General user-focused, high-level animated Fediverse explainer video?

I’ve looked around for a high-level Fediverse explainer video but haven’t found anything that wasn’t a technical talk.

Sure there’s videos about PeerTube, Mastodon, etc, but I’m thinking something far more generic and not just an ad for a single implementation.

If this doesn’t exist, could we band together to make it happen? It seems like it would fall squarely into the evangelism that a lot of people here are involved with.

My thought is if every project chipped in a few dollars we could commission something that is useful for sharing and everyone could benefit. Just an idea, though!

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Good idea.

If some money is brought together in a prize pool, then a hackathon - or rather a “fedi animathon” might be held, and the 1-2-3 submissions get a prize. Then fedi artists, blender communities etc. can compete and a lotta creative work will be the result.

(E.g. Blendernation has something similar. They holds regular contests: Category: Contests - BlenderNation)

It’s a cool idea, but I think it works for Blender because their community is focused on what the contest is.

I once tried to commission an animated explainer from somebody on the Fediverse and wasn’t able to find a single person who had that skill set I could hire, so I fear finding enough to run a contest would be difficult. Finding one person might be difficult :slight_smile:

Unless somebody really wants to volunteer to run a contest, as to not over complicate things we should make it as easy as possible on ourselves so it actually gets completed, and just hire a single professional that produces this type of content. I’d love to find somebody on the Fediverse, of course, but I was unable to do so previously.

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You can run a competition (given a budget!) by publishing a briefing to a design pitching website. I did that when a client needed a redesign, and the process totally rocked.

We’d need animators and people who make videos, not just a static design. Is this something they offer? It’s hard to believe people would animate an entire video knowing they might not get paid anything for it :slight_smile:

No of course not. Generally a pitch consists of a treatment and a graphic sample. Plus their previous work and a price obviously.

Yes. Super agreed.
By far the most videos can be found at the pages of the official conferences from 2019 and 2020
(click “Talks” or 2019 bottom) :

Shortly after, we already talked about being a band and doing such an explainer.
Unfortunately none of the involved projects got funding and so there was lack of time …
That brings it back to what @mathewlowry said, a budget.
Personally I can help and also offer technical infrastructure like my new cameras or production capacities of germanys public broadcaster ZDF.

Towards community funding I advocated in germany. Now I see a chance with sovereigntechfund.de -
While I am dealing with the nice new ministry, Ariadne can get us in touch with the coordinators of the fund and proposed to create awareness for AP …

When it comes to explainers, let’s mention this awesome video by @derekcaelin

If it comes to a contest, there are various contacts, what comes to my mind;
Christian / digitalcourage.de or @eest9 epicenter.works or Jan / EDRi.org etc.

I see, you are from SF, so how about talking to Cory Doctorow of EFF (e.g. regarding contest budget) ?
He also joined the new W3C Interop Community Group …
And Derek is also near.


In germany there are also awesome existing contests, we could talk to.
Personally was awarded Deutscher Jugendfotopreis (for photo) by Merkel and that thing was a real fun thing in life. And similar there is a Startseite Deutscher Jugendfilmpreis - Deutscher Jugendfilmpreis (for young people).

I guess I was imaging something far simpler than any of the above.

  1. Every Fediverse project chips in a few dollars.
  2. We hire an animator with that money.
  3. We work together to create a ~2min long video that talks at a very, very high level.
  4. All of the projects then have access to a quick video to show potential users when trying to describe what the Fedvierse is.

I’ll be honest, I don’t have any interest or the time to be raising money through governments or funding organizations. It was simply an idea to see if all the Fediverse-aligned projects could work together on something. That was probably too optimistic since it’s unlikely we’d all get on the same page I suppose.

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Well, personal opinion:

  1. Is the task of a government, fediverse should be payed by tax (some MEPs work together for this). Otherwise it will become a monopoly of former US presidents soon :wink:
    Not the task of people in Fediverse projects giving 8 hours/day for coding for free already and looking for funding. But let’s try …
    The conferences which I co-organised were completely for free for everybody and we got around 50 videos incl. Lightning Talks, so it might work.

  2. To find a good animator, the problem is probably not money but time.
    Anyway it was the reason why I mentioned @derekcaelin and the wonderful animation video :slight_smile:

I’ll be honest, I don’t have any interest or the time to be raising money through governments or funding organizations.

Same here

It was simply an idea to see if all the Fediverse-aligned projects could work together on something.

Personally ready here.
Unfortunately doing real-life-video like wars or docs on climate refugees …
So, I could “film”, “cut” or “edit” – but better not “draw” :slight_smile:
I can also ping those who don’t have an account here at the fediverse or talk to KJF where my idea was more that they can communicate in the newsletters to all young people that we are looking for such an explainer. They also have wonderful workshops in Berlin where people work together to create videos.

@gabek I cross-posted to Fediverse Town by @FediverseTown:

btw: For textual input there is (with guides linked in the end)

A good opportunity to speak about it are the monthly developer meetings.
11 active projects attended last tuesday
Please tell me if you’d like to bring it up next month.

/ OFF-TOPIC but videos
Danie van der Merwe made nice walkthrough videos

Friendica

Hubzilla

Pixelfed

diaspora

Nextcloud

Lemmy


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Is it just me, or are the majority of Fediverse apps copycats of existing successful walled gardens?
I mean, I get that this lowers the barrier to entry, but it also means there’s no reason for potential users to climb the barrier anyway, as all they’re offering is: “It’s just like X, but without your friends! And it costs money! And it’s not as slick!

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You’re right in a way but the one feature those walled gardens cannot provide is freedom to make the experience your own. It’s no coincidence that successful fediverse apps are AGPL licensed.

I’d like to add that @mathewlowry’s post made me spin off into this: What is the Vision of the Fediverse?

It’s fully understandable and logical that the fediverse started to explore better alternatives to traditional social media first, once they got the AS/AP standards in their hands. Now there’s the opportunity to a) go well beyond that and address the social aspects in many different app / business domains, and b) to come to a much deeper level of integration between individuals apps, and maybe even to such extent that ‘app boundaries’ disappear. The latter is what in the past I called From silo-first to task-oriented federated app design.

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