Become Informed,
Not Influenced

Other independent media platforms are highly fragmented. Publications compete for subscribers and followers, while readers are left to navigate the network while hitting paywalls and managing the volume of their own subscription lists. This only segments people further from each other. Instead, Aemula is one cohesive ecosystem. One subscription unlocks access to all content. Publishers don't have to compete for an audience or handle their own paid subscriber conversion. We have no ads or social media style growth mechanism. Just subscribe once and enjoy exploring freely.

Aemula is not a publication. We do not editorialize, we do not push narratives, and we do not require exclusivity. We are simply a neutral platform, providing infrastructure for independent publishers to share their work and for subscribers to access credible, trustworthy reporting in a cohesive environment. Where we do show similarities to traditional news outlets is in the newsroom resources we offer publishers, including premium data feeds, professional research tools, peer-editorial, collaborative tools, and communal grant funding. This way, independent publishers have the access and support necessary to conduct their best work, on par with what they could produce in a traditional newsroom.

While we do aggregate media from independent publishers for convenient discovery, we are not a news aggregator. Traditional news aggregators typically have human editors, their own biases, and curate work produced in traditional newsrooms, which are subject to audience capture and their own editorial narratives. Instead, Aemula is a verifiably neutral platform, we don't editorialize, and we incentivize independent journalists to produce original reporting outside of the perverse incentive structures that have become so common in traditional media.

Decentralization means that every independent publisher owns and controls their own work, and every subscriber controls their own account. We don't want to stand in between the direct line of communication between subscribers and publishers. We believe that freedom of speech is essential to maintaining a stable democracy, so no central authority should have control over the flow of information. Publishing, discovery, and monetization on Aemula is all peer-to-peer, open source, and fully transparent.

Aemula uses a verifiably neutral, open-source, community-governed curation algorithm. Rather than just feeding you more of the same topics you always read, Aemula aims to promote the exploration of new perspectives. To avoid any algorithmic bias, our curation process does not see any detail about the content or the readers. Instead, we simply look at past interactions between readers and media to build an understanding of who typically agrees with whom, allowing us to view the different ideological communities that form. The algorithm then tries to find ways to build bridges between these communities to open new lines of communication across ideological divides. But you shouldn't have to rely on us to tell you what to read. You can see a visual representation of how our algorithm views all published content on our Explore page, so you can control how you discover content.

Anyone and everyone can publish on Aemula. We simply provide the infrastructure necessary for individuals to publish independently. Since publishers retain ownership of their content, we require no exclusivity. If you want to post content that you have published elsewhere so you can expand your reach and earnings within our subscriber community, we encourage you to do so! We have an integration with Substack, so you can link your account to cross-post automatically. While open publishing is great for independence and free speech, it is also at risk of malicious spam or bot posts, as well as harmful content. But we should not be the ones to determine what is free speech and what is harmful content. Instead, Aemula provides tools for peer-editorial and paid community moderation. We utilize an immutable reputation system to ensure that credible publishers are rewarded for their quality work, while bad actors fail to negatively impact our community.

Reader subscriptions are paid into a community-governed subscription pool. At the end of each month, our open-source payout algorithm programmatically determines the share each publisher earns from the pool. Your activity as you read and interact with content on Aemula is used as the input into this process, so that your subscription goes to the publishers you support.

Aemula earns 10% of subscriptions so that we can invest in more support resources for independent publishers, grow our community, and continue improving the platform. Our focus is to ensure publishers and other contributors to the Aemula community are compensated for all of the great work they produce. We want to streamline costs and balance the amount necessary to reinvest into cultivating a healthy information environment so we can pass on as much of the subscription payments to publishers and contributors as possible.