The Uncensored News Software

The Uncensored News software lets you run your own news site, tightly integrated with Mastodon and the Fediverse.

The Forest wiki is the software running  UncensoredNews.US.  163 RSS feeds, 55,000+ listed articles, 12,000+ recommended articles 79 recommended climate videos, and a growing number of curators. Login with Mastodon, post to Mastodon and import from Mastodon.

To circumvent censorship and propaganda, we need distributed news, a federation of IndyMedia news servers.  The Forest wiki is a distributed news server.   But it is much more than just a news server.   A Forest Wiki news server, such as UncensoredNews.US is a searchable tree of categories containing videos, articles, RSS feeds, Mastodon feeds and images.   When a topic suddenly becomes hot, you can search the historic database,  and publish the relevant content.  This is particularly helpful when it comes to politics, we tend to forget what some politician like Ron DeSantis has done in the past.  When someone posts climate misinformation, I will often search for the correct information, and post a number of articles correcting their misinformation.

The Forest wiki is not just a search engine, it is also a discovery engine.  If you search, and find one article of interest, you can browse the category, to find other articles of interest.  For example the section on climate victories includes many things with completely different search terms.   Or if you find an article you like about the risk of sea level rise from the Thwaites Glacier, you may want to also explore the following categories.  Global Ice --> Polar Ice --> Antarctica --> Thwaites Glacier .

There are a million tools for publishing articles on the internet.  What the Forest wiki does is aggregate and curate those articles.  The Forest wiki contains everything needed to run a curation site.  You can add RSS feeds, it will import the articles and their preview images.   You can curate the RSS feeds, recommend the good articles and quickly post them with an image to Mastodon.   You can add timelines from trusted Mastodon curators. It will import their toots, filter them,  import the recommended articles and their preview images.  You can add videos, and their preview images.  You can very quickly toot those videos.   

We are so used to massive databases and infinite scrolling that we have forgotten a basic principal in human factors.  There should be no more than about 7 items in a  category. The Forest Wiki lets you sort content into a tree of categories.    You can organize them as a topic taxonomy.  You can do this one article at at time, or you can search, select the relevant articles and move them all at once to a desired category.     Then it is possible to just pay attention to the categories of interest to you.

If you would like your own Forest wiki Indymedia news server, point a domain name at cname UncensoredNews.US, send @UncensoredNews@Mastodon.Social the url, and I will create the server for you.  You can then login with your Mastodon account, and start curating news.  In the near future you will be able to migrate your data to your own internet host using a Forest Wiki Docker container, or a BastilleBSD container.    You can play with an older version of the Forest Wiki, or download it from Docker Hub, but it does not yet include the news curation functionality.