Now that it’s been a couple of months since the Journaling January event, I have a question.
Is there something else that we want to do before the next FediWriMo in November? There are seven months between now and FediWriMo, so if we wanted to have another event, or possibly two, we could.
Please comment on any style of writing even you would be interested in having. Let’s discuss any ideas that you have.
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I had an idea off the top of my head for something along these lines:
- A collaborative writing event that looks something like this:
- At least 2 people, if not more, write something together (novel, novella, short story, etc.)
- The group sets a goal of words on a per individual basis to bring about a common goal
- Minimum of 5,000 words total for the work being done (i.e. 2,500 words per individual)
- A theme is established for that group, considering the interests, likes, and dislikes of particular genres
- Event is done using almost exclusively FOSS and/or a local-first proprietary application or two if necessary
- e.g. myself using Obsidian (local-first), LibreOffice Writer (or the OnlyOffice equivalent), or something else that’s either local-first (if closed-source) or FOSS
- OS doesn’t really matter, but Linux or BSD preferred
- On mobile, GrapheneOS is preferred, but locked-down iOS and/or a de-Googled Android OS could potentially work too
I don’t know the edge cases for an event like this right now, but hopefully, these basics should be alright to serve a foundation of sorts.
It’s an interesting idea…but I would say that it would take a lot of work. There would be a need for the group to come up with a plot outline, and all the characters, settings etc. in order to have a coherent story.
My suggestion for something like this would be to think about using a private repository on a versioning system. Something like Codeberg…you could use the wiki for notes, and the issue tracker to keep track of each other’s progress. You could write the story in plain-text (markdown) and check-in / check-out the files as you work on them.
Another option if you don’t want to use a hosted solution would be Fossil It’s a version control system, with a wiki, that can be peer-to-peer replicated. That way all copies of the repository could be locally hosted.
Sendo and I looked at Fossil, and it’s indeed decentralized for version control (it has Git integration too if he’s not mistaken). That said, I could see that being a bit of a hurdle, though it depends on if people trust Codeberg or not (I know Sendo does, as he has some repos there).
There are actually open-source collaborative things like Proton Docs or OnlyOffice’s word processor to name a few, though there are some others that do the same thing. The question is self-hosting on doo-doo internet.
You can export from Fossil to git, but you can’t go the other way, IIRC. And, in the process you would lose the history, and things like the wiki and issues tracker would likely not track.
I was thinking it was an either/or situation: if you want to stay local first use Fossil and have direct syncing, so each participant has a local copy of the repository. If you are okay with a hosted repository, Codeberg would be the better choice.
A third option would be hosting a Fossil repository and have the participants sync to the hosted repository. (If you wanted to go that route there is Chisel. If you want to be more secure while hosting a Fossil Repository, it is possible to encrypt it.)
Personally I’m not a fan of the other solutions as there is too much that isn’t within my control. Even Codeberg is something I wouldn’t be comfortable with, seeing as it is hosted on third party servers. But I do get where you are coming from, most writers are not into the technology all that much, so setting up something liek Fossil might be a pretty big ask.
Another random thought: if you used something like Codeberg, you could use a git plugin for Obsidian, and replicate a whole vault to a private repository.
- A collaborative writing event that looks something like this:
