[Lucinda Jordaan at Global Investigative Journalism Network]

I'd missed this story from back in July. Rappler is building its own end-to-end encrypted, decentralized communities on the Matrix protocol.

"Built on the open source, secure, decentralized Matrix protocol, the app has the potential to become a global independent news distribution outlet, and promises to pave the way for a “shared reality” — a call Ressa has been making to counter “the cascading failures of a corrupted public information ecosystem.”"

This is both incredibly cool and makes a ton of sense. It's the first time I've seen a newsroom build decentralized communities in the wild - and it's doubly cool that it's end-to-end encrypted. For CEO Maria Ressa, whose work has been beset by endless legal challenges in the Philippines, that last feature is particularly vital. But it all helps the newsroom evade censorship and avoid serving up its content for AI vendors to train on.

This quote from Ressa is something that every newsroom should learn from:

"We realized: there is no future for digital news unless we build our own tech, because there are only three ways a digital news site, or any digital site, gets traffic: direct, search, or social search.

[...] If you do not trust the tech, then you are always going to be at the mercy of surveillance for-profit tech companies that, frankly, don’t understand news or the value of journalism."

Exactly. I've banged this drum repeatedly, but it's a far more effective message from Ressa than me. This is the way. I truly hope that more will follow.

#Media

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