A publisher deserves a home, not another feed entry

We had been collecting publications and public material for a while. There were articles, recordings, feeds, publisher sites and individual contributors. The first temptation was to make a better discovery feed. It was useful, but it left out the people who make the work.

A publication isn't just a list of URLs. It has editors, contributors, a subject, a history and readers who may follow it for years. The person writing an article may also publish elsewhere, host a channel or participate in a local community. A feed card doesn't give any of that much room.

That's why our public-profile work moved toward person and organization homes. A writer can have posts, collections, publications and relationships. An organization can have its own contributors and channels. A publisher's material can live in a reading room and appear in related topic collections.

The important relationship is that the article still belongs to its original source. A collection or community is a way of finding and discussing it. It does not become the publisher merely because the article appears there.

Someone discovering a story wants a simple page and a link to its source. Someone researching a subject wants related articles and the people behind them. Someone making a podcast wants recordings, transcripts and permission to reuse material. A community might want to organize a reading group around the same publication.

Those needs suggest a set of connected products: public profiles on Aurekai Life^{[1]Aurekai Life}, media and channels on Aurekai Live^{[2]Aurekai Live}, Source Library for retained material and account-owned publishing tools.

The open web has a long history of making this possible through links. ActivityPub^{[3]ActivityPub} is one important standard for connecting social publishing between independent servers. We can learn from that approach while keeping the meaning of a source and the identity of a publisher clear.

We started dogfooding this work with real publication cohorts, reading rooms and community posts. The next step is to make those relationships feel natural to a reader: the story, its author, the publication and the surrounding community should all be easy to find.