We need an alternative to big tech platforms: Introducing, MUNI

MUNI, an online community space and network, launches on September 16, 2026. It's time for a platform where facts and trusted voices can thrive.

MANILA, Philippines – Anyone with a social media account can see that our online spaces are not like they were.

Instead of seeing your friends’ posts, you see content you never asked for, from accounts you don’t even follow. Around a third of online content posted after chat bots came into the picture may have been written with AI. We dodge disinformation, AI slop, and toxic sludge on our feeds every day.

And so, we built MUNI.

MUNI was founded on the belief that facts and verified information can thrive, but only in a platform that gives it a chance. MUNI is that platform, which launched on September 15, and can be accessed through the websites of various Philippine news outlets. We want to invite other news groups and civic groups to join us on MUNI.

MUNI’s origin story: Our experiment with Rappler Communities

The predecessor of MUNI is Communities, which we at Rappler launched in December 2023. At the time, we were already getting worrisome signs of how internet enshittification and big tech’s opaque algorithms were driving people away from journalism.

Back then, we envisioned an alternative space where we could bring our readers, our supporters, our partners in the civic space, and even other Philippine news organizations. If the huge platforms we had relied on for distribution and connection were no longer helping us, and were even endangering our community, why not build our own? 

That’s what Rappler Communities was for the past three years. It became a space, a digital plaza, where we created public chat rooms centered on our news coverage and civic action. It’s built on top of the Matrix protocol, a messaging system that is decentralized, interoperable, and secure, and now used by governments like Germany and France.

Our reporters sent their live updates and photos from their field coverage to the chat rooms, and our readers could ask them questions in real time. Our partners used the chat rooms to tell us what was going on in their sectors or communities. We used the chat rooms for election monitoring and crowdsourcing incidents of corruption to fuel our investigative journalism. Earlier this year, that anti-corruption Communities initiative won gold at the Digital Media Awards Asia-Pacific, under the audience engagement category.

What we’ve seen is promising. Despite our miniscule newsroom budget and limited resources for a large-scale campaign, Rappler Communities has thousands of regular users.

The use of our chat rooms is now part of regular newsroom operations, for breaking news coverage and scheduled interactions between our journalists and curious community members. We’ve even created chat rooms moderated by civil society groups, civic leaders, and government officials, not just journalists. We’re all guided by one principle: create an online space where facts and verified information can thrive, so that real-world change can happen.

The technology may be new, but the ethos is time-tested: People equipped with facts and top-quality information are able to make better decisions and change their situation. 

This September, the month of World News Day, we’re going all-in with Communities, and now want to offer it to as many organizations and people as possible. And so, we’ve renamed it MUNI, a Filipino word that means “to reflect.” It is also a word within, “community,” the heart of this initiative.

We want to invite trusted civic groups, communities, and newsrooms all over the world to create chat rooms on MUNI. Because of the Matrix’s decentralized infrastructure, your chat room can exist within your own apps or websites. In our case, MUNI exists as a tab on the Rappler app. It’s also visible on the websites of two other news outlets: Daily Guardian in Iloilo, and SunStar in Cebu, among others.

The more of us are on MUNI, the more viable this space becomes as an alternative to platforms now dominated by AI slop or profit-driven algorithms.

Explore MUNI by downloading the Rapper app, for free, from App Store or Play Store. Tap the Muni tab at the bottom, then join as many chat rooms as you want. If you already have the Rappler app, just open the app and you will be asked to update it. For some users, it may take time for App Store or Play Store to give you the update option since we have just launched this.

Want a chat room on MUNI?

If your organization is interested in joining MUNI, please email us at community@rappler.com by October 31, 2026, so we can invite you to an exploratory meeting about MUNI.

Let’s assert our independence from tech platforms that don’t prioritize facts and verified information. Let’s give ourselves, and our community, a real choice. – Rappler.com