@Nandakumar Edamana can you share some of the articles you published (or the publications which you contributed to)? This is something I'd like to try myself as well

@Badri Sunderarajan Thanks for your interest. I've mainly written for Open Source For You, Info Kairali, and some publications by Mathrubhumi. Please visit https://www.opensourceforu.com/author/nandakumar/ and https://nandakumar.co.in/learn/ for some samples. If you are interested in contributing, OSFY (English) is always open for FOSS-exclusive contributions from anyone, as long as it meets their standards. Info Kairali (Malayalam) is also looking for new and better contributors, although they are not FOSS-exclusive.

Q: Is this proposal LLM-generated? If yes, can you please disclose the same? If not, I'm confused about some inconsistencies such as differing audience in the start and end of the doc, no mention of Indian channels despite being India focused etc, mentions of a "Fact Check/Legal team" etc.

@Nemo it was disclosed in a comment here: https://codema.in/d/NFUtAlox/a-dedicated-print-magazine-/1

@perry Thanks. I was expecting it to be a preface to the post, instead of a comment, which I missed. It would be nice to see the prompt as well, since that is what tells us your reasons, instead of whatever the LLM generates.

Suggestion: Run on the Hacker-Monthly magazine model, which used HN as a feeder-source-for-content.

Hacker Monthly is a print magazine version of Hacker News — a social news website wildly popular among programmers and startup founders. The submission guidelines state that content can be “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.” Every month, we select from the top voted articles on Hacker News and print them in magazine format.

It lasted a few years (2010-2015), and had a decent subscription base. The articles were anyway on the internet, so it wasn't about having "exclusive articles", but the curation and the allure of a well-typeset print mag that worked for them.

Pick existing content from the network (Planet FSCI, LWN, FOSS Blogs etc), run them through an editorial process, and focus on typesetting, distribution, monetization,

I think @Nemo's suggestion is a good starting point (The Browser pulls this off successfully without even being in print!) but we can take this opportunity to do a bit more. First, some comments on the main proposal. These are partly based on my 6 years serving as editor of Snipette (the last 3½ years of which included a print edition).

• Rather than focus only on those in the field and tech-savvy readers, I think there is also interest among the general public (not necessarily tech savvy) for regaining more control over their digital lives. Hence, I suggest editing at least about 60% of the articles with those people in mind—basically, there should be enough in it that most people can pick it up and get something out of it. We should be careful not to become like "Resonance" which is meant to be accessible to the general public but in practice not as easy to follow for people without the respective scientific background.

• Aiming for an international audience is good as it can get us more funds more quickly 🙂 however, we should also keep shipping costs in mind. With the US ending the de minimis exemption, shipping to the US in particular could turn out to be disproportionately expensive. Fortunately, the exemption is still in place for other countries, so we can ship ordinary unregistered packages at not too high rates. My suggestion is to use this and re-send using a registered option if people complain about non-delivery. For the US, perhaps we could team up with some US-based small publication to conduct local printing of each others' copies.

• Quarterly issues is a good idea to start with. We should build a buffer of articles before announcing a release date of the first issue. Ideally, also have an internal timeline of (for example) 1 article per week so that we don't end up with having to rush during the final weeks. This would result in each issue having about 12 articles. (This number can be adjusted based on the type of content like longer deep dives, shorter quick news updates, etc. but works as a thumb rule).

• We need to keep in mind that typesetting also takes time. Sometimes, articles have to be mildly edited to fit better in print. For Snipette (which was also a quarterly magazine) we would aim to have 80% of the articles ready before the printing deadline so that typesetting can begin. By the time they were typeset, the last 2-3 articles would also be included. I don't think we should have separate windows for submission call, editing, etc. but rather have it as a rolling release. Those pieces which don't make it to the existing issue can always go into a future issue.

• 10,000 subscribers sounds like a good number to be able to do offset printing. (For lower numbers, digital printing would be more cost effective but it would be relatively expensive). I am not sure where we would get carbon-netural paper, soy-based inks, etc. but if we decide to go for this I can get in touch with the people behind Sanctuary Asia magazine whom I'm sure would have thought about this. I think The Asparagus also does something similar, but in Canada.

• We should decide whether we want the magazine to be in colour, greyscale, or something in between. Black-and-white and greyscale are obviously more affordable. Colour can be more attractive, but if we decide from the start that we want to remain greyscale, it is possible to design artwork appropriately to make it work there too. There are also options in between like having two colours, or making some pages coloured while others are duotone or greyscale. We are likely to have quite a few screenhots of various software, so it's important to also keep in mind how those perform. That said, I use a greyscale e-paper monitor and "high contrast" mode works well for most things.

My idea for procuring articles is similar to the Snipette model:

1. Hunt down interesting articles (the feeds Nemo mentioned would be a good starting point, but we can also manually flag anything interesting). The purpose of this is twofold: to find potential articles for publication, but also to find authors who might be interested in writing something specially for this publication.

2. Reach out to the authors asking if they want to republish or write (depending on what we decided). Either way, we will eventually end up with a submission.

3. Take the article through our editorial process. The purpose of this is to fact-check the article, add references where necessary, edit the article for style, grammar, etc. and give it a tone consistent with the rest of the magazine (while still preserving the author's voice). At Snipette, we would usually also suggest changes such as adding more sections or taking the article in a different direction to improve the point that the author wanted to make. This takes some skill but it is doable and worth the effort to bring out a polished product. Once the first few submissions come in, the editorial team should meet to come up with some rough guidelines for the magazine, which can be fine-tuned over time.

4. We should ideally also have artists (can be in-house or recruited through a second submission call) to illustrate the articles. While it's possible to use (CC licenced) stock imagery, creating our own illustrations would let us have a more consistent style and also let us make pictures that are more relevant to the article at hand. Good artwork would also the magazine much more attractive!

5. The final step is typesetting. This sometimes happens in parallel to editing and artwork, as it may be necessary to make changes to the text and/or artwork to better fit the page. For Snipette, we used the workaround of adding "factboxes" which let us adjust the spacing without editing the article itself; illustrations and diagrams can also be used for the same purpose. Typesetting can be done in a dedicated software like Scribus. However, I have also been looking into having a print stylesheet in CSS which automatically styles the page into print-friendly format. We never got to use this for Snipette, but I am interested in experimenting with it again and seeing how doable it is. There is also an ongoing NLnet funded initiative on a similar theme.

6. Besides typesetting, I gather from the proposal that we are planning to publish digitally. We could use Ghost for this as it is easy to program for/integrate into other systems, and recently got native support for ActivityPub. The only problem is that the inbuilt "membership" (subscription) system is tied to Stripe; however I had some workarounds in mind and if we come up with a solution it would also help other independent publishers who are based in countries where Stripe is not properly supported.

Regarding articles for non tech savvy users: this would need good editors, ideally including some who are themselves not from the tech community as it would be easier for them to flag when any explanation needs to be improved. I am willing to help mentor in this.

I want to take this opportunity to point out that making articles more accessible and engaging to a non tech savvy audience is not the same as "dumbing it down" or overexplaining. It is easy for those of us who are well versed in a topic to fall into that trap when trying to explain for someone outside our area of expertise. Rather, it is more about having a different context or lens from which we approach a topic, and covering it from that viewpoint. The important thing is not to assume that the reader is less capable of understanding something than you; just that they may have a different initial knowledge base upon which they're building.

A related consideration: how are we going to reach these people, as they are less likely to be on the regular channels like the forums, Fediverse posts, and communities we were planning to reach out to? The answer is that we can reach out to people within the Free Software community as the primary target audience when it comes to marketing and purchasing subscriptions. The fact that it is in print would make it easier for people outside that community to stumble upon it lying around in someone's house. It is at this point that, if they realise there's enough in it for them as well, that they'd be more likely to subscribe or at least start borrowing the print copy from someone who already has. In some ways, this is similar to the Prāv model where we are expecting people who already know about and use XMPP to spread it to those who don't.

Things I haven't covered:

• Besides "articles", we could also have news updates, cartoons, etc. that can either be taken from existing sources or created afresh. Suggestions for this are welcome. Full Circle Magazine may provide some ideas.

• Marketing and outreach (to potential subscribers) are one area the Snipette team was lacking, so I don't have any good suggestions there. Ideas are welcome!

• We should also work on budget finances. The proposal mentioned hiring editors on a three-month contract, so I assume they are going to be paid. Will authors get paid as well? To what degree? What about publicly available content that we decide to reuse (we may not be legally obligated to pay, but would still be nice to offer if we can).

The proposal being generated by AI puts me off so I didn't read it :)

@Ravi Dwivedi We will create final proposal after the discussion which is human written. I also want to avoid AI, after noting its adverse affects. I was used to use AI without knowing the downsid though is in work i use Ai widely for coding and Documentation. I think you should create another thread on limiting the AI surge.

Just wanted to point out https://codema.in/d/4SzerK5H/maintenance-of-peertube-instance-/9 and https://codema.in/p/UJ2TNe5u/do-we-want-to-keep-fsci-s-peertube-instance-at-videos-fsci-in-around-

Basically we need to learn from the previous experiences we had about taking commitments and then it becoming a burden later on. So a clear plan and commitment is a must when starting something new. Unless there is a strong commitment from people, we should not just start, however good and important the idea is.

@Pirate Praveen  I remember contributing to setting up the peertube instance but later not getting time for it. I feel that we always can take younger minds as students and motivated professional in the early part of career can contribute. I remember being motivated to get some learning our of the contributions. Also monetary benefits can motivate contributions from more people

@Tanzeem Mohammad Basheer All I'm saying is we need to think ahead for at least 1-2 years, do we have people who commit to maintain it? It is ok to handover shutdown things we can't manage anymore, but that has to be part of the commitment. Like we shutdown matrix and diaspora on diasp.in since we could not find volunteers any longer. So keeping it in good shape or shutting it down, someone needs to take full responsibility. I did that for some of the services, but I can't take that responsibility for more services. Like for peetube, if you cannot manage it anymore, you need to find someone else to hand it over, like Harish did or shut it down like how we did for diasp.in matrix.

After seeing all the discussion, I'm not certain if we have enough momentum to sustain this long-term. @Pirate Praveen is also right in that we need to think ahead and plan for futuer.

But perhaps we can have a short-term vision for just a stand-alone FSCI 2025 Print Issue? No guarantee that it happens again, proposed and managed as a one-time thing. That gives us the freedom to experiment and learn from it as a one-shot without worrying about the long-term impact.

@Nemo I think an audio call with the people who volunteered could help

@Pirate Praveen since the proposal is closing soon, we can create a call for volunteers next to see who is interested in dedicating a significant amount of effort to this. And the audio call can happen with those people.

Makes sense, although given we're on the brink of October, I think FSCI 2026 Print Issue is a more doable goal 🙃

But the next step is to see if enough committed volunteers step up. So far, we have had some interest and offers for support but nobody stepping up to actually drive the project forward. I am treating this proposal like in Prāv where we can have an "in principle" agreement and another poll later when people come up with a concrete team of volunteers and a proposal.

Running a publication long-term is doable even with two or three people (I've done it that way) but it is crucial to have a very high level of dedication and commitment from those 2-3 people. I'm talking at the level of spending a significant amount of time each week to get articles out. If we have a larger number of volunteers, the workload will reduce a bit but it will still require at least two people with the same high level of commitment.

I suspect the same is true even for bringing out single issue. But it would be a good test case for people to understand what they are getting into in the longer term, and at worst we can make compromises like extending deadlines and cutting back on plans midway.

I still support the idea of a publication (regular is better, but a single experimental issue is also good) and I can provide mentoring/support/connections, although I don't want to be a core part of this project until I've seen it run for a year or so mainly because I want to make sure the other volunteers are equally committed after learning what it takes, and not risk being the only one driving it forward.

Aggregating existing articles would be nice but I am not personally to interested in it as we already have that happening in several places (including Planet FSCI). However, taking existing articles as a starting point and putting them through an editorial process to bring them up to some standard would be a good way to create more value with relatively less effort (relative to writing articles from scratch, that is).

@Badri Sunderarajan I agree with this.

Magazines usually build an audience over time, and the attention that audience brings is the incentive for people to write more. And so on...

Taking existing content can help with bridging the initial lack of incentive to write quality articles.

In 2025, in tech, there are so many avenues to publish, and to make ones point heard. Why write for this FSCI mag? Who has the patience to read cover to cover?

But a one time print publication with limited special copies that circulates as an artefact of history has value in itself.

There are several different purposes/directions here and that's probably why it is difficult to move forward with this.

• Magazine as a traditionally understood medium which has long term brand recognition, recurring audience, etc. But also requires editing, social media, etc.

• A booklet/zine/one time publication that is a fun project which captures how people are speaking and what people are doing now. A time capsule that becomes a very interesting thing 5-10 years later.

• A newsletter which is a curated collection of articles (new or old, original or reposted, written or otherwise) which builds an audience of its own with a different format

• A blog (interesting to note would be how the quality criteria of a blog post and magazine article would be different, whether it is even feasible)

• ...

I think the bigger question would be whether this is a serious effort at building an audience – which would mean so much thinking and commitment and creativity.

Or whether this is a fun project.

The former obviously requires drivers.

@Akshay thanks for breaking down the various definitions.

From the original description, I was assuming this to be a "Magazine" by your above definition. I would ideally like that to happen, and while I don't have any stats my feeling is a print magazine in this space is something we lack at the moment and that there will be a reasonable number of people at least browsing through most pieces if not cover to cover. We could take a proper survey on this of course, once we come up with rough editorial guidelines and maybe some sample articles.

But based on the number and dedication of volunteers it may be better to start with something less ambitious first (such as a one-time Zine) that would also be a nice project in its own right.