---
# System prepended metadata

title: Distributed Press piece for COMPOST Issue 03
tags: [COMPOST, distributed press]

---

# Distributed Press piece for COMPOST Issue 03

###### tags: `distributed press` `COMPOST`

Outline
* Intro
    * What is Distributed Press?
        * API: Printer of printing presses
        * Sutty CMS integration: dweb publishing out of the box
    * How is COMPOST related to DP?
    * Try it out!! Send us bug reports [here]
* Story of COMPOST and Distributed Press
    * DWeb Camp 2019
    * Discussions between Udit, Ben, and Mai
    * Interviews with people about what's needed
* Process / team
    * Hypha
    * Sutty
    * Languages - Spanish and English
* Support
    * FFDW
    * Coil/web mon grant in 2020
* Our goals
    * Local first, offline use
    * Anti-censorship
    * Culture of cooperation, international, decentralized creation
* How to get involved
    * Sutty CMS
    * Github pages
    * File bugs
    * Spread the word

## Draft 1

Before the invention and boom of the printing press, publishing a new book involved a lot of painstaking labor and learning how to fit everything together and distribute copies to the masses. This drastically increased the barrier to entry and limited the sorts of things that could be published and the sorts of peopel that could realistically publish something.

The Distributed Web has been in a similar state in that publishing content involved using proprietary cloud services, or hiring p2p experts to figure out how to get your data out there. Distributed Press changes all that and makes publishing to the Dweb accross multiple protocols, along with human readable links to your published content way easier.

In tandem with Distributed Press for publishing your sites on the DWeb, we've also been working with Sutty which is a Content Management System that makes it easy to publish sites using templates and customizable graphical user interfaces for authoring posts. Think Wordpress, but for static contents instead of PHP.

We've combined these tools to author and publish COMPOST as a way to guide the usability of these tools and to have a successful use case to point to for people wanting to publish their own magazine.

You can check out [how to set yourself up with distributed press](https://docs.distributed.press/) yourself, and we'd love feedback and to learn about any bugs you find on our [Issue Tracker](https://github.com/hyphacoop/api.distributed.press/issues/). If you're interested in an out of the box CMS, check out [Sutty](https://sutty.nl/en/) and their pre-made templates.

### How Did COMPOST and Distributed.Press come to be?

// TODO: I actually have no clue so help would be appreciated here

* DWeb Camp 2019
* Discussions between Udit, Ben, and Mai
* Interviews with people about what's needed

### Who's working on this and how do we work?

* Hypha
	* Canada/Ontario/Toronto based non-profit worker cooperative
	* Spawned from Toronto Mesh project
	* Fully remote Team
	* Consulting on decentralization related projects.
	* Talk about some of the Hypha initiatives?
* Sutty
	* Argentinan worker cooperative (state/city?)
	* Working with activists? (Would love more info here)
* Languages - Spanish and English
	* Separate Issue Tracking between teams, bridging between them with certain members
	* Sutty is Spanish-first with English localization
	* Localization in Sutty can open the door to supporting new languages outside of just Spanish/English so that folks can use their local language for both the user interface and their templates.

### How did we get funded?

* Coil/web mon grant in 2020
	* TODO: $ amount here
	* Initial MVP with IPFS and Hypercore publishing
	* Integrated Web Monetization API to update a JSON file with data
	* Updating the file was done at regular intervals and is an inspiration for making it easier to integrate more services like this with DP in the future.
* FFDW 2022/2023
	* TODO: $ amount here
	* Several milestones.
	* First one is this release where we revamped DP
	* Next up we will be working on social APIs
	* Later we will focus on versioning
	* Working towards collaborating with other FFDW projects for their publishing needs

### What are our goals?

* Local first, offline use
	* We believe in [Local-First Software](https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/) which works offline, on local networks, and scales up to the internet.
	* This is important for having resilience in access to published data and the ability to publish data regardless of your connectivity to a third party.
* Anti-censorship
	* Building your publishing stack on local-first principles means that you can be more resilient not just to network outage, but to targeted takedowns by authorities attempting to censor speech.
	* This enables activists to publish zines to get their message out and exchange information between devices directly.
* Culture of cooperation, international, decentralized creation
	* This project is made by cooperatives working together internationally and targeting a cooperative and international audience.
	* We want to foster a culture of cooperation and plurality and encourage it in folks that we work with.
	* Having decentralized technology at the core of our publishing 
* Ease of use
	* Outside of our goals for how we want Distributed.Press and Sutty to work under the hood, we want to make it *easy* to use and to reduce the barrier to entry for publishing your content on the dweb.
	* At every step we're looking for ways to simplify deployment, simplify interacting with the server, and to build small tools that can be embedded within existing workflows so that people can focus on their content and rely on us to figure out how to get it published.


### How can you get involved?

* Sutty CMS
* Github pages
* File bugs
* Spread the word