Independent Media Project

The Independent Media Project seeks to empower publishers, journalists, and other content creators to control their destiny by providing them with a decentralized foundation that cannot be taken away without due process. We can free creators from the specter of shadowbanning, demonetization and censorship, while ensuring they receive all of the revenue paid by their subscribers, increasing their incomes when compared to other platforms. This could be up to a 10% increase in revenue compared to other popular publishing platforms. Once a platform has you locked in they can jack up prices in the future without much recourse. 

Publishers will be able to publish any type of content–text, audio, and video. Creators will also have business model flexibility, with options to choose from various subscription or advertising models, and switch between them as their business grows and changes. 

This project is a subset of use cases being supported in the Humane Social Media Design project. Journalism has been demonstrated by Substack as a great early use case for scaling Humane Social Media, as this use case does not require a network effect to be immediately useful to content creators or subscribers. 

Mosaic will ensure ecosystem interoperability with Web Standards, APIs, and Test Suites. It will be like how you can have any email provider and still email other people, but with richer data structures and easier data portability. Interoperability and decentralized identity mean that the network will not be subject to vendor lock-in and service providers (like publisher space theme and hosting providers) will have the flexibility to compete and innovate.

At a high level the decentralized architecture is simple; it will consist of: 

• publisher spaces
• individuals who subscribe to these spaces, and an
• apps that aggregates notifications from these spaces into a newsfeed-like interface.
  
  

When combined these building blocks enable freedom of association without the need for a central intermediary. The ecosystem is robust and doesn’t bake a cryptocurrency into the core solution, but there will be plenty of flexibility for developers to integrate with cryptocurrencies.

For more detail see the Technology page. 

Status and Roadmap

We are in the early stages of the design phase of this project. Contact us if you are interested in participating. The general roadmap, is to: 

• Design, document use cases and theorize a solution
• Create a compelling demo
• Attract founding publishers with reach
• Build and launch the beta solution