Project Mushroom is a new social media platform that accepts it has values and an agenda - but on the “awakened” side
The question of how healthy communities relate to planetary digital/social networks has been one we’ve addressed from the beginning of the Alternative Global. Yet while our own developments are ongoing, it’s fascinating to keep track of “social” elsewhere, as it evolves and irrupts.
Our own thinking about an alternative media accepts one premise above all - that all news has an implicit agenda (we are informed both by the Glasgow Media Group and Peace Journalism methods). It just depends how explicitly aware journalists and practitioners are of its existence. We’re pretty clear to you, our audience, from our taxonomising and major themes, that we are coming from a take on climate crisis, radical technologies and superpowered community. And that this take informs our news-gathering and projects.
So it’s bracing, as Elon Musk does his worst with the Twitter platform he recently bought, to find a response to his libertarian agenda which is just as militant and clear. The Mushroom Project is a new and super-progressive social media project - almost the anti-matter to Musk’s position. They set out their stall below, on the basis of a very successful crowdfunding round recently:
Project Mushroom started in November 2022 as a community-led effort to build a safe place on the internet. We are assembling a creator council that will help direct our efforts going forward. This is open to anyone who wants to help build a better online experience — free from harassment, free from bigotry, and one that promotes connection, mutual aid, and transformative action at a critical moment in history.
The name 'Project Mushroom' comes from the ground beneath our bodies. Mycelium is the part of a fungus that gathers nutrients, comprised of web-like threads. Like Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark, a mushroom is the visible fruit of the work of billions of connections waiting for the perfect moment to rise up together.
Project Mushroom is a project of Currently, and organized by Eric Holthaus, a journalist and climate scientist who has spent his career focused on climate justice and equity. We're also working with ex-Twitter employees who want to continue their work of bringing a safer, better online experience into the world.
We will offer at least four types of creator services:
🍄 Newsletter hosting/publishing (including setup, maintenance, discoverability, creator tools via Ghost)
🍄 Live events hosting (audio, video, in person, and creator support)
🍄 A curated Mastodon-based social media network
🍄 Onboarding assistance for your followers to join you
More info on these tools will become available as they are built and passed through our community-led advisors.
Our goal is to build an open-source community of creators that can help each other bring into being the world that needs to exist.
Instead of paying for your blue check, Project Mushroom will ensure creators are paid for their labor. We are contemplating a pay structure that would let creators keep 100% of their proceeds from their paid memberships *and* charge $0 in setup fees or ongoing maintenance. In exchange, we'll fund Project Mushroom by engaging with mission-aligned advertisers (i.e. no Exxon) and host regular membership drives to keep this a community-funded effort. We are doing this for us.
We’ve had enough of the scorched earth policies of billionaires on a warming planet. Project Mushroom will cultivate timely and accurate information that supports community resilience and safety during the climate emergency. It will work to build strong, long-term relationships with people whose stories we share and those who use our services.
More here. We’re fascinated to see that this is partly being set up by ex-Twitter employees - one of the positive outcomes of Musk’s executive shake-up of the platform.
As we attempted to sign up, we came upon this explicit manifesto, which we have to “accept” to go on to fully register:
Is this an understandable reaction to the distortions of platforms like Twitter and Facebook? The Mushrooms don’t beat about the mycelial bush:
We’ve had enough of the scorched earth policies of billionaires on a warming planet. Project Mushroom will cultivate timely and accurate information that supports community resilience and safety during the climate emergency. It will work to build strong, long-term relationships with people whose stories we share and those who use our services.
We’re supportive - but referencing from our own archive of research and sense-making, we wonder whether we need media that reaches across divides and builds richer common-sense locally, than a perfect garden the of values-and-ideology aligned. We’ll watch Mushroom with interest.