Distributed Press was born where code meets cooperatives. As Hypha's first internally incubated product, it was designed to solve a problem that is increasingly urgent: an unhealthy reliance on centralized publishing tools.
But while the technology was ready, the industry wasn't. Between dwindling budgets and institutional inertia, the media world moves slowly.
While Hypha will continue to maintain the Distributed Press architecture, our grant funding from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) has concluded, marking an opportunity to reflect on the project's rewards and challenges.
When I sat down to create this post, I tried prompting an LLM for some thought-starters on how to frame the tensions inherent in a complicated multi-year open source software project.
In the course of this discussion, the LLM fabricated something it calls "the integrators' curse" (which doesn't exist), supposed that the Distributed Press project was limited by its dependence on open source protocols. While the integrators' curse is bogus, it does touch on real tensions regarding the decentralization of infrastructure and the challenges of working with emergent technology.
Every decentralized project faces these dilemmas. The choices you make define whether you're building the future—or just another platform with better PR.
We built a B2B product (Distributed Press) for a market (publishers, journalists, media) but despite the downward slide toward media censorship in North America, the fit is not yet there.
Media organizations know that the centralization of their distribution infrastructure is a looming cliff, but as of now—December 2025—it's still a tomorrow problem.
Is Distributed Press just ahead of its time? The reality is that when tomorrow finally comes, it's likely that technology will have evolved and someone will put forth a simpler/faster/better solution.
As Petr, our business development lead, noted in his final report: "Assumption that journalists or publishers care about their work being distributed to DWeb is false."
But: just because the media isn't there yet doesn't mean they shouldn't be. More than half of humanity lives in countries where press freedom is considered "very serious."
Without a clear product market fit, Distributed Press relies on grants. At Distributed Press, we were incredibly fortunate to work with the amazing FFDW team: they are supportive, thoughtful, and really get the work we're doing.
But grant writing is both an art and a science, and the team wasn't able to attract a new funder to the project. Over the past few years at Hypha, we've worked on numerous grant-funded technical projects. Once the funding ends, the projects often end—living in the purgatory of Github or GitLab.
While Distributed Press may not be poised on the edge of commercial success, the project has been undoubtedly successful in other ways.
The team delivered on the original vision of an easy to use, decentralized publishing tool. Over 100 sites are using Distributed Press to share their content via IPFS and Hypercore.
The Social Reader is a privacy-first personal reader for subscribing to content published on federated social media. It's local-first, running off your own computer. It works offline.
The Social Inbox integrates websites with interactions on federated social media platforms like Mastodon, allowing websites to have their own Fediverse account.
Everyone uses infrastructure, but almost no one wants to maintain it. Our product, Distributed Press, is the "town" we're building at the nexus of three great highways: IPFS, Hypercore, and ActivityPub.
While all of the technical accomplishments are well and good, it's the teamwork and solidarity of the Distributed Press project that stands out as genuine success.
For three years, the team spanned numerous timezones, two cooperatives with different working cultures, and a fair amount of team member turnover to deliver on a vision for decentralized publishing.
Working on Distributed Press felt good. We always had a check-in at the beginning of our weekly team calls to take a beat and see how everyone was doing.
Gracias to fauno, Ania and the whole Sutty team. Thank you to our technical lead Mauve, Akhilesh, Jacky and to the original Distributed Press dreamers, Benedict, Udit and Mai.
We're figuring this out in real-time. The old startup playbook doesn't apply. The old open-source playbook doesn't quite fit either. It's awkward, and it's contradictory, but it's also necessary. This is the real work.