can directly browse, read and comment on wiki articles.

To follow Ibis development subscribe to !ibis@lemmy.ml or join the Matrix chat. Contributions to the source code are more than welcome.

There have been various posts here in the last days describing how difficult it is for new people to start using Lemmy. In fact they are absolutely correct, it is much easier to get started on Reddit. But what many forget is that Lemmy is not a corporation employing dozens of full-time designers, running A/B-tests and so on. Lemmy is an open source project run by volunteers, with only @dessalines and me working on it full-time. Neither of us is a particularly good designer, and our time is mainly spent working on the backend (database, federation, api), and preparing the upcoming 1.0 release.

If you see anything on join-lemmy.org or in the Lemmy UI itself that could be improved, the best option is to make that improvement yourself. Both of them use standard web technologies (nodejs, tailwindcss, inferno etc). The userbase here is quite technical so there are many of you able to contribute. We rarely reject any pull requests as long as they make a real improvement. Though it usually requires a little back and forth to review the changes and then address the review comments.

You can find the source code for join-lemmy.org here and follow development instructions in the readme. Regarding the default Lemmy UI go here and read the documentation with development instructions. If you are not a developer you can still help, for example by improving the documentation. Additionally you can make changes to the texts for joinlemmy and lemmy-ui.

All this said, there have also been some suggestions to make onboarding easier by directing new users to a hardcoded default instance. This may sound like a good idea at first but won't work well in practice. Running such an instance would take significant time for administration and moderation, but we maintainers are already too busy. Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated. So if you want to get nontechnical users to Lemmy, the solution is to link them directly to a specific instance based on their interests.