самиздат — self-published, passed hand to hand
Under the USSR, banned truth moved one carbon copy at a time. We do the same thing at internet scale — smuggling independent journalism past state censorship in Russia, Iran, and Belarus, and standing for one idea above all: a free press, everywhere.
Authoritarian states don't burn newspapers anymore — they block domains. When a censor cuts the address, the story is still out there; the reader just can't reach it. Samizdat Online rebuilds the bridge, over and over, faster than it can be torn down.
Our central editorial focus is global freedom of the press. Not one country, not one language — the universal right to report and to read. We curate and translate the world's independent journalism into five languages and deliver it inside the firewall, where it's needed most and reaches least.
Every reader we reach is a small act of defiance. Multiply it by a network that refuses to hold still, and censorship starts losing the one fight it thought it had already won.
A shuttered press is only half of censorship — the other half is silencing the conversation. Ay! is Samizdat's browser-based encrypted calling: no app store, no install, no phone number handed to the state. Open a link, and you're connected — voice and video that route around the same blocks our news does.
It's built for the moment a journalist needs to reach a source, or a family needs to reach each other, and every ordinary channel has gone dark.
A newsroom is only the beginning. Around it we're building the tools a free press actually needs to survive.
Record photo and video evidence in the browser and blur faces and shift voices before a single byte leaves the phone — no app, no trace, no trust required.
A narrative observatory that tracks how independent and state outlets cover one event differently — making propaganda legible by comparison.
An embeddable button that lets outlets turn any article into a link guaranteed to reach readers behind the firewall.
Circumvention configs delivered through ordinary channels using hidden payloads — reaching users the app stores can't.
Russia, Iran, and Belarus are where we started, not where we stop. Our technology already pierces China's "great" firewall — the 800-lb gorilla of state censorship — and the same machinery works wherever a government blocks the press. What we need now are people: experts in Chinese media, and in every language and culture with a story its censors would rather bury, to help us report and translate for the readers who need it most. If that's you, come build the next desk with us.
* Freedom & the Media, Freedom House — only 13% of the world's population enjoys a free press.
The technology, in one paragraph
Every article becomes an SOS-Link — a tokenized web address
of the form https://{rotating-domain}?t={token} that decodes on our
servers, fetches the blocked page, and rewrites it to keep the reader safely
inside a network of disposable domains. Censors block addresses; we generate,
provision, and rotate hundreds of fresh ones automatically, retiring any the
moment a probe detects it's been cut. It's a distributed, self-healing swarm
designed to always stay one move ahead of the block — no VPN, no app, just a
link a reader can open.
Circumvention is a movement, not a product. We build alongside the people already doing the hard work of keeping Russians and Iranians connected — sharing infrastructure, audiences, and the same stubborn refusal to let the lights go out.