Big news: Today was the last day of the live production of "Declare Your Independence" . Don't worry, Ernest Hancock won't be leaving LRN.FM and his show will be staying put on weekday mornings. However, what *is* changing is that he'll no longer be doing a live show.

There are a few reasons for this:

First, Ernie has over the last year been producing his show from the road as he is traveling the country in an RV. This is good in that it will allow him to talk to more guests in-person, but the down side is he is relying on mobile internet connections which vary from okay to terrible when it comes to live audio delivery.

Second, by recording his show as a podcast he'll have more flexibility on when he can record his interviews. Since Ernie never took callers on his live show, whether it is produced live or not really doesn't matter.

Third, it means he can go commercial-free and do a...

We recently announced the various ways we're decentralizing and cutting reliance on Big Tech. We launched our own social network last month. Our video archives are on the uncensorable LBRY . We launched our own federated, self-hosted, open source Matrix chat server , and more is to come.

We're even experimenting with peer-to-peer video streaming but it's not-quite-ready for primetime. Meanwhile, thanks to a tool called "Mobcrush", we are now to get around the pain-in-the ass hoops that YouTube and Facebook have placed in front of regular live streamers like us. As of tonight we are going to be streaming video not only on DLive and Twitch as normal,...

In a recent article at Free Keene , I went over a bunch of our decentralized and polycentric, self-hosted alternatives to Big Tech social media. If you didn't read it and you're interested in what alternatives are available, you should take a few minutes and check it out .

In the article, Telegram got an honorable mention for being the best of the centralized communications options out there. We've been using it between activists in the Keene area for most of the last decade and over the past few years we've been posting our show prep to our Telegram channel . Recently, Telegram upgraded its channels - which are a one-way communication method - to allow channel owners to create and...

Longtime liberty activist John Bush is back with a new show, " Live Free Now "! You can now hear it as part of our podcast lineup on LRN.FM. Also, be sure to check out John's latest activism project, Freedom Cells !

Speaking of activism, Free Talk Live hosts including me, Aria, Nobody, and Chris Waid protested yesterday at the NH Attorney General's house. Don't miss the video here: https://youtu.be/rAnzz3Cq0nU

Have you checked out our Matrix chat server yet? Get step-by-step instructions on how to join at chat.lrn.fm .

Thank you as always for listening to and supporting Free Talk Live , Ian

UPDATE: You may need to log out and log back in to the Matrix server to ensure the old channels disappear from your channel list.

After a couple months of experimenting and receiving your feedback, tonight we made a major change to the settings of the LRN.FM Matrix server . The issue was that we missed an important setting when setting it up initially. We figured out the problem when someone noticed it was impossible to create an unencrypted room on the server. Why would one want to have an unencrypted room? Simply because it makes life easier.

Encryption is a very cool feature of Matrix, there's no doubt. However the trade-off for security is inconvenience and cost. In the case of Matrix rooms, the inconvenience includes not being able to see content that was said in a room prior to joining it. This could be considered a feature from a security perspective, but for rooms that are open to the public, it's not very welcoming. Also,...