Nowadays, participatory digital media provides disadvantaged communities with a voice, and digital storytelling tools, live-streaming, social media and vlogs are being regularly used by grassroots activists (e.g. #BlackLivesMatter or #MeToo) - re-defining our perspectives of collective action and often also leading to real-life changes. It can be argued that in the hyper-connected digital era, most of us have become media co-creators. However, digital technologies have also unleashed new inequalities of power and wealth, reinforcing divisions between the information rich and poor, the activists and disengaged. The utopian idea of participatory media and digital culture has been questioned in recent debates on disinformation, deep fakes, algorithmic oppression, and social media echo-chambers. While digital technologies have democratised our access to the media-making process, they have not entirely helped when fighting with the problems initially covered by the community video movements in the 1960s (e.g. poverty, gender, and racial discrimination). My presentation aims to explore the following questions: How does the work of these movements fit into current participatory digital storytelling practice and media literacy debates? What does it mean to be a radical media maker in the digital era? And finally, what can young digital media designers and producers take from the work ethos of the early community media activists?