Part of Maria Ressa’s response to what she calls the “enshitifcation” of the internet is a new app platform called Rappler Communities.

And in a WAN-Ifra World Editors’ Forum interview with Lucinda Jordaan, she warned, “There is no future for digital news unless we build our own tech.”

The Rappler co-founder and chief executive, and 2021 Nobel laureate, called for collective action “This is existential for the planet – if journalism doesn’t survive, democracy dies,” she said.

Launched last December, the mobile app built on the decentralised open source Matrix protocol, “has the potential to become a global independent news distribution outlet”, promising to pave the way for a shared reality to counter “the cascading failures of a corrupted public information ecosystem”.

Ressa says the launch was prompted by the events of last year – generative AI, Meta “choking traffic to news sites”, and Google building generative AI on top of its search – “we knew we would have to pivot.

“We realised there is no future for digital news unless we build our own tech, because there are only three ways a digital news site, or any digital site, gets traffic: direct, search or social search.”

With the roll-out of AI search, “the digital funnel is closing” giving publishers no control over their distribution.

Ressa said they were building an ontology and a way to use the new technology of generative AI, and realised they needed to do more than building it on Meta or Twitter, “when we can’t be assured that facts will win, or that the hideous manipulation of algorithms will not happen”.

Building the communities prepares Rappler for the 2025 elections and “gives us an idea for how this will survive this era,” she said, “because I’m making the bet that the enshitifcation of the internet, or the Age of Enshitocene, is only going to get worse, and people are going to want a place where they’re not attacked; where they can say what they think without being attacked, and that you can actually trust that the person you’re talking to is a real person.

“Once our community is set at the matrix protocol chat app, it can then work with other news organisations and become a trusted news distributor. So we will own our distribution, and we could strengthen our communities.”

Ressa said Rappler planned four more new sites before the end of the year, in different parts of the world, federated on the protocol.

End-to-end encrypted, decentralised, and neither individually owned nor profit-driven, “it’s literally, a place where we have a shared reality”.