About Us

COMPOST is a magazine about the digital commons. We curate art, reflections, and experiments about building the web as a shared resource with active stewards.

We approach COMPOST 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.

If you like what we’re doing, please consider becoming a subscriber, contributing money (or cryptocurrency), and supporting us through Web Monetization.

Experiments with Publishing

Issues and Labs

We treat each issue of COMPOST as a lab. During the development of an issue, COMPOST contributors and the core team experiment with the design and governance of a digital commons. From December 2020 to February 2021, our Issue One cohort has been thinking about creative collaboration, collectively supporting livelihoods, and growing our community sustainably.

A Distributed Press

We want creators to have more control over the means of digital publishing. We do this by building tools and testing approaches that support alternative publications.

Our magazine is published using the Distributed Press, a sister project of COMPOST. It is an open-source publishing tool for publishing to web and DWeb ecosystems including Interplanetary File System and Hypercore. We are also working on support for distributed social networks like Scuttlebutt and Aether that rely on plaintext-based messages. You can learn more about how we approach COMPOST and Distributed Press on our Wiki.

In order to find us on the DWeb, you will need a compatible browser. For example, you can view COMPOST by typing ipns://one.compost.digital into the address bar of the Brave Browser (desktop) or Opera Browser (mobile). You can also use the Agregore Browser to view COMPOST at both ipns://one.compost.digital and hyper://one.compost.digital. Give it a try!