Post-Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit: Self-hosting & -publishing workshop
The second workshop in our Post-Publishing Digital Toolkit program will take place on the 22nd of February, between 13:00-19:00 at offline, Lichtenrader Str. 49, 12049 Berlin.
We will present and discuss self-hosting methods for artists and others, as well as how to revive the usage of RSS feeds, and will look at some nice free and open-source software for digital publishing.
At the workshop, we want to share with you our quest to break free from the ever-enshittifying products, services, and platforms run by the oligarchic big tech and move towards self-hosting our data, websites, and services at Well Gedacht Publishing.
To register, please send an email to [email protected]
Program:
- How to self-host a static website at home, using a cheap mini-PC, Raspberry Pi, or an old laptop? (2:30 hours)
- 30 minutes break
- Using RSS in 2025! Is RSS also a publishing tool? Advocating wider use of RSS and Atom feeds today as an alternative to oligarchic social media, Spotify, Youtube, etc. (or Big Social). We'll show how to use it daily, its obstacles, and how to overcome them. (40 minutes)
- Trying out Pandoc to generate websites from text files. We will convert files into one another, doc, epub, HTML, and markdown for instant, easy, and self-hosted digital publishing. (1:20 hour)
- Looking at alternative (to big tech) digital publishing platforms and tools for specific publishing needs (40 minutes)
We would also like to learn about your experiences, existing solutions for avoiding big tech or propriety software, and ideas on digital autonomy models. These could include examples from your practice or could be collective practices.
After the workshop, we want to open it up to everyone who may wish to join us for a drink. It will be a casual meet-up for people interested in self-hosting and self-publishing and questioning the hyper-comfortable tools and platforms on the market; you are more than invited to join and/or contribute to our wiki Post-Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit!
Post-Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit is a project exploring how to overcome the limitations of digital publishing today, on social media or elsewhere online, and aims to advocate self-hosting methods for artists and artists' book publishers. All graphic design in this project is done by Fadi Houmani. Stay tuned for the launch of our project wiki. PPDPT is funded by the Berlin Senate Department of Culture's Innovation Fund for Digital Development of the Cultural Sector.