Indymedia
Open-publishing news for movements: anyone could upload audio, video, and reporting to a shared newswire, with editorial collective control. Prefigured federated, account-light, community-run media.
About Riot · a protest.net project
A free internet in the lineage of Indymedia.
Riot helps a community carry wikis, websites, news, social feeds, group decisions, and events across participant-held copies and replaceable paths. That can reduce dependence on one provider, but it does not guarantee publishing, access, persistence, or resistance to censorship. Riot is new, but it comes from decades of helping movements publish and keep control of their own tools. The full builder story lives on the home page; how Riot compares to adjacent protocols is in the protocol field guide.
Where Riot comes from
A lineage, not a lone project.
Each of these came out of a real need that central platforms failed to meet. Riot inherits their goals and tries to avoid their dead ends.
protest.net
A structured calendar and organizing hub for demonstrations and direct action. Ran for years as a single, community-edited site before social platforms absorbed and then discarded that role.
TXTMob
Broadcast SMS alerts for affinity groups and mass mobilizations. Built so a trusted sender could reach a list fast during a convergence — the direct ancestor of Riot's alert tools.
Grounded in the field
Not guesswork. Built on what communities actually need.
Riot's design draws on two bodies of evidence: how mutual aid and movement media have actually worked under pressure, and what makes prosocial local spaces healthy when the pressure is off. The same structural answer keeps appearing: bounded, human-moderated, non-extractive spaces beat algorithmic feeds.
Crisis response & movement media
Occupy Sandy's shared editable ledger, Verificado 19S's two-source rumor protocol, TXTMob's channel matrix, the 2023 Türkiye earthquake response, and the 2019 Hong Kong protests. What people reach for when the network is down: consumer chat apps, even for trained responders. Trust is established in person. Many parallel channels beat one general feed.
Prosocial local spaces
Front Porch Forum (235,000 members, 13,473 surveyed), the 2025 "Local Connection Crisis" survey (2,028 people), and New_ Public's Roundabout converge on bounded content, named stewards, non-extractive incentives. The finding that matters most: forums that were more active were rated less favorably. The platform people value is the one they don't live inside — which is Riot's model by design.
The engagement-addiction risk that prosocial frameworks warn against is structurally lower for Riot by transport design: no server pushing a feed, no algorithm optimizing for time-on-device. That is not a policy choice to maintain — it is how the system is built. Why Riot carries this further →
The point of Riot
Publish first. Carry it anywhere.
Every earlier project in Riot's lineage was, at root, about getting movement information out when the usual channels would not carry it. Riot narrows that to one job: help a community prepare, verify, and merge information from participant-held copies. Local use does not require a reachable server; exchange still requires a compatible path that is actually available.
Open newswire
A public space anyone in the community can publish to, in the Indymedia tradition — but carried on the community's own devices rather than one hosted site that can be seized or blocked.
Alerts and decisions
Broadcast alerts in the TXTMob tradition, plus shared checklists, decisions, and events. Preload the tools before the crisis; keep using them locally inside it.
Verify and merge
Nothing is accepted without a human looking at it first. Signed entries can merge across functioning devices that exchange them, reducing dependence on any single address; this does not guarantee every record has another reachable copy.
This is publishing as mutual aid, not publishing as a platform. For the data model that makes it work, see the protocol field guide.
The builder
@rabble, building Riot on Willow.
The full builder history — protest.net, Indymedia, TXTMob, Odeo, Twitter, Planetary, Nos, and Divine — is on the home page. Riot is the next chapter, built on the Willow libraries rather than another centralized platform.
@rabble is building Riot using the Willow libraries. Riot does not claim that @rabble implemented Willow or authored the Willow protocol specification. Read the full builder section ↗ · Compare Riot with neighboring protocols ↗
Why this exists
Seizure resistance is not theoretical.
Riot is being built in the shadow of real government action against community-run publishing. Offline-first, self-carrying data is a direct response to that history, not a slogan.
2017 — Linksunten Indymedia
Germany's interior ministry banned Linksunten Indymedia and police raided spaces associated with its alleged operators. A single hosted movement site was removed by state action on a single day.
2026 — complete-ban demand
In June 2026, interior ministers from all 16 German states asked the federal government to examine a complete ban of de.indymedia.org, alongside seizures, hosting takedowns, and network blocks.
Local-first removes a mandatory home server; it does not repeal radio range, device loss, or hostile peers. Already-held participant copies can reduce dependence on one address, without guaranteeing that another reachable device holds a complete copy.
What Riot is not
Honest about the gap.
Not a shipping product yet
Riot is a prototype in development. No stable release has shipped — early builds appear on the releases page as they are cut. The screenshots on the home page are real app screens from the iPhone simulator build — they are not evidence of sync over physical-device radios.
Not a universal protocol
Riot is a community application runtime built on Willow, not a new universal social protocol. For a comparison with adjacent systems — AT Protocol, ActivityPub, Nostr, Matrix, Briar, and others — see the protocol field guide.