Sabot Media

A/I may be ending. The story is nowhere near over. For twenty-five years, #AutisticiInventati showed what it could mean for movements to build and control their own communications infrastructure. Its loss should not send everyone searching for the next single service to replace it. It should send us looking in a hundred directions. In Boise, the Boise Autonomous Solidarity Hub is experimenting with one of them. @BASH@kolektiva.social has put a small independent publication on NomadNet, a system running over Reticulum rather than relying solely on the conventional web. It has articles, archives, submissions and contact functions, reachable through a cryptographic network destination instead of an ordinary domain. 99a904b9ab830b7baa9d5115eb8854d7:/page/index.mu That is not the answer. That's what makes it interesting. Other projects are trying other things: cooperative infrastructure, self-managed servers, RSS, mirrors, print, radio, downloadable archives, federated publishing and networks that barely resemble the commercial web at all. We don't need to find another A/I. We need to understand how to build a thousand different pieces of what made A/I possible. Sabot is beginning a living guide to autonomous media and infrastructure, aimed especially at small and rural projects: how to publish, archive, distribute, host, mirror and keep going when a platform, host, domain, provider or collective disappears. Coming Soon: BECOME THE THOUSAND SERVERS A living guide to autonomous publishing, infrastructure and survival Follow the people experimenting. Follow small radical media. Preserve what matters. Then build something.

Nineteen days before the U.S. sanctions deadline, Autistici/Inventati is shutting down. For twenty-five years, A/I built infrastructure for people who understood that privacy, autonomy and resistance require more than good intentions. Now a government order has made keeping that infrastructure alive untenable. There is grief in this. There should also be fury. Because fascism does not arrive only as boots in the street. Sometimes it arrives as a designation, a compliance deadline, a terrified service provider, a bank account that suddenly stops working. Bureaucracy has always been one of authoritarianism’s favorite costumes. The paperwork looks terribly respectable while the walls close in. And this cannot remain a problem for “the nerds.” People organizing in every sphere need to understand what autonomous infrastructure means, why it matters, and what happens when we leave it to a tiny number of exhausted technical collectives to keep the lights on for everyone else. We need to become the thousand servers. Now. If one autonomous project can be isolated, there should be ten more behind it. A hundred. A thousand. This should be the moment radical hosting, federated services, community servers, privacy infrastructure and collectively controlled networks begin flourishing, not retreating. Build them in basements, social centers, infoshops, collectives, cooperatives and wherever else people can keep a machine humming and a cable plugged into the wall. The lesson cannot be that autonomous infrastructure was too dangerous to maintain. The lesson has to be that we did not have nearly enough of it. We ❤️ A/I. We are heartbroken to see it end this way. And we refuse to treat its shutdown as the end of the idea it spent twenty-five years proving was possible. Use the logo and banner provided by @subvertising@mastodon.bida.im to keep their memory alive. Let's not forget this by next week! Goodbye, A/I. Not farewell. Read our full report: https://sabot.media/post/ai-shuts-down campaign page: https://sabot.media/campaigns/autistici-inventati #AutisticiInventati #Antifa #DigitalRights #Privacy #MutualAid #AutonomousInfrastructure #Fediverse #SelfHosting #RadicalTech #NoBlogs #SabotMedia

Noblogs is back up for now! Go now and save some sites.

Posted on IG: We’re done posting to Meta. Sabot’s Facebook and Instagram accounts may remain online for now. A collective decision about whether to delete them entirely has not been made. But I, personally, have made my own decision: I’m no longer going to spend my time feeding our reporting, organizing work, photographs, graphics, or attention into Meta’s platforms. If other members want to post here they have access and are able to do so. This was not an easy decision and we may return. But for now I think it is important and I hope you follow us off these platforms. If you’ve followed us here, thank you. Seriously. But this is where our active presence on these platforms ends. Sabot isn’t going anywhere. We’re publishing more than ever. We just don’t need to keep pouring our work into corporate platforms designed to trap communities inside somebody else’s infrastructure, harvest their attention, and decide which parts of the world they’re permitted to see. Independent media should have independent infrastructure. Communities should be able to find each other without asking Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms for permission. So come find us elsewhere. Follow Sabot on the federated and independent social web. Follow our Mastodon presence, subscribe directly to sabot.media, use RSS, bookmark the site, share our work directly, or print and distro it. The internet is much bigger than Facebook and Instagram. It always was. I’ll see you outside the walls. -Ash

Preserve a Public Noblogs Site

Public movement history should not disappear because a server, provider or domain does.

If you run a Noblogs site, save two different things:

A WordPress export containing the material needed to rebuild the site.

A static mirror showing the public site as readers actually saw it.

If you administer the site Open YOURBLOG.noblogs.org/wp-admin and sign in. In the dashboard, select Tools → Export. Select All content, then press Download Export File. Rename the downloaded file blogname-export-YYYY-MM-DD.xml.

Install the free, open-source program HTTrack. Open HTTrack and select Next or New Project. Give the project your blog’s name and choose where the backup should be stored. Select Add URL, paste the complete public homepage address, then select Next → Finish.

When the download finishes, choose Browse Mirrored Website. Open several posts, archive pages, images and downloadable files to make sure they work.

Put the WordPress XML file and the entire HTTrack project folder inside one clearly dated folder. Keep one copy on your computer and another on a separate drive or trusted location.

The XML export does not preserve the site’s appearance. The HTTrack mirror is not a replacement for the WordPress export. Keep both.

If you are preserving someone else’s public site

For an important individual page: Open the public page and copy its complete URL. Go to Internet Archive: Save Page Now. Paste the URL and press Save Page. Open the archived result and confirm that it works.

Install the free, open-source SingleFile browser extension. Return to the original public page, wait for it to finish loading, click the SingleFile icon and save the resulting .html file.

For a whole public site, follow the HTTrack instructions above using the public homepage. Do not sign in, enter passwords or attempt to reach private pages.

Record the page title, author or collective, original URL, publication date and the date you saved it. Internet Archive is an additional copy, not your only copy. Submitting a homepage does not guarantee that the Archive captured every linked page.

Finally, test the local backup with Wi-Fi turned off. Open its index.html, click through several pages, and make sure images and documents load. Preserve public material only. Do not bypass logins, collect private data or republish material that could expose people. Respect authorship, context and removal requests.

An export is not a mirror. A mirror is not enough. Keep both. Keep two copies.

#Noblogs #InternetArchive #DigitalPreservation #MovementArchives #AutisticiInventati #ResistantCommunication #IndependentMedia #SabotMedia