Most of our everyday communication tools are products of the very system we aim to transform. They are shaped by the business model and patriarchal mindset of their creators, ultimately influencing people’s behaviours and keeping the society on the track of competition instead of cooperation.

The window of opportunity to implement measures and avert the worst-case scenarios of climate change is gradually closing. We need tools that operate beyond the confines of capitalism and the attention economy able to harness our inherent cooperative abilities and foster them globally.

Based on our experience a tool able to help us to shift towards an eco-systemic economy must be:

• USEFUL: solves real daily problems
• POPULAR: enables millions of people to build networks and cooperate
• SCALABLE: grows exponentially without major problems
• EASY & FAMILIAR: short learning curve for new users
• ACCESSIBLE: for people of all backgrounds and physical abilities
• 100% OPEN: client, server and protocol must be open source
• DECENTRALISED: people must be in control without intermediaries
• INTEROPERABLE: connects with existing platforms expanding the ecosystem
• EXPANSIBLE: even junior developers should be able to contribute
• ECOLOGICAL: reuses existing infrastructure with low environmental impact
• SUSTAINABLE: the core group of people working on the project must be paid

FediPress won’t be flawless, but it’s crafted with all these considerations in mind to find a proper balance.

In a democracy free speech is key but our voices are currently owned by platforms managed by other people: Big Tech (Meta, Google…) and even Small Tech (Mastodon, Matrix…).

Your voice can be marginalized or silenced at any time for many different reasons: an AI doesn’t find your content interesting, an underpaid moderator mark you as spammer, a volunteer moderator doesn’t agree with your opinion, a donation based server deletes your data to free space…

Even when you think about Fediverse, how many people are really owning their domain with their federated server?

Having the theoretical ability to manage their own server is quite different from actually being able to do so: anyone must be able to easily be part of the Fediverse.

When you buy a megaphone you 100% own the tool who enhances your voice, meaning you’re in complete control. FediPress allows anybody to own their messaging app (software + data), meaning you can finally own your digital voice.

Since can be easily installed in your website anybody can finally own software and data.
In this case you can really own (software + data) and make open protocols popular again.

The vision of the web 1.0 was for everyone to own a website and other web services (email, forum, chat…), having direct control over their domain (digital address) and server (digital home). While perhaps naive, this concept remains valid, forming the foundation of today’s web.

With the web 2.0 we moved to a platform-centric vision of the web, forgetting the fundamental political role of our websites and making us all unwilling participants in the attention economy.

The web 3.0 relies on complex tech (blockchain, smart contracts…) blending web services with money-driven dynamics. Making it fully understandable only by very skilled developers and financially educated people. We are not against these technologies since are still in their infancy, we just think there are less convoluted ways to build cooperation tools.

Fediverse, in a sort of web 2.5 fashion, offers everybody an opportunity to own their federated server under their domain allowing websites and platforms to speak to each others without intermediaries.

ActivityPub is the most widely used open protocol for interoperable web platforms, with millions of users and thousands of servers: fedidb.org

An ActivityPub plugin for WordPress already exists and we want to build FediPress on top of it. Compatibility with these platforms is already established: Mastodon, Pleroma / Akkoma, Friendica, Hubzilla, Pixelfed, Socialhome, Misskey, Firefish. We aim to add also Mobilizon and Gancio to federate events.

In the future nobody stops us to integrate other open protocols (Matrix, BlueSky…) or specific APIs (Telegram, Messenger, WhatsApp…). Thanks to the DMA interoperability is the future.

WordPress is used by +43% of the web and has a built in plugin store, look at it with the eyes of a non-tech person: it’s like an app store for them. Instead of an app, which goes offline very often, a plugin runs in the server 24/7. Meaning we don’t need a centralised infrastructure or complicated P2P/blockchain tech to connect people, allowing FediPress to speak with other servers in a web 2.0 fashion.

WordPress is written in PHP, which is the most used and popular server-side scripting language, with a +70% market share, meaning many people will be able to contribute to the project.

We’re aware that many people use WordPress.com or a cheap hosting solution, ending up centralising again in few data centers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud…).

However, you’re renting a domain and a hosting, so you’re legally and directly responsible for what you do online. This is very different than be register in a platforms, where you sign an agreement and accept to be silenced at any time. It’s a very different scenario.

Since WordPress is so popular, you’ve a lot of different choices: a cheap shared hosting, a cooperative, a privacy concerned hosting, a collective of activists or even own a small server in your home.

You can even start with a cheap popular hosting and later move in another server: transfer a website is commonly included in the offer or you can use an automated tool with few clicks.

That’s really up to you at this point, choose wisely.

Pretty much all Fediverse servers use HTTPS encryption to transport your message from client to server and between servers: the communication protocol is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or, formerly, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

When you choose a hosting solution for your WordPress you should pick one with a SSL certificate included: the most common is Let’s Encrypt since it’s free.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE), however, is another story and is still an open discussion in the Fediverse. Mastodon, for example, is working on implementing E2EE DMs.

Right now is not a major priority for the scope of this project, so if you’re concerned about the privacy of your conversations you should use a different solution.

It will definitely be a nice feature to add in the future.