What Comes Next
The near-term work is to listen and follow where the feedback takes me next. This is a completely different ball game than releasing to a small set of beta testers and I’m excited to see how my approach to the project evolves as a result!
Some directions are already clear. Alerts, which I deliberately deferred at release, come first based on newest feedback from beta testers and building this feature will also mean applying the same standards of transparency and control that govern the feed. Beyond that, I am exploring localized reporting preferences, aggregation of perspectives beyond traditional publishers, and a number of smaller refinements. I hold these plans loosely on purpose. If this journey has demonstrated anything, it is that the most important requirements tend to reveal themselves through use rather than planning.
I also want to be transparent about how this platform sustains itself, because a product built on the argument that readers deserve to see how systems operate should extend that same visibility to its own future. When I defined the initial product requirements, I left the business model open with one non-negotiable constraint: monetization could never depend on behavioral advertising, the sale of personal data, or restricting the foundational mechanisms of transparency and control. And to that point, everything that exists in Mosaic News today, all of its functionality, will remain completely free and ad-free and I do not plan on revoking access to any existing features to place behind a paywall.
The primary monetization path I am exploring instead sits a level below the app. This project began, in part, because the existing news APIs were expensive, inflexible, and geared toward enterprise use, which forced me to build an independent aggregation backend of my own. As such, I plan to open the feed-aggregation pipeline to developers, offering the full capability of the backend at an accessible price that substantially undercuts the existing news-API market. In line with the mission of Mosaic News to reduce information asymmetry for readers, I believe opening the infrastructure extends that same mission to builders, so that the foundation I had to construct alone becomes something others can build upon. The details deserve their own careful design, and I will share them publicly as they take shape.
As for the Mosaic News app itself, I am exploring the addition of premium features, aimed primarily at power users, that would further extend that capability of the app beyond the existing core features. The idea is that the core and full experience would be available for free to all users with only the nice-to-have features behind a paywall. This philosophy counters some of the findings I made in my competitive landscape research in which essential transparency and control tools had been placed behind paywalls, in tension with the very mission they served. So the rule for Mosaic is simple: no existing feature will ever move behind a paywall, and nothing required to see, question, or control the system ever will be.
Finally, in the long term, I plan to open-source the aggregation backend for anyone to host it themselves as well as explore open-sourcing the Mosaic News app as well. In line with Mosaic News’s mission, this feels like the right destination for a project that began based on the frustration with today’s existing informational asymmetry.
City Three
Transparency. Agency. Privacy.
In City One’s digital landscape, these are rare values to find in any institution beyond their surface level. To these institutions, each of these tenets is transactional, often with the reward being your attention, the principal object of economic capture and commodification in this digital landscape. Each arrangement reinforces the dominant asymmetry of who gets to control information, and who must simply receive it. In the thirty years since Brin’s essay, Masoud showed how far we had drifted in the opposite direction toward a reality like City One, where even our information environment is optimized to capture us rather than to inform us.
City Two showcases a more reciprocal reality where ordinary people have the transparency to observe and understand how institutions operate, keep them accountable, and use levers to control outcomes, but privacy is still a casualty of this trade-off.
City Three
Mosaic News provides services, information, and visibility into its institutional activity to citizens, while citizens' personal data cannot flow back. Citizens retain transparency, agency, and privacy.
That is why, for some corners of our digital landscape, such as how we stay informed as a society through the news we receive, I believe it is important to extend this philosophy further and look toward a new model: City Three, where ordinary citizens hold the informational advantage, can keep these institutions accountable, and have control over the outcome without having to sacrifice their privacy. The main philosophy here is that people should know far more about these media institutions than those institutions know about the people they serve.
Realizing City Three does not depend on waiting for better technology. It depends on the choices institutions make about how they distribute informational power: whether their systems are legible or opaque, whether people can control them or merely react to them, and whether personalization requires surveillance or preserves privacy. These are not inevitable features of a digital platform; they are design, business, and governance decisions. This project is an attempt to demonstrate that institutions can choose differently—that a platform is capable of delivering transparency, agency, and privacy together, ultimately giving readers more power over the institutions that inform them. I hope Mosaic News can serve not only as one contribution to that idea, but as proof that this relationship is possible and an invitation for others to chip away at informational asymmetry in their own corners of the digital landscape.
It has certainly not been an easy journey with too many obstacles to count, but it has been a truly gratifying and liberating experience to have made at least some contribution to this idea. Cheers to what comes next :)
Josh
Chapter Summary
Mosaic News is now live on the App Store, and in an important sense the roadmap no longer belongs entirely to me. The near-term work is to listen and follow where the feedback takes me next. Some directions are already clear. Alerts, which I deliberately deferred at release, come first based on newest feedback from beta testers and building this feature will also mean applying the same standards of transparency and control that govern the feed. Beyond that, I am exploring localized reporting preferences, aggregation of perspectives beyond traditional publishers, and a number of smaller refinements.
As far as monetization goes, everything that exists in Mosaic News today, all of its functionality, will remain completely free and ad-free and I do not plan on revoking access to any existing features to place behind a paywall. Instead, I plan to open the feed-aggregation pipeline to developers, offering the full capability of the backend at an accessible price that substantially undercuts the existing news-API market. In line with the mission of Mosaic News to reduce information asymmetry for readers, I believe opening the infrastructure extends that same mission to builders, so that the foundation I had to construct alone becomes something others can build upon. In the long term, I plan to open-source the aggregation backend for anyone to host it themselves as well as explore open-sourcing the Mosaic News app as well.
City Two makes the power to observe reciprocal, but privacy remains the price of participation. City Three goes further: people can see, question, and shape the institutions that inform them without being observed in return. Mosaic News is an attempt to demonstrate that platforms can choose this relationship—that transparency, agency, and privacy can exist together, giving readers more power over the institutions that shape what they know.