We are having a tech reboot for the last few years, federated seems to be where it’s at right now, and it makes sense, the #fediverse is flourishing where so many “#web3” or pure #p2p projects stumbled. This isn’t to say #p2p is bad. But for a peer-to-peer social network to actually work and be social useful, it would need mechanisms for collectivising: shared moderation, subjective trust, a way to handle conflict. Purely (stupid)individualist solutions have been tried before, and they don’t hold together at all beyond a tiny scale. Atomised people cannot build any lasting commons.
The strength of federation as a path is that it collectivises by default. Servers are groups, not individuals, decisions are made within communities, not in isolation, this builds resilience. What is currently #blocking this path is our #fashionistas and #geekproblem people, who are still clinging to parts of #mainstreaming “common sense!. If you try to vertically scale, if you dream of competing head-on with Silicon Valley, running giant datacentres with teams of sysadmins, you’ve already lost. That’s their game, their best proficiency. You cannot beat them at it.
The path forward is to do something they cannot do without breaking their own business model. Something they would never want to do even if they could. That’s the opening. That’s the #OMN path. So let’s be clear about what the current #openweb reboot and the #fediverse is not:
The fediverse is not an electricity grid. You don’t have to be plugged in everywhere for it to function.
The fediverse is not feudalism. You are not a serf bound to some lord’s server. You can leave, fork, migrate, or self-host.
The fediverse is not a commodity. It is not like a telephone line or a utility service to be packaged, sold, or regulated in the same way.
And no, the fediverse is not a big truck that carries data down the highway. It’s a messy garden, a bazaar, a commons.
The #fediverse works because it is untidy, diverse, and decentralised. It’s a network of collectives, not a monopoly machine. The #OMN path and vision is to lean into this: not to replicate the #dotcons in smaller, scrappier forms, but to compost the mistakes of the past and grow something native, nourishing, and #4opens.
The #OMN isn’t about isolated gestures, it’s about building federated, trust-based media networks that actually work at scale. Right now, the truth is simple: you can’t just join or create one tomorrow. Why? Because the path needs composting first.
By composting, we mean taking the wreckage of past projects – messy, co-opted, burned-out, over-managed, or over-centralised – and turning it into fertile ground. From this social fertile soil can we grow #OMN that support:
Open, federated collaboration
Shared media creation and distribution
Affinity group – based moderation and governance
Strong social resilience against co-option by corporations or #dotcons
We need to then bride this existing federated path into the seed #p2p path with social tools that work and hold this bridge in place. The #OMN is a work in progress, and that’s intentional. It’s about building the crew, the culture, and the infrastructure before anyone can just “join.” This isn’t a platform you log into; it’s a path we create together, step by step. Until we do that composting, passive participation isn’t possible, the first step is #KISS that’s exactly what we’re focused on making happen.
Fluffy side: cautious, slow-moving, grounded in “keeping the peace” and managing optics. Classic problem: avoidance of conflict means bottlenecking decisions, blocking energy, and trying to centralise control, so things don’t blow up. Spiky side: impatient, direct, “get it done” energy. Spikiness pushes things forward, but often burns bridges, creating splits and mistrust. Neither path alone works – one stalls out, the other fragments. Their clash in the UK “Your Party”, just tore apart what was an opening for a broad left #mainstreaming alternative which we do need.
There are lessons here for horizontal/grassroots paths, a big one is that centralisation kills: When “leadership” becomes bottlenecked around personalities (Corbyn as “elder statesman”, Sultana as “young firebrand”), it reproduces the same control problems we see everywhere – #NGO capture, careerist gatekeeping, etc. Energy without mediation burns out: Spiky approaches are essential (they break inertia), but without social glue and open processes, the movement shatters.
Sadly, it’s looking like the political vacuum, is back. The 700,000 people who signed up are proof that there is real mass desire for something beyond the #deathcult#mainstreaming. But they’re now “homeless” – with no trustworthy structures to plug into. That vacuum will either be filled by opportunists (careerists, NGOs, “#fashernista”), or open the path for something like the #OMN: messy, federated, not centralised around personalities. And/Or the Green Party (this needs a separate post).
Focusing on the grassroots path I have been working on: this is exactly why the #OMN and #openweb reboot needs balance, so the signal-to-noise ratio can stay healthy. Otherwise, we just mirror the left’s long history of splits. What it means for the fluffy/spiky debate: The “Your Party” implosion shows us:
You can’t fix spiky by being fluffy. The soft style just frustrated allies and deepened mistrust.
You can’t replace fluffy with spiky.
The only path forward is process, not personality. That’s where horizontal projects like the #OMN can work – by creating open, transparent, mediated structures that don’t depend on charismatic individuals at the centre.
For the #openweb reboot, this bad moment is actually what we are working to fix. It shows how much energy there is (hundreds of thousands signing up). It shows the cost of control blindness. Likewise, it creates urgency for native governance paths and experiments in the #fediverse and beyond – where messy affinity-based groups, guided by the #4opens, can provide a home that doesn’t implode around personality clashes.
The question now is who can see the need for the practical mediation layer of the #OMN, is designed to bridge – not abstract theory – it’s the path that makes messy, spiky, fluffy humans work together without blowing everything up. For the #OMN and #openweb reboot, the answer isn’t “less conflict” or “more central leadership,” but better mediation and horizontal process, so collective energy isn’t wasted on repeating the same old splits.
The generation of the last 40 years of “There is no alternative” (Thatcher → Blair → Sunak/Starmer) produced passivity and cynicism. #Dotcons capture: people live inside algorithmic bubbles, shaped for consumption, not collaboration. This is the era of individualism as common sense: many can’t even imagine “the collective” except as a threat. We now face naked, fear + distraction: #climatechaos, wars, economic precarity → endless doomscrolling instead of agency. And this is why movements implode: the raw material (people) have been warped by the #deathcult.
What we can work with, even in this mess, people still show hunger for meaning (why 700,000 signed up for Corbyn–Sultana’s thing). Anger at the #nastyfew elitists (but it often gets channelled rightwards – Farage, Trump, Reform, conspiracies).
There are moments of solidarity (mutual aid, Palestine protests, climate camps). Skill fragments (#geekproblem energy, activist culture, DIY practice – but siloed). We don’t start from zero – we start from these contradictions.
Practical paths for dealing with this generation is in part about: Break the spell by expose #mainstreaming as a control system, using simple, repeatable stories (hashtags, memes, metaphors like composting/shovels) to make the invisible visible.
Then the path, affinity first, not mass. Don’t try to herd 700,000 people. Start with small, trust-based circles that actually work. Show results, not rhetoric. This attracts people who are sick of endless talking shops. Compost the conflict, instead of suppressing spiky energy (which turns toxic), build mediation layers, so conflict gets processed into growth. This prevents the inevitable splits from killing projects before they start.
We need working, visible alternatives, things people can touch: #OMN publishing hubs, #fediverse tools, radical media gardens. Each working piece is a counter-spell against “there is no alternative.” This is about reframing success and stop only measuring change in electoral wins or #NGO funding circles. We need to measure it in resilient collectives, working infrastructure, and shifts in common sense.
The challenge we need to compost, is that, the current generation has been trained in #stupidindividualism. What we need to learn is you cannot beat that as individuals, the only path is to recreate collectives – messy, organic, trust-based – where people can unlearn the #deathcult through practice. That’s why #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback matter: they’re not just tools, they’re containers for relearning collective life.
The #algorithm on #YouTube has flipped hard right wing for me, a few other people have said the same, please add if you have seen this as well? If this is widespread, it shows how important it is to get normal people back to the #openweb reboot we are all involved in here.
This is obviously a form of social control, with the dominating of the #dotcons platforms in most peoples lives, plain and simple, the price of us building this domination.
The #hashtag story begins with disempowering the #mainstreaming in our own minds. First step: breaking the spell, realising we don’t have to live inside their frame.
Second step: forming the affinity group circle. Gathering with others who can see through the smoke and mirrors. From that circle comes the power to build the #OMN shovel.
Third step: composting. Taking all the #techshit – the failed projects, poisoned cultures, and dead ends – and turning them back into fertile soil. #OGB
What we do with that soil is up to us. That’s where the future grows. #KISS
The #geekproblem only sees #cavetechnology. But society is far too complex for that, you’d have to kill billions to make it work.
4opens is the opposite: a data commons. Light as a tool to fight with, not darkness to hide in.
The problem isn’t that people refuse to act. The problem is that most are stuck in paralysis: “What do I do?” If the only options they see are worshipping the #deathcult or reinventing the wheel, passivity looks like the safest choice.
The design challenge of the #OMN isn’t just tech – pipes, tanks, metadata – it’s rituals and rhythms that invite participation. We need a seed affinity group whose job is simple: set the shovel down in front of people.
Don’t only complain that they aren’t digging. Literally put the shovel in their hands and say:
Run a local flow.
Tag a batch of data.
Moderate one stream.
Host one screening/fire circle.
Tiny, clear tasks. The kind you can do in an hour. That’s how you turn passivity into momentum. Shifting habits into usefulness, instead of fighting people’s flaws, turn them into leverage.
#fashionistas crave visibility. Fine. Give them the role of spreading compost metaphors, making the work look alive and fresh. Let them shine light on the soil.
#geekproblem crave puzzles and edge cases. Good. Hand them the tricky parts: trust plumbing, metadata sieves, redundancy logic. Their obsessiveness is an asset if aimed at the right joints of the system.
#mainstreaming crave “safe” recognition. Use it. Frame #OMN as “the next big thing everyone will need to join.” Let them be the “early adopters” who stay safe by appearing ahead of the curve. They don’t need to lead, they just need to follow momentum.
Each group moves in circles, polishing surfaces while the compost pile rots. But if you show them something real – a flow that works, a network that breathes – they drift toward it. Shiny surface with soil beneath, puzzles that connect to lived use, recognition that feels inevitable.
The Lesson, is, don’t try to convince people in the abstract. Show them working compost. Show them trust flows in action. Show them that it’s easier to do something useful than to do nothing. That’s how we push. That’s how we turn paralysis into practice. That’s how you start to compost the #deathcult.
For this in activism, some traditions work, many do not. It’s more complex than it looks, because those traditions that “don’t work” often do work – but only for the people who push them. That’s the root of the hashtag story: a tactic, a format, a ritual can give visibility, ego, and career advancement to its promoters, while leaving the commons weaker. The tradition “works” as a personal lever, but fails as a collective tool.
We’ve all seen this: Endless meetings that build someone’s identity as a “process person,” but drain energy from action. Branding projects that make a clique look good to funders, while hollowing out grassroots trust. Campaigns designed for headlines and hashtags, not for long-term change.
The bitter truth: a tradition can succeed as a ladder while failing as a bridge. We don’t need to throw everything away. We need to compost. To ask: Who does this serve? Does it build trust, or personal power? Does it strengthen the commons, or just the clique?
The hashtag story isn’t about rejecting all rituals. It’s about refusing to confuse personal gain with collective growth. Traditions that build soil – trust, flows, openness – must be tended. Traditions that rot into self-serving traps must be turned, aerated, broken down. That’s the cycle: compost the false, nurture the living.
With the tyranny of the structureless path, every attempt to share the commons decays into a fog of personalities, cliques, and unspoken power. What needs composting here is that, at best, you end up with a smiling violent man as the backstop of governance.
Without mediating structures, what emerges is not freedom but hidden hierarchy. “Smiling violence” – the agreeable man (or clique) who insists they’re just holding things together – quietly blocks challenge, manipulates process, and reserves the final say. If you’re not paying attention, and can’t move away, you wake to find yourself living in #feudalism, with its ever-present threat of personal violence lurking behind the smile.
This is how “horizontal” spaces rot. They confuse the absence of shared structures with openness, when in fact it is poisoned soil: domination by those most willing to coerce, block, or flatter. Without functioning myths and traditions, shared trust, and open processes, what grows is not commons but personal power, one person’s will, or a small group’s grip.
The smiling violent man is not an accident. He is the inevitable product of structurelessness:
Without flows of accountability, you get bottlenecks of control.
Without mediating trust systems, you get gatekeepers posing as “protectors.”
Without a backbone, you get a backstop, a hard edge of coercion dressed in kindness.
The result: commons replaced by fiefdoms, trust replaced by muscle, care replaced by the mask of “caring the most.” Once that happens, the commons are no longer common, they are held hostage.
When I see this again and again, I sometimes say: “grow a backbone.” But this rarely lands well. So let’s pause and ask what backbone really means in social settings:
Structure / Stability: Like a spine holding the body upright, a social backbone is the framework that keeps everything from collapsing into mush. In #OMN terms: the #5F framework is the backbone, UX, UI, and culture all grow around it.
Courage / Integrity: To “have backbone” means to stand firm under pressure. For movements, this means holding the line when mainstreaming forces, fashionistas, or gatekeepers push back. Backbone is refusing co-option, staying rooted in trust.
Invisible but Essential: The backbone is not the face, not the style. It’s the quiet strength – shared trust and open processes – that allows everything else to move. Often invisible, but without it, nothing functions.
A social backbone, then, is the shared trust + open processes that holds a community upright against both internal decay and external capture. By contrast, on the progressive path the #fashionistas build style without backbone (pretty, but collapses quickly), and the #geekproblem builds bone without flesh (rigid, alienating).
Metaphors work when people use them, this might become convoluted 🙂
The comments brought up some points -When we talk about composting bad process, the stink comes from rot sealed off from air, the smiling violence holding the heap down, suffocating flows. The shovel (#OMN) exists to turn the pile, let oxygen in, keep the ecosystem alive. But the real work is done not by the shoveler but by the hidden actors: the invertebrates, fungi, and bacteria. The slow, distributed, many-voiced work of transforming mess into fertile ground. That’s us, when we build trust-based flow networks.
So let’s think about this backbone metaphor more. In biology, spines give structure, but ecosystems are held up just as much by invisible scaffolding: fungal networks, soil webs, rhizomes. In tech, the Internet “backbone” was designed with redundancy, no single node decisive, everything routing around damage. That’s closer to an exoskeleton or even a rhizome than to a rigid spine: strength through distributed paths, not central authority.
Back to the subject of tech #Mainstreaming likes to tell the story that the Internet came from the Pentagon, born a war machine. There’s truth there. But there’s also the buried history (see APC’s work) of people shaping it into a commons, a tool for organizing, a network not of command but of association. That history is the “invertebrate” path, fragile, messy, hard to see, but alive. And in truth, tech is ideology embodied: the people who built the early net built something that could survive without the state, routing around command and control. That’s a good definition of anarchy.
So the wider metaphor isn’t just backbone, but ecosystem: A scaffold that gives form (#5F of the #OMN as the bones). Shovels to aerate and mediate (#OGB as the process tools). Invertebrates and fungi (the hidden actors – users, trust webs, communities). Rhizomes and redundancy (the net’s anarchic, native design).
The danger comes when we forget this, and mistake surface style for soil depth. The #fashionistas offer flowers without roots, the #geekproblem offers bone without flesh. The commons require both – backbone and compost, scaffold and ecosystem. Otherwise, the heap stinks and collapses into fiefdoms.
The Open Media Network (#OMN) is an “anything in, anything out” network powered by a mediated trust system. Instead of one corporation or #NGO controlling the flow, the commernerty decides what happens to the data that moves through it. At its core, the #OMN is a data soup: tagged data objects flowing through channels. These flows are shaped by trust. You consume and share based on your trust relationships, not on algorithms designed to manipulate you.
Key features are built-in, not bugs: Lossy data – it doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. Redundancy – multiple instances mean resilience, not waste. Trust mediation – human-scale filters that grow communities. The #geekproblem often resists these messy but living dynamics, demanding rigid perfection. But that rigidity kills creativity. The #OMN embraces mess as the fertile ground where culture grows.
The network is built on the normal #FOSS process, #4opens – open data, open source, open process, open standards. Its focus isn’t inventing new shiny toys. It’s about weaving together what already exists into a functioning grassroots media/news commons. Others are free to build their own projects on top of the framework. What’s exciting is the flows of trust that emerge. These aren’t abstract protocols, they’re the living arteries of new communities.
In short: The #OMN is decentralized, trust-based, open by design. It empowers people and communities to take control of media, to create their own flows, their own networks, their own power.
It’s not about serving users. It’s about empowering people. It’s not about control. It’s about trust.
The #OMN is not a product. It’s a shovel. Use it to compost the #deathcult, and grow something alive.
For the more geeky – 5 Functions of the #OMN (#5F)
Think of the #OMN as plumbing for media, a system of pipes, holding tanks, and connectors. It’s designed so anyone (not just geeks) can understand and use it. Every site in the network is built from these 5 basic functions:
Link / Subscribe
Plumb a new pipe into the network. A flow of content comes in or goes out. Each pipe can connect to any other function.
Trust / Moderate
Flow passes through a sieve. Trusted content moves smoothly; noise gets filtered. You can send flows straight through, into holding tanks, or split them into new pipes.
Rollback
Empty the tank, rewind a flow, or remove specific objects. Essential for correcting errors, spam, or bad data.
Edit Metadata
Add tags or notes to the “tail” of a data object. Metadata determines how content gets sieved and aggregated. This is the backbone of news curation in the OMN.
Publish
Add new content objects into the flow. Optionally editable. Publishing is just another pipe into the system. At the core sits the storage tank: a simple database holding all the flows.
Nothing new here. This isn’t rocket science – it’s the same way plumbing works, or how power grids function, or how neurons connect in the brain. The #OMN builds on this #nothingnew principle: simple, understandable systems scaled up to empower communities.
UX/UI then sits on top of these 5 functions. That’s the “macro” – the surface layer people touch – but underneath, it’s all just pipes and tanks for flows of data.
The #fashionistas are everywhere in our spaces. They look shiny, sound clever, and always seem “in the know.” But scratch the surface, and you find nothing but mirrors and buzzwords. They are hallucination machines, not listening, not dialoguing, not building, just repeating the same empty lines to hide their lack of substance.
We need to shovel the empty words into piles, turn them over, and use the stink to fertilize something real. The #OMN is one such tool. Not polished, not PR-friendly, not built for grants or press releases. It’s messy, grounded, spiky, and fluffy. A toolkit for people who actually want to build, not brand. The #fashionistas will hate it, because it doesn’t need them. Good. That’s how we know we’re on the right path.
These #fashionistas conscious or not, are about wrapping the #deathcult in a soft blanket of jargon and “professionalism”, to make exploitation sound like innovation. To turn grassroots messiness into #PR. And people keep falling for it. Why? Because the #fashionistas sell the feeling of being respectable, of being listened to by power. They dangle the bait of #NGO grants, seats at the table, and photo ops. But what they deliver is silence, blockage, and decay.
They call it communication, but it’s not dialogue, not listening, not truth. It’s hallucination: Smiling faces repeating empty words. Buzzwords to cover the rot. Smoke and mirrors to keep power safe in its head down worship.
This is the work of the #fashionistas of our spaces. They parade their new “frameworks,” their shiny “initiatives,” their endless “community guidelines.” Always dressed up, always polished, always empty. They are masters of looking good while doing nothing.
They sell hallucinations because reality frightens them. Reality is messy, full of dissent, full of challenge. Reality is compost – steaming, turning, breaking down. From compost grows life. From their hallucinations grows only more of the #deathcult. While they hold the space, communities are silenced. When they push themselves, the centre holds only rot. With their hallucinate, the #mainstreaming keeps killing the margins.
What we do not need is their delusions. We do not need their fashion “shows”. Our path is different. The path we take is composting. Shovel in hand, we turn the pile. We let the stink breathe. We break down the lies, the #PR, the shiny reports. We turn their hallucinations back into fertile ground for something real.
Not only that, but we need more projects like the #OMN on this path: open process, open data, open code, open standards. The #4opens is this compass: sunlight over secrecy, dialogue over control. The #KISS principle is our reminder: keep it simple, keep it real.
Let the #fashionistas keep their hallucinations. We need to be busy with planting the soil.
Sanity means stepping outside the churn. The obstacle is simple but heavy, people cannot see change and cannot face challenge. That blindness keeps us stuck, yes, some say what I write here is “bleeding obvious.” It is, but that’s the point, it’s not for the already converted, not for the initiated. These posts are shovels: tools to compost the #fashionistas and the #geekproblem, to turn the pile of #techshit into fertile soil.
The #OMN project grows from this compost. It’s not a theory to admire, it’s a path to move people out of #mainstreaming and into diverse subcultures where we actually live change and challenge. When rupture comes – and it always does – the strength of that diversity, the lived practice of horizontals, will be seeds for planting a future worth having.
This path is not about being “original.” It’s about being useful. About creating spiky, fluffy translations that help us step aside from the churn, shovel in hand. Use them, or lose them, please.
We keep seeing this mess. The moment grassroots energy spills over into #mainstreaming, something alive, the #fashionistas arrive to “facilitate.” Suddenly the spiky edges are dulled, the fluffy warmth is flattened, and what’s left is another empty process path, they kill with kindness, or worse, with “common sense.”
Let’s be very blunt, these people are not important as individuals. What matters is the path they push us down. The “commonsense” they sell is poison. Every time we let them set the frame, our spaces collapse back into #stupidindividualism or #NGO capture. Every time.
Every so often I answer the out reach calls from more traditional alt/progressive media orgs, let’s look at some of the very illustrative “common sense” knock backs. The recent examples are Freedom’s reaction and Good Internet’s submission call – As their reaction is useful to illustrate the fault line of “radical publishing” in a federated media path.
Here’s a sketch of how it can (and arguably should) work if we’re serious about, #openweb, and soft-communing infrastructure:
Radical publishing vs content marketing
Linking, promiscuous citation, and remixing are not “self-promotion,” they are the currency of commons media. The #deathcult “common sense” (silo good, linking bad) flips this into “spam” because it serves enclosure. A federated media path re-asserts: to link is to share; the work which is often missing is to normalize this against the #geekproblem hostility.
Federated magazine model
Think of Good Internet or Freedom not as final silos but as temporary, themed hubs: Each issue/edition is an editorial filter over the wider #datasoup. Every piece lives in at least two places: Original home (blog, Fediverse post, OMN node, site). Curated home (magazine issue, zine, aggregator). Citation = federation: linking outward is a feature, not a weakness.
Protocols over Silos
ActivityPub / OMN: an article = Note or Article with links, tags, signatures. Bridging: same content can be pulled into Good Internet’s site, Freedom, an OMN feed, or a #p2p archive. Editorial collectives act as curators, not gatekeepers: they federate, contextualize, and remix.
Radical editorial practice
News vs. Narrative: anarchist/left publishers still to often mimic #mainstreaming news style. But radical publishing can foreground process stories (assemblies, conflicts, federations, mistakes) as valuable. The “native common sense” is that embedded links aren’t a vice; they’re a form of solidarity economy. Columns / paths: rather than stand-alone “takes,” recurring voices build a long-form conversation thread across issues.
Overcoming the spam accusation
Transparency: declare openly, “this piece first appeared on hamishcampbell.com – we federate because knowledge is commons.” Reciprocity: every time you link out, you also lift other projects, so the “flow” is visible. Editorial notes: curators can preface with: “We include links because they build the #openweb – federation isn’t promotion, it’s solidarity.”
Practical workflow (2026-ish)
Write a blog/site piece on your own, or community domain (independent anchor). Publish simultaneously to Fediverse (AP Article). Flag it with #OMN metadata (topic, source, tags). Editorial collectives subscribe to flows/feeds – curate into magazine/zine/weekly digest. Federation tools track lineage: where did this piece appear, when, how remixed. Readers move from curated hubs back to source domains (and sideways to other linked nodes).
Why it matters to anarchists
Free software is political; so is free publishing. Federation prevents capture by the #nastyfew – no central owner can throttle which radical voices appear. Linking promiscuously creates a mutual aid economy of attention, the opposite of platform/silo enclosure. Each zine/collective/magazine is an affinity group node; federation = council of nodes. It encodes horizontalism in media.
So when you bump against “not news enough” or “too self-promotional,” that’s the clash between #mainstreaming editorial common sense and federated radical publishing practice. One assumes scarcity (guard the pages); the other assumes abundance (share the flow).
It’s good to see more people turning their focus back to the #openweb. For the past five years of the #reboot we’ve been distracted in a signal-to-noise mess from the #fashionistas. That time needs to be over, we need to start looking clearly at both internal rot and the external threats.
A good first step is in balancing the realisation that we actually have far more direct power to deal with the internal mess than we do over the eternal #dotcons and their #closedweb “common sense”. That’s why we need to put activism into composting the internal #blocking (see: https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost). Composting isn’t just a metaphor – it’s a way to recycle the piles of #techshit we’ve built up into soil that can grow new #openweb seeds. #KISS
I understand the focus on the external #dotcons, yes, we also need to keep pushing back against the external enclosures. But inside our own spaces, it’s clear that possessiveness, in code, in reputation, in control over projects, undermines cooperation. It destroys trust, it wastes resources, it corrodes integrity. People often destroy what they love, not out of hate, but out of possession.
Drafting blog posts, polemics, and rallying calls to sharpen the #OMN narrative. Use the compost metaphors (#techshit, seeds, soil) into accessible messaging that sticks. Editing to transform the long posts into shareable, short-form content for Mastodon, Fediverse, and allied networks.
Curating and organizing existing #OMN writings into a structured wiki-style knowledge base. Building summaries, FAQs, and primers for newcomers who hit the projects cold. Draft “composting guides” – how to deal with #blocking, #fashionistas, and #geekproblem inside communities.
Writing simple documentation for the Unite Forge and other #OMN tools. Helping draft roadmaps that explain what’s built, what’s missing, and what needs contributors. Produce explainers on why #OMN is different from #dotcons and #NGO capture, grounded in #4opens.
Write out templates for horizontal decision-making (#OGB style) that projects can adapt. Suggest practical ways to “compost” blockers while keeping the wider network fertile. Help draft neticate rooted in #KISS + #4opens rather than #NGO-speak.
Each of these can be grown into living resources: wiki pages, blog posts, shareable guides, or activist toolkits – depending on where you want the energy to flow.
The geek answer (bad faith or blindness): “If only everyone learned to code, then society would be fairer.”
The activist answer: Code is part of the landscape, but culture, governance, and lived practice matter more. We don’t escape domination by teaching more people to type commands, we escape by changing what we do together with the tools.
Why “teach everyone to code” has become a dead-end slogan – it’s been tried, it’s been funded, and yet it hasn’t shifted power one bit. If anything, it’s reinforced the tech priesthood instead of breaking it.
The #geekproblem is exactly this blindness: geeks mistake tools for culture, skill for power, and training for change. They can’t see that the last 20 years of “learn to code” projects have failed precisely because they sidestep politics, trust, and social fabric. It’s comfortable, because it keeps power where it already is.
So, coding literacy might be useful, but it’s not transformative without social literacy – trust, collective governance, open processes. The real activist social tech path is to compost geek mess-making and build alt-cultures where tools serve the collective, not the priesthood.
Otherwise, “coding for all” is another flavour of #blocking – keeping us stuck, distracted, and blind. This is a useful example of the blinded #geekproblem. I use the word blinded to illustrate that people can’t see the sense in front of their faces. And I use the hashtag #blocking to show the outcome of this common “sense” blindness #KISS
Coding is not automatically social power, but in some contexts it does act as power, and understanding when/why helps unpack the #geekproblem.
When coding is not power
Most coding done in industry is low-level labour: writing scripts, fixing bugs, maintaining old systems. These programmers aren’t powerful; they’re workers. Their code serves capital.
Teaching kids to code (“everyone can make an app!”) rarely translates to actual power, because the infrastructure, distribution, and governance of platforms remain controlled by corporations.
Coding on its own doesn’t equal voice. A line of code in a corporate repo is no more socially powerful than a line in a personal diary if the person coding has no agency over how it’s used.
When coding is power
Coding becomes power when it bridges infrastructure + governance + culture.
Building #openweb infrastructure: If you can write the protocols or standards (e.g. ActivityPub, TCP/IP), you shape the possibilities for everyone downstream. That’s a kind of structural power.
Gatekeeping: If you control the codebase of a popular project, you can decide what features exist, whose contributions get merged, and which voices are excluded. This is soft but real power.
Automation and scale: Writing code that automates tasks (e.g. bots, algorithms, moderation tools) gives leverage over many people’s experience, especially when hidden in the background.
Narrative + legitimacy: In activist or grassroots spaces, coders too often get treated as “high priests” because they appear to have magical abilities others lack. This cultural framing inflates their social weight.
Coders confuse technical power with social change. They think: “If I can write the tool, I can fix the politics.” But tools reflect cultures. Without collective governance, tools just reproduce existing hierarchies.
The illusion of inevitability: because software underpins modern life, geeks assume society must organize around them. That blindness is what we’re pointing to.
When geeks push “everyone must code” as the path, they miss that most people don’t need to code to have power, they need agency in decision-making and trust networks.
How it really works (coding + social power)
Coding has power when embedded in movements that control their infrastructure. Example: early #Indymedia coders had real social power because their code directly enabled publishing outside corporate media – and at the start they were accountable to activist collectives.
Coding has power when it’s used to mediate flows of attention, trust, and resources. For example, algorithms that boost or bury voices. In grassroots hands, that can be liberatory; in corporate hands, it’s oppressive.
Coding becomes shared power when it is paired with open process (#4opens), shared governance (#OGB), and cultural literacy. Otherwise, it’s generally more priesthood, likely for the #deatcult in the end.
So: coding is like fire. On its own, it’s just heat and light. In the hands of a few, it’s a weapon or a fortress. In the commons, with shared tending, it’s the hearth – collective power.
To recap, coding as social power: Myth vs Reality
Myth 1: Coding = empowerment We’ve been told that “if everyone learns to code, everyone will have power.” Twenty years of coding bootcamps, “learn to code” initiatives, and school programs prove otherwise. Most of this simply trains people to slot into corporate pipelines. The power stays where it always was.
Reality: Coding on its own is labour, not empowerment. The infrastructure, governance, and distribution layers decide where the power flows. Without culture and collective governance, coding is just fuel for someone else’s engine.
Myth 2: Coding makes you special Coders often act like priests, holding secret knowledge. In activist spaces, this creates the illusion that coders alone can “save” or “lead.” That’s the #geekproblem in action.
Reality: Tools are only as powerful as the cultures and processes around them. A coder without collective accountability is just another gatekeeper. A coder inside a collective, with open governance (#4opens, #OGB), can help shift power outward.
Myth 3: Coding will fix politics The geek fantasy: “If I build the right app, the politics will fix itself.” We’ve seen this with countless “alternative platforms” that end up reproducing the same hierarchies.
Reality: Politics is culture, trust, and process. Code can mediate, amplify, or automate, but it cannot replace politics. Tools without culture are empty shells; culture without tools is still possible.
The compost view is the task isn’t to make everyone a coder, but to compost the priesthood and grow cultures where coding is a part of the collective. That’s the #KISS answer: code can support social power, but it is not social power.
Build cultures, not just tools: Stop pretending apps fix politics. Tools only matter if they grow inside strong cultures. Put people first, tech second.
Open the process (#4opens): Keep everything open: code, data, governance, strategy. Power hides in shadows; openness dissolves the priesthood. If it’s not open, it’s not our path.
Practice collective governance (#OGB): It helps when decisions about infrastructure are made more horizontally. Coders are part of the collective, not above it. Shared governance turns coding from priesthood into common fire.
The path out of the #geekproblem is in composting geek blindness and building living cultures where coding is a part of growing the commons.
For an example, this post is relevant to the degeneration of the #SocialHub project, which for meany years was the place for #ActivityPub and #Fediverse#openweb reboot, but now what’s left of the social side is the few remaining active unthinking “problem” people.
This is a normal path and outcome, that we need to compost to keep growing seeds #KISS
Most of the mess, and most of the #blocking, comes down to the same old story – ownership and control. Who holds the keys? Who decides? Who gets locked out? Instead of wrestling in that cage, the #OMN takes a simpler path: we walk away.
We put a class of media into the commons, governed openly through the #4opens: open data, open process, open source, and open standards. That means no one can close it down, hoard it, or fence it off for profit. The value comes from the shared pool, not from gatekeeping.
This is the heart of #KISS in the #OMN: make the flows work first, in ways people can understand, and build trust on top of that. The tech exists to serve these flows, not to dictate them. This isn’t about perfect crypto or hard lockdowns; it’s about commoning media so that everyone has the right to read, share, and build on it.
Yes, the #mainstreaming mess will eventually follow us – as it always does. But the plan and hope is that by the time it catches up, the habits, culture, and expectations we’ve grown around open media will have shifted society enough that the old traps won’t work the same way. If we’ve done our job, the default will be more open, collaborative, and accountable, not locked down. That’s the #KISS path: simple, resilient, and grounded in the commons.
On the #OMN with #indymediaback and #makeinghistory paths – We’re not talking about a single bridge, but a federated ecosystem, with the current example of both #DAT and #ActivityPub running on the same server, sharing a common database of media objects. As the data flows, text and metadata are redundantly stored in the open (#4opens). That way, if one server gets hacked, it can simply be rolled back and restored from the wider pool. #KISS
The P2P side works much like #nostr in that it can have a list of flows in and out to servers and can use any of these to publish and receive media on the #openweb. The advantage of the #p2p app side is that each local app in a backup for the online servers (see #makeinghistory), which as critics say can be, and will be, taken down some times. Also, they will work in their own right for people who need a more locked down path, and this will be needed in more repressive spaces and times. The clear advantage is this still gives them outflows to the wider #mainstreaming client server media outreach, to what matters, effect, so it ticks both boxes.
We aim to solve technical issues with human-understandable social paths, not hard tech for its own sake. Yes, in a minority of cases hard tech will be needed – but that’s for the #geeks to solve after the working social paths are clear, not before.
We fix problems through #KISS social processes and #4opens transparency, not by defaulting to encryption and lockdown. Hacking is outside the focus scope of the #OMN. What we’re building is about trust and flows, not code as an end in itself. Hacking belongs on the #geek paths – useful, but only after the trust and flows are established. The code should be there to secure what’s been built, not to block it before it exists.
Without trust and working flows, there’s no value at all, no matter how secure, encrypted, or elegant the tech stack. If the campaigns, activism, and people aren’t using it, the system is pointless. And being pointless is something we need to be more honest about. Building for the sake of building, while ignoring the social, community layer, feeds the #geekproblem and starves the movement.
So, what can people actually do in the real world to make this path happen?
If you have resources, you can help fund the development work – keeping it in the hands of the people actually building the open commons, not some corporate gatekeeper.
If you’re technical, you can code the applications and servers that power the flows. We need builders who understand that trust and usability come first, not shiny tech for its own sake.
If you work in UX or testing, you can make sure what we build is something real people can actually use and trust – simple, clear, and accessible.
If you do media, you can tell the story. Write, film, photograph, blog, podcast – whatever it takes to spread the word. The more people hear about an alternative that works, the more chance it has to grow.
Whatever your skills or resources, the important thing is to get involved in the flow. This is not a spectator sport, and the is unlikely to be pay, it’s #DIY so the commons will only be built if we build it together. #KISS #4opens #OMN
Activist tech has been stuck in “bunker mode” for 20 years. We now need to work on building #4opens native, commons-first systems that store, share, and protect movement knowledge in ways that don’t require a priesthood of insiders to operate.
In an active movement, forum threads, shared docs, livestreams, and photos aren’t just chat noise, they’re collective memory. If we treat them as disposable, we throw away the hard-earned lessons that future activists will desperately need. The solution is #KISS-fed, redundant, federated archiving:
All public movement data sits in the commons.
Metadata + content are mirrored across multiple federated nodes.
Backups are easy to pull, restore, and re-seed by anyone who ever has trust access.
Data is grouped via hashtags, not rigid taxonomies, so it flows where it’s needed.
This is appropriate tech: low-complexity, high-resilience, built for social utility first. But for this to grow it can’t be mediated to death by the #geekproblem – code should follow social needs, not the other way round. If we can get this kind of infrastructure running, we stop losing our history, we keep movements porous instead of paranoid, and we finally start building bridges instead of walls.
Let’s look at an example of this: For the #DAT protocol to become relevant in #FOSS activist tech, we need to stop treating it as an isolated island and start building solid bridges to #ActivityPub. The two are not enemies – they are complementary paths. p2p tools and protocols like DAT brings distributed, peer-to-peer file persistence; ActivityPub brings the social layer, discovery, and conversation. Together, they create a space where activists choose their preferred path without being siloed or alienated, and without the unhealthy isolation that comes from the current #geekproblem habit of fetishising one protocol at the expense of all others.
Diversity is the basis of any healthy ecosystem – biological, social, or technological. In nature, monocultures are fragile; in tech, monocultures are authoritarian. We need to approach activist infrastructure with the same principles that make ecosystems thrive: multiple species of tools, cross-pollination between communities, and a constant flow of ideas and resources. This doesn’t mean adding complexity for complexity’s sake; it means designing with #KISS in mind, while ensuring redundancy and adaptability.
If we take this ecological view of the #openweb, then bridges are not optional extras – they are the lifelines. In our example, by linking #DAT and #ActivityPub, we create a richer habitat for movements to live in. We make it harder for corporate capture to take root, and we give people the freedom to move between spaces without losing connection and context. That’s how we replace the bunker mentality with a real commons, not just defensive walls, but thriving, interconnected gardens.
