Story.Pub

Story.Pub is the digital real estate for an adaptation of Discourse for crowd-sourced storytelling.

Not sure yet whether this “distribution” will be as a Discourse Plugin or a Discourse Theme Component or a combination.

This project is my overarching mission.

That, and telling my own stories.

What else is there in life, after all? (Nothing “real” is the answer I continually arrive at.)

The stories of humanity, as told by those who’ve lived them, individually and collectively.

Then, learning from, and recording those lessons.

Then documenting them in ways that future humans (and bots) can build upon – the lessons of the past – instead of forgetting those lessons, hard-learned and hard-earned by us (which sadly every generation so far seems to do.)

But, I digress.

Contributors on the site can be treated by other contributors and visitors with things they can set up as gifts to give (where there will also be gifts I’d like - a personal registry) in their user profile.

Users can also gift things that are contributed and made available in the registry by sponsors of the site, i.e…

“Buy me a Beer”

“Buy me a Coffee”

“Buy me a Smoothie”

“Buy me Breakfast | Lunch | Dinner”

Or other (non-food items)

Sponsors can contribute these.

Users can buy them for others contributors the site.

People can “gift” things to each other.

Contributors and visitors can earn gift points along with badges for participating on the site, to use for buying gifts for others.

Even non-profits could be sponsors and offer gifts that users can buy for others in their names. Like i.e…

“Buy a person who is homeless an Uber-delivered hot meal, or a night at the Ritz” :slight_smile:

To fund these gifts and make them available for spending points on the site, users on the site (and others) can contribute to these non-profits who are sponsors on the site.

I.e. when a fact or supporting evidence is contributed (or even just time spent and posts created, read and replied to, loves received, votes received, replies received, etc.) Discourse already has this feature built in. It’s already keeping a fine-grained track of everyone who does anything on the site. Even passive things like how many posts a user has read, and how much time (and when) they’ve spent on the site.

A User’s profile tracks and displays all of these things publicly.

BandLab is a platform that can be used for creating and processing audio.

Also Otter.ai, and even more basic tools like SoundCite.

Any audio contributed is best if it is also transcribed, so auto-transcription like That already built into YouTube.

Simple tools and the maximum automation for simplification of use by non-techies, that is the goal.

Accessibility.

Continue to nudge and push and pull “Geek Orthodoxy” in this direction.

Increasingly I am convinced that this “Geek Orthodoxy” – the culture of the geeks that built (and continue to build) the internet – are the key to leading the larger culture toward more joyful and productive ways of interacting with one another, and away from the pernicious toxicity that seems to be wedging the dangerous divides among us these days.

I predict that its the youth of today who have participated on social media who will come to understand this (and who have been hurt the most for so long by the sickening behaviors too often exhibited by the narcissists among us.)

My hope is that this generation of youth will eventually be able to find the wisdom and willpower to change things as we have not. I do hope this movement rises and succeeds sooner than later.