I’ve learned that no one is insignificant.
The first thing you notice, if you go to enough protests in the same city, is how familiar everyone becomes.
Hannah Lynn talks about Manchester that way. Anti-racism marches. Climate marches. Demonstrations against government policy. Different placards, different speakers, but often the same cluster of people moving through the streets together. You start to recognise faces in the crowd, even when you don’t know their names. You see who keeps turning up.
For a long time, Hannah was simply one of them. A regular presence, someone who showed up when something felt wrong. Then friends began asking a simple question that stuck with her more than any chant: how do you actually find these protests?
It was not that the information did not exist. It was scattered across Instagram stories, private WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, Facebook events that might or might not be current. If you were already in the loop, you might find your way. If you were new, or nervous, or far from existing networks, the barrier felt much higher. You needed time, context, and enough confidence to know where to look.
In early 2024, that question met a specific moment: weekly protests in Manchester against the occupation of Palestine. Shadow-banning and throttled reach on social media. A software engineer.
“I can build a website,” Hannah thought.
So she did.
a rough little map of the streets
The first version of what would ultimately become findaprotest.info began as a simple act of translation. Take what was already happening in the streets and make it easier to see. She threw together a site, “really horrible,” in her words, the kind of page that made at least one early visitor tell her it hurt their eyes. Design was not the point. She listed all the protests she could find and kept adding more as she went.
Then she fell down the rabbit hole.
Once she started looking, she realised how much could sit in one place. Ceasefire resolutions. Poems. Contacts for legal support if you were arrested at a demonstration. Organisations like Green and Black Cross in the UK, and lawyers in the US offering pro bono help. It became an online pinboard for anything Palestine-related she could reach. It was messy, unsustainable, and completely driven by instinct: if this helps someone show up, on it goes.
Around the same time, she joined Tech for Palestine, intending to volunteer on someone else’s project. Instead, she found herself bringing this unruly collection of resources into their orbit. Two volunteers joined her before it was even formally recognised. They began to help pull things into the site. Slowly, a shape began to appear.
When Tech for Palestine opened an incubator, she applied with what was then called Ceasefire Now. During the application process, they saw the core of what she was doing and said yes, but also asked her to refine. What was the true nature of what she was building? What was its purpose?
The answer, when she finally named it, was elementary.
Help people find a protest.
She registered the domain findaprotest.info in late May 2024. It took time to arrive at the name because “we tend to believe that serious work requires abstraction, or at least something clever”. In the end, she went with the plainest possible description of what they were trying to do.
It still makes her smile.
what gets wired in early
Hannah grew up in social housing with a single mother and three siblings. Money was tight. Attention was scarcer than it should have been. When you grow up in those conditions, you learn early who gets listened to and who does not. You notice whose complaints are dismissed, whose anger is penalised, whose fear is treated as an inconvenience.
Her father, she says, has always hated bullies. He puts Israel firmly into that category. Her mother comes from an Irish family involved in unions. She took Hannah to her first protest and is still protesting in her seventies. “Those values got baked in early,” Hannah says. Standing up for people being treated unfairly feels less like a deliberate political stance and more like something in her nervous system.
It is not a cost-free way to move through the world. Speaking up can be lonely. People prefer to believe things are fine because it is easier. Being the one who says they are not fine is uncomfortable for everyone. She has paid for that discomfort in strained relationships, in the experience of being taken advantage of, in the steady erosion of some social circles. Even so, she does not see silence as an option.
“I would still rather live this way than compromise who I am,” she says. It is not a slogan. It has the quiet finality of a decision made and remade across decades.
That insistence has shaped her work long before find a protest existed. She has volunteered at food banks, delivered food on Christmas Day, worked with refugees, brought meals to people who are homeless. Consistently showing up for people who the system has failed, asking what’s needed, and then doing something that helps.
Building an infrastructure for protest looks, from the outside, like a leap into tech activism. From the inside, it is another version of the same impulse.
finding the ones who almost join
When you listen to Hannah talk about find a protest, the word that recurs most often is “barrier”. Barriers to attending protests. Barriers to organising them. Barriers to working together across causes. The early site was always about lowering those barriers, even if she did not call it that at the time.
She talks about the spectrum of allies. At one end, the people who keep showing up, who will find protests however they can. At the other end, people who are sympathetic but hesitant. Maybe they are nervous about going alone. Maybe their newsfeed is full of sensationalised images of police violence. Maybe English is not their first language. Maybe they have care responsibilities, precarious jobs, immigration worries. None of those things translates neatly into a retweet.
The question for her was: if the first group is already showing up, how do you reach the ones who don’t know how?
Part of the answer was to widen what counted as an action. find a protest lists protests, but it also lists solidarity actions and other ways of showing up. It is built for organisers as much as attendees, a central place where events can be found even when social media reach is patchy. When Instagram is shadow-banning protest content, for example, people can still find events via search engines. This is infrastructure, in an old-fashioned sense, created so that resistance is less dependent on the goodwill of platform companies.
Another part of the answer was to make space for people whose entry point is not Palestine.
find a protest began with Palestine protests because that cause is closest to Hannah’s heart. The team thought hard about what it would mean for the site to be visible in search engines. They did not know whether search results would be quietly throttled in the same way social media posts were. There was a risk not only of suppression but also of being pigeonholed.
So they deliberately broadened the range of protests featured. She gives the example of the No Kings protests in the US. People might come to the site looking for those events, attend one, and feel “I’m starting to step in and make a difference.” Next week, they may want to attend another protest. There is no No Kings event nearby, but there is a Palestine protest. Some will scroll past. Some will come back later. Some, she believes, will go.
She has no numbers to prove this, and that is the point.
The site does not track individual users. The only data they see comes from Cloudflare, their hosting provider, which shows overall visitor counts and rough location. “I’m pretty sure I can’t even turn that off,” she says. There are no pixels, no personalised analytics, no funnels. A visitor is counted only once as a unique active user.
One particular week, when protests were surging in many countries for different reasons, they reached around 270,000 people. There are close to 7,000 subscribers to the weekly email.
Hannah remembers an early conversation with Paul Biggar from Tech for Palestine, who wanted her to aspire to hundreds of thousands of users one day. At the time, they had a few hundred. She cringed internally. The idea felt absurd, almost embarrassing. She could not imagine herself at the centre of something at that scale.
A few months later, that projection had become reality. She learned two things from that week. One was that Paul has “an incredible ability to see potential before it exists.” The other was more personal. Scale is possible when you stop dismissing yourself as insignificant.
The fear she has had to move through, over and over, is the fear that she does not matter. That what she does is too small to count. The work of the platform and the people who use it has slowly worn away at that belief. “I’ve learned that no one is insignificant,” she says. Your actions can propagate in ways you do not see. That is true of a single person deciding to attend their first protest. It is also true of someone quietly maintaining the system that helps them find it.
The system itself reflects a particular form of care.
the cost of doing it properly
find a protest runs almost entirely on volunteers. Until recently, the costs were paid out of Hannah’s pocket. She has a full-time job and works on the platform in the margins of the day. Morning before work. A couple of hours after. Sometimes at lunch. For a long stretch, it was seven days a week. Her partner cooked most of the meals while she kept working at her laptop after dinner. Her time with family and friends shrank to almost nothing.
“It definitely caused problems with my relationship,” she says, without drama. She kept going, but eventually she set boundaries. She tries to stop by around half six. She takes Saturdays off. “I’m not always good at it,” she admits, but the intention is there.
At the time of publishing, Hannah has a 2-week-old.
“I’m curious too,” she says when asked how parenting sits alongside find a protest. She does not have close friends nearby with children. She is not someone who has always wanted to hold other people’s babies. Motherhood is new terrain. Activism is not.
She prepared for time away from find a protest for months. She now has a strong team, with people leading different areas of the project, and as more responsibility is shared, she will be able to reduce her hours on the platform. If they can secure more funding, some people could be paid for their time.
Funding arrived modestly when Tech for Palestine gave the project a small grant, which now covers running costs. They can pay for a few tools rather than building everything themselves. Before that, the decision was always the same: if a tool costs money, see if they can build their own version instead. It meant reinventing the wheel and living with limitations, but it also meant independence. When you meet people who volunteer every week, “that time is more important than money,” Hannah says. Her responsibility is to treat that time with respect.
Respect, for her, is not an abstract value. It is visible in the infrastructure decisions the team makes.
They avoid using tools and providers whose leadership is closely tied to what they see as conflict or oppression. They are moving away from a hosting provider because its CEO posed for a photograph with Netanyahu. On the public site, they use Leaflet for maps instead of Google Maps, because they do not want to rely on a company they believe is complicit in genocide. Organisations like Sanity and Slab have offered them discounted or non-profit plans, but they still check where data is stored and how it can be accessed.
Everything they host that contains personal data, such as subscribers’ email addresses, is kept in the EU rather than the US, because regulatory frameworks there make it harder for authorities to access data without prior notification. Even in the UK, she points out, a warrant could be issued for database access without her knowledge as the owner. “We do try and consider really carefully what tools we’re using, where even the data is hosted,” she says. They also take the minimum possible data. They do not ask for names; only emails. They encourage people to use anonymous addresses if they are worried.
This insistence on integrity comes from experience. She talks about a friend approaching her to build a site together. They wanted her skills and even referenced her previous work in their pitch deck. The value she brought, technical and product, was clear. But as the project developed, they chose to continue without her. There was no explanation or payment for work already done. At the same time, she watched them speak in public about women’s empowerment and values-driven work.
The contrast stayed with her. “Some people perform goodness,” she says. “Others do the work quietly, consistently, and with integrity.” That experience did not make her cynical, but gave her the insight she needed. Success that comes at the expense of integrity, trust or dignity feels fragile and short-lived. How you get somewhere matters as much as where you end up.
find a protest is built on that principle. And it’s obvious in the way she talks about responsibility.
“The people who show up,” she says, when asked who she feels accountable to. Volunteers, organisers, attendees. Being present. Following through. Treating people as humans rather than resources. If someone gives their time and care to something they are involved in, they feel a responsibility to honour that. It is simple. It is also rare.
more of us than you think
The work itself keeps evolving.
One ongoing concern is how to make protests more inclusive of multiple crises. A common criticism of the Free Palestine movement is that it ignores other conflicts, especially in Sudan. Hannah’s experience at protests tells a different story. At the marches she has attended in several countries, people often carry signs for multiple causes. Speakers refer to different struggles. “Everyone out for Sudan, everyone out for Palestine,” organisers will say, within the same event. Explicitly linking struggles brings more people into contact with issues they may know little about.
On the site, the team has actively sought out data sources for different causes so they can list those events. They are also beginning to think more deliberately about organisers themselves.
Through a collaborator, Dr Alexei Abrahams of Pillar of Salt, the team built an API to help them gather protest data into a visual representation of the network of organisers and influencers they track. The organiser map looked fractured, with many disconnected nodes. The influencer map looked dense and highly connected. Influencers collaborate on posts and regularly amplify one another. Organisers, who handle logistics and on-the-ground risks, often work in isolation.
One of Hannah’s big goals for the future of find a protest is to help change that pattern. She would like to build an organiser platform where people who care about similar issues in the same area can find each other, coordinate, and share knowledge. She talks about running regular workshops, a kind of Protest 101, that responds to the steady stream of messages they get on social media from people asking how to organise an event, how to collaborate, what rights they have, and what to expect. For now, it will have to wait. They do not have the capacity.
Five years ago, she thought the hardest part of this kind of work was convincing people to care. Now she thinks differently. There are more people willing to show up and do good than she realised. The real task is to create space and structure so that care can become action. Movements are often defined, from the outside, by their disagreements. On the inside, she has seen people put aside their differences long enough to do something together. Letting go of the need for total agreement has made her more patient and less cynical. It has also given her a kind of grounded hope about what collective action can look like, imperfect as it is.
The world is held together, James Baldwin said, by the love and attention of a very few people. Hannah would argue that the “few” is larger than it looks, that there are far more people willing to care and act than anyone realises. What she has built is a way for some of them to find each other.
The rest is still unfolding.
