The networks we use shape who we are – and the networks we are given by #dotcons are designed to make us spectators. Every interaction is reduced to a metric: a like, a share, a click. We are data points to be monetised, attention to be harvested, behaviour to be predicted and sold. In these systems, connection is shallow, fleeting, and ultimately extractive.
The #4opens offer a different path. When your networks are open, knowable, and modifiable, you stop being a statistic and start being a person again. Not just a profile, not just a follower count – a participant in a living community. You can see who is contributing, who is caring, and who is struggling. You can understand the shape of your social environment and intervene meaningfully, rather than being nudged along invisible pipelines designed to maximise someone else’s profit.
Open systems give us tools to know each other better. Not superficially, through algorithmic suggestions, but genuinely: by making relationships and contributions visible, traceable, and shareable in ways that respect the participants. Collaboration becomes possible without asking for permission. Knowledge, help, and support flow where they are needed. Trust can be rebuilt across distance and time, because the infrastructure encourages transparency, accountability, and mutual care.
This isn’t only about technology, it’s about escaping the isolation of the #dotcons. Social media was sold to us as connection, but it atomised communities into consumable fragments. It told us we belonged to brands, not to people. The #4opens remind us that belonging is not transactional, and connection is not a product.
In open communities, relationships matter more than metrics. Reciprocity replaces algorithms. Long levity replaces virality. Care replaces performance. People organize not for attention, but for mutual survival, growth, and flourishing.
You can get a glimpse of the change and challenge in bodied in such projects as the #Fediverse. It can be radical: networks of care that scale, knowledge that accumulates instead of being enclosed, resilience that emerges from participation rather than extraction. Belonging becomes real again, and communities can function as spaces of power and support rather than channels for profit.
The choice is ours: continue to live as data points in someone else’s spectacle, or reclaim the digital commons as a terrain for genuine human connection. With the #4opens, the infrastructure is ready. The question is whether we will use it to rebuild what has been lost.
A bunch of native #openweb people spent real time, energy, and focus pushing the #EU toward the #Fediverse. This wasn’t theoretical, it wasn’t speculative, it wasn’t a #NGO whitepaper or a #VC funding pitch. It was practical outreach, grounded in working technology and lived experience, aimed at reducing Europe’s dependency on centralized corporate platforms.
The webinars mattered, they demonstrated that EU institutions were genuinely open to #ActivityPub as a viable public infrastructure standard, not as a niche hobby project, but as a way to regain institutional and civic agency without defaulting to US-based platforms.
This is the work we needed more of, but this kind of engagement is slow, unglamorous, and politically awkward. It doesn’t fit VC startup narratives or revolutionary aesthetics. But it is the work required if Europe wants digital sovereignty without surrendering to #BigTech or reinventing the same centralized failures under an #EU flag.
So the obvious question is: what went wrong? Drift, fragmentation, and the return of the #dotcons. Instead of consolidating that momentum, the grassroots fractured, attention drifted, energy leaked away, people burned out or moved on. In the end, outreach was blocked from both sides
And then slowly, predictably, attention returned to the familiar #dotcons, because they are easy, visible, and culturally dominant. They offer the illusion of reach without the substance of agency, in the long run, this is just more #techshit to compost later.
#SocialHub itself documents much of this history. The discussions are there, the threads exist, the intent is visible. But there is little aggregation, little synthesis, and almost no narrative continuity. For anyone not already embedded, it’s hard to see what mattered, what succeeded, and what was quietly blocked or abandoned.
Because we didn’t document, curate, and repeat this story, the same myths keep resurfacing:
“The EU was never interested.”
“Federation can’t work at institutional scale.”
“There were no serious alternatives.”
“Centralized platforms are the only realistic option.”
None of these are true – but they feel true when history is missing. When people don’t know that EU–Fediverse outreach already happened, when they don’t know that viable alternatives already exist, when they don’t know that these paths were actively neglected rather than disproven.
Then people fall – again and again – for the #dotcons mess, believing it’s the only possible future. This matters now, as focus shifts back to tech change, and is exactly why #OMN, #indymediaback, #makinghistory, and #OGB exist, not as competing platforms, not as replacements for everything else, but as infrastructure for memory, communication, and accountability.
Before we argue about funding models, platforms, or scale, we need to get the ordering right:
History — to remember what already worked and what failed, and why
Media — to tell the story properly, in our own words
Governance — to keep power visible, contestable, and rooted in trust rather than myth
Without these, attempts at “European digital sovereignty” will reproduce the same capture dynamics under a different logo. Telling the story is political work, if we don’t tell our story, someone else will, and it won’t be told in our interests. It will be told as inevitability, as market logic, as “there was no alternative.” That story always ends the same way: more centralization, more dependency, more enclosure – followed by another round of cleanup and composting.
We already did part of the hard work, we opened doors, we proved viability. What’s missing is not only technology – it’s memory, narrative, and continuity. Until we fix that, Europe will keep mistaking amnesia for realism, and surrender for pragmatism.
The #OMN is not trying to invent the future, it’s trying to restart a social path people forgot they had. That path was never clean, it never asked permission, it never felt safe. But it was real, and that’s the only soil movements have ever grown in.
Why this has to happen now? Because the ground we’re standing on is collapsing. The #dotcons are rotting – hollowed out into surveillance, manipulation, and rent extraction. Journalism has collapsed into PR cycles, outrage farming, and access journalism. Activism is trapped in performative loops that generate visibility but not power.
#climatechaos doesn’t wait for governance frameworks, steering committees, or another round of funding calls. And more bluntly: the knowledge is dying with the people who lived it. If this knowledge isn’t re-embedded in practice now, it doesn’t get “preserved”. It becomes an archive, not a lineage. Archives don’t fight back, lineages do.
Why everything feels so hard? The feeling of complexity isn’t because the work is impossible. It exists because people are traumatised by collapse, capture, and betrayal. Projects were taken over, movements were professionalised, trust was burned and replaced with process. You don’t argue people out of that, you outgrow it by example. Working systems dissolve fear faster than any explanation ever could.
This will never be mainstream – stop wanting it to be, accept this early and everything gets easier. The goal is not millions of users. The goal is hundreds of nodes that matter. If it works, it spreads sideways: by imitation, by reuse, by adaptation, that’s how #Indymedia spread, that’s how it will happen again – if it’s allowed to stay messy. #Mainstreaming is how movements die politely.
Reboot action media, not commentary, this is where most #Fediverse projects go wrong. #Indymedia worked because: it covered what people were doing, it was embedded in movements, it was operational, not opinion-driven – Action reports. Situation updates. Logistics. Reflection after action. Signal is useful under pressure. Noise is everything else.
Make mediation visible again – #Blocking culture killed community memory, bring back: named metaphors, public-but-careful conflict summaries, rollback instead of deletion, context instead of erasure. This does not mean tolerating abuse, it means treating conflict as social material, not contamination. Movements grow by composting tension, not pretending it isn’t there.
Cultural infrastructure, not nostalgia. Plumbing, not a platform. The #OMN is not: a solution, a network to “join”, a replacement for anything. It is: pipes, flows, tools for people already doing work. Examples:
“You’re documenting housing struggles? Here’s a way to syndicate without selling your soul.”
“You’re organising climate actions? Here’s a way to publish without an algorithm.”
“You’re running a local media collective? Here’s a way to connect without central control.”
People don’t trust platforms, they trust tools that work.
The reboot principle is affinity before scale. Action before legitimacy. Use before platform. This is how #Indymedia worked before it forgot itself. A practical path to rebooting a community of action. Start with a small, visible “We”. Not an open call, not a mailing list, a named affinity cluster of people with shared history and aligned instincts, 5–15 people, is ideal. People who ship things, who argue honestly, who don’t need brand permission to act. This group is not representative, it’s responsible. Their job is not to speak for anyone, it’s to do visible work others can plug into.
Final note. This isn’t about being radical for style points, it’s about being adequate to the moment. The tools already exist, the knowledge already exists, the need is obvious. What’s missing is the courage to stop waiting for permission and start rebuilding the paths that once carried real power.
This space has a long history. The #fediverse grew out of the “cats” of libertarianism and, to a lesser extent, anarchism – notably without the (O). That lineage mattered. It shaped the instincts of the space: suspicion of central authority, an emphasis on autonomy, and a belief that technical decentralisation could substitute for social and political process.
I wrote this a few years ago.
Today the landscape has shifted. This #openweb space is increasingly layered with #NGO capture and thick #mainstreaming noise. Yet it remains fundamentally #native. That contradiction is where the real work now lies.
So the question is not whether the #fediverse is “good” or “bad”. The question is how we rebalance it so it becomes effective for real change and challenge. This is where #4opens matters – taking #FOSS out of narrow tech culture and back into society as a lived, social process.
We also need to be honest about failure. In the struggle between open and closed, we didn’t just lose because they won. We lost because we failed. And this matters, because we have power over our own failures. Over theirs, we mostly have liberal wish-fulfilment.
That distinction is crucial.
If you are genuinely interested in social change, there is one thing you should not do: do not push #mainstreaming agendas.
This is where the Fediverse is badly out of balance. The flows are soaked through with #deathcult assumptions, even when wrapped in progressive language. These agendas reproduce the system while pretending to soften it. They are driven by careerism, respectability politics, and status-chasing – not transformation.
What the #fediverse does not need is more branding, more respectability, more #NGO frameworks, or more “safe” narratives. That path leads to capture, stagnation, and eventual irrelevance. What we actually need are real alternatives: grounded social process, not just protocol purity; governance that emerges from use, not authority; democratic mediation, not aristocratic coders; trust built through practice, not #blocking policy documents.
What the world actually looks like
To be clear, #NGO occupation rarely looks like a hostile takeover. It arrives wearing the language of care, safety, professionalism, and responsibility. For many involved, the problem is not intention, it is structural effect.
A recurring pattern appears: governance without mandate. Foundations and NGOs emerge claiming to “represent the Fediverse” while having no meaningful user representation at all. Boards dominated by a small, self-referencing mix of developers, funders, and institutional figures. Decisions made behind closed doors, then presented as consensus.
This is the classic NGO move: speaking for communities rather than being accountable to them. Native, messy, grassroots portrayal is replaced with advisory councils and codes of conduct written by people who do not do the day-to-day social work of maintaining messy communities.
Then comes funding-driven agenda setting. Once grant money enters, priorities shift. Work that is legible to funders gets done; work that is socially necessary but messy gets sidelined. Success is measured in reports, visibility, and institutional recognition. Use-value is replaced by funding-value. Common-sense problems are reframed as opportunities to be sold to institutions rather than grown with communities.
This produces policy-first, people-second thinking: universal moderation frameworks, platform-wide “best practices”, compliance language imported from reactions to corporate platforms. All of this ignores the Fediverse’s actual strength – that it is contextual, local, and plural.
What works for a medium-sized EU instance does not work for a radical activist server, a queer safe space, or a small-language community. One-size-fits-all governance is a centralising instinct wearing decentralised branding.
Conflict is then sanitised rather than mediated. Conflict is treated as reputational risk, not as a normal and necessary part of social life. The response becomes pre-emptive rules, rigid enforcement, avoidance of political disagreement – in #OMN languae, #blocking.
But grassroots communities are not products. Conflict does not disappear when it is hidden; it reappears as burnout, factionalism, and quiet exits. This is one of the main drivers of the long-term churn that drains focus and energy from the #openweb.
Meanwhile, the space is distracted by attempts to brand the Fediverse for mainstream acceptability: “safe for brands”, “ready for institutions”, “just like Twitter, but nicer”. This strips away its radical roots while offering none of the resources of corporate platforms – the worst of both worlds.
Finally, depoliticisation is smuggled in under the banner of neutrality. Calls for “apolitical” spaces function in practice as quiet enforcement of liberal norms, exclusion of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and system-critical voices, and privileging those already comfortable within the mainstream. Neutrality is not neutral. It is a political choice that favours the status quo – the #deathcult dressed up as common sense.
This kind of behaver is inevitable, so the question is not if we ban it, but much more how we balance this with healthy grassroots structure. The way out of this is not less politics. It is better, more grounded politics: rooted in lived use, open process, and the messy reality of collective life.
Get off your knees.
Why “messy” matters explicit, social, and unavoidable. The word “messy” matters, a lot. It’s not a weakness, it’s the core requirement of any humane alternative social technological project. If what we build only works when everything is clean, controlled, and predictable, then it will collapse the moment real people start using it.
Real life is messy, communities are messy, power is messy, conflict is messy. If our tools and processes can’t survive that, then they aren’t tools for liberation – they’re toys for ideal conditions that don’t exist. This is where most alt-tech keeps failing.
We keep trying to build hard systems that assume away social complexity. Perfect protocols, elegant abstractions, clean governance models. But this obsession with cleanliness produces brittle systems that shatter under any stress. Anything that requires everyone to behave “correctly” in order to function is already authoritarian by design.
That’s why messy-first thinking is not optional – it’s the way out. Most “hard code” is actually #techshit from the moment it’s written, not an insult, it’s compost. The uncomfortable truth is the value of software is not only in the code, it’s in the social use around this code. Documentation, shared norms, trust, mediation, onboarding, storytelling, conflict resolution, continuity – this is where value lives. Code is one needed layer of that social substrate. Without the substrate, the code is dead on arrival.
This is where the #geekproblem bites hardest. The value that actually matters – social use – is invisible to many of the people writing the code. So they optimise for what they can see: features, refactors, rewrites, new projects. The result is more churn, more fragmentation, and ever-growing piles of decaying #techshit. From the inside, it feels like progress. From the outside, it’s entropy.
This is why #4opens is such a sharp tool if we use it. Not just open source code, but open process, open governance, open data, open participation. That means valuing outreach, long-running social threads, and shared ownership as much as clever technical solutions. If a project can’t explain itself in plain language, can’t survive disagreement, can’t onboard non-experts, and can’t evolve without a small priesthood of maintainers, then it’s already failing – no matter how elegant the code is.
So the question of value isn’t “how clever is the system?” It’s: who can use it, who can shape it, and who can carry it forward when things get messy? We need a diversity of tools and cultures that can live in the mud, absorb conflict, and keep going anyway. Mess isn’t the problem, mess is the medium.
Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult – it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters.
But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people off their knees to challenge the altar to stop the sacrifice. It rearranges the seating in the temple, feeding the deeper problem, obedience. Progressive mainstreaming accepts the frame, accepts the metrics, accepts the economy of extraction and then argues about distribution. It negotiates better terms with a machine that is killing us. That is not transformation, it’s managed decline.
The project of real change and challenge – the work the #OMN exists for – starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with people standing up and walking away. Walking out of the temple of the #deathcult we all live in, not in purity, utopia or comfort. But into mess, cooperation, unfinished tools, shared risk, and actual agency. This isn’t about better policies inside the system. It’s about building outside it, under it, alongside it – until the system hollowed itself out and no longer matters.
It’s about people picking up shovels, composting the wreckage, and growing something that can actually sustain life. This is simplicity #KISS#OMN
We have already seen the failures: lived through #Indymedia, the #NGO turn, the #dotcons capture, the #Fediverse repeating old mistakes. When we talk about #OMN, we’re trying to stop people from re-learning the same lessons by losing again. Silence would be complicity.
The #OMN is where critique becomes agency. It’s not about “promoting a project”, if we don’t talk about this without something like #OMN, critique collapses into doom, aesthetics, or personal exits. #OMN is a way to, act collectively, without lying about power, money, or governance.
Forgetting is how capture happens, the moment people stop naming alternatives, the space fills with managerial language, funding logic, and fear-based control. We talk about #OMN to keep the space open enough for something human to grow.
The #OMN is a path that resists #stupidindividualism, where most contemporary “solutions” reinforce isolation, personal brands, and individual safety strategies. #OMN starts from the assumption that survival and meaning are collective. We need to keep talking about this because almost nobody else does.
It’s unfinished – and that matters. It’s not about defending a polished system, instead, it’s about holding open a process. Talking about #OMN is how we invite others into the compost rather than presenting them with a finished product to consume.
We talk about #OMN because it’s a native way of saying: “We don’t have to repeat this. We can build differently, together, if we remember what already worked.”*
It’s not evangelism, it’s stewardship.
A few of us have been working on real, positive, horizontal social and technological solutions for over twenty years. Not hypotheticals, not vibes, things that actually work.
We know they work locally, we know they work socially. And after more than a decade building on the #fediverse, we know they can work in tech, at scale without going vertical, corporate, or authoritarian.
This isn’t speculative any more. Our creative task now – the #nothingnew work – is simply to combine what already works: Horizontal social practice, federated #openweb tech, trust-based governance. We already have a slate of projects waiting to be built: #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback and #makinghistory. What’s missing is not ideas, it is people willing to show up and implement.
And here’s the hard truth: every time we try to talk about radical or progressive language, power, or structure, people retreat into #blocking and ignoring. The same unresolved tensions get replayed endlessly, nothing is mediated, nothing is grounded. Bad will accumulates, the social commons rots.
This rot isn’t accidental – it’s structural – To work our way out of this mess, we need both #fluff and #spiky. We need broad categories to think clearly, the #mainstreaming#fashernista rejection of this isn’t sophistication – it’s submission. It’s a soft, polite form of #deathcult worship.
You don’t dismantle a #deathcult by being nicer to it, you dismantle it by stopping your participation and building something better.
So this is the question, not rhetorical, not theoretical: Are you going to help make this happen? Are you going to pick up a shovel? Or are you going to stay on your knees, arguing about tone while the ground burns?
#mainstreaming people are wilfully blind and alt people tend to be pessimistic, it’s a problem. Historically, real social change doesn’t arrive by waiting for collapse. It arrives because people are active, they build alternatives in advance, strong enough to bridge the mess when existing systems fail and lose legitimacy. This isn’t theory. It’s how change has always happened.
If you are interested in a better outcome, we need to remember, build first, collapse later is the lesson that we keep forgetting. You don’t wait for the crash, you prepare, are ready to catch people when it comes.
Projects like the #OMN are currently blocked because capitalism, especially after forty years of neoliberalism, has poisoned our idea of individualism. We’re trained to see ourselves as isolated actors rather than members of a society capable of collective care and collective power. This keeps us passive while the systems hollow out around us.
One of the biggest blocks to change is the belief that politics is something done to us, rather than by us. People blame politicians for everything – climate breakdown, cultural decay, economic precarity – while avoiding responsibility for the systems we participate in daily.
In the working alt paths, we build parallel systems to make change happen. Revolutions don’t begin with a dramatic break. They begin quietly, when people redirect time, energy, trust, and care into structures that actually work. Gradually, those structures grow. Eventually, the old ones hollow out and lose relevance.
But we are society. It starts and ends with us. Learning how to help your neighbours now – feeding people, housing people, sharing skills, organising locally – isn’t charity. It’s practice. It builds the muscles, myths, and traditions we’ll need when systems fail harder than they already are. And they will fail. The only uncertainty is how badly.
This can start anywhere – including with shared tech infrastructure like the #OMN. You don’t need permission, mass consensus. You, simply, need commitment, continuity, and care.
Over the last decade, #techchurn has produced mountains of #techshit. Both mainstream and “alternative” tech piles need composting if we want to grow a more humane world. From a grassroots perspective, many past alternatives – anarchist, ecological, socialist – did work imperfectly, until they were eaten, flattened, or professionalised by #NGO, #fashernista, and #deathcult dynamics.
Stepping away from the tech mess means composting it. It’s good that people try not to push pointless tech projects. And let’s be honest: most new tech projects are pointless. In the era of #climatechaos, we don’t have the luxury of pretending otherwise.
That’s already happening, unevenly and messily, especially across the #Fediverse. The real question isn’t whether parallel systems will emerge. The question is whether the balance will be humane, democratic, and resilient, or authoritarian and exclusionary.
To figure out what’s worth building, we need to do #4opens reviews and publish them. This isn’t gatekeeping – it’s collective responsibility. Let’s build a shared culture of useful tech, together. The task now is to reboot what worked, using federated #4opens tech, and then innovate forward from there. This is where #OMN and #indymediaback sit: not nostalgia, but composted continuity.
In the era of #climatechaos, too many people are on their knees worshipping the #deathcult. We need to call pointless things pointless – clearly, calmly, without fear. If that idea scares you, ask why. Fear is how obedience is maintained. #fashernistas, get off your knees. Use the #4opens as a shovel. There are piles of techshit that need composting.
Collapse won’t be clean or total. It’s unlikely we’ll see a single cinematic moment. What’s far more likely is a long series of crises: recessions, austerity, market “corrections”, institutional decay, shrinking legitimacy. Capitalism isn’t stable. It’s inherently extractive and unsustainable. Growth has been artificially inflated to concentrate wealth upward, while the real ecological, social, and psychological costs are pushed downward. The illusion of growth hides the reality of extraction.
Power won’t step aside politely, as legitimacy shrinks, power concentrates. Smaller and smaller groups cling to control through coercion, surveillance, and force. History shows that entrenched power has to be pushed over, not waited out. That doesn’t mean chaos. It means having something better ready.
All thinking is critique. If you aren’t looking at faults, you probably aren’t looking at the thing at all. Don’t be afraid of that. Gardening requires digging. Lift your head, your shovel. Dig, and plant.
Without parallel institutions, collapse just creates a vacuum. And vacuums get filled by the worst actors. What actually matters doesn’t appear magically after a crisis. Community, care, knowledge, trust, culture, and shared infrastructure are built slowly, beforehand, by people who show up consistently.
The #Fediverse is an accidental #openweb reboot – a product of #fashernista energy, messy and decentralised. Herding cats is hard, but it’s not a flaw. It’s the material we’re working with. One path forward is #OGB – grassroots, DIY producer governance – building shared norms and flows without hard centralisation.
This isn’t apocalypse fantasy, it’s continuity. Waiting for the system to fall is a losing strategy. Protesting without building is noise. Commentary without construction is theatre.
If you want change: build alongside, build underneath, build beyond. That isn’t extremism, it’s history.
This comes up again and again, in every horizontal movement that survives longer than a moment. Nobody gets to speak for a commons just because they feel inspired, loud, organised, or early. In healthy horizontal culture, legitimacy comes from process, not from individual initiative. This is as true for Rainbow as it is for #OMN, the #openweb, or any federated public space.
In “native” Rainbow culture, you don’t “call” a gathering on your own. Not because individuals are bad, but because individual authority is exactly what destroys non-hierarchical spaces. Gatherings only have legitimacy when they emerge from an open, inclusive council, a process that anyone affected can see, join, and influence.
People can scout locations, talk to locals, seed conversations, suggest ideas. All of that is valuable. None of it confers the right to represent the whole network. That boundary exists for a reason. Without it, you get hierarchy-by-default, confusion, misrepresentation, and reputation damage. When unilateral calls fail – and many do – it’s not just personal embarrassment, it poisons the commons. Outsiders can’t tell the difference between a real gathering and a made-up one, and trust erodes.
Council Is not a formality, it’s the safeguard, A real council isn’t a checkbox. It’s a space where people with lived experience of the culture can speak, be challenged, and listen. Traditionally this happens within existing gatherings, because that’s where diversity of voices actually exists.
Yes, in US gatherings, sometimes people talk about “three experienced people” as a minimum. That’s not an ideal. That’s an emergency fallback when the wider process has broken down. Three inexperienced people do not make a council. Not because newcomers are excluded, but because they don’t yet carry the collective memory of what works, what breaks, and who pays the price when mistakes are made.
This is basic #4opens thinking: open process, open participation, visible decision-making, accountability to the wider community. If you skip this, you’re not being radical – you’re being careless.
Inclusiveness is the test, the real measure of legitimacy is who was invited, a council that: meets in secret, is announced too late for others to attend, chooses inaccessible locations, excludes people due to personal conflict or political discomfort… is not legitimate. Full stop.
Horizontal culture cannot survive cliques, factions, or quiet exclusions. That’s how “informal power” replaces explicit hierarchy – the worst of both worlds. This isn’t about being nice. It’s about building processes that can hold disagreement without splitting. That’s what keeps a movement alive across decades.
Unilateral action breaks trust. Calling a gathering without a council, without visible support, without shared buy-in, isn’t just “doing your own thing.” It actively undermines the commons.
When fake or failed calls happen: travellers waste time and resources, local communities get confused or hostile, land managers lose trust, the whole network looks disorganised. The criticism here isn’t personal. It’s structural. Representation carries responsibility, and responsibility requires process.
Why this matters beyond Rainbow? This isn’t a niche cultural rule. It’s a universal horizontal principle. The same logic applies to: federated media (#OMN), grassroots tech, open governance (#OGB), the #fediverse, consensus-based organising everywhere
Council isn’t “governance theater.” It’s the cultural glue that replaces hierarchy. Without it, everything grassroots can very easily drift toward control, capture, and collapse. With it, you get continuity without leaders, coherence without command, and trust without enforcement.
That’s the path the #OMN is on. Not platforms, not figureheads, not “calls” from above. Just open process, visible legitimacy, and shared responsibility.
Forty years of hard indoctrination doesn’t just fade away. It has to be dug up, held in our hands, recognised for what it is, and composted. If we don’t do this, we have no hope – none – of moving away from the accelerating mess that’s already killing millions and is on track to kill billions. Hobbes’ “nasty, brutish and short” isn’t a warning anymore; it’s a weather report.
Mainstream thinking feels normal because we’ve lived inside it for a generation and a half. But “normal” is a trick. Normal is the smell of rot covered with flowers. Normal is the daily worship of the #deathcult: competition as virtue, greed as destiny, extraction as progress, (stupid)individualism as freedom. Normal is the mess of walking around in a toxic story and calling it common sense.
A useful social activism path is to make this “common sense” story feel dirty, polluted, contaminated. Because it is, everything we touch – our institutions, our media, our language – is soaked in the residue of #neoliberalism. The indoctrination runs deep enough that we police ourselves long before any authority needs to step in. We repeat the slogans: There is no alternative. Don’t be unrealistic. Be responsible. Trust the experts. Let the market decide.
And that’s why we need to dig, turn over the dead soil so something else can grow. We need to break the spell and remind people that doubt, imagination, and collective action used to be normal too, before they were systematically stripped away.
Composting isn’t about purity or escape, it’s about transformation. Taking the poisoned narratives, breaking them down, mixing them with lived experience, adding the oxygen of open discourse, and letting something organic and grounded emerge. Something native, that belongs to us.
The #OMN, the #openweb, the #fediverse, grassroots media – these aren’t personal hobbies. They’re the tools we use to use, and can use agen to compost forty years of damage, to open spaces where new stories can sprout. To let people speak without being filtered through corporate interests and #NGO gatekeeping, rebuilding trust, messiness, solidarity, and actual democracy.
Because the mainstream isn’t just wrong – it’s killing us. And the longer we pretend it’s clean, the faster the rot spreads. Its past time to get our hands dirty, time to compost the #deathcult to grow something worth living in.
If you’re looking to do affective activism – activism that moves people, shifts culture, and builds real change – then you need to start from lived reality, not from academic distance.
The academic histories of our movements aren’t useless, but they are strongly second-hand and often shaped by #fashernista thinking: polished narratives, fashionable theory, safely detached accounts. They smooth over the mess, the conflict, the creativity, the failures, everything that actually matters when you’re trying to build power from below.
What we do need are more minority views from the people who were there. Not just the dominant stories, not just the tidy retellings, but the perspectives that expose the actual tensions inside our organising:
open vs closed
process vs control
serendipity vs bureaucracy
These are the real power that shaped our victories and our collapses. Take #indymedia. From my experience, it began open, horizontal, serendipitous – messy in all the productive ways. And it died closed, formal, bureaucratic – captured by the very forms it was created to resist. This is not a critique of individuals; it’s a plain, structural story. And it’s the kind of story we must use if we want to reboot anything today.
This is exactly why we have the #4opens: openness of code, data, process, and community. It’s a simple but powerful way to mediate these recurring problems. It keeps us grounded in transparency rather than personality, in shared pathways rather than gatekeeping, in public good rather than private control.
If any of this reads like a personal criticism, it isn’t. It’s a reminder that the future depends on honest memory, not sanitised mythology. To build the next wave – #OMN, #openweb, new grassroots media – we need our own histories, told by us, in our own messy, contradictory, living voices. That’s the compost the next movement grows from.
Let’s look at this. #ActivityPub is not a product. It’s not even really a “protocol” in the narrow, rigid sense that vertical tech likes to imagine. ActivityPub is a shared vocabulary, a public language for moving meaning and connection across the #openweb. It gives you nouns and verbs, and the community defines the grammar through lived use.
This is why the #OMN works with ActivityPub, a metadata and meaning layer, not a platform, flows, not silos. ActivityPub is the widely deployed #4opens protocol that treats publishing as a flow, a conversation.
Unlike the more vertical stacks (#ATProto is a good example), ActivityPub doesn’t force a worldview. It doesn’t tell you, “this is how your network must be structured.” It doesn’t enforce hierarchy or lock you into one interpretation of identity, authority, or workflow. It’s a #KISS path – here’s a shared language, verbs for publishing and receiving, express objects, updates, relationships. The rest is up to the commons
This flexibility is exactly why the #OMN can become a part of this flow. ActivityPub, with #FAP process, is already evolving this way – not through top-down committees, but by developers and users defining new grammar for shared needs. Quote posts, permissions, object types, and many other extensions are emerging organically. This is horizontal protocol evolution, which aligns well with the #OMN path.
To mediate the #geekproblem trying to break this path. We need to say clearly why we don’t want an “ActivityPub 2.0”. A clean break is a vertical move, it reproduces the #techcurn cycle: throw away the compost, start another shiny stack, burn everything down every five years because fashion demands it. It’s the #fashernista mindset applied to protocols.
For the #OMN, we need continuity, evolving the commons, not abandoning it. ActivityPub works because it’s an accretion protocol, not a replacement protocol. We extend it, we add grammar, we build bridges, we compost the broken bits. This is the #nothingnew ethos: repair, adapt, extend, don’t rewrite reality every cycle.
This is fine up to a point, but still too much – Central points of failure – Which is fine for much of the #fediverse. But the #OMN isn’t only for well-resourced servers, it’s for change and challenge. Activists on the ground, communities without reliable hosting, people under surveillance, low-resource groups, offline-first publishing, pop-up networks, autonomous movements that cannot rely on central infrastructure.
For this layer, we need true #p2p protocols. This is where #DAT, #Hypercore, and similar tools matter – not as replacements, but as bridges. These are needed for resilient metadata flows, where stories, tags, and meaning travel across networks even when the networks are broken.
We need to understand why both matter, It’s because they do different things. ActivityPub gives us: wide distribution, discoverability, moderation structures, federation, slow-moving cultural infrastructure. We add to this what #p2p gives us: autonomy, resilience, offline survival, local-first publishing, anti-censorship pathways,
The #OMN’s job is to bridge these layers, same metadata vocabulary, same hashtag meaning system, same open processes. Two different transport layers depending on the need. Think of it like the compost metaphor: ActivityPub is the shared soil bed. #p2p is the mycelium running underneath, keeping it alive when storms hit.
This matters, we don’t want just another Fediverse, we don’t want just another p2p experiment. We need a living ecosystem that can: publish everywhere, survive disconnection, resist capture, remain open, remain public, remain messy, remain ours. ActivityPub gives us the public commons, p2p gives us the underground root network. The #OMN ties them together through shared metadata, hashtags, practices, and governance.
Compost, not silos, ecosystems, not empires. Federation on the surface, peer-to-peer underneath. This is the #OMN path.
What we are suffering from a shortage of collective pathways. The crisis we are walking into isn’t caused by a lack of charisma or vision at the top. It’s caused by the cultural trap we’ve built around individual solutions to systemic problems. #stupidindividualism – the obsession with personal leaders, personal brands, personal genius – is going to kill millions and displace billions over the next 20 years. Not because individuals are inherently harmful, but because individualism is the wrong tool for a collapsing world.
Vertical thinking can’t see horizontal realities. If your whole value system is built around leaders, ranks, and “key figures,” you will be blind to the commons, to networks, to peer processes, to messy collective agency. And this blindness is not neutral, it accelerates #climatechaos, feeds the #deathcult, and locks us into the same extractive paths that got us here in the first place.
The way forward isn’t another charismatic savior or another “hero innovator.” What we need is to balance collective pathways built from the ground up. Any working future needs:
Networks, not heroes. Because no single person can hold the complexity ahead.
Practices, not brands. Because technique and culture outlast personalities.
Open processes, not closed hierarchies. Because transparency is the only antidote to captured systems.
Shared governance, not managed optics. Because appearance won’t save us, but participation might.
Messy, compostable infrastructures, not shiny hype machines. Because real change grows from what we renew, reuse, and reimagine, not what we market.
This thinking points toward the #OMN, not as a product, not as a platform, not as “the next big thing,” but as a path. A way of organising, publishing, coordinating, and governing that is native to the horizontal world we actually live in. A way to compost the #techshit and grow something more real.
We don’t need better leaders, we need better collectives, we need spaces where the horizontal becomes visible again. And we need them now.
The #mainstreaming has a crap story, they say that the crisis of communication – the noise, the chaos, the misinformation, the anxiety – can only be solved by “returning to trusted sources.” They will argue that decentralized media is dangerous, that the “wild internet” must be cleaned up, that only vetted, official voices should have reach.
They will say that decentralized paths, all horizontal spaces are inevitably viral cesspools, and that our #openweb native podcasts, newsletters, open blogs, fedi servers are similer unregulated contamination. The growing fascism, in the end, will push that non-institutional voices are a threat to public order. That public conversation must be brought back under professional management, them.
The line will be simple: “Let the experts speak. Everyone else, sit down.” This is the predictable response of a broken society that lost control of its own narratives. And yes, they are right about one thing, that Big Tech is a sewer. The #dotcons profit from rage, division, algorithmic sewage, and emotional manipulation. Their business model is engineered disinformation. They are the factories of mess we live in.
But the establishment’s mistake, or more accurately, their strategic convenient lie, is pretending we, the #openweb, are the same, we are not. The #fediverse is not Facebook, Podcasts are not TikTok, Blogs and newsletters are not X, the #openweb is not #AlgoMedia.
We are: human-scale, chronological, transparent, open-process, community governed, non-addictive, non-manipulative. Decentralized media is not chaos – it is plurality. The messy public – not the polished elitists – speaking in many voices.
The establishment wants a return to vertical media because they cannot see horizontal people. Their value system literally blinds them. They believe discourse must be orderly, top-down, fact-checked by institutions that have long since been captured by the #deathcult of capital and careerism.
The problem is not that too many people speak, the problem is that too few people have been allowed to listen. The #OMN is the seedling of the opposite vision, many small voices, widely distributed, human editorial networks, community amplification and messy compostable infrastructure. The fedi, podcasts, blogs, newsletters – these are not the disease. They are the immune system emerging in response to the disease.
The establishment sees disorder, we see a rewilding,
They see danger, we see a necessary correction.
They see fragmentation, we see a path back to collective agency.
Not only that, but the current #mainstreaming are desperate to recentralize the narrative because decentralization breaks their #deathcult monopole on truth, framing, and attention. The people do not need saving from themselves, they need saving from the system that hijacked their voices. They need a native path that is open, messy, federated, to push compostable public media, where trust is earned through transparency, not authority.
Looking back at the old TubeMogul stats – the archived page from 2011 – I had a jolt: 18 million verified views, and when you added the torrent distribution, RSS syndication, video CDROM redistribution, and all the edge-case channels we seeded into, the total was closer to 34 million views. These were big numbers back then.
All grassroots, all #KISS, all built on the early #openweb ethos, that number matters, not for vanity, rather, it showed proof-of-work for what a truly decentralized media network could do before the #dotcons consolidated their grip.
People forget this now, but #visionOntv was one of the earliest real-world demonstrations of the idea behind what we have now with the #Fediverse, years before the word existed:
distributed hosting
open content flows
creative commons
no algorithmic manipulation
human curation
peer-to-peer distribution
training and empowerment as core paths
This wasn’t theory, it was practice, in the era just before the enclosure of the Web took hold. The original vision – visionOntv’s mission statement from back then – looking at it now through the Web Archive – still works:
“Are you feeling dejected and bored? Does mainstream media make you feel ill? Then get off your ass…” This wasn’t branding, it was the cultural tone of a time when people still believed the internet could change things, and it genuinely did. visionOntv was a platform, seed for a network, built around a simple idea: video for social change, delivered in formats normal people could actually use.
We were deliberately designing for the “lean-in / lean-out” model before UX people had the words for it. You could sit back and watch it as TV. Or you could click deeper, link up to the grassroots campaigns behind the stories, jump straight into action.
The point was always outreach, always getting beyond the activist bubble, aways trying to plant seeds of agency in ordinary people, that “compost” metaphor we still use today. Quality, not chaos, visionOntv was not open-publishing, we had a quality threshold, we mentored people into producing work that worked, visually, politically, narratively, not gatekeeping, but gardening.
This is something the #openweb forgot: freedom isn’t the same as noise. We were trying to hold onto a craft tradition inside a political one. Tools, Training, and #4opens. We pushed #FOSS open source production tools as far as they could go, but we weren’t dogmatic. If a corporate tool was necessary for outreach, we used it. The guiding star was always:
Does this help media democracy grow? Does this empower real people? Does this keep the compost fertile?
And because we distributed everything in Creative Commons non-commercial, people everywhere could download, remix, project in their communities, hand out self copied video CDs to run their own screenings. One broadband connection could feed a whole neighbourhood. That was media democracy. Again: this was proto-Fediverse thinking before the word existed, this was a people’s broadcasting network built on the #4opens.
What happened, the #dotcons consolidated – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – and sucked the air out of open distribution. We were publishing into a storm of #enshittification before the word was coined. And of course we tried to ride the wave, keep the doors open, keep the channels alive. But the gravity of centralized platforms crushed the ecology, distribution dried up.
The “lean-in/lean-out” mechanism was rendered obsolete by the algorithmic feed. The early #P2P ecosystems were squeezed by copyright paranoia and corporate capture. It wasn’t that visionOntv failed, the Web changed around it, in the same way soil ecology collapses when a monoculture plantation takes over.
The #Peertube Era That… Almost Happened. When the #Fediverse bloomed, we did the obvious thing: we pushed all the video archives, feeds, and channels onto PeerTube. It was the correct move, and we were there early. But PeerTube was young, fragile, underfunded, underhyped. And unlike the massive #dotcons, decentralized tech requires community support to stay alive.
We didn’t get that support, so the server went dark. And now the whole archive – all that history, all that outreach, all the proof-of-work – sits offline. This isn’t a guilt trip, it’s a call-out to the people who care about the #openweb: Come on, folks, let’s bring visionOntv back https://opencollective.com/open-media-network/projects/visionontv
This is about revolution as regeneration, not only destruction. In an era built on tech dependency, revolution isn’t only about smashing the machines, it’s about liberating them. Turning tools back into commons, not commodities. It’s composting the toxic monoculture of the #dotcons into fertile ground for the #openweb to grow again. Revolution means reclaiming agency, not blindly rejecting technology, but re-rooting it into light, human-scale, transparent, and accountable relationships.
The #openweb as infrastructure for freedom, isn’t just a technical architecture, it’s a social contract. Revolution means re-establishing that contract through the #4opens. When we build networks this way, we decentralize power, not just servers. The #KISS act of publishing, federating, and remixing information freely is itself revolutionary in a world where everything is locked behind paywalls and algorithms.
Tech as commons, not commodity, We’ve learned that “innovation” under capitalism means enclosure and surveillance. Revolution in this context looks like refusal of extraction: creating cooperative infrastructures that are not driven by profit but by maintenance, care, and shared use. Think of community built #p2p mesh networks, open hardware, peer-to-peer storage, and federated #ActivityPub publishing as revolutionary paths – not add-ons, but foundations.
Cultural and cognitive shifts, shifting the cultural narrative from “user” to participant. From “consumer” to custodian. The real struggle is against the #deathcult of endless growth and the #geekproblem of technocratic detachment. It’s about re-learning how to think together, rebuilding trust, and balancing the #fluffy (care, empathy, collaboration) and the #spiky (truth, resistance, boundaries).
Practicing digital mutual aid – sharing skills, hosting, dev, and care.
Bridging online and offline organising, connecting digital tools to local struggles for housing, food, land, and rights etc.
Above all, any real revolutionary network – like the #OMN – has to strip away the old skins of power. No hierarchies. No hidden structures. No property games. No fetishizing of tools, status, or “official” etiquette.
If we’re building something new, we can’t carry the unconshuse ghosts of the old world with us. That means not just saying we’re open, but being #4opens. Open in decisions, and open in how decisions are made. Transparent in process, not just in outcome. Coherent theory is practice, and practice is theory.
Everyday life has to reflect the world we want to grow. That means composting the commodity mindset, no trading social trust for personal gain. It means building through shared assemblies, through community, through small and self-directing circles that stay alive to change and challenge.
The structure of the #OMN should always be simple, transparent, and direct, so that anyone can walk in, understand it, and shape it. No special knowledge required, no gatekeeping. Thousands of “unprepared” people able to join, act, and make it their own. That’s what #4opens means, a living culture of clarity and participation.
Only when a movement reflects the decentralized, self-organizing community it wants to bring into being can it avoid becoming another elitist shell, another bureaucracy pretending to be radical.
When the #OMN does its work right, it doesn’t stand above the revolution, it dissolves into it, like a thread into a healing wound, leaving behind not an organization, but a living network.
That’s the path: community, openness, trust, and the messy joy of self-organization.
