Disappearing from Search: A personal story about visibility, #dotcons, and the shrinking #openweb

Recently I’ve been doing media interviews – one mainstream piece for a #boatingeurope article coming out in traditional media, and another for the Cherwell student paper in Oxford focused more on biography. Both journalists said the same thing: “It was surprisingly hard to find information about you online.”

Around the same time, a boater friend told me something similar. After finally discovering my YouTube channels – which contain thousands of videos and millions of views – they commented that it had taken real effort to find them.

That got me thinking about the subject of memory online and the #dotcons silent blocking of our native cultures. I took it for granted that people could easily find my work with a simple web search as for years my work, the is a lot, was easily discoverable through a simple Google search. But I had also noticed something quietly changing, I had gradually disappeared from the front pages of many searches. Old links were rotting. Connections between projects were becoming harder to trace.

So I decided to dig.

Testing different search engines

I started with “alternative” search engines.

Brave search https://search.brave.com/search?q=hamishcampbell&source=web

Results: 6 out of the first 9 results were clearly about me. Strong signal, good context.

Mojeek https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=hamishcampbell

Results: All first-page results were relevant.

This felt similar to how search engines used to behave years ago – linking together projects, history, and context.

Bing https://www.bing.com/search?q=hamishcampbell

Results: 7 relevant results on the first page, 4 unrelated. Not perfect, but still reasonably discoverable.

Then I tried Google again

With some hesitation, I went back to the default mainstream search engine.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hamishcampbell

What I found was troubling. Searching for “hamish campbell” (with a space automatically added): NO results on the first page. Only one link on the second page to my site. None of my wider online presence appeared at all, no connected accounts or historical references anywhere. Only after clicking the link “search instead for hamishcampbell” (without the space) did the result improve slightly – but still showed only internal pages from my own site as link 5 none of the broader network of projects, media, and accounts I’ve built over decades.

What the people had said to me was true, in practical terms in the default mainstream search experience, I am now largely invisible.

What this reveals about the changing web

This isn’t a story of one person’s visibility, it reflects a dysfunctional shift in how discovery works. Older search models emphasised linking between sources, context and historical continuity, distributed identity across the web. Newer models emphasise platform-contained identity, engagement signals controlled by corporate ecosystems and algorithmic filtering based on opaque commercial criteria. This shift weakens the connective tissue of the #openweb. Instead of a web made from links, we get silos made from platforms.

A kinda random view on this https://www.impactlab.com/2025/07/19/the-death-of-google-search/ for people who like links.

Link rot and historical amnesia

Another issue is link rot. Projects built across independent websites, forums, mailing lists, and early social platforms slowly lose visibility as sites shut down, algorithms deprioritise older content and corporate platforms become default discovery gateways. The result is a quiet rewriting of history. Not through censorship – but through absence. If something cannot be found easily, for most people it effectively does not exist.

Personal visibility vs structural invisibility

This isn’t about ego or personal branding, it matters because grassroots history lives through networks of links and references. When those links disappear from discovery, movements lose continuity, new participants cannot learn from past experiments and alternative culture appears smaller and weaker than it actually is. This strengthens the illusion that the #dotcons are the only viable digital ecosystem.

Why this matters for the #openweb and #OMN

The #OMN project exists partly because of this problem. We need infrastructures that treat media and identity as shared commons rather than platform assets, preserve link histories and support federated discovery rather than centralised closed ranking. Search should reflect networks of meaning, not just commercial algorithmic popularity. The old web worked because links mattered, today’s platforms profit by obscuring these links.

What we can learn

A few practical lessons are we need to maintain independent websites as roots of identity, and cross-link projects deliberately, links are memory. Support alternative search engines and indexing projects to build discovery into open protocols rather than proprietary platforms.

Most importantly, don’t assume the #dotcons #closedweb remembers you. If we don’t actively maintain open linking structures, the history of grassroots media disappears from any mainstream visibility. And rebuilding that memory is one of the core tasks of the #openweb reboot.

Brexit, tribal politics, ten years on – Still a mess

The tenth anniversary of the #EU referendum is approaching, and there is still talk about economics, institutions, and political strategy. But sitting through a discussion on this subject, the uncomfortable truth remains: the real transformation was not structural, it was psychological. And ten years later, it is still a mess.

The statistics are stark. The divide between “Leavers” and “Remainers” persists long after the referendum itself faded into history. The identities remain entrenched, even as the practical realities that supposedly defined them blur and lose relevance. This suggests the divide is not primarily rational or policy-driven, it is psychological, cultural, and emotional.

In many ways, it is strange – almost absurd – that this split continues to shape British political identity so strongly. The original issue has moved on, the world has shifted, yet the identities remain frozen. For me this persistence comes from the lack of meaningful alternatives, when there is no shared narrative or collective project to replace the old divisions, people hold onto the identities they have, even when they never made any sense.

The hard-right instrumentalisation of the referendum did long-term damage to our social fabric. Political actors pushed tribal framing because it worked, it mobilised people through emotion rather than consensus. But once unleashed, this dynamic did not disappear, it reshaped how people see each other and how they interpret political reality itself.

Political identities existed before Brexit, but there was once a larger middle ground, a messy but functional consensus where disagreement did not translate into mutual hostility. The referendum hardened boundaries that had previously been softer. It turned difference into braking division. A growing disconnect between cultural elitists and broader society, might help to explain why the referendum could become such a powerful symbolic battleground, many people felt excluded from decision-making long before Brexit became the focal point.

What is striking from this event, is how some analyses continue to dismiss the role of algorithmic platforms – the #dotcons – in amplifying these divides. Ignoring the structural role of platform incentives, attention economies, and engagement-driven algorithms feels like a blind spot. Social media did not create division out of nothing, but it undeniably intensified and entrenched #blinded tribal identity. Likewise, dismissing disinformation entirely misses the broader dynamic: even without organised campaigns, for profit algorithm social ecosystems reward emotional narratives over any shared understanding.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of discussions about tribal politics is the quiet resignation that often accompanies them. “That’s the way the world is,” some commentators say, as if polarisation were an inevitable feature of modern life rather than a social outcome shaped by technology, media, and bad political choices. From my perspective, this fatalism is part of the problem. Disaster in leads to bigger disaster out, accepting division as normal ensures it continues.

The deeper issue is that we have not yet built credible alternatives – social, technological, or cultural – that allow people to see tribal identity. Without shared spaces for dialogue, without media infrastructures designed for cooperation rather than conflict, the divide persists because there is nowhere else for collective energy to go. Ten years on, the lesson of Brexit may not be about sovereignty or trade deals, it may be about how fragile shared reality is, and how easily societies slide into identity-driven conflict when communication systems reward division over understanding.

The challenge now is not to analyse tribal politics, but to outgrow it. That means rebuilding common ground – culturally, socially, and technologically – rather than accepting fragmentation as the new normal. Because if we keep feeding the same dynamics, the outcome is predictable, mess in, and an even bigger mess out.

#Oxford

The #twittermigration, signal vs noise, for rebuilding #openweb culture

Treating the Fediverse as #stupidindividualism is a kind of blindness, yes, individuals matter, but the #Fediverse only works because of shared culture, shared norms, and collective responsibility. Without this social layer, federation becomes fragmentation – lots of voices, but little shared direction to hold together.

Since the #twittermigration of a few years ago, many of us are feeling the signal-to-noise shift. New people bring energy, creativity, and different expectations – but also habits shaped by algorithmic platforms. The result is a changing “tribal” self-image in Fediverse spaces. This change is not automatically bad. But it does mean we need to actively strengthen #openweb culture if we want the transition to be two-way rather than simply importing #dotcons habits into decentralised spaces.

Remember the people lived through this so will be traumatized, so be kind if you can.

Some conversations frame this as individualism vs collectivism, that’s too simple. Healthy networks hold both, individuals with autonomy, creativity and communities with shared norms and mutual responsibility.

Too much individualism → fragmentation and noise.
Too much collectivism → rigidity and exclusion.

The Fediverse works when it behaves more like a murmuration – many independent actors moving with shared awareness.

The “village vs city” problem. When we started on this path, as Mastodon and other Fediverse instances grow, the experience shifted from small instances feeling like villages, to the wider network feeling like a city. What the huge influx of mainstreaming “common sense” did not bring with them, is that tiny or very large instances alone cannot solve signal-to-noise at scale.

Social structures must evolve alongside technical federation. We are now out of balance on this path, and we need to actively find our way back. Some practical paths are to this balance is by creating and boosting thematic tag cultures (#openweb, #4opens, etc.) as social filters, like watering a garden to help it grow.

The old strategies are still good, though now largely blocked on the #dotcons. Publish from independent platforms first, then syndicate outward (self-hosting as roots, social networks as branches). Encourage open, transparent filtering tools – not hidden algorithms but user-visible choices. Curated flows (human moderation, thematic feeds, affinity groups) instead of purely chronological chaos as networks grow.

Back to the risk of importing “closed” habits. One danger of rapid migration is the unconscious push toward familiar “closed” solutions of hidden moderation logic, opaque ranking systems and defensive blocking cultures replacing mediation. Common sense from closed platforms often fails in open environments.

Open systems are harder, they require active participation, shared stewardship, and cultural literacy. If we don’t defend these values, the #openweb reboot risks recreating the same problems we tried to escape.

Judge by the #4opens as a simple compass to use to evaluate projects before boosting them. Not as purity tests, but as practical signals for long-term resilience. The goal isn’t gatekeeping, to grow a living ecosystem where openness survives scaling.

Please boost this #openweb culture content, not as nostalgia, but as active infrastructure. Remember, individual vs collective is false opposition, so please don’t be a prat on this subject, thanks.

This message is a shovel

Ten years ago – and honestly long before that – there were endless conversations on #failbook about how useful it was for campaigning. The dominant view back then was simple: it’s just cat memes, it’s just tooling, it isn’t political so we can use it harmlessly. Before Snowden, this wasn’t a fringe view – it was probably a 90% consensus, especially among activists, and #fashionista tech communities. I’m not pointing fingers here, as this was normal. Many of us – including friends and collaborators – believed this.

And that’s exactly why we need to remember it. If we forget, we repeat, if we scapegoat, we learn nothing and become no better than the trolls. The problem isn’t individuals – it’s collective amnesia. The is an issue of responsibility and historical memory, that when people deny their own history of responsibility, they disconnect from reality. That’s how too meany people drift into the same “post-truth” space we criticise in figures like Trump or Stammer, where inconvenient past positions are quietly erased.

The uncomfortable truth is that many of us argued that #dotcons were neutral platforms, engagement was empowerment, memes were harmless cultural glue. Meanwhile, our healthier #openweb tools were neglected and dismantled, community infrastructure withered, while the #closedweb platform economy consolidated power. Looking back isn’t about blame. It’s about understanding how we arrived at this mess.

The campaigning trap? Ironically, many tech-minded activists used to run workshops teaching people how to campaign on #dotcons – even as we recognise that these platforms structurally undermine autonomy, community governance, and sustainable organising. This didn’t only happen because people were stupid or malicious. It happened because convenience replaced infrastructure building, the #geekproblem undervalued usability and social design and short-term reach trumped long-term resilience. The result is a paradox: we built our movements inside systems that weakened them.

But spreading more shit without composting it – just makes alternative spaces smell worse and drives people away. This mess is not history, it’s now. This conversation isn’t nostalgia or score-settling. It’s about the present and future. Looking back is how we understand structural mistakes to rebuild shared memory and #KISS avoid repeating cycles of platform capture.

The compost metaphor is useful, #OMN is a spade not a weapon – a tool. A spade digs, turns soil to compost what came before. The mess we helped create – the attention traps, the algorithmic silos, the dependency on corporate platforms – isn’t something to deny or hide, it’s material to compost into something better.

The choices we made then still shape the terrain we stand on today. It’s the #fashernista problem, one of the biggest blocks to building real alternatives is this #fashernista dynamic – activism as aesthetic performance rather than infrastructure building. It looks radical, It feels good, but it rarely produces durable tools or collective power. Real alternatives require slower, less glamorous work of maintaining systems, building trust networks to support messy grassroots processes and designing for longevity rather than attention spikes.

A bridge forward? As I keep saying, this isn’t about shame or purity politics. Almost everyone followed the same path because the incentives pointed that way. The real question is that now that we know better, what do we build next?

#OMN isn’t nostalgia for a lost web – it’s an attempt to learn from past failures and construct a media infrastructure that remembers history to support collective agency and avoids repeating the mistakes that led to the current #dotcons landscape.

This message is a shovel. The question is whether we use it to dig trenches against each other – or to prepare soil where something better can grow.

Funding Proposal: Open Media Network (#OMN) – Building Portable, Human-Centred Digital Commons

Pile technology

Pile technology is an interesting and under-discussed organisational pattern that already shapes how many people actually work, especially in #FOSS and grassroots tech cultures.

Instead of hierarchical structures, formal taxonomies, and rigid workflows, pile-based organisation emerges from accumulation: a directory full of files, browser tabs waiting for attention, TODO lists that grow organically, issue trackers used as thinking spaces rather than strict pipelines, mailing lists and chat logs functioning as living archives

This “pile-first” approach is not laziness or lack of structure – it is adaptive cognition. Humans often work by gathering, clustering, and revisiting material over time rather than pre-defining perfect categorisation systems. Many of the most productive hackers and organisers operate this way by collect first, make meaning later with structures emerging from usage rather than planning.

Why this matters for #FOSS paths – A lot of modern tooling tries to impose rigid models with strict schemas, enforced workflows, heavy governance structures and “one correct way” UX patterns. These approaches frequently fail in grassroots environments because they assume clarity exists at the start. In reality, most innovation emerges from ambiguity, experimentation, and partial understanding.

Pile technology supports exploration without premature optimisation with low barriers to participation and iterative sense-making through organic collaboration. This aligns with successful #FOSS practices of rough consensus and running code, scratchpads and prototype repos, forks as exploratory piles, tagging emerging after content exists. In other words: piles are often the pre-structure phase of successful systems.

The shift from paper piles to digital piles? Historically, piles existed physically: cardboard boxes, stacks of notes, folders on desks, clipping archives and activist pamphlet collections. As work moves digital, the nature of piles changes with infinite accumulation becomes possible, where search can be used to replace physical memory. The risk is that digital tools force artificial structure too early, and replace human piles with opaque algorithmic sorting. Neither reflects how real communities think.

Lessons for effective organising, when we take pile technology seriously, we design systems that: allow messy accumulation without penalty, support multiple overlapping ways to revisit material, make recontextualisation easy (tagging after creation) to preserve chronological flow alongside thematic grouping. This maps directly onto many #openweb values of feeds as flowing piles, links as connective tissue and public commons growing through incremental contributions. Instead of trying to eliminate mess, we build tools that metabolise mess into meaning.

For projects like #OMN, about aiming to rebuild grassroots media and collaborative publishing by start with piles, not categories. Let trust and editorial structure emerge from participation. Treat tagging, curation, and narrative as second-order layers on top of accumulation. Avoid premature schema design that excludes contributors. In practical terms this means newswire-style flows are piles, tag streams are reorganised piles and editorial features are curated piles. This path reframes “messiness” from a problem into a core design feature.

Why this matters right now? Many contemporary platforms bot #dotcons and #FOSS optimise for control, engagement metrics, and monetisation rather than human cognition. They flatten piles into feeds designed by algorithms, removing agency from users and communities. A strong “native” #FOSS path can instead embrace human-scale chaos to feed collective sense-making and preserve autonomy over organisation. Pile technology is not anti-structure – it is pre-structure. Understanding this helps us build tools that grow organically instead of imposing brittle frameworks that collapse under real-world use.

An affinity group is not just “a group of people who agree”

The #openweb is the soil, #OMN the seeds

We are feeling a cultural current many of us recognise but rarely name clearly. A feeling that something fundamental has gone wrong, not just politically or economically, but culturally. An experience that imagination has narrowed, participation has thinned, and people are increasingly pushed into the role of spectators rather than participants in shaping the world.

This didn’t appear overnight. It grew out of decades of #neoliberal restructuring that reshaped culture, technology, and social life. Collective institutions were hollowed out, public spaces became marketplaces, creativity became branding and community became “audience”. Instead of shared projects, we were offered platforms, instead of commons, we were given services, instead of any participation, metrics.

This cultural shift produced a generation who feel the weight of a system that seems unavoidable – a reality that presents itself as permanent even as it fails to meet human needs. People sense the limits, but struggle to imagine alternatives because the cultural language for collective agency has been systematically eroded.

This is the environment the #dotcons thrive in, where the #closedweb turns culture into extraction and participation becomes only more engagement metrics. Community, user base, conversation content streams are where cooperation is #blocked due to competition for visibility.

And over time, this reshapes what people think about organising itself. Grassroots action begins to look unrealistic, messy, and inefficient compared to polished controlled platform experiences. Then trust disappears, replaced by algorithmic mediation and institutional management.

Yet beneath this dominant culture, another current has always existed, the #openweb culture, rooted in collaboration, experimentation, shared stewardship, and imperfect but real participation. IP protocol stack built on mailing lists, wikis, federated systems, grassroots media, DIY infrastructures, spaces where people build together rather than consume.

This culture never fully disappeared, as it was needed by the mainstreaming, it was just pushed to the margins. The #OMN project grows from this undercurrent, not as a reaction against technology, as a continuation of the parts of internet culture that treated technology as commons rather than a commodity. It #KISS recognises that infrastructure shapes social behaviour, and that rebuilding a healthier culture requires rebuilding the spaces where people meet, publish, and organise.

The difference is social logic, from social platform ownership grows to shared protocols, from central moderation to community mediation, from passive users to active participants. It’s the change from scale-as-growth to scale-as-federation.

Importantly, this isn’t nostalgia or any path to purity politics. The culture that produces #OMN understands that systems are messy. Grassroots projects fail, fork, and struggle. But instead of seeing this as weakness, it treats messiness as the natural process of collective growth. Composting rather than perfection.

The mistake of both corporate platforms and #NGO approaches is trying to engineer clean solutions to fundamentally social problems. The #geekproblem looks for perfect systems; the grassroots path builds resilient ones through ongoing practice.

This is why affinity groups, federated networks, and the #4opens matter. They create structures where trust emerges from shared action rather than imposed authority. The culture behind #OMN is not defined by ideology alone, it is defined by lived practice of people who build together and communities that govern themselves, to remain open to change

In a world that tells us “there is no alternative,” the simple act of building functioning alternatives becomes quietly radical. And when enough small, federated efforts connect, what once felt impossible begins to look normal again. That is how cultural change happens, not through grand declarations, but through many small working examples growing from shared soil.

The #openweb is that soil, #OMN is the seeds.

For sceptical #FOSS engineers, this isn’t an argument for abandoning structure, security, or technical rigour, it’s the opposite. The lesson from decades of open-source development is that trust does not mean naïveté; it means building systems where failure modes are expected and mitigated through transparency, modularity, and federation. #OMN applies these same engineering principles socially: small loosely-coupled groups instead of monoliths, open protocols instead of platform lock-in, observable processes instead of hidden governance.

If “pure trust” sounds unrealistic, think instead of reproducible builds, version control, and peer review, trust emerges from verifiable processes and shared ownership. The goal isn’t utopian social engineering; it’s creating resilient sociotechnical systems where collaboration scales horizontally because no single node becomes a point of failure or control.

#KISS

An affinity group is not just “a group of people who agree”

An affinity group is not just “a group of people who agree”

A practical bridge-building approach for the #openweb / #OMN – for grassroots organisers, Fediverse communities, and sceptical #FOSS engineers.

An affinity group is not simply “a group of people who agree.” It is a functional social tool: small enough to build trust, structured enough to act, and open enough to grow.

A working path is to start with purpose, not only ideology. The biggest mistake is forming around identity or theory rather than function. Affinity groups work when they are built around shared work, not shared labels. So for #OMN, instead of saying “let’s build an affinity group for radical media,” we try something concrete like: “a small group committed to building and testing OMN publishing workflows for real users.” A clear, practical purpose lowers defensive reactions and creates common ground.

Ideal size and composition matter. Affinity groups historically work best with around 4–8 people – large enough for diversity, small enough for trust. This avoids both NGO-style bureaucracy and lone-founder burnout. Useful roles include: builder (technical), organiser (social process), storyteller or documenter, critic/tester (essential for reducing groupthink), and connector (linking to the wider network). These are roles, not hierarchy.

Trust must be built through practice. Many people distrust grassroots projects because they have seen “pure trust” models fail. So don’t rely only on ideological alignment, build procedural trust instead. Examples include small, regular deliverables (“what did we actually ship?”), rotating facilitation, transparent public logs where possible, and shared infrastructure ownership, so no single person holds control. Trust grows from repeated, visible action.

Clear boundary rules prevent both NGO capture and chaos. Without boundaries, affinity groups dissolve. Keep rules simple and aligned with #KISS: anyone can observe, participation requires contribution, decisions are made by consent or rough consensus, and there are no permanent leaders, focus more on rotating roles. Forking is allowed, following federation principles. This mirrors ActivityPub socially as well as technically.

Mediation is built into #OMN. Use soft mediation practices such as assuming good faith but verifying through actions, and asking whether behaviour supports the shared task. When conflicts cannot be resolved, allow parallel experiments rather than endless arguments. This avoids the classic problem of well-meaning people unintentionally derailing collective work.

Avoid the #NGO trap from the start. Instead of mission statements, boards, and strategic documents, focus on working notes, small experiments, and iterative prototypes. Document reality rather than intentions. NGO structures often push power upward; affinity groups keep power at the edges.

Bridge-building with #FOSS and Fediverse communities is essential for adoption. Frame #OMN affinity groups as neither anti-engineering nor anti-structure, but anti-centralised control. Messaging like “we’re applying federation principles socially, not just technically” resonates strongly with #ActivityPub builders and open-source contributors.

Growth should happen through replication, not scaling. The affinity group is not the movement – it is a seed node. New participants do not simply accumulate; instead, new affinity groups form. Groups coordinate through federation via shared protocols and culture. This approach mirrors #Indymedia nodes, the early Fediverse, and many successful activist networks.

Concrete first steps: identify 3–5 people already doing related work; define one narrow OMN goal; hold a weekly 60–90-minute working session with a public log; rotate facilitation from the beginning; and ship something small within two weeks. Momentum builds legitimacy.

Affinity groups solve three problems simultaneously: they prevent NGO-style centralisation, reduce lone-founder burnout through shared responsibility, and resist #dotcons growth-for-growth’s-sake logic. In many ways, they are the social equivalent of federation.

People need permission to stop controlling

We need to describe a real structural problem that shows up again and again in grassroots projects. Well-meaning people arrive claiming to help “community”, but operate through control patterns learned from institutions, #dotcons platforms and professional #NGO culture. They work very hard, believe they are doing good, and unintentionally damage horizontal processes they want to become a part of.

This isn’t primarily a personal problem – it’s a culture clash problem. And yes, mediation, especially embedded mediation, is what we’re building into #OMN to correct direction. Let’s break this down in to practical approaches that actually work in messy grassroots ecosystems. First we need to name the real tension clearly, the conflict is NOT good people vs bad people, activists vs NGOs and grassroots vs professionals. The real tension is: Control logic vs Trust logic

Control logic (learned from #dotcons / NGO structures) is about optimising for risk reduction by centralise decision-making to push standardisation. They measure success through outputs and metrics, and assume governance must prevent failure.

Trust logic (#DIY / grassroots / early #openweb) is about optimise for participation and learning by distributed responsibility and messy iteration. Success is measured by living community, where governance supports emergence rather than preventing mistakes.

Most people don’t consciously choose control, they import it because it’s what they know. So #OMN mediation starts by framing this as different operating paths, not moral failure. We build “translation layers” instead of confrontation, the worst outcome is ideological escalation, leading to #blocking

Instead, we try to create structures that translate between cultures. Examples: Write governance docs describing WHY things are messy, explicitly explain “social messiness is intentional design”. We to do this to frame openness as resilience, not lack of structure.

People from institutional backgrounds need permission to stop controlling. We can try and use process friction as onboarding. Maybe sending people through archaeology (reading posts, repos, etc). Might be actually GOOD – but only if framed constructively. Instead of “read this before asking questions” we could try “The project is built through shared learning – exploring this material helps you understand why we work this way.” Make friction educational, intentional, welcoming but firm. Not defensive.

One contradictory thing is that we need to recognise is the hardest workers are risk points, the worst ones work the hardest. Yes, because control-oriented people express care through effort, effort becomes legitimacy, legitimacy becomes informal authority. What’s the solution maybe to balance effort and decision power, decisions require some consensus and transparent process, not only labour contribution. We can also help by make invisible labour visible (care work, mediation, maintenance).

On this path, we need to introduce “soft boundaries” instead of hard blocking, as hard blocking only escalates conflict. Instead, we can focus on redirecting energy into specific roles or tasks, channel control impulses into infrastructure or documentation. Example: “That’s an interesting governance idea, can you prototype it in a parallel working group?”. This, preserves autonomy, avoids direct rejection and tests ideas in practice.

What works if you have the resources and patience is to teach #DIY culture implicitly, not by argument. Many problems come from lack of exposure to horizontal culture. Best not to lecture about #DIY, instead make participation experiential, let people see how trust works through doing. Design processes where newcomers experience collective decision-making, and failure is visible but safe.

Structural mediation patterns for #OMN are strengthened by regularly asking:

Are we slipping into control patterns?

Are we excluding through complexity?

Are we drifting too far into informal hierarchy?

Make this normal so that multiple pathways allow for experimental edges, stable core infrastructure and messy periphery. People can self-select into environments matching their comfort level.

We should always be making visible social values, not just technical #4opens. This needs to be explicit: openness to disagreement, expectation of plural narratives, composting failure, a powerful governance guidance – Compost works because decomposition is allowed, friction produces transformation, nothing is wasted, but everything changes form. Translating into policy – that conflict is expected, critique is welcomed but must produce something, few things are sacred – but everything is documented.

The deep strategic insight (important) is the goal is NOT to eliminate control-oriented people. We need them as healthy ecosystems require institutional thinkers (stability), grassroots experimenters (innovation), activists (accountability) and bridge-builders (translation). The problem occurs when one mode dominates. So mediation is about maintaining ecological balance.

#KISS #DRAFT

Composting the myths: power, hidden religions, and why the #openweb matters

Let’s look at an example of how belief systems shape political reality. Some people still deliberately conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This confusion isn’t neutral, it shapes how discussions are framed, who gets silenced, and which political paths remain possible. Let’s be clear:

Anti-Semitism is racism. It targets Jewish people as a people. It is hate, exclusion, and violence, and it must be opposed wherever it appears.

Anti-Zionism is political opposition to a state ideology and to actions carried out in its name, particularly when that ideology manifests as ethnic nationalism, apartheid, and genocide. Criticising state power and political structures is not racism; it is part of political accountability.

Much of the current framing is not about honest thinking, it is about strategy. By collapsing these two terms together, critics of state violence can be delegitimised without engaging with what they are actually saying. Debate is shifted away from material realities and toward defensive arguments about identity.

We need to refuse this mess-making. Instead of getting trapped in endless semantic battles, shift the focus toward power and consequences of who holds power? Who is being harmed? What structures enable that harm? Then, how do we build paths toward justice that do not reproduce oppression?

Moments of political rupture – scandals, revelations, shifting alliances – expose how #mainstreaming narratives are constructed and maintained. When these moments occur, people become more open to questioning “common sense.” That creates opportunities for real social change and challenge.

The goal is not to win rhetorical battles inside broken frames, but to move discussion toward ethical clarity and collective responsibility. Focus on actions, structures, and outcomes, not weaponised labels designed to shut conversation down.

A radical view of the Palestine

This dynamic reflects a broader pattern. People often live inside belief systems that function like religions, even when they present themselves as purely rational. These systems shape what appears normal, possible, or inevitable, and define which questions are allowed.

Modern economics is one of the most powerful of these belief systems. Despite presenting itself as objective and scientific, much contemporary economic thinking has only a tenuous connection to physical reality – ecosystems, material limits, social relationships, and lived community experience. Instead, it operates through abstract models centred on growth, competition, and individual optimisation. These abstractions become controlling myths of markets become invisible gods, “efficiency” becomes moral virtue and growth becomes salvation.

Humans have always created symbolic systems to understand complexity. The problem emerges when these systems detach from the material world. When that happens, distorted decision-making becomes inevitable. Ethnic cleansing, #climatechaos, ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, and recurring conflict are not anomalies, they are predictable outcomes of a worldview that treats nature and community as externalities.

One of the deepest misunderstandings reinforced by liberal ideology is the belief that society is simply the sum of independent individuals. In reality, the individual – their freedom, reason, and identity – emerges from social relationships. Strong individuals are produced by healthy collective structures, not opposed to them.

This insight sits at the heart of anarchist and commons-based traditions, and it was central to the original spirit of the #openweb. This is why the open web – and #OMN – matter, they represent a break from economic fundamentalism because they treat infrastructure as commons rather than commodities by prioritises interoperability, shared stewardship, and collective agency over enclosure and extraction.

By strong contrast, the #mainstreaming #closedweb (#dotcons platforms) reflects economic dogma of enclosure instead of openness, surveillance instead of trust and platform ownership instead of shared governance leading to individual extraction instead of collective flourishing.

The tragedy is that many “alternatives” risk reproducing the same patterns because they inherit the same assumptions. This is why #OMN matters, it isn’t simply another technical project, it is a shifting of the underlying social logic from product thinking to ecosystem thinking, from institutional control to community process (#4opens), from scale as success to resilience as success, to move from abstract models to lived social reality

If modern economics functions as a religion disconnected from nature, then grassroots digital commons are a form of re-grounding. They reconnect technology with human needs, ecological awareness, and collective agency.

We need to be composting the myths. Across both examples – geopolitical narratives and economic ideology – the task is similar: compost the myths. Recognise which assumptions no longer serve us so that new forms can grow. That means questioning inherited narratives, rejecting reactionary nationalism, and building alternatives rooted in shared stewardship and open process.

The #openweb, at its best, is not nostalgia or utopian fantasy. It is a recognition that healthy systems grow from real communities and collective care. And perhaps the most radical step is simply this: step outside our inherited belief systems long enough to remember that we built the web together – and we can rebuild it differently.

Best not to be evil about this. #KISS

It’s interesting to think about the idea of good and bad faith when dealing with people in change and challenge interactions. If you spend time in life doing activism, this will be an ongoing, unpleasant reacuringing relationship. When pushing aside, pushing back #mainstreaming there will be a lot of bad faith coming at you, your good faith is the best and likely only defence.

Funding Proposal: Open Media Network (#OMN) – Building Portable, Human-Centred Digital Commons

https://nlnet.nl/fediversity

Project Title

Open Media Network (OMN): Portable Digital Commons for a Federated Europe

Summary

The Open Media Network (#OMN) is a real grassroots initiative to build sustainable, human-centred digital infrastructure aligned with the principles of the #openweb and the #4opens. To providing easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and freedom at their core – OMN focuses on creating living social ecosystems alongside technical infrastructure.

At a time when the European Union is investing in alternatives to dominant platform monopolies (#dotcons), The OMN addresses a critical gap: ensuring that open infrastructure remains socially grounded, decentralised in governance, and accessible to grassroots communities, not only institutional actors.

This project proposes to develop practical tools, governance models, and community infrastructure to support a resilient federated ecosystem built on open standards such as #ActivityPub.

Problem Statement

The digital public sphere is currently dominated by large corporate platforms that centralise power, restrict portability, and commodify user participation.

The EU’s growing investment in digital sovereignty and open infrastructure presents a historic opportunity. However, there is a structural risk of replacing Californian platform capitalism with European platform capitalism; building technical infrastructure without sustainable social ecosystems; funding professionalised, institutional actors while excluding needed grassroots innovation.

Healthy digital ecosystems require tension and balance between institutional stability and grassroots experimentation. Without this, “commons infrastructure” risks becoming technocratic infrastructure lacking community participation – leading to failure, abandonment, and wasted investment.

Project Vision

The Open Media Network aims to develop a federated, portable digital ecosystem where: individuals and communities retain control over their data and identity; services are interoperable and portable across providers; governance is participatory and transparent; grassroots actors can build and sustain independent infrastructure.

The goal is not only technological decentralisation but social decentralisation, ensuring that federation is lived practice rather than technical abstraction.

Objectives

Portable Hosted Services. Develop and deploy easy-to-use hosted services based on open standards that prioritise: service portability between providers; user-controlled data ownership; interoperability via ActivityPub and related protocols.
Grassroots Governance Models. Design and test governance frameworks rooted in #4opens principles, with open data where appropriate; open process and decision-making; open standards and open participation. These models will be documented as reusable frameworks for wider adoption.
Experimental Commons Infrastructure. Create an experimental environment where: grassroots communities can launch federated services; low-resource groups can participate without heavy technical barriers; experimentation is encouraged alongside stability.
Historical Memory and Knowledge Transfer. One of the recurring failures of digital movements is loss of institutional memory. OMN integrates documentation and archiving into the infrastructure itself, ensuring lessons learned are preserved and accessible.

Key Activities

Develop and maintain ActivityPub-compatible hosted services.

Build onboarding pathways for non-technical users and grassroots organisations.

Establish pilot communities using OMN infrastructure (e.g. activist media, local networks, cooperative publishing).

Produce documentation and toolkits for governance and sustainability.

Engage with EU initiatives (e.g., NGI Commons) to bridge grassroots and institutional approaches.

Innovation

Unlike many decentralisation projects that focus primarily on technical architecture, OMN emphasises social infrastructure as core technology; governance experimentation alongside code; low-barrier participation for grassroots actors. This creates a resilient ecosystem where innovation emerges from diverse communities rather than centralised development teams.

Expected Impact

Increased adoption of federated technologies across grassroots communities to reduced dependency on proprietary platforms. Strengthened European digital commons aligned with democratic values by development of replicable governance models for decentralised ecosystems. Long-term sustainability through community ownership rather than platform lock-in.

Alignment with EU Priorities

This project supports digital sovereignty and European autonomy, open standards and interoperability, sustainable digital commons, privacy and data portability and innovation through diversity and experimentation.

Sustainability Strategy

OMN operates on a low-cost, distributed model, prioritising: community stewardship; cooperative hosting paths; modular infrastructure that can be replicated and adapted. Rather than scaling toward centralisation, sustainability emerges through federation and shared maintenance.

Consortium and Community

OMN builds upon decades of grassroots media and openweb experience, including work on Indymedia and federated social networks. The project actively collaborates with FOSS communities, federated platform developers, grassroots media networks and independent infrastructure providers.

Funding Request

We seek funding to support: development and seed infrastructure hosting, coordination and community facilitation, documentation and knowledge sharing leading to governance experimentation and research.

Closing Statement

Europe has a unique opportunity to build digital commons that avoid the failures of platform capitalism. The Open Media Network provides a grassroots pathway that complements institutional initiatives, ensuring that the future European internet remains participatory, portable, and human-centred.

Projects

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN++functions we need to add a README to the project page https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/Open-Media-Network

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/MakingHistory

https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia/indymedia-reboot

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody

Building #OMN projects

Need to add this for context – How can we talk about the #NGO mess as hard blocking https://hamishcampbell.com/the-ngo-mess-is-hard-blocking-2/

The #openweb reminds us that meaningful autonomy comes from shared infrastructure, collective governance, and mutual trust. Projects like #OMN are built on this understanding: individuals do not create networks alone; networks create the conditions that allow individuals to flourish. Real freedom grows from commons-based collaboration, not from isolated platforms or competitive silos.

UPDATED 02

Open Media Network (#OMN)

A Practical Infrastructure Layer for Portable, Human-Centred Digital Commons

Summary

The Open Media Network (OMN) is a pragmatic effort to improve the usability, portability, and resilience of federated digital infrastructure through incremental engineering grounded in existing open standards.

Rather than introducing new protocols or replacing existing ecosystems, OMN focuses on integrating known working components – ActivityPub, open hosting practices, and activist community traditions – into deployable, reusable infrastructure patterns.

The goal is straightforward we build a practical layer that allows grassroots communities and small organisations to deploy federated services that are portable, interoperable, and socially sustainable.

This project addresses a persistent gap between technically sound decentralised systems and real-world adoption by non-specialist users.

Problem Statement

The technical foundations of decentralised social infrastructure already exist. Protocols such as ActivityPub demonstrate interoperability and federation at scale. However, adoption barriers remain that existing solutions optimise for developers rather than communities. And institutional funding risks producing technically impressive systems that fail socially due to missing grassroots participation.

This results in a paradox, an ecosystem has functional protocols but lacks usable grassroots infrastructure patterns. The OMN addresses this gap, it’s not a new platform or protocol, more an integration and implementation project that focuses on packaging existing federated technologies into existing cultures. Creating reproducible deployment models for small-scale operators, that natively scale by federating. Supporting data flows and thus service migration between providers. And embedding governance into operational practice rather than treating governance as a theoretical layer.

The core engineering philosophy is to use existing tools.

The EU opportunity and danger, what grassroots projects can offer

What can grassroots #openweb people actually do when the EU is building alternatives to #dotcons, but with very real risks of recreating European versions of the same problems? This is a historic moment, for the first time in decades public funding is flowing toward digital commons and infrastructure sovereignty is being taken seriously. Federated technologies like #ActivityPub are gaining traction, largely due to years of grassroots work which is leading to initiatives such as @NGICommons attempting to support open infrastructure.

But alongside this opportunity comes an obvious risk, that they replace Californian platform capitalism with European platform capitalism. The danger: is European #dotcons. Institutional “common sense” – especially when combined with bureaucracy and the #NGO class – tends to reproduce familiar patterns of projects prioritise compliance and institutions over communities. Tech governance becomes professionalised and detached from users and seed communities. Yes, open standards exist, but power centralises anyway as funding rewards scale, stability, and safety rather than needed native grassroots paths.

The result is predictable, European #dotcons. The structural problem is institutions optimise for safety when #EU funding systems are designed around risk avoidance, measurable outcomes to build controlled delivery structures. This leads to only professional actors and institutional partnerships. Grassroots projects – messy, political, horizontal – rarely fit comfortably into this narrow thinking.

So even when the intention is to “build commons,” the outcome becomes safe-looking infrastructure that lacks living social ecosystems. The commons turn into infrastructure without community, and frequently fail, leaving funding poured down the drain and more #techshit to compost.

Why grassroots counter-currents matter is that healthy technology ecosystems need tension between institutional builders for stability, grassroots radicals for innovation and activists for accountability. This balancing leads to communities and real-world grounding.

Without this tension, governance ossifies and technology becomes abstracted from users. Political imagination shrinks and becomes #blocked. Grassroots projects like #OMN represent the compost layer, the messy soil where new forms grow. Institutions rarely generate this energy themselves.

Where initiatives like #NGICommons sit is that some people inside these initiatives genuinely want openness. Much like early Google’s “don’t be evil” phase, there is still a window of possibility. This means influence is still possible and direction is not fully locked in. Individuals inside may be allies, even if institutional structures trend toward mainstreaming. The danger is not simply bad intentions, it is the structural gravity toward institutionalisation.

We need practical strategies (not just critique) to move grassroots actors to shift direction, critique alone is not enough. Practical engagement matters to frame grassroots work as ecosystem infrastructure. Don’t argue only from ideology, speak in terms institutions understand: that tech ecosystems need experimental edges as monocultures fail. We need to argue that diversity increases resilience.

Policy language travels further, when we push for small “wild funding” streams. Instead of demanding institutional transformation, push for small structural openings:

microgrants

low-bureaucracy funding

experimental tracks

funding for governance experiments, not just technical deliverables.

Small budgets can create disproportionate impact.

Promote ActivityPub + social governance together as many EU projects adopt federation technically while retaining centralised governance culturally. We need to communicate that federation without social decentralisation is fake decentralisation. This is where #OMN has strong positioning.

Build parallel legitimacy, not only opposition, as institutions might respond to working prototypes with visible communities that demonstrated outcomes. Critique alone rarely shifts funding flows. Working alternatives do.

We need to find sympathetic insiders, every institutional structure contains pragmatists, a few idealists and sometimes meany reformers. So bridge-building matters. Not everyone inside #NGICommons or EU initiatives is an opponent, some are actively trying to resist corporate capture from within.

The EU currently has three possible futures:

European #dotcons – platform capitalism with EU branding
Technocratic infrastructure without social life (#techshit to compost)
Living digital commons grounded in grassroots communities.

The third path requires messy activism with strong social processes (#4opens) and historical memory rooted in #openweb culture. Without pressure from the grassroots edge, institutions drift toward the first outcome by default.

The deeper insight is that grassroots movements do not need to “win” against mainstreaming. They need to remain the compost layer that keeps the ecosystem alive. That means critique combined with collaboration where possible, strong and grounded independent experimentation and most importantly refusal of capture.

Why mainstream EU tech funding needs counter-currents, why tech activism matters

Privacy in the age of #Dotcons

Let’s be honest, we already lost metadata privacy. The #dotcons, the surveillance state, and the data brokers see everything. This isn’t a warning about what might happen, it’s the reality we live in today’s mess. In normal peoples lives every click, every message, every connection is tracked, logged, and monetised. There is no going back to the sealed, closed-off privacy of a pre-digital era. Not legally, not technically. The dream of private digital spaces was always fragile, and today it is gone in the #mainstreaming

So what can we do? The answer is radical, counterintuitive, and deeply political: we open the metadata bag, to make the hidden flows of power visible. Every algorithm, every tracking pipeline, every corporate and state extraction point should be exposed, audited, and understood. Transparency becomes a shield against abuse because secrecy is the tool that enforces power asymmetry. We stop pretending that corporate surveillance is acceptable, or that peer-to-peer transparency is inherently dangerous. The logic flips: if everyone can see what is happening, then no one can hide exploitative behaviour behind opaque systems.

Yes, this is uncomfortable, radical transparency is not convenient, it forces us to confront how deeply control and extraction have penetrated our lives. It means admitting we’ve been stripped naked by Google, Amazon, and the NSA. But in a world where we are already exposed, radical transparency becomes the preferred path to justice.

The question is no longer “how do we hide?” – because hiding is largely impossible, but “how do we share wisely, and govern openly?” In practical terms, this means:

Open metadata protocols that let communities see what is being collected and how it is used.

Collective oversight of platforms and systems, ensuring that algorithms are auditable and accountable.

Peer-to-peer transparency, where participants in networks control their data and can trace its flow.

Commons-based governance, so that data isn’t captured by a few corporations or states, but managed in the public interest.

Outside often delusional #geekproblem ghettos, privacy as an individual, sealed-off right, is dead. But privacy as collective control over visibility is still possible. It’s not about hiding; it’s about choosing who sees, how it’s used, and under what paths.

The #OMN path treats transparency not as a threat, but as power to know, power to act, power to hold institutions accountable. By making information visible and governance participatory, we reclaim control in a world that has tried to strip it away. In short, in the age of the #dotcons, radical transparency is the new privacy. And it is not only possible, it is necessary.

#KISS