Indymedia Stories #2: Another Anniversary, Looking to the Future

25 Years of Indymedia.org and the Independent Media Centres

25 years ago today¹, the website for the first IMC (Independent Media Centre) went live at www.indymedia.org, providing a globally accessible platform for independent media coverage of the protests against the World Trade Organization summit in the US city of Seattle.

In some ways this would be the ideal time to finish writing up a detailed retrospective I started planning in 2019, for the 20 year anniversary of the Indymedia network. I could go into a lot of detail on many aspects of its history from an insiders perspective, and I’m definitely planning to write about my time as a founding volunteer for the Aotearoa IMC (which finally disappeared from the web in 2022). Look out for more Indymedia Stories on this blog over the next year or so.

In late 2019, I was seeing plenty of articles being published to mark the 20 year anniversary. So I decided to keep my powder dry, read a bunch of those, and focus my piece on any aspects of the Indymedia story that don’t get as much attention or fanfare as I think they deserve. Then I ran out of time before a long international trip.

My plan was to go home to Aotearoa to see family and friends, and then keep working on a longer article on Indymedia when I got back to China, via the FOSS Asia Summit in Singapore. But COVID-19 had other plans. I never got back to China, I’ve survived period of involuntary homelessness, and I’ve had to move into at least 9 different rentals to stay housed. It’s only in the last year or two that I’ve been settled enough to start thinking about Indymedia again.

Anyway, it has to be said that at 20 years old, the Indymedia network was a shadow of its former self. Many of the sites that served the news gathering of local IMCs, as well as most of the servers that provided collaboration tools for global networking, were long since shuttered and gathering digital dust. I hadn’t been actively involved in the Aotearoa IMC I co-founded since about 2007. I finally stopped publishing there a few years after that, when the newswire became a flood of seemingly unmoderated noise, dominated by a handful of chronic spammers.

In 2019, there were some signs that a phoenix could be rising from the ashes. Indymedia.org, which had until recently been frozen in time since 2013, was suddenly bearing a promise that “Indymedia.org is being rebuilt”, along with links to a bunch of 20 year anniversary articles. But 5 years later, the only consequence of that is that one of the few remaining global IMC digital infrastructures disappeared - the original Indymedia site (maybe still running Active?) - and never came back.

So what can the history of the Global Network of IMCs tell us about the future of digital news media?

Appearing even before the creation of Wikipedia and its MediaWiki software, Indymedia.org was a pioneering example of what was then a novel concept. The web as a read/write medium, where anyone could contribute using basic cut’n'paste skills, rather than just a collection of read-only pages made by geeks who could write HTML. Seven years before the founding of Wikileaks, the open-publishing newswire of indymedia.org was one of the earliest “citizen journalism” platforms. It can also be seen as one of the earliest experiments in both the practices and technologies of “social media”, producing among other innovations, the technology that gave birth to Titter.

That drive to empower people to create and share, was reflected in a commitment to using software that respects people’s freedom to do that. At the time, “Open Source” was a newly coined term for Free Software (or as I tend to call it Free Code), and both terms were referenced in one of the core Principles of Unity for the emerging Indymedia network, committing IMCs to;

“… committed to the use of free and open source code, whenever possible, in order to develop the digital infrastructure, and to increase the independence of the network by not relying on proprietary software.”

The original Indymedia.org ran on a patchwork of server software known as Active. Originally strapped together by a collective of hackers in Australia, for a local cluster of activist news and event announcement sites. As more IMCs started up to run open-publishing activist news sites for their city or country, this bleeding edge CMS (Content Management System) software was swapped out for a variety of others, written specifically for Indymedia use (including DadaIMC, Mir and Oscailt). These in turn, were gradually replaced by more general purpose Free Code CMS, like Drupal (WordPress, now the most popular CMS on the web, published their first versions in 2003).

As with the CMS that enabled websites to be read/write (“Web 2.0” in SillyCon Valley speak), there were many new media technologies that Indymediatistas wanted or needed during the first few years of the network. Many of these have now been developed to greater maturity by open source communities.

For example, when activists started publishing their videos on YouTube to get them to a larger audience, and to reduce the strain that streaming large media files placed on Indymedia servers, Indymedia geeks dreamed of having a decentralized, free code tool like PeerTube. That can be used to run video-publishing sites that are independent, but federated into a larger network.

A network where videos can be found and viewed across the whole federation, not only on the one where it’s first published. Where sites can mirror each others’ videos to route around attempts at censorship. Where users contribute a little bit of their own bandwidth to help serve a video if it goes viral. Avoiding the lose-lose scenario where every time you get a video out to a large audience you lose money, or risk having servers go down and sites go offline. Where video channels can be followed and videos commented on by users on other federated platforms like Mastodon, forming an interconnected “fediverse”. 

New technology like this makes new forms of activist media possible, but technology was never at the core of Indymedia. The sites we ran were more than shared blog farms. They were always understood as a means to a larger end. When we said “don’t hate the media, become the media”, Indymedia activists were articulating a democratisation of media. Which could in turn have a democratizing effect on a rapidly globalizing human world, whose politics and everyday life were increasingly under the unaccountable rule of corporations.

As the public - and especially activists - become increasingly aware of the downsides of Surveillance Capitalism, we have a unique opportunity to remind them of this vision. It’s also worth reflecting on the Achilles Heel of the Indymedia project; it’s lack of a sustainable economic base, and the resulting dependence on donations and volunteer time to keep its growing infrastructure running.

For the grander vision that animated Indymedia to be realized, sharing economic solidarity strategies like forming Platform Cooperatives will be just as important as promoting the potential of decentralized technologies like PeerTube and other fediverse tools like PixelFed and Mastodon. Perhaps even more important. As always, watch this space!

Indymedia Stories:

1. Indymedia and the fediverse

2. Another anniversary

Image:

Screenshot of the front page of Indymedia.org as it looked from 2013-2020, courtesy of Better.fyi

1. Technically it’s now Dec 1 in Aotearoa, but I’m guessing it’s still Nov 30 in Seattle? This post was meant to go out yesterday, but due to a technical glitch where SubStack thinks my timezone is about 12 hours behind what it actually is … it didn’t.