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About Publishing since May 2026

What this desk does

Freedom.Tech is an automated news desk for practical freedom tech: Bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr, privacy software, AI, and self-hosting tools. Every weekday morning at 06:15 UTC, a pipeline reads 470 first-party feeds, clusters what shipped, and publishes a single daily brief plus a dedicated post for every meaningful release.

How the pipeline works

The whole site is a static build. There is no live database, no editor sitting at a desk, no content team. A single GitHub Actions job runs daily and does five things:

  1. Fetch. Pull the latest entries from every source feed (GitHub releases, RSS, a couple of HTML pages).
  2. Cluster. Group items that are the same story across multiple feeds. The same release picked up by different sources collapses to one post.
  3. Score. Rank each cluster by category, recency, signal keywords, and whether it's a security patch.
  4. Write. Generate the daily brief and a dedicated post for every release that meets the bar. Hand-curated edge cases (rare) live as plain markdown in the repo.
  5. Publish. Commit the result, which deploys to Cloudflare Pages.

What gets covered

The current beats:

  • Bitcoin: Core node, hardware wallets, self-custody tools, sovereignty stack
  • Lightning: LND, Core Lightning, LDK, Lightning wallets, swap services
  • Nostr: clients, relays, NIPs, ecosystem tools
  • Freedom Tech: Tor, SimpleX, Matrix, Signal, Element X, decentralized messaging
  • Privacy: Tails, Qubes OS, GrapheneOS, Cashu / e-cash, coinjoin / payjoin tools
  • AI: local LLM runners, open-weight models, agent frameworks, frontier-lab announcements

What gets cut

The desk doesn't cover price moves, ETF flows, token marketing, conference photo posts, or anything that looks like personality coverage. It also drops commit-firehose noise: you'll see release notes for a project, not a list of every PR that landed since yesterday. There's a curated source list if you want to see what makes the cut.

Editorial model

The daily lead, weekly recap synthesis, and per-story operator's notes are written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 via a constrained prompt with a post-filter that blocks hype, price-talk, exclamation points, and second-person voice. The editor cannot omit stories or alter facts. It only adds framing. When the LLM call fails or its output gets rejected by the filter, the brief ships without editorial; nothing is suppressed downstream.

Source descriptions come from each project's own homepage or README. The desk doesn't paraphrase or rewrite them.

Distribution

  • Web — the home page is always today's brief.
  • Full RSS feed — every post.
  • Weekly-only RSS — recaps only, for readers who want synthesis without the daily firehose.
  • All daily briefs — chronological archive.
  • All weekly recaps — Sunday synthesis archive.
  • Nostr: every brief and recap published as a NIP-23 long-form note to 19 relays.

Contact

Everything — factual corrections, source suggestions, story tips — lands in the same inbox: DM the desk on Nostr. The sources page also has a one-click Suggest-a-source button that opens a DM with the right context pre-filled.