Inspiration
Social media has become the world’s primary news source, yet who gets to speak is still tightly controlled. Large Instagram pages shape narratives, while everyday people with firsthand experiences rarely get access to those audiences. We wanted to flip that model—treating news like open-source software, where anyone can contribute and the community decides what matters.
What it does
Open Source News is an open platform that lets everyday people publish posts and reels through shared, high-reach Instagram accounts. Instead of news flowing top-down from major outlets, individuals can submit content directly, making breaking news, local stories, and underreported perspectives visible to much larger audiences.
How we built it
We built a lightweight, social-first platform that:
- Accepts user-submitted news content (text, images, and short videos)
- Structures submissions for Instagram posting
- Allows moderation and approval before publishing
- Distributes approved content to shared Instagram accounts
The system prioritizes speed, simplicity, and accessibility over traditional newsroom complexity.
Challenges we ran into
- Balancing open participation with moderation, trust, and misinformation prevention
- Designing around Instagram’s posting limitations and workflows
- Defining what “open source” means for news without sacrificing credibility
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Building a working proof-of-concept for crowd-driven news distribution
- Reframing large social media pages as shared public infrastructure
- Lowering the barrier for everyday people to have their voices heard
What we learned
- People are eager to contribute to news when the process is simple and transparent
- Social platforms are powerful, but access—not reach—is the real bottleneck
- Open systems require thoughtful governance, not just open submission
What's next for Open Source News
- Improve moderation tools and transparency
- Expand to multiple shared accounts by topic or region
- Introduce reputation-based trust and community validation
- Open-source the platform so others can run their own networks
Our long-term goal is to make Open Source News a public utility for modern journalism.
Built With
- cloud-run
- facebook-graph
- google-app-engine
- google-cloud
- javascript
- node.js
- react
- redis
- supabase
- typescript
- vercel
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