Building Freedom-First Communities with Soapbox
Social media platforms are increasingly censoring and deplatforming voices. Soapbox offers a way to build spaces where you control your content. Learn how we're building the future of censorship-resistant communities.
Social media platforms are increasingly censoring, shadow banning, and deplatforming voices they disagree with regardless of advertiser, shareholder, or political pressure. Soapbox offers a way to build spaces that allow you to control your content.
Here's how we're building the future of censorship-resistant communities. We're decentralizing the internet by helping you regain control of your community so a large company, government, or other entity can't silence you.
If you're wondering how much need there is to build communities that can't be taken down, this is a very real online threat to the most vulnerable. 2024 marked the "14th consecutive year of decline in global internet freedom. Of the 72 countries covered by Freedom on the Net 2024, conditions for human rights online deteriorated in 27, and 18 countries registered overall gains. The year's largest decline occurred in Kyrgyzstan, followed by Azerbaijan, Belarus, Iraq, and Zimbabwe." This is also a problem for those in Western countries who face pressure to upload identification in order to access a social media platform.
According to the Human Rights Foundation, AI tools, like Shakespeare from Soapbox, can be used to liberate. "AI tools can be paired with Freedom Tech protocols like Bitcoin and Nostr to ensure that anyone can safely and securely access the world's best intelligence."
Soapbox uses Nostr's censorship-resistant technology to provide tools for building a free and open Internet. As it's a protocol rather than a company, Nostr remains censorship-resistant, so there is no central control. Nostr lives not on centralized server racks, but on independent relays distributed globally. It's what our conversational AI builder, Shakespeare, builds on for your websites and apps. You build them and they exist on Nostr so there's no need to sign up for a subscription to deploy your creations.
Starting with a Clear Tech Decentralization Mission
In 2019, we witnessed platforms actively censoring women discussing their rights. Existing decentralized platforms like ActivityPub and Mastodon offered partial solutions but didn't solve the core problem: giving communities true independence from centralized control.
We launched our first project, Spinster, to prove what's possible when communities control their own spaces.
"Spinster used Soapbox, the front end software for Spinster," says M.K. Fain, our Chief Product Officer, "Then we generalized Soapbox. We made a version with our purple branding and feminist theming. What if that theming and customization were available to anyone?"
We forged a path forward by creating Soapbox software that lets anyone build their own censorship-resistant community. You can have your Soapbox while owning and controlling it.
Moving to True Online Decentralization
Our early work revealed a flaw in existing decentralized protocols like Mastodon, which created "mini Twitters" where administrators held ultimate power over user content and identity. The Nostr protocol offered a breakthrough solution.
Fain says, "We were having the same problem on ActivityPub servers as on Twitter. ActivityPub doesn't work like Nostr where everyone has their own identity. It's a bunch of mini Twitters. One admin controls everything, and each person is dependent on that admin."
With Nostr, you own your identity through a key pair instead of signing up for an "account" with your email or other personal identification. Your Nostr messages flow freely across its distributed relay network, and while communities can curate their spaces, they can't censor or de-platform you. Content filtering happens on the app side. This preserves community standards and individual autonomy.
The worst case scenario is you get booted from a relay. However, with Nostr's decentralized nature, other relays pick up your content, keeping it alive in case of any form of censorship.
Explore Communities Powered by Soapbox
See real-world examples of communities built with Soapbox tools. These platforms demonstrate the power of decentralized, censorship-resistant technology in action.
Building with And Other Stuff (AOS)
Soapbox is now part of And Other Stuff (AOS), a collective of innovative Nostr projects. Working with teams from White Noise, Cashu, and Nos, we're focused on:
- Making decentralized technology available to everyone.
- Providing simple tools for building Nostr communities.
- Integrating fast, efficient, and private payments.
- Ensuring private, encrypted communications.
- Supporting those needing platforms that resist censorship.
Communities will benefit from other tools in the AOS collective, like the privacy-enhancing tools in Cashu and White Noise. The group's goal is to make Nostr the best social protocol for open-source AI-first development and integration. Together, we want to build Nostr's future so that it's widely adopted and sustainable. Decentralized AI tools, like Shakespeare, will empower non-profits and the oppressed.
Join Us in Building a Free and Open Internet
We're creating more than social platforms. We're building infrastructure for free expression. If you're:
- Facing platform censorship or shadow banning.
- Looking to build an independent community.
- Passionate about digital sovereignty.
Soapbox provides tools to help you create permissionless spaces you have control over. We envision a future where canceling, shadowbans, and "content moderation" disguised as censorship are things of the past.
If you don't know how to code, that's OK! You can start building your censorship-resistant community using Shakespeare. You can also check out Chorus by AOS, an app we debuted at the Oslo Freedom Forum in May. If you're already a dev, check out our tools like MKStack. Teach yourself Nostr NIPs with NostrHub, which lets you explore a complete NIP database and publish custom NIPs.
Our tools are open source, decentralized, and production-ready.
Shakespeare helps you build without:
- •Censorship
- •Platform lock-in
- •Monthly subscriptions to build your websites & apps
Shakespeare gives you the ability to:
- •Pay for AI credits with Bitcoin or use a free LLM to get started
- •Deploy without purchasing a domain (though you can if you want to)
- •Get started building websites & apps without knowing how to write code