25 years of Riseup

For our 25th anniversary we asked you to send us stories how you got to know Riseup and how the infrastructure we provide is useful to you. If you still want to send us your story you can write to outreach@riseup.net - we don’t have the labor time to reply but we always enjoy hearing from you!

It’s truly inspiring to see what you all are up to and how you use Riseup so we wanted to share the stories we received. Here are some that can be shared publicly:

dear riseup,

from our rainbow and black&red and purple hearts we would like to say thanks for being such a great partner in crime (maybe not between 11 and 12 CET, when you sometimes collapse, but resting is political, isn’t it?). this year our collective is celebrating their anniversary too - the 10th! 10 years of supporting people with access to safe and legal abortion. they write us everyday, we coordinate their travels and talk about our activism – the tools you provide make our work possible. while a new person in our group gets familiar with crabgrass they’ll delete a page accidentally (it happens to everyone, let’s be frank), confuse rise with rice (we are not native speakers, otoh your polish is non existing), or just stumble in a 100 little ways, but afterwards the relationship is smooth and sweet.

wszystkiego najlepszego, stay rebel and stable!

abortionists (from europe)

Sending this in response to your call to action in the last newsletter around sharing out stories of riseup!

I had never heard of riseup before I moved to Portland in 2007, but I had heard that Portland was a place I could find a solid “bicycle fun” community (https://www.shift2bikes.org), and that the best way to engage was a mailing list…which was hosted on riseup. I subscribed, and thought nothing much of the riseup service since all I used was the email list and never the website.

Fast forward a couple years and I had taken a leadership role in the community and the mailing list admin duties, and I started using the website a lot more since we do moderate signups individually after a few jerks whom we kicked off the list kept re-signing up. But then I also started learning about your mission and was pleased to be part of it even just as a user!

Finally as I read your newsletters, I was inspired to donate more, and refer your service to more people since it was clearly user-focused and not part of “big tech” that was selling user data.

The Bike Fun community has been a huge part of my life for 17 years now and I have loved every moment of it. Thank you for facilitating awesomeness for me - and many friends - in and around Portland, Oregon, USA!

Happy Birthday Riseup, Thank you very much for the people behind this project, providing safe internet communication for radicals, activist and agents of social change.

I am using Riseup since 2010, the same year we started our autonomous/anti-authoritarian space project called Etniko Bandido Infoshop and Community Resource Center here in the so-called Philippines. And now, for 14 years we still exist and I am still using Riseup.

I managed to have this email because of our comrade who came to visit our space and suddenly stay here for three years when we are just starting running the space. He is the one introduce this email along with other safe and secure email. Now, we separate ways and he has its own land regeneration project in Mindanao called Feral Crust but our comradeship and friendship remain the same.

Hope RiseUp continue because our struggle never ends For autonomy and decolonization Keep the fire burning against the State and Capital

Etniko Bandido Infoshop & Community Resource Center

I’ve been an appreciative user of riseup.net since the beginning… shortly after the Shut Down the WTO in Seattle in 1999.

I have been working to end wars of aggression, economic, racial and gender inequality, defending reproductive rights and curbing environmental destruction for over 50 years - mainly through movement building and direct action.

I have concluded that the electoral system is a joke (if voting worked, it would be illegal!), democracy in the US is a cruel myth, and that the only way we can make real change happen is through non-violent revolution. But the people are afraid, mis-informed and stuck trying to survive economically

I am now 83 and have to admit that nothing we have done has worked. Ever more carbon is spewing into our atmosphere, corporate control of politics has increased so there is more rigging of elections, more killing of innocent people by the police, more mass shootings, more imperial wars, more economic inequality, more restrictions for abortions, more hate, lies and divisiveness than ever. Still I’ll keep trying till the end.

Thank you for supporting our efforts for all these years.

Thank you for all the work you have done and continue to do to support activism for a better world! I worked at the Syracuse Peace Council and we have used riseup for our listservs for many years - and just always felt good about security and being able to put our politics where our cyber activities were. Then, when I needed to get a new email address, I got a riseup one. So thank you.

Congratulations to your 25th birthday! Thanks a lot for all the work you’ve been doing!

In the past years we’ve built a network uniting more than 200 member initiatives across the globe to counter aviation promoting a just mobility system for all: Stay Grounded. And guess how it all started: with a riseup email list! Thanks so much for providing the important basic infrastructure for us to connect and share information, calls for action and campaign ideas, collaborate in working groups and build solidarity together.

I joined in 2013 when the Snowden fiasco added more urgency to my desire to use non-google, non-corporate email communications. In addition to Riseup email, I also started benefiting greatly at that time from the mailing lists, doing a search led me to several including perhaps most influentially “no drones” and “wtr” or war tax resistance. This lists were a huge solace and invaluable resources for me as I continued my personal daily activism re: war tax resistance, writing and teaching about peace causes including but not limited to the themes of those two mailings lists. It was (and still is) a strong reminder and source of strength to communicate with war tax resister and peace activists demonstrating outside military bases nationwide. As today and yesterday come with ever more gruesome news from Lebanon pager terrorism, and more, looking 10, 20 years back it’s difficult to know if or how progress is being made toward peace, democracy, mutual aid, etc. in this country and worldwide. But the fight continues, as a quote I read from I think Chris Hedges, “we don’t fight fascists because we know we will win. We fight them because they are fascists.” Thank you brave tech collective birds for all you do to support these communications.

Late to the party, we’re Newbies here… only been with you since the summer… but boy were we pleased to find you. We were struggling to send out mass emails to our supporters after our account with mail chimp suddenly decided to add huge costs to it. Then set up gmail accounts which immediately starting bouncing emails back. With a genocide going on in Gaza and attacks in the West Bank we needed a way to get protest plans out reliably and quickly and we were starting to panic. A quick chat with activists led us to you. We’ve sent out 3 mass emails so far and everything is working fine so far thank goodness. Thank you for doing what you’re doing, not only good to know we can get our message out but also know we are using an activist site who cares about the world and justice.

Happy Birthday from Exeter PSC - hope to be celebrate many more birthdays with you!

I first heard of Riseup back in May when a couple of comrades showed me your pamphlet they brought from the Constellation Anarchist Bookfair.

Reading that pamphlet filled me with relief, with hope. So much infrastructure already built! So much already done! That feeling of “thank fuck someone alreay figured this shit out”. I spent that whole meeting smiling, unbelieving of the activation code in my hand.

The work we do today will fuel that same hope for future generations. A new web, for a new world.

Congratulations on 25 years of the project!

We are so happy to be part of the larger Riseup family, and all the positive things Riseup stands for.

Lemondrop is a 501c3 that has been helping people and animals since 2011, when we launched our website in 2013 with our public email - Riseup was our #1 choice to provide privacy for our business emails. It was absolutely the best early decision that we made. Riseup has supported us every step of the way, answering any questions or offering support instantly when we needed it. We absolutely love and appreciate all that Riseup does for small but vital nonprofits like us.

Thank you for all you do. Here’s to the next 25 years!

I came to riseup through my animal rescue efforts. To date, we have served and saved hundreds of animals while often at odds with our local government. Having riseup as a technological partner provided us one less headache to deal with, namely privacy. Thank you for what you do and all the little critters you help.

Punch Up Collective has benefited from Riseup in so many ways over the years – we have an email address with you, we use Crabgrass for hosting all our shared organizational documents, and we’ve been using the Riseup Listserv service to put out our weekly Radical Events Ottawa (REO) email since 2018. This is a public announcement list for radical events, meetings, protests, and other activities in Ottawa, Ontario, on unceded Algonquin territory. Punch Up started this listserv in response to what we saw as a gap in Ottawa organizing infrastructure – a way for fellow radicals to share upcoming activities without relying on Facebook, Instagram, and other commercialized platforms. Every week, events submitted by midnight on Friday, or things we’ve discovered are happening, are included in the email sent out on the following Monday. We also post the event list on our webpage and various social media.

As Punch Up, we are committed to building people’s capacities and collective power and, where appropriate, institutions that can last over the long haul. We want to help build radical movements that are large-scale, organized, multi-generational, combative, and working towards a world where everyone can flourish. Riseup’s wonderful infrastructural support definitely helps us make a contribution to this work! Thanks for everything you do.

Punch Up Collective on unceded Algonquin territory

punchupcollective.org

I got to know of Riseup on the “Bois Lejuc” barricades. Fighting against the nuclear waste disposal project, at “Bure dans la Meuse”. We weren’t fighting with the same weapons they were, one would’ve though it was a war… Choppers, wave scramblers, lawyers put in custody, comrades facing house arrest, ministerial decrees and other freedom-denying and anti-democratic measures… All of this was hard. For me Riseup was a “safe place”, a light in the shadows: comrades supporting us from afar, helping us and giving us a welcome dose of force and courage. Thanks to every one of you, you’re all very precious to me.