NCE.DFOS Week 08

Hey friends! Here we are at week 08 in NCE. Two whole months of DFOSing! Feels like just yesterday this began, and like it’s been part of our lives forever.

Here’s what’s going on this week.

The big topic: SpaceCamp's first cohort wraps

Last week our squadmates Lena and Danielle hosted the first-ever SpaceCamp — a weeklong virtual cohort where people went deep into how to make their own DFOS space.

We're going to soon publish a Field Guide of the lessons we shared and learned. Several SpaceCamp posts from this week are worth reading standalone before then, including:

• How Your Space Grows on Trust
• Rituals from the Forest (documenting actual recurring things happening in real spaces right now)
• WIP: Pricing and Membership Models
• How to connect your AI agent to DFOS via MCP

Even better, we're going to keep doing this. SpaceCamp cohort two will take place next month. Stay tuned.

Platform: Money incoming

Last week we promised it. This week it's coming. Money and treasuries will enter the DFOS universe.

This particular release has been slower going for obvious reasons: money is sensitive, we have to get it right, and we have to be delicate in how we help spaces introduce monetization into their universes. We're excited by where we've landed and will do a full walkthrough this week when it goes live.

Biggest DFOS growth week yet

Last week was the biggest week for DFOS usage in our history. More than 1,000 people joined a space last week, and this has been the biggest week for active users yet.

What's encouraging is that this is happening even as the NCE space, for example, has settled into a less noisy rhythm than before. The energy and activity increasingly being pushed out to the margins, where the real dark forests live. This is great news.

Our public waitlist also continues to grow. Now 4k+ people have signed up. We're going to start inviting those folks in at the start of next month. The forest is ready to grow.

Of note across the forest

• In clear.txt, Vinny's "coding with someone who's in love with you" is great. Allison's "The Art of Changing" (ethical tension around AI trained on open source), and Vinny's Studio Update Week 001 — cleartxt.xyz evolved from a one-way showcase to a two-way surface for project submissions and collaboration. Very cool.

• Sounds of the Forest ran a "movies & TV" Song of the Day theme all week: bizzle's Sailor Moon pick, Robert's Kavinsky / Drive, David Crompton's Nina Simone. Bizzle also made a public post welcoming new members and laying out what the space is for.

• Worst Generation launched Worst Gen Wednesday — Black Dave's last recording session for his album happening this weekend.

• In Elysian Collective, Elle Griffin published "Decentralize America", the latest in her "Let Cities Build Utopia" series. Andy Futuro asked the direct question — "Why DFOS over fediverse/ActivityPub?" — which generated a useful answer thread.

• Peripheral Forms posted a constitution and roadmap: "a benevolent dictatorship aiming to become democratic," continuing the aesthetic resistance / slopulism mission.

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Moments from NCE

• Lena built the NCE Atlas — 207 members mapped across 29 countries at nce-map.vercel.app

• Edgar posted the week 08 design riff: "nothing great is created alone," by @vinny / clear.txt friends

• Robert wrote "The Value of Settling Down on My Creative Process" — reflections on aging, stability, and the creative process

• Aiden: 3 for 3 wrapping his annual demo reel by end of Q1

• Douglas McCurdy's first post: Caged Elegant 2026 — "beauty still being there, but trapped and hidden right now"

• #ScreenshotSaturday returned March 21, curated by Robert — featuring "Global Majority" screen print by @kattattak

• The Reading Club posted Chapter 5 notes from James C. Scott: "Making Social Space for a Dissident Subculture"

• Chorus top posts: Yancey's ML Silicon Valley image (15 upvotes), the Metalabel Studios photo (30 comments), Justice's "Dark Turtles All the Way Down"