AnarchistFederation.net - live news from 250+ anarchist collectives

The Online Anarchist Federation aggregates daily news from all of the anarchist websites in one single convenient place so you can make sure to never miss anything.

Over 250 sources are automatically republished here as soon as new content becomes available. More than a simple media relay, this platform is an up-to-date database of the radical alternative press and a leading source of anarchist information.

We are a multi-lingual platform bringing together the publications of anarchist organizations from all over the world. Available in english, french, german, spanish, and portuguese.

Why?
Improving online presence. The problem with independent decentralized media is that there are so many of them, it’s hard to keep track of all the different websites and make sure you don’t miss any news. Imagine if you had 250 friends on Facebook and the news feed didn’t exist – the only way for you to get news from friends would be to look at 250 different pages. Obviously, you would be missing a lot of news from some of your friends. This is the state of today’s digital anarchist media universe.

Fighting censorship. Recently, we have been reminded once again that anarchists can’t rely on capitalist platforms when Facebook banned anarchists and antifascists. This is another reason why we must implement alternative methods of distributing our news and our information.

Optimizing content distribution. Most anarchist websites aren’t optimized for modern web browsers and mobile devices. Websites with bad search engine optimizations are strongly downranked in search engines, which means the content has a lot less visibility than it deserves. The Online Anarchist Federation is built with SEO in mind for optimal distribution of the content across different search engines.

Independent media. Mass media are owned and controlled by a handful of capitalists and search engines are owned by big multinationals like Google and Microsoft. We need an alternative to aggregate the content of all the anarchist websites without relying on corporations.

Archiving for the future. Distributing the content on this website means that there is a digital copy of the information, making sure it doesn’t disappear if the original website goes down. Throughout the year we’ve seen some important websites like InfoShop and IndyMedia shutting down. Those websites hosted a lot of useful educational content on anarchist ideas, and sadly this content has now disappeared from the internet. Having a backup archive prevents this kind of risk.

Search engine. Having all the articles indexed in a database makes it possible to easily find exactly what you are looking for. Use the search engine to find a specific topic and bring up all the posts from 250+ anarchist groups matching your keywords.

United we are stronger. The platform is structured as an online anarchist federation connecting the groups together to have a stronger impact. Many anarchist organizations have used this horizontal and decentralized approach throughout history, and it can also be successful on the internet.



How does it work?
The website works as an automated news aggregator updated every 5 minutes. We automatically repost the articles from websites with public RSS feeds. The system to import the article and the images on the website was custom developed by our team for the specific needs of the Online Anarchist Federation.

Several tools are available to facilitate access to information through the integration of modern technologies such as the automatic translation of articles, accelerated mobile pages (AMP), social media sharing functions, notifications, newsletter, exporting news feed to other websites, etc. Our website is fully compatible with mobile devices and tablets. We use multiple SEO strategies to optimize the distribution of content across search engines, making sure the information is seen by a wide audience of readers.



Technical details
Non-commercial. This website runs on a custom-made platform built and maintained by a collective of activist programmers and volunteers. Most of the features are unique to this website. The server is powered by Linux and runs only non-proprietary software and open source libraries.

Activist server. This platform is hosted on a self-managed server powered by 100% renewable energy.

Security & Privacy. We take your privacy very seriously. To protect the users of this website, the connection is encrypted with HTTPS, an internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user’s computer and the site. We use security technologies like HSTS and OCSP. The server is behind a firewall to protect against hacking attempts and DDoS attacks. We also don’t track the IP addresses of the authors of the articles or the visitors of this website. Users can expect a secure and private online experience when using this website.

Full-text extraction. Unlike a standard RSS aggregator, we use a special content extraction technology to get the full text of the article instead of just an excerpt with the first characters. We also import the images and run an algorithm to pick the most relevant heading image for the article.

Artificial Intelligence. We use advanced A.I. technologies to increase the accuracy of our text extraction system, as well as language-detection features to ensure the text corresponds to the language of our website. We also have our own algorithm to guess the subject of the text, make sure the content is relevant, and avoid duplicate posts. Artificial Intelligence is trained with data which means it gets better and more accurate over time.

Self-managed. Most of the platform is automated to avoid human interference. If a decision needs to be taken, it will be collectively decided by the autonomous collective managing the website. You can join the forum if you want to participate in direct democracy.



Content policy
As a decentralized platform, we do not have an editorial committee, so it means the articles are published as-is without any editing. There are no humans who decide what is published and what is removed. To avoid media convergence, each of the publishers must preserve its autonomy.

Due to our editorial policy, it is therefore not possible to register as a member to publish an individual article on the website. If you want to post an article on this website, you will have to submit your content to one of the publishers that we are reposting here.

The comments section of the website has been intentionally disabled to avoid stealing traffic from the original authors and give them all the credit they deserve. Readers who wish to comment on a particular article are invited to comment on the website where the original article was published.

This website is not moderated and therefore, it is not possible to request to modify or delete an article.



Requirements for inclusion

• Content is related to anarchist ideas
• The point of view expressed is anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian
• The main role of the website is to distribute informative articles
• No opinion blog owned by a single person
• The main language of the website is English (use our multi-lingual platforms instead)
• Posts have at least 300 characters of text
• Most of the content is written articles (no images blog or events calendar)
• Average of at least 4 new posts per year (inactive sources will be disabled)
• RSS feed is available and validated

You can contact us to suggest adding a new source.

The collective operating this website reserve the right to remove any source at any time if the content does not meet the minimum standards we expect from an anarchist website. We do not tolerate any kind of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or any kind of discrimination, authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, or hate. This platform will not a tribune for the ideas we fight against. These issues are discussed in the collectively-managed forum.

The inclusion of a publisher on this platform is not an endorsement. The opinions expressed on our website are those of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect our official position as a collective.



Who are we?
This platform is a custom-made website built by the same team of activist programmers behind many well-known online anarchist communities such as Info Libertaire, Anarcho-Punk.net, Pirate Punk, Libertaire.net, No Gods No Masters Coop, and many others.

It all started as a community project by members of the french anarchist collective Forum Libertaire. The idea was to bring together all of the french anarchist news which was split into 100+ different blogs. The initial website InfoLibertaire.net was finally launched in 2016 and has now become the leading reference for the radical left press with over 100,000 unique visitors every month. During the last 4 years, our programmer team continued to improve the platform with new features and bug fixes. After a successful proof of concept, it’s now the time to extend the platform to other languages so more people can benefit from it.

The hosting of the server and the development of the website is made possible with donations from No Gods No Masters cooperative. This partnership secures the long-term sustainability of the platform with continued funding of the servers and also gives access to an experienced team of programmers for maintenance and updates. But more importantly, it also means we don’t have to put commercial ads or ask for donations to pay the bills.

The platform is run by activists and is open to anyone wishing to contribute or improve it. To contact us, use this form, or let’s talk on the forum.




Subscribe! Different functions allow you to receive alerts at any time for each new publication via web notifications in your Chrome or Firefox browser , on PC and mobile device (push notifications). Daily or weekly updates can also be emailed by subscribing to the newsletter.

You can also subscribe to the RSS feed with your preferred feed reader.

 

If you want to get involved in the collective you can join the forum here: https://forum.anarchistfederation.net/