The #openweb is a network of links, not islands

Ten years ago, I wrote about a problem that was already undermining the #openweb, that nobody was linking to anybody, and that the incentives were all moving in the wrong direction. #Mainstreaming platforms had little reason to send people towards alternative sources, while grassroots projects were left struggling to build connections with each other. Even when people wanted to cooperate, there were plenty of reasons to avoid linking, sharing audiences or giving another project visibility.

The result was an increasingly fragmented web. Lots of websites, lots of content, lots of people doing useful work, but fewer if any meaningful connections between them. Ten years later, the technology has changed, the underlying problem has not gone away. In some ways, it has become worse, as the attention economy has eaten the #openweb. The commercial internet is built around capturing attention, the more time people spend inside a platform, the more valuable that audience becomes to its owners. External links interrupt this process, they send people somewhere else, towards another publisher, another community or another source of information.

From the perspective of the #dotcons, this is a problem to manage, as their business model rewards keeping people inside their own environments, controlling discovery and turning the activity of users into something that can be measured, monetized and sold. Likewise search engines increasingly provide answers directly, social platforms prioritize their own feeds and recommendation systems and publishers compete for visibility inside systems they do not control.

The #openweb still has hyperlinks, but the “common sense” culture surrounding them has changed. The problem is not that links have disappeared, it is that the common sense dominating online life have weak incentives to support an open, reciprocal network of independent publishers. This matters because the web was never supposed to be a collection of isolated destinations. Its strength came from the connections between them: people following sources, discovering unexpected ideas, checking evidence, finding communities and building on each other’s work. Take those connections away, and the web becomes a collection of competing islands.

We have been building better technology, but federation is not enough, over this last ten years, the #Fediverse has grown, ActivityPub has become more visible, and more websites connect with decentralized social networks. This is real progress, we now have more technical possibilities for building an alternative to the centralized paths. But there is #blocking, we to often grow federated social networks that still reproduce the habits of closed #dotcons social media.

Federation connects systems, it does not create solidarity these systems need to work. The same applies to #FOSS, open-source software. Open code is important, but it does not guarantee that projects will cooperate, share audiences or build lasting relationships. Technical openness is necessary, but it is not sufficient. This is where the #4opens become useful: open code, open data, open standards and open processes. They can be used to give us a practical foundation for cooperation, but we still have to build the culture that makes that cooperation meaningful.

The mainstreaming trap… ten years ago, I described the difficulty of getting #mainstreaming alternatives to link to each other. This underlying tension remains, grassroots projects need reach, resources and recognition, mainstream organizations have their own priorities, reputation concerns and institutional incentives. They will link externally when it serves their purposes, the problem is that those links are selective and instrumental rather than part of a wider commitment to an open information commons.

Grassroots projects end up supplying stories, ideas, research and community knowledge to organizations that gain the attention while the original producers receive little in return. This is one of the quieter forms of #mainstreaming. The grassroots become useful contributors to somebody else ‘s system without building the independent relationships needed to sustain their own. The answer to this smell is not to refuse every mainstream connection, that would be another kind of isolation. It is a balancing act, work with wider institutions when useful, but maintain independent infrastructure, reciprocal relationships and the ability to carry on without their permission. We need bridges, not gateways that leave us dependent on whoever controls the other end.

Why don’t the grassroots simply link to each other? This is where the problem becomes more uncomfortable, as it is easy to blame the #dotcons as their incentives are obvious. It is harder to look at the habits and assumptions within our own communities. Grassroots projects compete for the same funding, audiences, volunteers and recognition. People worry about sending attention elsewhere. Organizations protect their own identities, developers build separate platforms, campaigns create separate communication channels.

Sometimes this mess happens for understandable reasons. Projects have limited time and resources, trust has to be earned, not every source is reliable, and not every relationship is useful. But too often, we reproduce the same competitive logic we claim to oppose. We talk about solidarity while treating our own websites as little territories. We talk about commons while keeping our work disconnected. We talk about decentralization while building social and technical systems that make cooperation harder than it needs to be.

This is the #geekproblem in a wider social form, the assumption that if we build the right technology, the human relationships will somehow follow. They won’t – a network is made through practice, people have to link, share, maintain, argue, repair and work together. The technology should support those activities rather than pretend to replace them. The OMN is about mediating this mess by making linking part of the infrastructure – the OMN is not another social-media platform competing to own an audience. It is a network of flows, a way to connect independent publishers, community archives, grassroots news projects and other sources through shared data and open protocols.

The basic technical model is straightforward.

SUB – flow in. Nodes subscribe to RSS, ActivityPub and other feeds, collecting public information from independent sources.

Shared data objects – connect the information. Nodes maintain local copies of text and metadata, preserving links to the original sources and recording provenance.

PUB – flow out. Nodes publish selected information through feeds that other projects can reuse, with attribution and links back to the original material.

FAT-PING – synchronize the metadata. Participating nodes share tags, classifications and relationships, allowing communities to connect information without requiring one central authority to control the whole network.

This #KISS technical path creates the possibility of something more useful than a collection of disconnected websites.

A local news project could publish reporting that appears in a community feed. An archive could connect that reporting to historical material. Another community could add relevant location or subject tags. Different frontends could present the same information for different purposes.

The original publisher remains visible. The information becomes more useful through connection. The wider network gains value as more people participate, the objective is not to scrape everybody’s content and republish it without permission. It is to build a practical commons around open feeds, clear attribution, appropriate licensing and community control.

The technology should make it easier to send attention outwards, not capture it inwards, we need to move from reciprocal links to reciprocal infrastructure. The original proposal is simple: if linking is going to become central to the #openweb again, the grassroots have to make it happen.

We need to take that idea further – reciprocal linking should be part of a broader practice of reciprocal infrastructure. That means:

Linking to relevant work from other independent projects.

Citing original sources rather than stripping information of its provenance.

Sharing feeds and making independent publishers easier to discover.

Connecting community news with historical archives and local knowledge.

Maintaining directories and cross-project indexes.

Supporting open standards so that information can move between different systems.

Building shared infrastructure without requiring every project to surrender its independence.

This is not about #SEO of creating artificial link exchanges or rewarding websites for linking to one another. Nor is it about pretending that every source deserves equal trust. It is about recognizing that the value of an open network comes from useful connections, not isolated ownership. Trust still matters, moderation still matters, communities need to decide what they publish and which sources they rely on. But these decisions should help build better flows rather than turn every community into another closed silo.

The political choice is simple (#KISS) – we have spent years watching the commercial internet turn relationships into engagement metrics, communities into audiences and information into a resource to be enclosed. The #openweb offers another possibility, but only if we are willing to practise it. This is not about abandoning individual projects, it is about making them part of a living commons. A river does not become powerful by keeping every drop in a separate container. It becomes powerful through the connections between its springs, streams and tributaries. The same is true of the #openweb.

Ten years ago, the problem was that nobody was linking to anybody. Today, we have more technical ways to connect, but we still need the social practice that makes those connections matter. The #OMN is one path to build that practice into the infrastructure itself, not another platform, not another silo. A network of flows, built by the people who need to begin to rebuild the #openweb.

I should LINK from this post, please post URLs in the comments.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #Fediverse #ActivityPub #RSS #indymedia #commons

Composting the mess, growing the alternative commons paths

Online and offline, we are living through an interconnected crisis of ecological breakdown, economic inequality, political disillusionment and social fragmentation that are not separate problems. They feed into each other, creating #mainstreaming paths that are increasingly unable to meet basic social and environmental needs.

The usual response to this now visible mess is to ask the same institutions that created these problems to keep managing the consequences. the chattering classes that run our governments promise new policies, corporations promise new technologies, and professional campaigners promise another round of reform. There people are inside the worship of the #deathcult, and their efforts are constrained by the paths they walk, endless growth, profit extraction, bureaucracy, electoral cycles and the concentration of #nastyfew power.

So this now visible mess, is not only a problem of individual greed or corruption, it is structural. That the #mainstreaming paths keep reproducing the problems because of the unthinking relationships remain unchanged. From common sense, and the #OMN perspective, this is where we need to change the conversation, to not keep relying on better management of #deathcult paths – we need to build the practical foundations of something different.

The old idea of #commons (a polite way of saying #communism) offers a grassroots path away from this spreading political frustration towards practical collective paths. This new path is based on older anarchist ideas, that are critical of the two dominant ways of organizing: the market and the state. Were we are told to buy what we need through commercial markets or campaign for governments to provide it. Yes, maybe both have their place, but neither gives communities any real much control over the resources and paths they need to grow.

So what is the idea of commons? let look at this, commons exists when people share responsibility for resources, establish collective “rules” and manage those resources for mutual benefit. This can mean land, housing, food, energy, knowledge, software, media or the infrastructure that connects communities. The point is that a Commons is not simply something owned collectively, it is something people actively maintain and govern together.

Examples, at a grassroots level, a community garden, a housing cooperative, a repair café, an open-source project and a grassroots media network can all be part of this path. They look different, but each creates space for people to become participants rather than remaining consumers, clients or spectators.

From a practical #DIY path we need to move past the #blocking of thinking of a utopian blueprint waiting for the right political moment. Commons already exist, our work is to strengthen them, learn from their successes and failures, and connect them, in the #OMN work using technology to widen political and economic alternatives.

It is about moving from spectators to participants, the most damaging consequences of our current blinded political culture is the loss of agency. People are repeatedly told that the important decisions are made elsewhere: by governments, corporations, financial markets, technical experts or professional #NGO organizations.

This path has lead to years of broken promises, so it is little surprise many withdraw. Some become cynical about politics; others retreat into, conspiracy, private life or the exhausting routines of survival in late stage capitalism. We can see this only as apathy, when it is a reasonable response to having little meaningful influence or power.

People need practical ways to take part in shaping their lives. Communing offers this through experience, people come together around a shared need, make decisions, distribute responsibilities, deal with disagreements and see the results of their work. They develop the skills and relationships that make further collective action possible.

This is political activity, even when nobody calls it politics – a community that takes control of its housing, food supply, energy or media infrastructure is not merely providing a service. It is changing who has power, who makes decisions and who benefits from the resources being created. The political shift is from asking those above us to solve everything towards building the collective capacity to solve more of it ourselves.

So yes our path is to build the new, but understand the struggle, that meeting real needs to make the old arrangements less necessary. This is a valuable corrective to a political culture that is trapped in permanent resistance, to do more than protest against enclosure, extraction and corporate power, we need to create shared resources that people can actually use.

But we should not mistake this for the idea that politics can be avoided. The existing system does not simply disappear because we build something better. Land, housing, infrastructure and productive resources are already controlled by power if #nastyfew interests and our own common sense. Communities face legal barriers, financial pressures, unequal access to time and skills, and the constant risk that successful initiatives will be absorbed, commercialized or captured by institutions.

Building the Commons is therefore both constructive and political. We create alternatives while challenging the conditions that prevent them from flourishing. The path is not to fight every battle on the opponent’s ground, more to develop enough practical capacity, shared resources and collective confidence that we have more choices about where and how to struggle.

The Commons needs protection against capture – shared ownership does not guarantee a fair or democratic path. A blinded commons might reproduce the same inequalities it set out to overcome. A closed group can accumulate informal power, technical experts become gatekeepers, and participation reduced to approving decisions made elsewhere.

This is where governance projects like the #OGB matter, communities need transparent processes, meaningful participation, accountability, accessible conflict resolution and ways to challenge people who accumulate too much control. Responsibilities shared, decisions remain open to scrutiny, and resources be protected from being quietly transferred back into private ownership.

The same principle applies to funding, yes, grants and investment help build useful infrastructure, but they can also redirect projects towards the priorities of founders. We need ways to bring resources into community control without allowing outside money to take control of the community.

The aim is to make the Commons durable without turning it into another institution that exists primarily to sustain itself. To help with this we need to move from isolated projects to a grassroots networks. A single local project can meet a local need, a connected network of projects begin to become change and change communities.

This is the idea of an wider Commons: many #4opens independent initiatives, rooted in their own places and circumstances, sharing knowledge and resources while retaining local autonomy. We do not need every community to follow the same path. Different places have different needs, histories, cultures and resources, diversity is a strength. Some experiments will fail; others will work well enough to be adapted elsewhere. What matters is that people can learn from one another instead of repeatedly starting from scratch.

Open-source #FOSS software is part of the answer, but it is not enough. We need grassroots digital infrastructure that is open in practice: open data, open source, open standards and open processes -the #4opens – combined with trust, human moderation and community responsibility.

Technical federation, like #activitypub allows this to grow without centralization were communities share tools, infrastructure, experience and political influence without handing their decisions to a distant headquarters. This is a space where grassroots organization becomes a bigger political path. Connected together, we can become the material foundations of a different social order. The process is gradual, uneven and full of conflict. But it creates something that symbolic politics alone cannot: an expanding body of people with practical experience of doing things differently.

The #OMN projects are a direct connection to grassroots media and the #openweb. Communities need to communicate, preserve their histories, share knowledge and coordinate action. Yet much of our digital public life is controlled by the #dotcons: commercial platforms that turn participation into a resource to extract, measure and sell. With our unthinking #fashionistas even supposedly alternative spaces become dependent on centralized platforms, opaque moderation and technical gate-keeping.

The #OMN is not another social media platform. It is a path towards shared grassroots infrastructure for news, archiving and, further down the road, governance. The aim is to help communities create and manage their own media resources, while connecting their work through open networks rather than surrendering control to the normal centralized platforms.

Media is part of the political infrastructure of the Commons. If communities cannot tell their own stories, preserve their own histories or communicate beyond corporate channels, their capacity to organize is weakened. A grassroots #openweb can help make local knowledge visible, allow successful experiments to be copied and give independent initiatives ways to connect. It can help turn scattered projects into a living network without requiring them to become one large organization.

From the local to the political – the commons is not a replacement for every form of politics. We still need struggles over public policy, land, housing, workers’ rights, ecological protection and the distribution of wealth. We need to challenge the power that keeps resources enclosed and decisions out of public hands. But these struggles become stronger when they are connected to practical alternatives.

A housing campaign can do more than oppose unaffordable rents if it also helps build community-owned housing. A food campaign can do more than expose an unjust supply chain if it develops cooperative ways to grow and distribute food. A media campaign can do more than criticize corporate #dotcons and #traditionalmedia platforms if it helps build shared, community-controlled infrastructure like the #fedivers.

This is how the commons becomes part of a bigger political path, not by asking everyone to agree on one path, but by connecting the practical work people are already doing around shared needs. The work provides a meeting point between people who might disagree about theory but can cooperate around tech, housing, energy, care, media or the future of their neighbourhood. Shared practice builds relationships, and those relationships support wider political action.

Over time, these connected efforts move resources out of extractive circuits and into forms of ownership and governance that serve the people who sustain them. This is a material shift in power, not just a change in language. The work starts where we are, there is no single blueprint, central plan or perfect organization that will deliver this transformation. The commons grows through people trying things, sharing what they learn and building on one another ‘s work.

That means starting with real needs, keeping projects accessible, making decisions accountable and sharing the tools and knowledge that others can reuse. It means accepting that communities are messy, that conflict is unavoidable and that trust has to be built through practice rather than demanded as a slogan.

It also means resisting the #geekproblem, the idea that the right technical system can solve social problems. Technology supports relationships and participation, not replaces them. The same applies to political organizations, structure matters, but it needs to remain accountable to the people doing the work.

We need to move beyond the choice between endlessly criticizing the existing system and retreating into disconnected #blocking. We build practical Commons while connecting them into a wider movement to challenging the mess that keeps people powerless.

The current #mainstreaming encourages us to see ourselves as isolated individuals competing for security and influence. The commons begins somewhere else, with the recognition that much of what makes life possible is already shared, and that we can organize more of it around mutual care and collective responsibility.

This is a political choice, to shifts power from extraction towards participation, from passive consumption towards communing, and from centralized control towards connected grassroots autonomy.

For #OMN, the task is to help build the media and digital infrastructure that makes this possible, on this path we do not have to wait for permission. We do have to do the work, learn from our mistakes, protect what we build and connect with others doing the same.

Build locally, share openly, govern together, connect without centralizing is how we begin to grow a different future from the ground up.

We are entering a period of overlapping crises

This mess is driven by climate breakdown, growing inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and the weakening of democratic institutions, these are no longer separate problems, they reinforce each other. At the same time, we are seeing a feedback loop of political movements built around fear, scapegoating, hierarchy and fantasies of escape. This creates a basic question we need to focus on – how do we build the means to live through these crises together, rather than retreating into individual survival, authoritarianism or delusions of technological escape?

One of the strongest #blocks running through the current crisis is, what could call, exit culture. You can see this in the wealthy #nastyfew who push the mess attempt to buy their way out through the nasty fantasy of private security, property and technology. Some feed political movements that imagine an escape into an ethnically or culturally purified nation, the hard right. Some religious movements look towards another imagined world. Some technology #geekproblem culture imagines that humanity can escape its material limits through AI, automation, space or digital transcendence.

The world is broken, so find a way out, a dangerous stupid social response to the systemic social and ecological crisis. But any one with any sense can see there is no #stupidindividualism exit from #climatechaos. There is no technological #dotcons platform that allows us to escape social relationships. And there is no bunker large enough to protect a society from the consequences of destroying the living systems it depends upon. What is needed is we need to actively be composting this mainstreaming mess, the alternative is not to escape, it is to focus on becoming more capable of being here.

Then on the left the is a matching fantasy, we romanticism collapse, but it is not automatically progressive. It is easy to look at broken institutions and think that their collapse must create an opportunity for something better. But collapse has no political direction of its own, maybe it can produce mutual aid, solidarity and new forms of democratic organization. More likely we get authoritarianism, scapegoating, violence and stronger hierarchies.

The outcome depends partly on what people and communities are ready to do when crisis washes over them. If communities have networks (like the #OMN), relationships, communication systems, practical skills and ways of making decisions together (like the #OGB), crisis can become an opportunity to build something new. If they don’t, people are much more likely to fall back on fear and whoever appears to offer simple answers.

So preparation matters, but preparation is hopeless, if people do not pick up the tools or when it means becoming an individual survivalist. We need to balance this commons sense urge, with working collectives to create social relationships and grow ways of looking after each other. It is now 20 years past time to move for survivalism to #KISS mutual aid, we need focus on how do we make sure people can look after each other when things become difficult?

That means better late than never to building relationships before the crisis, knowing who is around us, knowing how to communicate, where resources are, how to organize. Knowing how to disagree without destroying the group, how to make decisions, share responsibility. This is grassroots working democratic resilience from the bottom up.

We need grassroots repossess to authoritarian pushing insecurity – find someone to blame – the nation against the foreigner – the majority against the minority – the “real people” against outsiders – the pure against the contaminated. The hard right are pushing belonging through this kinda blaming exclusion.

We need to work to balance this mess, we need another form of belonging, that means building coalitions capable of holding difference without turning every disagreement into another power struggle. We need to compost the false choice between local organizing and large-scale networks, we need the strong local relationships to provide the social foundation of our change and challenge.

But we also need #KISS technology as tools, #4opens flow networks to allow those communities to exchange knowledge, resources and experience without surrendering their autonomy. This is one of the reasons the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub are interesting. Federation gives us a technical path where independent communities can remain independent while still communicating with each other.

This principle can extend beyond the current #openweb reboot of the fedivers, copying #dotcons social media. We need to build projects like the #OMN based on local relationships + open networks = distributed resilience. This is a much more interesting path than simply building another or replenishing the normal centralized platforms we currently live inside. This move need to be based on technology that supports social process rather than replace it with blinded control.

We don’t need a perfect future, a lot of political narrow thinking is trapped between two fantasies. One says, the existing institutions will eventually fix themselves. The other says, the whole thing has to collapse before we can build something new. It is dangerous to accept either of these paths blindly. What we do need is to grow, trust networks, practical democratic experiments, its fine that none of these are perfect. They need to work better than the current mess, to connect people and communities, so they can step from fear to cooperation.

The current hard right is good at turning insecurity into fear, they feed from fear of migration, cultural change, technological change. Fear of economic collapse, losing status and fear of the future. But the knee jerk reactions cant be to simply tell people not to be afraid as people have real reasons to feel insecure. The better balancing is to build something that gives people something better to fall back on than fear. That means replacing fear → scapegoating → authoritarianism with crisis → cooperation → solidarity. Not in a utopian sense, but as practical path.

On the native openweb path this is the question and the bigger reason for building the #OMN. As we don’t know exactly what the next twenty or forty years will look like, we do know that the existing system is becoming increasingly unstable. We know that #climatechaos is accelerating, that #dotcons technology is concentrating power. We know that authoritarian politics is growing. And we know that simply defending the existing structures is not enough.

So rather than waiting for the next crisis to tell us what to do, we start building now. Practical grassroots paths, not as an escape route, another #closedweb platform as smoke and mirrors for another hierarchy waiting to take control. A network of people and communities that can communicate, remember, cooperate, organize and govern themselves. That is the native #openweb path to compost this mess, that is the practical meaning of the old slogan “another world is possible”.

We don’t have to wait for another world, we can start building the means for it here.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #Fediverse #ActivityPub #mutualaid #democracy #resilience #KISS

Democratic Resilience: a report back

Composting the Last Five Years of the Fediverse

The last five years have changed the #Fediverse. What started, grassroots, commons-based native path has become much more visible. More people have arrived, more organizations have become interested. There are more conferences, more funding conversations, more institutional involvement and more attempts to make the Fediverse part of the wider technology landscape.

Some of this is useful, but it also creates a question that is harder to avoid – what do we actually want to carry forward from the last five years? Perhaps the answer is not to defend everything that has happened, or to reject it all. Perhaps we need to compost it, were omposting means taking what has grown, including the dead material, separating out what is useful and allowing something new to grow from it.

Lets look at an example – the paywall is not just about the ticket – this becomes visible in arguments about conference tickets and paywalls. At one level, the argument is simple, events cost money, venues cost money, travel costs money, some people organizing events need to be paid. But that isn’t really the interesting part, the question that matters is what a paywall means inside a commons-based culture. For someone who comes from the #openweb, free software, grassroots media and other commons traditions, putting a price on entry feel wrong, not just a financial barrier.

It becomes an ideological barrier as the message shift from “This is something we are building together.” towards “This is something you consume if you can afford to enter.” That distinction becomes a block, particularly when some of the people being asked to pay helped build the culture, infrastructure and ideas that made the network possible in the first place. The question therefore isn’t whether events should cost money, it is, are we paying the costs of maintaining a commons, or are we turning participation in the commons into a product? Those are not the same thing.

Let look at this shift from commons culture to event culture – over the last five years, the #Fediverse has developed an increasingly visible event culture. Conferences, workshops, panels and gatherings can be valuable, they create relationships, spread knowledge and bring people together. But there is a danger when the pay to enter events are pushed to the centre of the network. The commons starts to decay, funding resources and focus then starts to orbit around conferences rather than communities. This grows when access is controled by money, professional status, travel and institutional connections.

This doesn’t happen because somebody decides to push us into a #closedweb path, rather it is a common sense mainstreaming organic mess that happens gradually when a grassroots network becomes successful. Success brings institution thinking (#NGO), these institutions bring funding, funding feeds and creates professional roles. Professional roles push a feedback loop creating more top down organizations, these create events with paywalls.

This money creates barriers that eventually a culture that begans with people simply building things together can start looking surprisingly similar to the systems it originally wanted to move beyond. This is not necessarily corruption (though it often is when you lift the lid), it is institutional #NGO drift. Working to recognizing this mess making is part of keeping the commons alive were we need to fund and support the what can we build together? While still actively questioning who gets recognized, funded and invited? As those questions produce very different cultures. The first is about participation and making things, the second is about access to an emerging institutional path.

This is one of the tensions the Fediverse now has to work through, were the answer to this question is not simple, yes, we need to not to romanticize volunteer culture either, as volunteerism has its own exclusions, it to can depend on people having spare time, money and privilege. The point is to find ways of funding the commons without turning the commons into an industry. The last 5 years we have spent enough time trying to prove that the #Fediverse deserves to exist.

The more interesting question for the next 5 years is – What did we actually learn? What worked? What failed? Which projects created durable infrastructure? Which relationships survived? Which forms of organizing created useful results? Which created endless meetings? Which assumptions turned out to be wrong? Which things should we stop doing? And we need to do this without a paywall, to make this composting useful. So, to repeat, don’t throw away the good stuff, composting isn’t destruction, as there is a lot worth keeping.

The last five years have demonstrated the practical value of open standards, federation, independent communities, people running their own infrastructure, interoperability, grassroots paths, mutual aid, trust built through practice and the ability to leave one system without losing the network. These are not just historical curiosities, they are the useful material from which the next seeds can grow. But we have made mistakes over the last 5 years by thinking that moving forward means abandoning the culture that created the #Fediverse in the first place. And yes the is balance, equally, the mistake would be to freeze that culture in place. We maybe need to keep the principles while changing the practice, a way of looking at this is native and non-native paths

This is where the distinction between native and non-native paths becomes useful, a native path starts from the assumptions of the commons open, federated, participatory, interoperable and community-controlled. A non-native path can still use ActivityPub or Fediverse technology while importing assumptions from another world, closed access, professional gate-keeping, centralized authority, ownership, status and consumption. The technology alone doesn’t decide which path we take, #ActivityPub can carry both, as an open protocol does not nesserserly push an open culture.

This is one of the important lessons of the last five years, we need to pay attention to the social structures growing around the plumbing. What should the next five years look like? Perhaps we should balance pushing the #dotcons copying #Fediverse of five years ago. We need different streams to grow the useful material and build the next layers.

Not more copy’s of social-media platforms, not more common sense conference ecosystems, not another self selected central organization deciding what the network is. Instead open media → shared archives → trusted flows → local communities → federated governance to shape a native path much closer to the original promise of the #openweb.

Yes, the original path is good, the federated network should make it easier for communities to communicate, remember, cooperate and organize without having to surrender their autonomy. This means a renewed and a clear focus on moving from social media to social infrastructure is a useful path. As the biggest danger is that we keep reproducing the assumptions of the corporate social #closedweb while using open protocols. We don’t need to feed open infrastructure carrying closed social practices, were the technology is federated, but it feeds culture that is still centralizing.

Some of the current mess we need to compost – the protocol is open – the events tend to be pay-walled. The software is free – but the organizations are controlled by a small professional layer. The network is decentralized – the power isn’t. This is the contradiction mess we need to work on composting.

And yes, before you start kee jerk #blocking the answer isn’t purity, it is wide experimentation, meany native paths to build things, trying different organizational models that make the processes visible, we can learn from failure to keep what works. But please lets let what doesn’t work become composts. The commons needs metabolism, things grow, things fail, people leave, new people arrive. Yes, ideas become useful and then become obsolete, organizations shaped by these ideas appear and disappear. Practices get tested, some survive, some need to be broken down and returned to the soil.

That is what social composting means, not being afraid of the failures and contradictions of the last five years. They are part of the material we have to work with, the question is whether we can turn that experience into something more useful. The aim isn’t to reject institutions, funding or professional work. It is to #KISS keep asking who is this infrastructure for? Who can participate? Who controls it? What remains open? And the biggest question – does this strengthen the commons, or does it slowly turn the commons into another market?

For the #OMN, this is an important distinction as we don’t need another project that simply adds another social timeline to the #Fediverse. We need to explore what happens when federated technology is used for media, archives, trust and eventually governance. That means building from the things that have already proved useful while questioning the assumptions that came with the current #mainstreaming of the Fediverse, don’t overcomplicate what already works, build on it.

It’s interesting to see that the #mainstreaming is moving onto subjects that many of us native to the #openweb have been talking about for the last 20 years. The problem is that when our ideas finally become fashionable, they arrive with a rush of #fashionista baggage – followed by the #geekproblem reaction of trying to solve things with another layer of #techshit.

So maybe now is the time to get the shovels out, the #OMN is one of those shovels. We need to compost the onrushing mess rather than let it become another 20-year cycle of #techcurn, fashion and reinvention.

Take the useful ideas, break down the bad habits, keep the #openweb roots. Build something that the next generation doesn’t have to spend another twenty years digging its way out of.

#OMN #Fediverse #openweb #4opens #ActivityPub #commons #KISS

Why does the #Fediverse exist?

The #Fediverse exists because the corporate #dotcons are not enough, we don’t wont more of our social lives as products, our relationships into #closeddata, and our communities into audiences to be managed. We wont a different way to communicate, organize and build power together.

But the #Fediverse is not simply a kinder version of corporate social media, its has a promise based on the history of the #openweb: people and communities building their own spaces, connecting through open standards, and sharing power without handing control to a central platform.

The problem we need to compost is that there are few working, humane alternatives to the current #deathcult. So for meany people simply stepping away isn’t an option – We need practical alternatives that work in the real world, rooted in grassroots experience and capable of growing beyond isolated projects for these people to step to.

We already have a first step, that is the point of federation, with #ActivityPub, independent communities can connect and share without having to surrender their autonomy. We can scale horizontally, linking working social projects together rather than building another “common sense” centralized empire.

The #OMN takes this to the next step by bringing in grassroots practices we know work to this open technology, human trust and shared responsibility. #MakingHistory, #IndymediaBack, the #OGB and the #4opens are stepping stones towards a more sustainable world, not products to consume, but tools for #KISS collective action.

This is why the current push for #mainstreaming is more problem than solution. If we bring the habits of the #dotcons into the #Fediverse, we are pushing the turning of build something different into another version of the same old “common sense” mess – we become users demanding personal comfort, rather than participants building communities.

And this is where #BLOCKING becomes political. Blocking has a place, especially when people need protection from harassment and abuse. But if it becomes our default answer to every disagreement, it turns despair into the appearance of action. We retreat into smaller and smaller spaces while the structures of power who are ripping the world apart remain untouched.

We cannot build solidarity by pretending differences don’t exist, we build it by developing and growing ways to work through those differences, set boundaries, share responsibility and act together. That is how grassroots movements for the last 100 years have always built real capacity.

“Another world is possible” cannot just be a slogan, we have to make it possible, through practical projects, open infrastructure and communities that learn how to govern themselves. The #Fediverse exists to give us a path to do that. Whether we use it to build a different world, or simply recreate the one we already have, is up to us.

Keep it #KISS, less platform worship, less knee-jerk rejection, more collective work. We won’t block our way into another world, we have to build and grow it.

“Another world is possible” – but our friendly enemies keep pushing #mainstreaming dressed up in radical language. The result? We’re accepting “common sense” of the system instead of challenging it. Solidarity gets fragmented into identity and partisan battles, while class power escapes scrutiny. We end up pointing fingers at each other while the #deathcult carries on.

We need to defend the right to care, but turn that care into collective power. Real solidarity means looking beyond the latest distraction, naming structural power and building alternatives together. Don’t just make the existing world look kinder.

#makinghistory #OMN #4opens #openweb #ActivityPub #IndymediaBack #OGB

Can the #openweb reboot scale without copying the #dotcons?

There is a recurring argument about the #Fediverse that starts with a reasonable question of how can the Fediverse scale? So why, because, yes, it doesn’t yet have the same ease of use as mainstream social media. Infrastructure can be fragile. Servers can struggle when large numbers of people arrive at once. Developers need support and servers cost money. There are no universal performance guarantees, and there isn’t a single business model paying for the whole system. All of that is real.

But underneath this question is a important distinction. Are we trying to scale a platform, or are we trying to scale a network of communities? Those are not the same project, platform scale versus network scale. The #dotcons are built around platform scaling, the basic model is: one organization → one platform → millions of users → centralized infrastructure → centralized governance → monetized attention. The objective is to get as many people as possible onto the same system.

The Fediverse nativly comes from a different tradition, its #KISS path is: many communities → many servers → open protocols → federation → local autonomy → shared network. The objective isn’t necessarily to put everyone in the same place, it is to allow different places to connect. That is the central distinction that gets ignored by mainstreaming crew in discussions about “scaling the Fediverse”.

Scaling the platform is not the same as scaling the network, if we take the #dotcons model as our definition of success, then the Fediverse will always look deficient. It doesn’t have one company providing everything, have one business model funding everything, it doesn’t have one #UX controlling everyone, or one central authority making all the decisions. But these aren’t simply missing features, they are features we deliberately don’t want to reproduce.

The common sense question shouldn’t be – why isn’t the #Fediverse more like mainstream social media? The more need focus should be on – how do we make a federated network of communities sustainable at much larger scale? That is a different engineering, economic and social problem, a different idea of scale.

The problem we need to compost is then when #mainstreaming blindness asks – how do we get millions of people onto one platform? The openweb asks – how do we make thousands or millions of people able to participate in sustainable communities that can connect to each other? That is still scale, it is distributed scale rather than centralized scale. Instead of building one giant machine capable of containing everyone, we build a network of autonomous communities capable of supporting themselves while remaining interoperable. This is native to the historic logic of the #openweb.

This changes the #UX question, the cultural problem that is easy to mistake for a UX problem #mainstreaming common sense talks about. The #dotcons have spent years developing effective systems for capturing attention, infinite feeds, control algorithms, notifications, status competition, engagement metrics pushing personalized outrage. Constant “novelty”, better named as people becoming accustomed to digital drugs. So the mainstreaming “fix” is “why doesn’t this work like the platforms I’m used to?” But if the alternative simply reproduces the same addictive relationship between people and media, we haven’t built anything at all that we need, and the will still be no alternative.

Our native project we have worked so hard on for the last 50 years, is not only about changing the plumbing, its better understood as drug detox. The openweb needs working detox, what we do not need is a “better” version of the same addiction. The current reboot needs a different relationship with media to move from passive consumption towards participation – publish → participate → moderate → organize → build. This is the reasons the #OMN is interested in the federated flow #UX question.

The aim isn’t to make another platform that is easier to consume, it is to make participation easier than consumption. On this different path the #mainstreaming people still have veiled points, but the problem is they still use these to push us down bad paths. Yes, distributed doesn’t mean free, and this distinction should not become an excuse for ignoring the real material problems. Servers cost money, developers need to live, systems need maintenance, communities need resources, infrastructure needs reliability.

You cannot wish these problems away, but to rebalance this we do have seed paths, platform cooperatives are one possible response. Shared ownership and cooperative funding can provide useful ways of sustaining infrastructure and development. But this needed “business model” is not the same thing as a governance model.

And this is where the argument gets more interesting, the governance problem. Once we accept that the #Fediverse is a network rather than a platform, we need governance appropriate to a network, with questions like: Who decides? Who represents whom? How do autonomous communities resolve conflicts? How are shared resources managed? How do communities negotiate with powerful external organizations? What happens when commercial interests arrive? And how do we prevent a small number of organizations from becoming permanent gatekeepers?

These aren’t abstract questions, the more successful the #openweb becomes, the more contested it will become. The #dotcons have enormous resources and existing user bases. Governments, NGOs, foundations and commercial interests will also have reasons to influence an increasingly important open network. So governance needs to be designed before concentrated power becomes embedded.

The historical disagreement, the difference between the two approaches becomes clearer. One path says – The Fediverse needs to become sustainable enough to compete with Big Tech. Build better infrastructure, develop business models, support developers and perhaps use platform cooperatives.

The other says – yes, we need sustainable infrastructure – but don’t define success as becoming another Big Tech platform. Build the economic and governance systems around federation rather than replacing federation with centralization. These positions overlap on many practical problems, they diverge over the path of the thing being built. One starts from the platform, the other starts from the network. That distinction matters because the governance that follows will be different.

This is the gap that led to the #OGB – the Openweb Governance Body. The proposal for a native governance layer for a federated network. Using the same principles that make federation possible – autonomous communities, open protocols, distributed participation, federation between communities, local decision-making, shared standards, negotiation and mediation, accountability between participating groups.

In other words governance that follows the architecture, rather than creating one institution above the network, building ways for the communities within the network to coordinate. Governance between communities “Who should control the Fediverse?” – “How can autonomous communities govern their relationships with each other?” very different questions.

A community shouldn’t have to surrender its autonomy in order to participate, different groups should be able to connect, negotiate, delegate, challenge decisions and coordinate around shared problems. Governance becomes a network capability, rather than a permanent hierarchy sitting above the network. Institutions can still exist, foundations can still exist, cooperatives can still exist. The important thing is that they don’t become synonymous with the network itself.

#OMN is the media version of the same problem – how do we build federated media flows where communities publish, subscribe, moderate, archive and share information without handing ownership of the whole media environment to a platform? #OMN and #OGB are therefore two parts of the same larger project to build the social infrastructure needed for a federated openweb to remain federated as it grows.

The technology matters, #ActivityPub matters, federation matters, #FOSS matters. But none of these automatically produce a healthy social system, they are tools. The culture, economics and governance built around them matter just as much. Don’t scale the wrong thing, is the central lesson.

We should absolutely work on reliability, infrastructure, sustainability and usability, but we should stop treating the #dotcons platform model as the measuring stick for anything. Scaling a platform means concentrating more people and resources into one system, scaling a federated network means enabling more autonomous communities to participate and connect. Those are fundamentally different forms of scale.

What we need to compost is the mainstreaming mess of when we “forget” the historical openweb wasn’t created because people wanted a slightly nicer version of #Facebook. What these people forget is that it came from a different idea of what networked communication could be. The challenge, what we need to support, now is to preserve and develop that difference while dealing realistically with money, infrastructure, scale, governance and the arrival of powerful actors.

So please focus – the real question isn’t simply, can the Fediverse scale? It is, can a federated network scale without turning itself into a platform? And underneath that is can the openweb grow without becoming the thing it was built to replace? A basic #KISS governance problem, that is why we need to build the alternatives now, before the vacuum is filled for us.

The practical #OGB

Federation, not a central organization – OGB isn’t one body governing everyone. It is a federated governance layer that communities, projects and servers can participate in.
#ActivityPub native, were overnance functions are distributed through the same federation model as the #Fediverse. Groups can communicate, propose, delegate, challenge and record decisions across organizational boundaries.
Permissionless participation as the is no central gatekeeper deciding who is allowed to join the governance network. Communities can connect when they meet the basic protocol/social requirements.
Affinity groups rather than permanent representatives, were people organize around issues, projects or communities. Authority comes from participation and demonstrated trust, rather than simply holding an institutional position.
Sortition and recall. Where representatives are needed, selection is based on sortition rather than elections or permanent appointment. Delegates remain accountable and can be recalled.
Dilution of concentrated power. No person, organization or community is able to accumulate permanent control. Roles, influence and decision-making capacity are deliberately distributed.
Voices rather than a single leadership. A small rotating group of 3–5 “Voices” provides coordination and a public interface without becoming a permanent ruling committee.
Governance as a protocol/social practice. The important thing isn’t creating another institution, it’s creating a shared way for autonomous communities to negotiate with each other.

So in the current Fediverse the example is:

#SWF governance through an institution.
#OGB governance between federated communities.

And that fits the #openweb because the governance path follows the architecture – distributed, federated, contestable and permissionless, rather than the normal default common sense of centralized ownership. The interesting bit is that #OGB doesn’t have to replace existing institutions, it can talk to them, mediate with them, and provide a counterweight to them while the #openweb remains open.

#KISS

The answer to the #dotcons isn’t everyone becoming a sysadmin

“Just self-host it” is blinded techie advice that ignores reality, most people don’t want to spend their lives patching servers, managing certificates and worrying about whether they accidentally opened a security hole.

But the alternative doesn’t have to be handing everything to a commercial platform. There is a third path: community self-hosting. And this is actually how much of the #Fediverse has worked for the last decade. A local group, cooperative, union, neighbourhood or affinity group can share the cost, skills and responsibility of running services. Not one person self-hosting for themselves, people self-hosting together, gives us three broad paths:

Commercial services – convenient, but dependent on the #dotcons.

Individual self-hosting – independent, but a huge burden for one person.

Community hosting – shared infrastructure, shared skills, shared responsibility and collective control.

The #Fediverse already demonstrates that the third path can work. Federation means you don’t need one giant platform containing everyone, many independently operated servers can connect through common protocols and still allow people to communicate across the network.

This is maybe a useful step back to the geekpath we started this article on – but also a way of taking the original “self-hosting” idea further, from individual self-hosting → community hosting → federation → native #P2P.

The #OMN path is to build the social infrastructure around the technology: open standards, shared services, federation and communities that can actually manage what they use. But we don’t have to stop at the federated client-server model. We can build bridges between federated ActivityPub servers and native #P2P applications. Were #ActivityPub can provide the wider public network: actors, feeds, media objects, subscriptions and moderation signals and P2P can then hold some of those objects locally and exchange them directly between trusted peers – through local replication, peer connections, DAT-style distribution or other open P2P protocols.

The important thing is the bridge, not another closed gateway, not another platform or another layer of #techchurn. An open bridge where an ActivityPub object can flow into a community P2P network, be replicated and worked on locally, then flow back into the wider federated network as an open media object.

So the architecture becomes – person → community → P2P network → federated server → wider #Fediverse …and back again. That gives us a path from the familiar federated client-server world towards something more genuinely distributed, without throwing away the social structures that already work.

The goal isn’t to turn everyone into a sysadmin, it’s to make the technology simple enough that communities can own, operate and federate their infrastructure together, while people who want more independence can move further down the #P2P path.

Community self-hosting is step one.
Federation makes it scale.
P2P adds another layer of independence.
The bridge connects them.

That’s a useful path beyond the #dotcons and towards a more resilient #openweb.

The Fediverse is social tech built by people

Inside the #geekproblem, many things look realistic because they make sense within the bubble. Outside it, they tend to be irrelevant. My thought: #opensource / free software has real value, but as a path for social change and challenge, it has been devoured by capitalism.

That means social value keeps being reduced unless some good dose of #classwar is pushed back into the limp liberal thing it has become. The #4opens is a VERY gentle way of doing that – if people take an interest and actually use it.

Outreaching, what is the #OMN?

The #OMN (Open Media Network) is “anything in, anything out” network operating through a mediated trust, designed to handle a diverse range of content, data and interactions while leaving communities with the power to decide what they do with that data.

People can also choose their own level of engagement. You can be an active participant – publishing, tagging, moderating, connecting and contributing – or a more passive consumer, following trusted flows of information. The network does not need everyone to participate in the same way.

At its simplest, the #OMN is a “data soup” of tagged data objects flowing through channels, mediated by trust, rather than assuming that everything entering the network is equally valuable, useful or trustworthy, the network allows trust relationships to shape how data moves and how it is consumed.

This creates a different model of media consumption, with no central algorithm deciding what everyone sees, people and communities navigate the data soup through their own relationships, tags, channels and trust networks.

The #OMN is part of what we describe as Web 1.5 were #web01 had many of the things we now need back: openness, decentralisation, interoperability, linking, publishing and the ability for people to build their own spaces. #Web02 took much of that openness and wrapped it in dramatically better user interfaces. That was useful – people quite reasonably liked the easier ways of sharing, communicating and publishing. The problem was what happened next. The platforms became the infrastructure, this infrastructure was privately owned, communities became users, data became a commodity, social relationships became network effects. The #openweb was transformed turned into the #dotcons.

This is the mess we need to compost #Web15 is not about going backwards to Web 1.0. It is about taking the openness and decentralisation of Web 1.0, keeping the useful UX lessons of Web 2.0, and rebuilding the underlying infrastructure as an open, federated commons. That is the path we have taken the first steps on in the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub.

It’s the space the #OMN is working in – a data soup – the metaphor matters, not creating one perfect, clean, central database containing the definitive version of everything. Instead, tagged data objects to flows through networks. Objects can be copied, edited, tagged, linked, filtered, challenged, archived and passed between different communities. Different nodes carry different parts of the soup, some information will be useful in one context and apparently useless in another, that is OK.

The network is deliberately lossy and redundant, information does not have to be complete or perfectly synchronised everywhere, multiple copies and versions can exist, context is added as data flows. Something that appears irrelevant today may become important tomorrow – this is closer to how knowledge actually works than the fantasy of one perfect database.

The #geekproblem tends to see this redundancy, uncertainty and lossy data as technical failures that need to be eliminated. The #OMN sees them as characteristics of a living information network that need to be managed through trust and participation. Flows of trust – not simply the data, it is the flows of trust around the data. Trust becomes part of the network architecture, when people and communities decide which sources, objects, tag, channels and relationships they trust.

That trust can change over time, you don’t have to trust everything, you don’t even have to participate fully. You can follow particular people, communities or channels because you trust them, while ignoring other parts of the network. Someone else can make entirely different choices. This means there is no single central algorithm to decide what is important for everyone, instead, many smaller trust relationships create many overlapping flows through the #datasoup.

Those flows form communities and because they are federated, communities remain distinct while still sharing information and infrastructure. Trust instead of the algorithm is the differences between the #OMN and the #dotcons. The #dotcons operate by extracting social relationships into centralised systems, then using opaque algorithms to decide what people see. The #OMN starts from almost the opposite assumption: people and communities should have more control over the flows they participate in, the context and community relationships do more of the work.

This does not make the network magically free of disagreement, misinformation or bad behaviour. Quite the opposite, it makes those things visible and gives communities tools to respond to them. That is where mediation, moderation, tagging, rollback and open process become important. The network should make it possible for communities to see how things work, participate in decisions, challenge mistakes and build their own projects.

The aim is to take existing tools, protocols and technologies and embed practical federated media/news networks with a good user interface into these existing native #openweb flows. That is where the interesting part begins, real value is not the database, the protocol or the interface, it is the flows that emerge between people, communities, media objects and networks.

Those flows allow communities to form around shared interests, shared histories and shared trust without requiring everyone to belong to the same organisation or use the same interface. A network, not a platform, is better understood as commons infrastructure, rather than another social-media platform.

We build basic infrastructure and lets communities decide what they want to do with it, that is Web 1.5, not a nostalgic return to the old web, not another version of Web 2.0 – an #openweb reboot – using the best of what came before, leaving the centralised ownership model behind, and building the next layer around federation, trust, participation and the commons.

#OMN #Web15 #openweb #4opens #FOSS #commons #fediverse #KISS #geekproblem #dotcons

To compost the #dotcons, the #openweb needs more people with shovels

Yes, the #web02 revolution was a con, it always was. The problem is now most people have spent years pretending that the dominant technology companies were somehow neutral actors – clever companies making useful tools, occasionally getting a little too powerful, occasionally needing a bit of regulation. But now this comforting chattering class story is harder to maintain, as the long “invisible” problem has finally reached the #mainstream, the act of stepping over the smoke and mirrors can now be seen in books such as Gil Durán – that the Silicon Valley billionaire class has developed an explicitly anti-democratic political worldview, and it has accumulated enough money, technology and institutional influence to start acting on it.

The book Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy describes a political culture that did not suddenly appear with Trump. It has roots going back decades: hostility to government, hostility to taxation, extreme individualism, the fantasy of “exit”, private jurisdictions, network states, crypto-utopianism and the idea that technological elitists should be able to operate outside democratic constraints. This view of #geekpoblem history matters because if we treat what is happening now as simply another Trump-era political crisis, we shovel the wrong shit onto the compost heap.

This mess we need to compost is the blinded politics of our technology classes. The con was always bigger than the platform, #dotcons were never simply websites, there “value” comes from when they became infrastructure for social life. #Failbook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, X and the rest were built to control people, they “business modal” inserted themselves between people and their ability to communicate, organise, publish, buy, work and increasingly understand the world.

The con, the clever trick was that they appeared to be giving us something, free publishing, free communication, free social networks, search, storage and entertainment. But the real business model was the capture of the flows, our relationships became data, our attention a commodity, communities became markets, conversations became #LLM training material. Now that our social lives are increasingly controlled as behavioural prediction systems, and the more dependent we became, the more control and thus power accumulated on the other side of the interface.

This is why calling the #dotcons simply “social media companies” is too small a description. They became private governance systems, to make rules, decide visibility and control infrastructure. They moderate speech, shape markets, influence elections. They lobby governments to corrupt political control. And now some of the #nastfew openly talk about replacing democratic institutions with technological and corporate control. The con was never about advertising, it was about power.

Seeing the path underneath the technology is of the useful things, connecting today’s behaviour with 20th century ideas. The Silicon Valley ideology did not begin with artificial intelligence, it developed through decades of worshipping the #deathcult of libertarian and anti-government thinking. Books such as The Sovereign Individual became influential within the elitist chatting classes. Figures such as Peter Thiel pushed ideas, and funding at technology, sovereignty, crypto, private jurisdictions and “exit”.

The basic #nastyfew fantasy is consistent – when the government gets in the way, leave, if democracy is inefficient, replace it. When taxation is inconvenient, move somewhere else. If regulation applies to everyone, build somewhere it doesn’t. If nation states are obsolete, create new digital or corporate forms of sovereignty. It sounds futuristic, but underneath the science-fiction language is something ancient. A #nastyfew group of extremely wealthy people deciding that ordinary democratic accountability should no longer apply to them. This is simply oligarchy updated with #postmodern branding, and then came the #AI boom, that accelerates and intensified the #techshit class mess.

We should not need to talk about how the technology itself is not the enemy, the current #openweb reboot clearly shows it is not. So what is, a very normal story, the worship of the #deathcult, our political and economic structure around the #dotcons, and the #geekproblem that breeds this is the problem.

With #climatechaos visible all around us, we are still being told that all this #techshit is necessary because someone in Silicon Valley has decided that the future requires it. This now easy to see mess is why resistance to data centres, surveillance systems, crypto schemes and companies such as Palantir can become broader than narrow traditional left politics. People are now starting to experience #nastyfew billionaire power physically in the growing social mess. The abstract becomes concrete, the cloud a building, the algorithm becomes distracting fluff, the #dotcons platforms are revealed as workplaces when the billionaire becomes the person deciding what happens in your town.

The #OMN more profound question is increasingly about who gets to control infrastructure and who gets to participate in deciding how it is used. That is a democratic question, and it should also be a #openweb question. This is where the current reboot comes in to balance the mess. The #NGO, civil society answer cannot simply be to keep regulating the #dotcons harder while continuing to depend on them for everything. Yes, regulation matters, taxation matters, breaking up monopolies matters and basic democratic accountability matters.

But we also need alternatives; otherwise we remain trapped inside #nastfew controlled infrastructure. This balancing is why we can’t keep fucking up our #openweb reboot. We need to #KISS take the useful lessons from the early web – openness, decentralisation, interoperability, user control and federation – and combine them with the better UX lessons we learned from Web 2.0.

We need to build this alt path on the current #Fediverse, based on exiting reboot #4opens paths like #ActivityPub and #RSS. What we don’t need is more of what current takes the vast majority of #openweb funding and coding focus. Not another collection of #VC startups, any more “ethical” billionaire-funded platforms – not another centralised service waiting to become the next #dotcons.

We need something structurally different, we need practical shovels to composting the #dotcons. This is where I use the word compost deliberately, we cannot simply pretend the last 30 years didn’t happen, there is an enormous pile of #techshit. Some of it is bad technology, much is bad governance. Some is exploitative economics, surveillance, addiction. In our heads we need to compost venture-capital paths, empty innovation language and the stink of #NGO and institutional capture.

Some of the simple #geekproblem is just plain bad social thinking dressed up as technical expertise. But there is likely useful material in the pile too, the #web02 #dotcons did teach us things – They showed us that people want easy-to-use communication tools – the importance of good #UX, we need to take what is useful and use this to expose what is toxic. To understand how it happened, learn from the failures. Then we need to translate this understanding into action to break the concentrations of power, to open space to grow something different.

The #geekproblem is part of this, another uncomfortable layer. The alternative technology world has not always been good at avoiding the same mistakes, the #geekproblem is real. Too often we build technology according to what technically clever people think is interesting rather than what communities actually need. We confuse technical complexity with progress, confuse innovation with usefulness, technical decentralisation with democracy. And often we recreate the same power structures inside #FOSS that we were supposedly trying to escape.

The resulting technically elegant social mess, is a strange imitation of the #dotcons: technically open underneath, but socially closed around the people who understand the machinery. This mess is then feed into the funding problem, where the #fashernistas enter the pile.

With the current #openweb reboot, alternative technology is increasingly surrounded by funding ecosystems that reward fashionable language, impressive demos, grant-friendly projects and institutional credibility. The grassroots people actually doing the work can become secondary, the people who understand the community get pushed aside by people who understand the funding application. The messy project gets replaced by the polished project, the difficult social question becomes a technical deliverable, and the result is another layer of #techshit.

This is not inevitable, but we need an open process capable of exposing it, that is the reason the #4opens matters – Open data – Open source – Open standards – Open process. The fourth one is particularly important, if the process is visible, we can see who is making decisions, how money is moving, whose ideas are being prioritised and where the projects are about grafting. We can challenge it before the pile gets too big, we need to compost the #techshit at source.

To grow anything in the current mess, we need infrastructure that ordinary communities can understand, use, modify, share and govern. We need technology that supports participation rather than extracting it, systems where disagreement, correction, rollback and learning are normal. We need tools that help communities build memory rather than constantly throwing yesterday into the algorithmic landfill.

So we know what we need, we know what we need to compost. The chattering classes are finally waking up, we have the interesting thing, that some of the people who have spent years talking about “innovation” and “the future” are finally starting to notice what has been happening. The warning signs are no longer hidden, #nastyfew political power is visible as is the social and ecological damage.

The question is no longer whether there is a problem, it is becoming what we do about it. And this is where I worry about the next stage because every time the mainstream finally notices a grassroots problem, the #fashernistas arrive. They package it, brand it, secure the funding to create the conference to build their careers. This simply “common sense” behaver stinks and is going to kill and displace billions of people.

And somehow, after all that activity, the people who were actually doing the work are still standing outside the room, we have seen this cycle for decades, we cannot afford to repeat it here. So shovel harder, the #openweb reboot has a job to do, we don’t have the time to create another fashionable technological sector. We don’t need another class of sellout experts to compete to become another set of gatekeepers. And definitely not to reproduce the #dotcons with a nicer logo and some open-source code.

We need to shovel hard, turn over the #dotcons, expose the blinded ideology, compost the bad economics, the #geekproblem and the corrupt grant culture. We need to compost our own #fashernista performance. To balance this we have to keep the useful technology, the useful knowledge, the communities and most importantly keep the history. Then use all of that compost to grow something genuinely different.

The old web was open enough to give us a glimpse of what was possible, #web02 captured that openness and turned it into private infrastructure. Now we have a chance to take the useful parts back, not by going backwards, but by putting people and communities back into the centre of the flow.

The #deathcult worshippers have spent decades building an escape route from simple democratic accountability. Our path is not to follow them on this fantasy, it is rather to build a better path in the other direction. The #dotcons are a huge pile of compost, the question is whether we are willing to pick up the shovels.

Trust and the trustless mess

One of the useful arguments in the debate around decentralisation, blockchain and the #openweb is also one of the simplest – We do not actually live in a trustless world, we live in a world built on different kinds of trust. This is why the Fediverse worked because it was #4opens with a good #UI.

The problem it had to overcome and still does is that much of #geekproblem pushing technology is obsessed with trying to eliminate trust rather than understanding how trust works. The idea of the “trustless” technology sounds attractive. If we cannot trust governments, corporations, banks, platforms, administrators or even other people, why not build digital systems where nobody needs to trust anybody?

This is a simple mindset, instead of trusting a person, trust the mathematics, instead of trusting an institution, trust the protocol. Instead of trusting a moderator, trust the code. Instead of trusting a community, trust the ledger. It sounds wonderfully clean, but there is a problem – you cannot eliminate trust, the social truth is you can only move it somewhere else.

A #blockchain can make it difficult to alter records after they have been entered, but it cannot magically make the information entered into the system true. Someone still has to enter the information, someone has to write the software, someone has to maintain the infrastructure, someone has to interpret the results and someone has to decide what happens when reality doesn’t fit the rules. That distinction, people, is important for thinking about the future of the #openweb as the path to trustless is usually just displaced trust.

Imagine buying a digital object through a “trustless” smart contract. The theory says that you don’t need to trust the seller. The contract automatically enforces the transaction. But do you trust the person who wrote the smart contract? That the code does what you think it does? Do you understand the code well enough to audit it? Do you trust the software running on your computer? Do you trust that the thing described by the contract is actually the thing you want? Suddenly, the system isn’t trustless in any way.

On this blinded pushed #geekproblem path, you are exchanging trust in people and community for trust in software, tech infrastructure and your own technical ability. A tiny number of people are grasping for power, in this it is a “grassroots” mirroring of the current #dotcons mess. Supposedly trustless transactions always fall back on reputation, previous experience, known counterparties or the assumption that somebody will behave fairly.

And this isn’t necessarily a failure, it is a recognition of how society actually works, trust is basic infrastructure. We think of trust as something soft and personal, a handshake, reputation, knowing somebody. Being part of a community, a history with an organisation. But trust is actually a form of core social infrastructure.

When you buy something from a local shop, you don’t individually audit every component of the business. You trust the shopkeeper, the reputation of the shop, the legal framework. You trust food standards, trust that if something goes badly wrong, there are mechanisms for dealing with it. None of this means that the shop is perfectly trustworthy, it means that layers of “soft” trust, accountability and social mechanisms make cooperation possible.

The same thing happens online, we trust websites, moderators, administrators, developers. We trust maintainers, communities. They all have reputations, the interesting question here isn’t – how do we eliminate trust? It is, how do we build better systems of trust? The #geekproblem problem of pretending that trust doesn’t exist, is a fantasy of the trustless system that makes things less democratic. If trust is made invisible inside code, people lose sight of where power shapes process and actually sits. So replacing a human decision with a technical decision doesn’t remove politics, it hardens and hides it by simply hiding politics inside infrastructure.

The #geekproblem isn’t about technical people being bad or that technical knowledge isn’t relevant. Quite the opposite, complex systems need technical knowledge. The current problem comes when technical expertise becomes a substitute for social and political accountability. The system says, “The code says so.” But somebody decided what the code should say, decided what the code should not say – that is governance.

This is where the #4opens become useful.

Open Data.
Open Source.
Open Standards.
Open Process.

The point of this simple clarification of #FOSS is to make the system trustworthy enough to participate in and transparent enough that people can understand how that trust is produced. Open source allows people to inspect and modify the software. Open standards allow different systems to communicate. Open data allows information to be examined and reused. Open process makes decision-making visible. They together make trust more accountable, a much healthier goal.

On this current broken path, some people assume that decentralisation means removing trusted intermediaries. But decentralisation does not mean removing relationships, it means distributing relationships and accountability. Instead of one corporation controlling everything, you have many independent communities. Instead of one giant moderation department, you have distributed moderation, one platform deciding the rules, instead communities establish their own rules while communicating through shared standards. Instead of one central archive, many organisations hold copies and contribute metadata flows.

That is not in any way trustless, it is distributed trust, and distributed trust is much closer to how healthy communities actually operate. Reputation matters, people have always used reputation to decide whom to trust. You recommend a builder because someone you know had good experience with them, choose a restaurant because friends recommend it. You work with someone because they have a history of doing good work, participate in a community because you know the people involved.

An example of this #geekproblem in tech the last 20 years of #blockchain projects, is that they have to recreate reputation systems, off chain, to grow trusted parties because people need them to function. This shouldn’t surprise us, reputation is accumulated social knowledge, a record of relationships, it is one of the ways communities remember.

And that common sense is something that technology should help communities develop rather than trying to replace with abstract technical mechanism. This is the danger of “code is law” a seductive idea, if the rules are encoded into software, nobody can arbitrarily change them. But real life doesn’t work like software, people make mistakes, circumstances change. Sometimes the rules themselves are wrong.

A genuinely sustainable social system needs the ability to interpret, moderate, appeal, correct and change, this requires people, relationships and basic governance. It requires trust, were a completely rigid system may be technically predictable while being socially disastrous. Trust needs accountability, this is particularly important for grassroots technology. When we build alternatives to the #dotcons, we shouldn’t simply recreate their power structures with different software. We need to ask:

Who can make decisions?

Who can see what is happening?

Who can challenge a decision?

Who can correct mistakes?

Who can leave?

Who can fork the system?

Who can moderate?

Who controls the infrastructure?

Who owns the data?

These are trust questions, a trustworthy system isn’t one where nobody has power, it is one where power is visible, distributed and accountable. Trust isn’t blind faith, yes, there is a danger in romanticising trust, trust doesn’t mean blindly believing people. Good trust is built through evidence.

You trust somebody because you have a relationship with them.

You trust an organisation because it has demonstrated competence.

You trust a process because you can see how it works.

You trust a community because people hold each other accountable.

You trust software because it is open, tested and maintained.

You trust a system because there are ways to challenge it when it fails.

So the opposite of “trustless” isn’t “blind trust”, it is earned, observable, and accountable. This gives us a useful direction for the current #openweb reboot. It points to the mess we need to compost, we don’t need to recreate the fantasy of an entirely trustless internet. The commercial internet already tried extreme centralised trust – for 20 years the #dotcons became trusted intermediaries for almost everything, owning the infrastructure, controlling the algorithms, identity, data, moderation. They controlled visibility, they still control the economic relationship with users. That isn’t trustless, it is concentrated trust and concentrated power.

Trust is the missing layer, there is a tendency in narrow #geekproblem paths to think in terms of infrastructure first. Servers, protocols, APIs, encryption, algorithms. But underneath all of these sits a social question – why should anyone trust this system? And the answer cannot simply be “Because the code works.” as a system can work perfectly and still be socially terrible. The important question is whether the technology helps people create relationships that are transparent, accountable, resilient and capable of self-correction. That is a much bigger challenge than creating a trustless protocol, but it is also much more useful.

To build on a different path, we need networks where communities can trust their own infrastructure. We are already doing this on the #Fediverse, building on #ActivityPub standard that allow communities to communicate. Moderation systems where decisions are kind of visible and accountable. What is lacking is building governance that people can participate in, this is where projects such as #OMN and #OGB become interesting. There goal isn’t to make human relationships unnecessary, it is to build technical infrastructure that supports better human relationships.

From trustless to trustworthy, means accepting that trust is unavoidable and then making trust visible and accountable. It means combining open standards with open governance, decentralisation with community and recognising that humans aren’t bugs in the system – humans are the system.

Technology should therefore not be designed around the fantasy that people are unreliable components that need to be eliminated. It should be designed around the reality that people cooperate through relationships, reputation, shared history, norms, institutions and accountability. The #KISS task of the #openweb is not to eliminate these things, it is to build better versions of them, real alternative to the #dotcons – not more dead-end trustless technology.

The #OMN path is distributed trust, supported by open technology and democratic governance. And perhaps a more radical idea – rather than trying to remove trust from society, we should get much better at building it, sharing it and making it accountable #KISS.

#Trust #Trustless #OpenWeb #OMN #OGB #4opens #FOSS #Commons #Fediverse #Decentralisation #Governance #Democracy #Technology #Community

The language around #climatechaos is changing

For years, climate breakdown was treated as distant, a problem for activists, scientists, future generations or places somewhere else. That blinded view is now harder to sustain. Heat, fires, floods, crop failures, infrastructure disruption, rising insurance costs and the growing difficulty of simply keeping homes and communities safe are making climate disruption part of our everyday life.

As we are talking about tech on this site – the important question for the #OMN is therefore not only how do we stop climate change? It is also – how do we build the social infrastructure needed to live through the disruption that is already here? This is where the climate conversation needs to become broader, and treat adaptation not surrendering, due to the fear that talking about adaptation means giving up on mitigation, it doesn’t.

We still need fundamental social change to reduce emissions, change energy systems and challenge the economic structures pushing us to ecological destruction. But we also need to mediate the very real mess and disruption is already here, we need to be honest about that. A community facing repeated flooding needs flood planning, when homes become dangerously hot, people need cooling, insulation and better housing. When extreme weather repeatedly disrupts transport, energy or communications, communities need resilient alternatives, insurance companies withdraw from areas they consider too risky, it is basic that communities also need better ways of thinking about collective risk and resilience.

These are not future problems, they are now simply ordinary infrastructure questions. And this infrastructure is never only physical, we also need social infrastructure too. This is needed to grow climate resilience, information resilience, on this path we need native #openweb systems where communities can publish what is happening, preserve local knowledge, compare experiences, challenge bad information, coordinate responses and maintain collective memory. That is very different from the current model of social media, where information is filtered and controlled through commercial algorithms, engagement incentives and platform ownership.

The #climatecrisis is already difficult enough – we don’t need our communication systems making it harder. Thus, the climate crisis is also a media crisis: When a flood happens, what matters? People need to know where the water is. They need to know which roads are closed, where vulnerable people are, which services are operating. They need to know what happened last time to know who they can trust.

And afterwards, someone needs to record what actually happened, this last part is particularly important. Without good local records, every disaster becomes an isolated event. Communities repeatedly rediscover the same problems because institutional memory disappears. This is one reason the #OMN #makinghistory matters, the idea is simple: communities should create living, collaborative records of what is happening around them. Not just journalism in the traditional sense, but a shared memory infrastructure. Stories, events, places, people, evidence, changes and responses connected over time to give communities something valuable during #climatechaos – memory.

You would be right we already have more information than ever, the problem is that information is fragmented into disconnected #closedweb platforms. One person posts on Facebook, someone else posts on X, another publishes a video on YouTube. A council puts an announcement somewhere else, a local activist keeps information on a personal website were a journalist publishes an article that disappears behind a paywall.

Then the flooding comes, and suddenly nobody has a reliable picture of what happened. This is the #datasoup problem. The answer isn’t simply more information, we need better ways of connecting information while keeping its provenance, context and history. This is why open standards matter – #RSS, #ActivityPub, open metadata, decentralised publishing, archives and interoperable tools are not just technical preferences, they are pieces of a social resilience infrastructure. The #4opens is a useful starting point: Open Data. Open Source. Open Standards. Open Process. These matter because climate resilience cannot depend entirely on proprietary systems controlled by a few companies.

We shouldn’t respond to the crisis by creating another centralised technological solution and declaring it the answer. This is not about building one perfect system, there is another lesson here – climate chaos is too complicated for that. Different communities have different needs, the important thing is that these systems connect and remain open. We already have a path for this – the #openweb is already a diverse ecosystem rather than another platform monopoly. This is why the #OMN approach is deliberately practical and pluralistic, we don’t need technological purity, we need useful tools that work together and remain in the commons.

Yes, finally the wider #mainstreaming is noticing the physical problem. Heatwaves are no longer exceptional, flooding is no longer unimaginable, insurance withdrawal will become a political issue. Food and energy security need to become part of everyday political discussion. The mainstream is beginning to understand the hard infrastructure problem, but the social infrastructure problem remains much less visible.

We need to build paths through this before we need them – The worst time to discover that your community has no communication infrastructure is during a disaster. The worst time to discover that nobody knows what happened during the previous flood is during the next flood. The worst time to discover that all your community information lives on somebody else’s platform is when that platform changes its access rules or goes away.

Resilience therefore means building before the emergency, but not another giant centralised project, more lots of small interconnected pieces. Open tools, local archives, community websites, federated publishing sharing metadata based on open standards. Then the social side is people who know how to maintain servers, know how to tell stories, how to moderate and systems that allow all those pieces to connect, as climate resilience is also social resilience.

The deeper point is that climate chaos exposes the weakness of the current #dotcons social model. A society organised around individual consumption, competition, private ownership and short-term profit is poorly equipped for long-term collective disruption. The response has to move in the opposite direction: balancing individualism towards community; from enclosure towards commons; from proprietary platforms towards open infrastructure; from disposable information towards collective memory and from centralised control towards distributed resilience.

Technology cannot solve #climatechaos, but the wrong technology can make it much worse, while the right kind of technology can help communities organise, remember, communicate and cooperate. That is the space we are interested in with the #OMN to build the open social infrastructure underneath society – infrastructure that can survive the platforms, the political fashions and hopefully some of the climate disruption coming our way.

The climate crisis is not only asking whether we can build stronger walls, better drains and cooler buildings, it is asking whether we can become better at being a society. That is where the #openweb has a role – you need a shovel #OMN

#OMN #MakingHistory #climatechaos #openweb #4opens #IndymediaBack #OGB #resilience #commons #federation #community #climateadaptation

The Politics of Ignorance

OMN: Activity, culture and why Soviet experiments matter

One of the interesting things about the history of the #Fediverse is how many of its ideas come from places that, at first glance, seem completely unrelated to social media or network technology. #ActivityPub is a good example – the word activity carries a much older intellectual history, including the work of Soviet psychologist Alexei Leontiev, who developed what became known as activity theory. His work grew out of the cultural-historical psychology of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, and eventually became a major school of psychological thought.

For #OMN, this history is interesting because it points toward a different way of thinking about technology. The important question is not simply – what does a person do with a piece of technology?It is – what activity is the technology part of, what social relationships make that activity possible, and what happens when those relationships change? That is a much more useful starting point for grassroots technology, from the individual to activity

Leontiev’s work developed around the idea that human life can be understood through activity: the processes through which people actually live in and engage with the objective and social world around them. He described activity as encompassing human life in its social richness and variety. His model breaks activity down into connected levels:

Activity → motive

Action → goal

Operation → practical means

This is useful because it stops us treating technology as an isolated object. A button, interface, server or protocol does not have much meaning by itself, its meaning comes from the activity surrounding it. A publishing system exists because people are trying to communicate, moderation exists because communities need to negotiate trust and boundaries. An archive exists because people want to remember, a federation protocol exists because independent communities want to exchange information without becoming one organisation.

The technology is the means, the social activity is the larger thing, this matters for the #openweb – A lot of blinded technology culture starts from the opposite direction, it starts with the tool, a protocol, an application, a database. Here is a new platform, then we ask people to reorganise their lives around the technology, one of the roots of what I call the #geekproblem. The problem isn’t that programmers are bad people or that technical knowledge is somehow illegitimate. The problem is that technical systems become disconnected from the social activity they support. The result is often tech-first thinking, we build something technically impressive and then ask – what can people do with it?

Leontiev’s work also sits inside a wider tradition of thinking about human beings as fundamentally social. People don’t arrive in the world as fully formed independent economic or political units. We are born into relationships, language, culture, institutions and communities. We need to balance this, a useful grassroots approach is to start with – what are people already trying to do together, what technology would help them do it better? That is a different question, seeing activity is social.

Our ability to act independently is something that develops through those relationships. This is important for understanding the #openweb because the #openweb is not really about individual freedom in isolation, it is much more about collective capacity. The value of federation isn’t that everyone gets their own little island, it is that many different islands can communicate. The value of open standards isn’t that everybody has to behave in the same way, it is that different communities can remain different while still sharing enough infrastructure to cooperate. That is the social possibility sitting underneath the technical architecture.

ActivityPub is therefore more interesting than a protocol

ActivityPub carries the word activity for a reason.

The protocol doesn’t just describe pieces of content, it describes things happening between actors. Someone creates something – someone follows someone – someone likes something – someone shares something – someone blocks someone – someone undoes an action. These are social actions represented through technical infrastructure. That distinction matters, a closed platform can treat communication as a product. An open network, instead treats communication as a social activity that needs infrastructure. That is much closer to what we are trying to build with #OMN.

The #OMN approach is not inventing the perfect social media platform, that would be the wrong starting point. We are interested in building practical infrastructure for grassroots media activity: Publish. Subscribe. Moderate. Edit metadata. Rollback. These are not simply software features, they describe parts of a wider social activity. People create media, communities decide what they trust, information moves between communities, where people correct mistakes and stories develop over time. Archives preserve collective memory.

The technology should make these activities easier rather than forcing communities into somebody else’s business model, a simple needed step from activity to commons. This is also where the #4opens becomes important, #FOSS is useful, but it isn’t enough. A project can publish its code and still reproduce closed governance, concentrated power and dependency. For a genuinely useful grassroots infrastructure we need openness across the whole activity: Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Process. That creates larger commons around the technology, the code becomes something people can inspect and improve, data becomes something communities can work with, standards allow different systems to communicate, the process makes decisions visible and contestable.

This is not about creating a perfect system, it is about creating systems that can remain changeable by the people who depend on them, technology as a part of culture. We can build the most technically decentralised system imaginable and still reproduce centralised social behaviour, we build open-source software that puts us under authoritarian governance, federation can create little kingdoms. We can build democratic tools and allow a small group of developers or funders to control everything.

If communities have no control over their communication infrastructure, their social organisation remains vulnerable to whoever owns that infrastructure, the #geekproblem again. The technical architecture matters, but it cannot solve the cultural problem by itself. The opposite is also true, a healthier culture needs appropriate technology to support it.

This is why maybe Leontiev’s idea of activity is useful today, it gives us a way out of the endless argument about whether technology is inherently good or bad. Technology is neither the beginning nor the end of the story, it sits inside activity. The question becomes – What activity does this technology encourage? Who controls the means of that activity? Who benefits? Who gets excluded? Can the community change the system? Can people leave without losing everything? Can different communities connect without surrendering their independence?

Those are much better questions than simply asking whether a technology is “innovative”. This is also why native projects such as #OMN, #IndymediaBack, #MakingHistory and #OGB matter, as paths for growing infrastructure around social activities rather than trying to manufacture another attention platform.

#MakingHistory is about collective memory and living archives.

#IndymediaBack is about grassroots media infrastructure.

#OGB is about experimenting with governance structures.

#OMN is about federated publishing and the movement of trusted media between communities to rebuild collective capacity in a time when much of our communication infrastructure has been enclosed by the #dotcons. Human beings do not exist outside their activities and relationships – Technology is one of the means through which those relationships are organised – So the challenge for the #openweb isn’t simply to build better software – It is to build better relationships between people, communities and the tools they use to act together.

That is the part of the #Fediverse story that interests me, and it is where the #OMN project starts.

https://o.ee/blog/activitypub-won-by-being-boring