june forest meeting / recap

thanks to everyone who joined our first monthly Forest meeting last week. we had a great turnout, people joining from London, Margate, Manchester, Sunderland, Portland, NYC, Atlanta, Singapore, Colombia, Venezuela, Amsterdam, and beyond.

we heard from some incredible spaces this month, and the DFOS team was on hand to share what's coming next. here's a quick rundown:

Yancey walked us through his personal space and New Creative Era, showing how the desktop apps work, how to set up paid groups and private folders, and how he's using the blog to send newsletters out to people in the space. quick tip that came up in chat: there are two types of posts, a note (short, tweet-like) and a post (longer, essay-like). NCE will eventually become the main DFOS home/lobby for new members.

Richie from Sol Invicto showed how he's building a hub for his heavy metal/drum and bass project, with paid access to exclusive music, a press archive, and an RPG-style questionnaire that gates entry and sorts members into groups depending on how they answer. the chat loved this one.

Sam from Release Day / Creative Quest shared how they ran a month-long campaign space for 2,000+ people using an email allow-list to gate access. highlights included weekly newsletters with community spotlights that linked directly to posts inside the space, and a Release Day blog where people shared finished projects. one key learning: fewer channels is better, especially at the start.

Vinny from ClearTxt shared his space as a place for open collaboration and open calls. Brandon picked up from there to talk about the DFOS protocol, which is live and open source at protocol.dfos.com. short version: the protocol lets you own and author your work independent of any platform, including DFOS itself. if you want to keep content fully offline, that's possible too.

Brandon from DFOS also previewed some things coming soon: treasury and payments going live next week, more granular post permissions, video uploads, updated MCP, and the ability to create shortcuts that link between spaces.

a few things that came up in Q&A worth flagging: privacy on DFOS.com is similar to any standard web app (data lives on AWS), but the protocol allows for fully offline/local authoring if needed. there's a WIP privacy FAQ in NCE with more detail, and comments are open if you have questions.

if you're just getting started, the Start Here post in NCE is the best first stop.

see you next month!