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Launching Solidarity is Power: Building Independent Media with Purpose

When my wife’s union started facing increasing pressure at work — from federal ‘Doge’ agenda cuts to sudden policy changes affecting union roles and resources — we started looking for ways to tell those stories more broadly. Stories that weren’t making the evening news, but were reshaping real lives. That’s how Solidarity is Power started.

It’s an independent media project aimed at uplifting labor, mutual aid, and community action. Not with slogans — with documentation. Think: workers organizing, care networks growing, people showing up for each other. My role is to help make that storytelling visible, searchable, and resilient.

Behind the Scenes: Infrastructure and Workflow

I’ve been building digital platforms for over 20 years — from bare-metal PHP forums in the early 2000s to decentralized blockchain protocols and modern frontend stacks. For Solidarity is Power, I wanted something fast, flexible, and frictionless.

We went with: • Ghost CMS (self-hosted) for publishing — lightweight, markdown-friendly, and great with custom themes. • Obsidian + FreshRSS for clipping source material and managing a reading queue. • A custom GPT integration (yes, this one) that helps draft posts based on curated clippings and tagged sources.

The flow looks like this:

  1. Subscribe to dozens of RSS feeds, filtered through FreshRSS and tagged into Obsidian vaults.
  2. Draft posts using GPT-based agents that summarize and synthesize research based on direction.
  3. Edit collaboratively, often late at night, swapping notes and sources across devices.
  4. Push live on Ghost, complete with calls to action, custom ALT text, and retro-inspired feature art.

We treat the site like a media lab. Everything is versioned, tracked, and backed up — but we can move fast when stories break. That mix of reliability and responsiveness is part of the goal.

Why This Project Matters to Me

I’ve spent most of my career at the intersection of software and autonomy — whether that’s helping people self-host their infrastructure, invest independently, or now, tell stories outside the mainstream algorithm. My wife’s work in the union world keeps that grounded. She knows the stakes from the inside.

Solidarity is Power is where those worlds meet: my technical chops, her on-the-ground experience, and a shared belief that storytelling — done well — is a form of organizing.

We’re just getting started. There’s plenty more to ship.