Understory (https://understory.coop) is excited to invite you to the first gathering of the Understory Digital Garden Club on May 7th at 10am PDT (1 PM ET, 7PM CET):
Understory Garden is a Solid-powered digital gardening and publishing platform we’ve created with our Grant for the Web. Building a Web Monetized content creation platform on Solid has allowed us to create a space that empowers content creators to publish how they want, where they want, and to realize the economic value created by their acts of creation without centralized intermediaries.
You can read our latest update in the Web Monetization Community space:
Understory Garden is an open source (MIT licensed) Next.js application built on top of swrlit, a Solid data access library built on Inrupt’s solid-client-js and SWR. We’ll be publishing a stable version of swrlit in the coming weeks, and would like to invite the Solid community to help us co-create this tool and our platform on GitHub. You can see the source code, file features requests and sponsor our work here:
Yes please! One of our core goals building Understory Garden is to create a digital gardening space for folks who don’t happen to have a digital green thumb.
I’ve submitted a PR for it to be listed in the events section on solidproject.org. If you run further Solid-related events in the future, feel free to submit them there too (And if you plan them more than a month in advance, you can also email info@solidproject.org to request it to be listed in the relevant This Month in Solid newsletter.)
Hi @travis! Understory looks like a real exciting project that’s underway. I first learned about it via @bengo at SocialHub Besides aiming to apply some innovative tech like Solid the site looks great and inviting. You are open-source, planning a cooperative for the community and by the community.
Would you also be open to consider using FOSS video conferencing tools in the future? Things like Zoom feel like an opposite direction. For me and others in the free software movement they work as barriers to participate. There are great alternatives, like BigBlueButton (we held our ActivityPub conference with that) and Jitsi. They require no install or creation of an account for participants, and you can self-host these platforms if you want.
We definitely would! Zoom was our backup plan this time and likely will be in the future, but we’re hoping to use https://topia.io/ for future meetings because we’re friends with the folks building it - it’s also not open source, but is decentralized and peer-to-peer.
I’m definitely interested in BigBlueButton and Jitsi, but we’re hoping to use something a little less Zoom-like for future meetings - if you know of any open source alternatives to Topia I’d definitely love to learn more about them!
(And if you plan them more than a month in advance, you can also email