Meet Muni: The app at the heart of building community in the AI-driven, zero-click age
MUNI means “to reflect” in Filipino, and, serendipitously, the word is also contained within the heart of “community.”
MUNI is a scale-up: it builds on the success of Rappler Communities, the app launched by the independent Philippines news outlet three years ago. While Rappler+ is an exclusive, paid membership forum, Communities is free and open to all – with chatrooms proving the biggest drawcard.
Thousands used it daily, and chat rooms became a regular operational feature, used for everything from breaking news coverage to scheduled interactions with journalists, explains Pia Ranada, Rappler‘s Head of Community.
“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. Last year, that anti-corruption Communities initiative won gold at the Digital Media Awards Asia-Pacific, under the audience engagement category.”
“We’ve even created chat rooms moderated by civil society groups, civic leaders, and government officials – not just journalists,” adds Ranada.
Communities is built on the Matrix protocol – a secure, decentralised, interoperable messaging system – and is now even used by governments in Germany and France.
“Because of the Matrix’s decentralised infrastructure, your chat room can exist within your own apps or websites. MUNI, as an online space, thus functions as a common corridor linking various chat rooms that also exist in your newsroom’s own spaces. In our case, MUNI exists as a tab on our app,” Ranada explains.
‘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.’
At the heart of the matter
For the past three years or so, Rappler co-founder, Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, has been using every opportunity – in various speeches, op-eds and interviews – to highlight the existential threat newsrooms are now facing, and advocate for industry collaboration towards independent, trustworthy tech development.
“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,” says Ranada.
“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 organisations. 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 vision was prescient, according to WAN-IFRA and FT Strategies’ Future Newsroom Study 2026, which points to community as the differentiator, an argument Ressa and Rappler has long been making: “At a time of zero clicks from social media and search engines, and advertisers skipping newsrooms, direct and meaningful relationships with communities are more critical than ever for the survival of journalism,” emphasises Ranada.
“That’s what Rappler+ Communities was for the past three years. It became a space, a digital plaza, where we created public chat rooms centred on our news coverage and civic action,” she adds.
“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.”
A real choice
Rappler is inviting newsrooms to create secure chat rooms on MUNI, and reiterates its call to the news media industry this World News Day?: “Let’s assert our independence from tech platforms that don’t prioritise facts and verified information. Let’s give ourselves, and our readers, a real choice. 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.”
For more details, and an invite to an exploratory meeting on MUNI, email community@rappler.com.
