Four years of Newsmast. Where we came from. Where we’re going

This is the first mission for what was to become the Newsmast Foundation, from early November 2022:

Create a Twitter-like global community with a Wikipedia-like ethos but more fun: fully moderated, decentralised and run on a non-profit basis, running on the best technology available, with a mix of news, comment and entertainment.

Four years later, after what feels like ten years of work, we’ve lost a lot of naivety, but none of the ambition. With one big difference: our goal is to create networks of connected communities, not a global town square. To do this, we’re working with organisations, rather than end users. Community building around our original objective:

Knowledge for all, for good.

The case for doing this hasn’t changed. The big platforms are owned by a handful of billionaires and run in their interests. Communities need spaces they own, and ways to connect them to each other.

Here’s an update of some of the strands we’re working on.

Community-first technology

At Newsmast we’ve always believed in Anuj Ahooja’s rallying call: “people, not platforms”. That's why we’re founding members of European.Social, where civil society leads, bringing platforms and protocols together. When we started, Bluesky didn’t exist, and Mastodon was the main open social challenger. It’s been a good fit for our grassroots communities, and we’ve learnt a lot. We have a clear idea of what we want to do, and what we bring to communities. 

In a big step, from now onwards we’ll be supporting Atmosphere offerings too, tailored to the needs of our partners. We're working on a bid to build for EU youth alongside Eurosky and Mastodon. In the UK, we’re running a joint project with Eurosky to create a city-based app aiming to tackle loneliness in young people. And we're excited to have begun working with Blacksky Algorithms to deliver a UK-wide app for our Local News Tech Stack, building on their Acorn platform: decentralised community infrastructure.

What holds all of these projects together is our core focus on community-led design. Starting with the community, and letting the technology follow - no matter which protocol it's built on.

Apps for Change

Our first App for Change - Mo-Me - was launched in November 2025. Since then we’ve worked with pilots and partners around the world, across all four flavours of the Newsmast app. Here’s what we built, and are building, in 2026:

• News: apps for The Bristol Cable and the Leicester Gazette.
• Community: Mo-Me, Twt Cymru and Qlub.
• Professional networks: CSID Net, NITheCS and a network of museums in Brazil.
• Content creators: Find Out.
• Up next: events, groups and resources.
• All code released as open source.

16 apps are now live, in test, or being built, with partners in 11 countries. Alongside our work on big projects, we’ll continue to support diverse initiatives, like the Democracy Book Club, a Swiss platform for musicians, and a hyper-local app in Germany.

Scaling up

We’re working on some big, high profile open social projects, aimed at onboarding people around the world at scale:

CAMFED. Our mobile app for this big African charity is now in test, offering a portal built around news, community, groups and resources - all designed to move the 400,000 CAMFED Association members over to an open social platform.

French Media Alliance. We’re working with a group of large French media companies to build a state-of-the-art, human-first social app. The core version is up and running; next we’ll be rolling out own-branded versions for the different partners, ahead of a launch in January 2027.

UK Local News Fund. Together with Bylines Network, we’ve won a UK government grant to build infrastructure for independent local newsrooms in the UK. Based on Newsmast’s existing technology, we’re assembling a Local News Technology Stack, which we’ll pilot with a number of local demonstration projects, and Bylines Network. We’ll also be consulting UK news publishers on their technology needs, and creating a Discovery layer, bringing together news stories from across UK independent news outlets.

EU Youth-centred Social Media. Youth-Driven Open Socials - YOSO - is the name of a €1.5m bid led by Waag, to co-create alternative forms of social media with young people across Europe. Newsmast Europe is one of three builders, with Eurosky and Mastodon, and will lead the implementation phase. We hope that this is the first of many programmes and projects supporting open social which will be funded by EU institutions.

German content creators. Through Save Social - Networks for Democracy, we’re exploring how Mastodon and PeerTube can combine in an app for musicians, comedians, writers and artists. We’ve just started work on the technical integration, with support from Framasoft, developers of PeerTube.

US News Publishers. Along with Adam Schweigert, our Head of US Partnerships, we’ve been talking to a wide range of US independent news publishers, and to the networks that bring them together: INN, LION and the News Product Alliance. Our offer is a handful of founding pilots, with the set-up fee waived. We hope to have the first up and running in early 2027.

Outreach

By the end of 2026 the Newsmast team will have attended 30 events around the world, almost all in person. That's a big number! We've been spreading the word of what we do, and most importantly, listening to what people want. Building connections which will sustain us for years to come. A few of the highlights: enjoying poutine in Montreal, winning the Open Social Award at PublicSpaces (followed by an incredible after-party), forging friendships in the forest at DWeb Camp, melting in the heatwave in Paris at the launch of the French Media Alliance, swimming in the sea at Global Gathering - and sharing many pizzas with Björn and friends.

June was a pivotal moment in the year. We won the Grand Prize at the inaugural Open Social Awards in Amsterdam, chosen from over 70 entries from across the open social sphere. It’s the biggest vote of confidence we’ve had, helping us to open doors and gain partners around the world.

Policy

Our main policy work is through European.Social, where I’m co-convenor, alongside Björn Staschen from Save Social.

European.Social began in January, in a breakout group at a Social Web Foundation workshop before FOSDEM, and it has grown fast. The 12 founding signatories have grown to over 150 organisations and almost 700 individuals. All supporting shared European values, and a complementary technology stack, which brings together Matrix, ActivityPub and the Atmosphere.

On 4 November 2026 the coalition launched as an organisation, including a Builders’ Circle where the builders making social platforms in Europe can gather together, swap ideas, and get support. We’re working on shared infrastructure, in a Eurobridge and Euromoderation - and the big aim is to join together to unlock large scale European funding, channelled through bodies like the recently formed Digital Commons EDIC. The first fruits of this work are an EU bid for Youth-centred Social Media, led by Waag Futurelab, with technology from Newsmast, Eurosky and Mastodon, and distribution through Save Social.

Research

At Global Gathering in Estoril, Portugal, we ran a workshop on Wellbeing, ritual and return: Why people leave the platforms we build for them and what they need to stay.

Our provocation:

Commercial platforms have spent two decades perfecting the dark art of making people stay. We need to create healthy alternatives where people come back freely, unprompted, to a place they own, and in which they participate.

The Newsmast team introduced three thresholds every community platform must survive: adoption, return, contribution. We backed this up with examples of success and failure across three continents. The Circle then pooled the room’s experience: can ritual replace addiction? What makes adoption rational for institutions? What’s our shared metric for attachment?

Together we explored what makes people join, use and enjoy community platforms.

What we took away: the questions resonated with our audience, and provoked deep conversations. We need to move on from broad assumptions about the benefits of open social to data-backed playbooks of what works.

Together with the Civic Interaction Design research group at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, we’re taking this work forward, focusing on community stewardship, ritual and return.

Team and organisation

Early in 2026 we were fortunate to be joined by Mariana Borges, who is now our Project Manager. Mariana joined Newsmast in our first wave of activity, in early 2023, and we’re delighted to have her back. Our core team of Saskia Welch (Head of Community) and Mariana is supported by our part-time Editor, Ben Parker, our Civic Media Practitioner in Residence, Megan Lucero, and our South East Asian development team, led by Aung Kyaw Phyo.

To support our European work, we’ve created a Dutch foundation, Stichting Newsmast Europe, based in The Hague. Laurens Hof is joining as a Board Member; Mariana will be our first employee; and our hosting operations will run through here, provided by OVHcloud as standard where partners don’t choose their own provider. The UK-based Newsmast Foundation remains our global charitable umbrella; over time we expect to set up an operating arm and fiscal sponsorship in the US.

We’re a small team, with big ambitions, backed up by proven technology and experience. Making us the number one starting place in the world for any organisation wanting to share knowledge, build community and create an open social platform.

Friends, money and fun

A lot has stayed constant since we kicked off Newsmast four years ago. We moved early on building around communities, and there’s a growing consensus that this is the way to go. We also made some pretty big assumptions, which turned out to be wrong:

We believed that community leaders would jump at the chance to move to alternatives. Big names like Barack Obama and Taylor Swift were passed around. That didn’t work out. Instead, we have a growing army of friends and supporters - that’s you - who are spreading the word for us. In 2027 we’d like to do more to bring our friends together. Expect another big party - and more.

We thought money would flow easily to build alternatives to toxic, oligarch-owned social media. That was also wrong. The big foundations have been preoccupied elsewhere, with Trump administration cuts and the shiny allure of AI both capturing attention and funding. That is starting to change. We’ve won our first government funding, and started charging for our work. In 2027 that needs to accelerate. Our model is a blend: grants, social investment, revenue from partners, and research funding. We’ll need all four.

We wanted to have an element of fun in all we do. In a challenging world, that’s been tough. What we hold on to is the power of fandoms to bring communities to open socials - and the space for fun on even the most professional, scientific timelines. We need more of this in 2027.

Join us

Thank you to everyone who has helped us get this far: partners, advocates, builders, and the friends who speak up and spread the word. Four years in, we know what works. Start with the community, and let the technology follow. In 2027 we’ll be doing more of it, with more of you.

If you run a community, a newsroom or a network and want to build on open social, talk to us.