Nostr notes by DIY Conspiracy

“Bring back blogs and zines, but make it Substack”? Not so ...

2026-09-11T06:30:15Z

“Bring back blogs and zines, but make it Substack”? Not so fast.

Substack may give writers more freedom to cover what they actually care about, but replacing corporate music media with another privately owned platform doesn’t necessarily make journalism more independent. Some thoughts on clickbait, paywalls, unpaid labor, the open web, and maybe why writers deserve better than choosing between corporate dependence and working for free.

Link: https://diyconspiracy.net/substack-and-music-journalism/

#punk #musicjournalism #digitalplatforms #substack

What does punk teach us, and how does it shape the way we teach ...

2026-09-02T04:36:01Z

What does punk teach us, and how does it shape the way we teach others?

Scholar Sam Logan looks at punk pedagogy through a personal account of bringing DIY ethics, critical thinking, and punk culture into education. The article on our site also includes a call from Slugger Press for punk educators to contribute essays to an upcoming nonfiction book exploring how punk influences their teaching practice.

Read the article and find the submission details at the link below:

https://diyconspiracy.net/punk-and-education/

Flyers by the ever-reliant ghas (npub1vyy…zd3k)

#punk #pedagogy #education

Faircamp creator @npub1zx5…d279 talks to a hardcore punk zine ...

2026-06-26T04:38:51Z

Faircamp creator Simon Repp (npub1zx5…d279) talks to a hardcore punk zine about platform autonomy, the small web, and building a radically sustainable way for artists to publish music online.

Find the full interview at https://diyconspiracy.net/faircamp-interview/

shout out to Fairplayer (npub18xn…kv33)

#faircamp #music #punk #diymusic

Just banned a user from the DIY Conspiracy forum board. The user ...

2026-03-26T05:27:05Z

Just banned a user from the DIY Conspiracy forum board. The user had shared a seemingly AI-generated post claiming they play in a punk band and asking people to check out and subscribe to their YouTube channel.

The music was really mediocre, and everything felt super fake. All the YouTube thumbnail images were 100% AI slop, and the titles and descriptions were clearly AI-generated too. According to those video descriptions, the songs were supposedly taken from a 2010 EP and a 2013 album, but there’s no digital trace of such a band or those records on Discogs, Bandcamp, or anywhere else. No signs that this band existed before the channel showed up in late 2025.

“The questions [anarcho-punk] posed remain urgent. How might a ...

2025-12-13T08:19:08Z

“The questions [anarcho-punk] posed remain urgent. How might a generation facing ecological collapse, genocide and economic precarity reinvent circuits of solidarity? How can it buy time to experiment outside of waged labour? What role could music play in collective refusal? “We were an anarchist affinity group first,” reflects Bruce, “part of a generation lucky enough to live off a functioning benefit system. We just happened to use music as our main form of propaganda. Anarcho-punk wasn’t a soundtrack to revolt – it was a form of revolt. Its organisation prefigured the world we wanted: mutual aid, direct democracy, collective action.”

The London based MayDay Rooms’ anarcho-punk archive is a valuable resource for radical cultures and politics today, writes Seth Wheeler in The Wire 503/4.

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/collateral-damage/against-the-grain-archiving-anarcho-punk

A conversation with Holocausts’ Roy Elani on repression, ...

2025-12-12T09:18:07Z

A conversation with Holocausts’ Roy Elani on repression, resistance, and the anti-zionist punk scene in Israhell.

https://diyconspiracy.net/holocausts-interview/

Free Palestine. Free all anti-genocide activists.

Back in early 2019, right after we published our interview with ...

2025-12-07T10:12:31Z

Back in early 2019, right after we published our interview with Dawn Ray’d (the antifascist black metal band from the UK), DIY Conspiracy suddenly exploded with traffic and visibility online.

I had to upgrade to much more expensive hosting practically overnight just to keep the site from being shut down. In the months and years that followed, the site kept growing in visibility and readership, and the costs kept rising with it.

Then in March 2020, the Covid pandemic hit. I was working a precarious contractor job, and without community help the site probably would’ve gone offline. DIY punk label owners from Europe and the US stepped in with donations that kept everything afloat, but we still needed a more regular, sustainable way to cover the growing expenses.

That’s when Volo from the band Cold Brats came up with the idea: why not releasing compilation tapes as a DIY counter-alternative to Spotify and all those hardcore playlists that other webzines curate? So in 2021, we committed to something that's much harder than it seems: releasing a new compilation tape every single month, 12 tapes in a year.

This meant a lot of work on top of publishing 3 new articles on the site every week: sending hundreds of emails; curating tracklists; asking bands and labels for exclusive songs; getting artwork done (all artists contributed their artwork for free as they literally had just one week to complete it); sending tracks for level balancing (basic mixing/mastering done for free by Kontingent Records); and preparing everything for the tape pressing plant while hoping they’d finish each run in time so we’d have the tapes ready by the start of every month.

In retrospect, it all worked perfectly. Every tape arrived on schedule. Each edition sold out within days through the Patreon page (though we’d probably choose a different platform today). In total, the series included 191 different hardcore punk bands from all over the world. Tape #10 was a straight edge edition and came with an 80-page zine packed with interviews and critical essays. Several bands contributed tracks that still remain exclusive to these tapes and nowhere else online. I've mailed a copy of each tape to MRR for review but they never published anything (thinking it's a bootleg scam?)

The project covered the site’s expenses for the entire year of 2021 and a large part of 2022.

You can listen to all the tapes now for free:

https://diyconspiracy.bandcamp.com/

To me, this was a perfect example of what collective, unpaid DIY labor can achieve: keeping a project alive not by simply asking for money, but by putting something tangible and having fun along the way. It also connected us with so many people across the global punk community.

Now that I have a more stable and well-paid job, any extra that come in go straight back into DIY Solidarity and supporting cool projects, be it the Antipode book/tour, the DIY punk scenes across places like Indonesia, printing zines, or booking small local shows.

- Mittens XVX

Built from the belief that the music industry no longer serves ...

2025-12-03T06:03:19Z

Built from the belief that the music industry no longer serves artists or listeners, mirlo.space (npub1ynz…en3h) is pushing for a radical, federated, and decentralized reimagining of how music is shared online.

https://diyconspiracy.net/mirlo-interview/

Fuck Spotify, Decentralize Bandcamp!

Amidst record inflation and police killings of civilians, ...

2025-09-01T04:30:15Z

Amidst record inflation and police killings of civilians, Indonesia's punk scene has taken a militant, insurrectionary stance. We wrote about 15 current hardcore punk records from Indonesia that are keeping the resistance alive!

https://diyconspiracy.net/indonesia-hardcore-punk-2025/

Firefund for Indonesia Safe House Network: https://www.firefund.net/indonesiansafehousenetwork

RIP Affan Kurniawan and FTP! 🔥