About

tir labs

The immune system for public-good journalism.

About tir labs

tir labs builds open-source infrastructure tailored for journalists, researchers, and citizen newsrooms. Named after the tir (Toll/interleukin-1 receptor) protein domain—a critical part of plant and animal immune systems—our tools provide the press with a defense against those who wish to hide their harm.

We believe journalism is a public good. We are building an open-source ecosystem of tools and AI resources designed for:

  • Intelligence & Research: Gathering and analyzing data to hold power accountable.
  • Evidence Handling: Securely managing sources, documents, and data.
  • Production & Distribution: Automated pipelines that help journalists research, write, and distribute news faster.
  • Cost & Content Management: Keeping technology affordable and accessible for independent writers.

Our Ecosystem

  • opentir: The open-source intelligence and surveillance tool for the people, featuring openingest, our data gathering router for intelligence. Designed for journalists and researchers, not for-profit corporations.
  • newsroots: A modern approach to a newsroom CMS built on Laravel and eloquent APIs from roots.io. Includes the newswoo plugin, the newsdesk theme, and fully integrates newspack.
  • Ghostpack: The Ghost CMS equivalent of WP newspack, providing lightweight, high-performance publishing for independent writers.
  • tir-infer: Free AI inference for newsrooms and journalists, built to make state-of-the-art models accessible without prohibitive costs.
  • mastograph: An experimental initiative to map the decentralized internet.
  • postdated: A non-profit, working-class newsroom run by citizen journalists, built entirely on tir infrastructure.
  • try tir: The central hub for our open-source tools and corporate headquarters.

Principles

Open source first. We prioritize well-maintained, open-source software over proprietary alternatives. Every tool we build is designed to be forked and self-hosted.

Infrastructure we control. We default to Cloudflare products and our own infrastructure. We don’t send data through corporate APIs when we can run it ourselves.

Never for corporations. Our tools serve journalists, researchers, communities, and consumers. Not for-profit companies.

Working-class voice. Our newsroom, postdated.org, reports from the perspective of working people. Not from the perspective of shareholders.

Technology

Our infrastructure is built on Cloudflare (Workers, Pages, KV, R2, D1, Vectorize, AI), ClickHouse for real-time analytics, Laravel for newsroots CMS, Ghost for Ghostpack, Python for tir-infer inference, and ActivityPub for mastograph fediverse mapping.

See the full technical architecture on our Stack page.

Open Source

All of our projects live at github.com/tir-labs. Every repository is open for contributions, forking, and self-deployment.

Get Involved

If you’re a journalist, researcher, developer, or community organizer who believes in open infrastructure—reach out.