Our current working models of “governance” in #opensource are mostly:
Monarchy – the dictator for life. Aristocracy – the devs. Oligarchy – NGOs/funders. And way out on the edge: Democracy – the users.
We need better governance native to the #openweb. Let’s look at this at a more personal level before the normal wider social view. Yes, in #FOSS development the devs doing the work deserve respect, and #OMN isn’t arguing that users should simply demand things from volunteers.
The point about “aristocracy” is about more where decision-making power sits, less whether devs are privileged people or whether their work has value. If the people who write and maintain the code also decide what the project is, what gets built, what gets rejected and how the project develops, then you have a governance structure where technical expertise becomes political authority.
Hope am clear, that isn’t a criticism of individual developers, it’s a structural observation. The #OMN approach is to separate doing the work from owning the direction. Developers are essential participants, but so are users, moderators, communities and other contributors. Different kinds of knowledge need different kinds of power.
The challenge is building governance where devs don’t get bossed around by users, users don’t get bossed around by devs, funders don’t get to buy the direction, and nobody gets to become the permanent ruler.
That’s what the #OGB work is trying to explore: governance native to the #openweb, based on trust, transparency, participation and voluntary cooperation. This alternative isn’t “users rule”, it’s shared power with different roles.
With this in mind lets talk about the wider issue, a reminder: when I talk about the internet and society, I am not necessarily talking about you, I am talking about groups, cultures, classes, institutions and patterns of behaviour that you might be part of. You can recognise yourself in a critique without the critique being a personal attack – Simple – Take the useful bit and move on.
What is interesting – and a pretty good example of #stupidindividualism – is how difficult this has become. We increasingly seem to believe that we are not allowed to talk about groups any more. Everything has to be reduced to the individual “Are you saying I’m stupid?” “Are you attacking me?” “Who exactly are you talking about?” This makes it difficult to discuss social patterns, and that matters because many of the problems we face are not individual problems. They are produced by relationships between people, institutions, technologies and economic systems.
If we cannot talk about groups, we cannot talk properly about the #geekproblem, #mainstreaming, the #dotcons, #NGOs and funders, tech communities, activist cultures, class interests, institutional power, #neoliberalism or the wider #deathcult culture. We end up privatising a public conversation.
This is one of the things that makes #dotcons-style social media so destructive, as everything becomes personalised, emotional and reactive when structural criticism gets turned into interpersonal conflict. But a feeling is not a fact, a feeling attacked does not necessarily mean someone is attacking you. Sometimes it means that something has made you uncomfortable, or challenged a worldview you have become accustomed to.
That discomfort can actually be useful as the point isn’t to find individuals to blame, the point is to understand the systems and cultures we are collectively caught inside. We need to get beyond the #neoliberal#TINA – There Is No Alternative – thinking that reduces everything to individual choice and responsibility. We need to be able to say – This is a group pattern, a cultural pattern, a class interest, an institutional problem. It’s about how power reproduces itself, then we can actually talk about what to do about it. That is the conversation we need to reclaim: public, collective and capable of naming the structures that shape our lives.
Remember none of this is about personal attacks, not tribal prat fights, not individualised outrage. It’s a public conversation about public problems.
The problems we face in the #openweb are often presented as technology problems. Which protocol, platform, licence, federation path, software? Which standard? These questions matter, but they are not the foundations of the problem. A lot of what we are seeing is really a cultural clash. Different parts of the alternative tech world have different ideas about what technology is for, who it should serve, how much control is acceptable, how open something needs to be, and how much compromise is useful? That difference isn’t necessarily a weakness, when we nurture this it can be our strength.
To do this we need to support, fund and actually use a wide range of #openweb technologies, as there is no single “right path” waiting to be discovered. The #openweb should be a messy ecosystem, some projects will be radical, others pragmatic by compromising with existing institutions. Some will refuse every compromise, some will be technically elegant, were others will be slightly ugly but actually useful. Some people will be idealists, some will be organisers, geeks, activists – some will be experimenters, others will be complete weirdos.
We need all of these people. Even the “sellouts” can push open technology into places that fundamentalists cannot reach. The fundamentalists can protect principles that pragmatists might otherwise throw away. The pragmatists can make things usable, while the experimenters can discover things nobody expected and the weirdos can see possibilities that the sensible people completely miss.
The problem starts when any one of these groups decides that they are the whole movement. Then diversity becomes tribalism, difference becomes factionalism and criticism attack. And eventually everyone starts spending more energy defeating people who are broadly on the same side as building the commons we actually need. We’ve seen this mess before, the history of alternative technology is full of splits between people who wanted to build practical infrastructure and people who wanted purity, between technical communities and social movements, between centralised coordination and decentralised autonomy.
The lesson shouldn’t be “pick the correct side” – it needs to be – learn how to work with difference. This is particularly important now because the #dotcons have already demonstrated what happens when a technical ecosystem becomes dominated by a few powerful platforms. Monoculture creates dependency, creates control that leads to vulnerability. The answer to this simply cannot be to build another monoculture with different branding, we need plural infrastructure, based on #KISS#openweb native standards that communicate with each other.
That is where #FOSS based on open standards and the #4opens become important, they give a common floor without demanding a common culture. We don’t need everyone to agree, but we need enough openness that different projects can coexist, exchange knowledge and build on each other’s work. This is also why projects such as #OMN, #OGB, #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory shouldn’t be understood as competing for the one correct future. They are paths, pieces of a wider ecosystem.
Buts yes the important thing is to keep the commons alive while we experiment. The value isn’t in choosing one tribe and defeating the others, value is in creating conditions where difference can coexist, challenge assumptions, learn from failure and grow something wider than any individual project. We need disagreement without fragmentation, criticism without destruction and experimentation without constant reinvention. To make this work we also need pragmatism without selling everything out.
To help compost the #geekproblem we need technology that serves the social projects rather than becoming the social project. That means supporting the native diversity, contradictions and productive tensions that make an ecosystem resilient. And yes, you are right there are to meany people being prats currently on this subject.
Just because you feel attacked doesn’t mean someone is attacking you, sometimes that feeling is worth listening to, it may be telling you that something doesn’t fit with how you currently see the world. But a feeling is not a fact, this matters because much political discussion now begins and ends with personal reactions rather than examining the underlying structures.
Take the hashtag #stupidindividualism. Many people read it as, “You’re stupid because you’re an individual.” That isn’t what it means, the intended meaning is: The form of individualism promoted under capitalism makes us think and act in ways that become self-defeating.
The criticism is not of individuality, individuality is valuable. The criticism is of an ideology that teaches us to see every problem as personal and every solution as individual, even when the problems are obviously social, economic or ecological. This is what we mean by #stupidindividualism.
When every issue becomes “my opinion”, “my identity”, “my choice”, or “my feed”, we lose the ability to understand systems. We stop asking how institutions, technology, economics and culture shape our lives together. That isn’t stupidity as an individual trait, it’s a social condition.
The same misunderstanding appears whenever we talk about #mainstreaming or the #deathcult. When we say #mainstreaming thinking has become “insane”, I’m not saying that individual people are crazy. I’m saying that forty years of neoliberal common sense has normalised behaviours that are collectively destructive.
Endless economic growth on a finite planet, treating community as a market, replacing trust with metrics, replacing politics with branding and replacing human judgement with algorithms. These ideas have become “common sense”, yet they are driving us deeper into #climatechaos and reinforcing the #geekproblem, where technical fixes are repeatedly offered for problems that are fundamentally social.
The same pattern appears across the #Fediverse. Most people are acting in good faith, but many default to familiar #FOSS assumptions without asking deeper political questions. Most newcomers have little knowledge of the history of the #openweb, making it easier for corporate interests, NGOs and well-meaning developers to reshape the space according to the assumptions of the wider #closedweb.
Without governance that fits the culture (#OGB), fragmentation is inevitable. Without trust, federation becomes increasingly fragile – without memory, every generation repeats the same mistakes. Rebooting the #openweb isn’t primarily a technical challenge, it’s a social one. The first step is recognising that not every uncomfortable idea is a personal attack, sometimes discomfort is simply the beginning of thinking.
History shows that societies can normalize destructive ideas until they become “common sense.” The tragedy of the Irish Famine illustrates how blinded dogmatic thinking becomes more powerful than human need. Food existed, yet the prevailing political economy treated markets, property rights, and profit as more important than preventing mass suffering. The disaster was not simply natural; it was shaped by human choices and by the values those choices expressed.
Today we face a different crisis, but one driven by the same logic. The #deathcult metaphor tells us that the right to extract, pollute, and profit need to be better balanced with the right of communities to defend the ecosystems they depend on. This isn’t currently in any real balance. Over the last forty years we’ve shifted the political centre so far toward markets and private accumulation that environmental destruction is treated as normal, while protecting the commons is portrayed as extreme.
If we continue to use our current “common sense” to “balance” destruction against survival, destruction wins. Climate breakdown isn’t negotiated with, ecosystems don’t compromise, physics doesn’t vote. The task is therefore not to seek a mythical middle ground, but to move the social balance back towards the real commons, cooperation, stewardship, and long-term thinking. Only by changing what society sees as “common sense” do we have any realistic hope of avoiding deeper ecological and social collapse.
This is where the #OMN comes in, the #OMN is not simply another technology project. It is an attempt to shift power away from the #dotcons and away from the #geekproblem that has dominated so much of the #openweb. Instead of platforms extracting value from people, or technical elitists deciding what everyone else needs, the path is to place power back in the hands of the people who actually create culture, knowledge, and media.
The #4opens provide the practical framework: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. Together they create the conditions for shared ownership, transparency, and trust rather than enclosure and extraction.
The #OGB complements this by providing grassroots governance. Rather than relying on central authorities or corporate gatekeepers, it explores ways communities can make decisions together while remaining federated and autonomous.
None of this guarantees good outcomes, technology never does. What these projects do is create the possibility for healthier social relationships. They build commons infrastructure instead of proprietary platforms, they distribute power instead of concentrating it, they make cooperation easier than enclosure. As the future is not determined by technology alone, it is determined by the values embedded in the systems we build and the communities that choose to use them.
That’s why the real struggle isn’t simply over software, t’s over the values that software embodies. #KISS reminds us to keep these solutions simple enough for ordinary people to understand, use, and shape themselves. Without that, the commons will once again be enclosed by experts, corporations, or bureaucracies, and we will repeat catastrophes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) in todays rush towards #climatechaos.
The choice is ours. The tools matter because they shape the possibilities. What we build with them remains a collective responsibility.
The #Fediverse is an accidental reboot of the #openweb, it wasn’t designed from the top down, it emerged because thousands of people built alternatives to the #dotcons. That’s its greatest strength, it’s also why it’s so messy.
Herding cats – the #Fediverse has no central authority, every project, server, and community has its own priorities, culture, and governance. It’s often like herding cats. This can be frustrating, but it’s also what makes the network resilient. There is no single point of failure, no CEO to sell it, and no corporation that can simply shut it down. The challenge this leave us with is not eliminating the mess, but learning how to live with it productively.
The invisible problem that keeps blocking this path is in part the limits of “common sense”, what the #geekproblem refuses to see is that the difficulty isn’t primarily technical. For over forty years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what people experience as “common sense.” Competition replaces cooperation. Individualism replaces commons. Endless critique replaces collective construction. People absorb these assumptions without realising it, then push them over real alt paths.
When alternative ways of organising are introduced, many people instinctively react with hostility or retreat. Push too hard, and they disappear back into familiar habits, like snails retreating into their shells. This isn’t usually bad faith, it’s learned behaviour.
We have a project to mediate this mess, native governance without hierarchy. This is where the Open Governance Body (#OGB) comes in. The goal isn’t to control the #Fediverse or impose bureaucracy, the goal is to create lightweight, transparent ways for communities to coordinate, resolve conflict, share responsibility, and make decisions together.
Governance should emerge from the grassroots, not be imposed from above. That’s why #OGB builds on the principles of the #4opens:
Open Data
Open Source
Open Standards
Open Process
The last of these – Open Process – is the missing piece. Technical openness alone isn’t enough. Communities also need visible, participatory ways of building trust. What matters is creating processes that turn #mainstreaming failures into shared learning instead of endless conflict.
The future of the #openweb won’t be built by perfect software, it’s built by imperfect people who learn how to cooperate despite their differences. That’s the real work of #OMN and #OGB: not replacing the mess, but giving it enough structure to grow into a healthy commons.
The internet didn’t become broken overnight, it drifted from being a network of communities into a marketplace dominated by platforms whose purpose is extracting value. This is the logic of #dotcons most of us invested our lives and community into. How did we get into this mess? The problem isn’t only bad companies, it’s that our digital lives depend entirely on proprietary #dotcons paths and software, commercial interests end up controlling our reality.
This is why #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) matters. The “free” in #FOSS is about freedom, the freedom to use, study, modify and share the tools that shape our lives. Those freedoms create something much more important than software, they create #4opens social power. Open code means community accountability.
Instead of trusting #closedweb corporations, we can build “native” trust through transparency. That changes how communities work as closed platforms create consumers, open projects create participants. The community doesn’t just use the infrastructure, it becomes in part responsible for maintaining it. We can exit to a more #DIY path, were anyone can inspect, improve, challenge and adapt to disparate community needs.
This isn’t always the fastest path as open collaboration is often messy. Consensus takes time, criticism can be uncomfortable. But these are social strengths, not weaknesses. Diverse communities find problems earlier, reduce hidden bias and create paths and systems that are more resilient because they are shared.
The #OMN approach builds on this real world path and body of ideas. That technology can strengthen communities rather than replacing them, code can support human trust rather than algorithms deciding everything. Infrastructure should belong to the commons rather than becoming another private enclosure.
Today’s #closedweb social media platforms are digital landlords. Yes you may build a following, create value and invest years of work, but you’re still a tenant. The rules can change overnight, your reach can disappear, your community can be fragmented at the click of a button.
The #openweb offers another path were we have control of identity and content to connect through open protocols instead of closed silos. We need this more than ever to building communities that can survive the failure – or hostility – of any single platform.
We can’t keep repeating the same mess, this composting matters even more in the age of #AI. If the software, models and infrastructure are closed, then a handful of companies determine how knowledge is created, filtered and shared. If they are open, communities can inspect them, improve them and govern them together.
The future isn’t simply open source software, it’s open source society. That means investing back into the commons we depend on. Maintaining infrastructure, supporting contributors, building institutions that outlast individuals. Planting trees whose shade we may never sit under.
That’s what #OMN is about. Not simply writing better code, but helping build a better social fabric for the #openweb. Because freedom isn’t something technology gives us, it’s something communities build together.
The current common sense of #neoliberal worldview replaces trust with greed as the social motivator. The problem is that every successful society is built on trust. When you undermine trust, you build a #deathcult. Climate breakdown, inequality, social isolation and failing public institutions are not accidents – they’re the predictable outcomes.
When people recognise the problem, ask them what the solution is. Most will instinctively reach for the same neoliberal “common sense” that created the crisis. That’s the moment to gently point out that those ideas are part of the #deathcult, not a way out.
The alternative starts with rebuilding trust, commons and community, #FOSS needs to become a core to this.
Facts matter, technology matters, governance matters. But people rarely change because they read theory, a specification or a list of features. People change because of stories, this is why storytelling is central to the #OMN path. A story gives people somewhere to stand, it connects ideas to lived experience.
Instead of explaining the #4opens as an abstract framework, tell the story of a community escaping a #dotcons platform by building trust on the #openweb. Instead of arguing about governance, tell the story of how a group solved a conflict through #OpenProcess. Instead of listing technical features, tell the story of someone who regained control of their community tech after years of platform lock-in.
Stories carry values, the last forty years of #mainstreaming have been held together by stories about competition, consumption and individual success. These stories have normalised the #deathcult, making extraction and enclosure feel like “common sense.” We now need better stories about cooperation instead of competition, commons balancing ownership, about trust instead of surveillance. Stories about building rather than consuming.
The #Fediverse itself is a story, an accidental reboot of the #openweb that proves another internet is possible. It isn’t perfect, but it demonstrates that people can build social infrastructure without billionaires directing the conversation.
The challenge is that the academics or the #geekproblem tell stories only to other, academics or geeks, technical and academic paths are important, but they don’t inspire people to act, so we need stories that people can understand:
A neighbourhood rebuilding local media.
Boaters organising to defend the waterways as a commons.
Volunteers composting #techchurn into useful tools.
Ordinary people discovering that they can build infrastructure together.
These stories become shared memory, shared memory becomes culture, culture shapes “common sense.” and changing common sense is how lasting social change happens. So don’t just build software or academic theory, tell stories that help people imagine themselves as part of a healthier #openweb.
People often ask which messaging platform they should use. Matrix? XMPP? Signal? Something else? The honest answer is there is no perfect option.
At the #OMN we’ve tried running #XMPP servers for years. From a #4opens prospective it’s probably the strongest foundation. Socially, though, it’s still trapped by the #geekproblem, despite years of outreach, we never found any implementation simple enough for normal communities to adopt at scale.
#Matrix is in meany ways worst, but for different resigns. Its governance and development have drifted towards an #opencore and #NGO model that doesn’t sit comfortably with grassroots #openweb values.
#Signal is the best of the bad options. It’s centralised and reproduces many of the patterns of the #dotcons. But people will actually install it and, sometimes, keep using it. That’s worth something.
The point is that these aren’t just technical choices, they’re social ones. Too much of the conversation gets trapped in feature comparisons, cryptography debates and protocol wars, while the real challenge is helping ordinary people communicate, organise and build trust together. That’s why #KISS matters.
Simple tools people actually use are often more valuable than technically perfect tools that remain confined to narrow inward looking communities.
The same lesson applies across the #Fediverse. We have seeded good technology, but we’re allowing the #fashionistas and chattering classes to dominate the conversation while practical grassroots organising gets pushed to the margins.
This is a recurring pattern, and one we need to compost. The future of the #openweb won’t be decided by having the cleverest protocol. It will be decided by whether we build communities around tools that ordinary people can understand, trust and participate in.
Technology matters, but social process matters more. That’s the path we’re trying to grow with #OMN and the #4opens.
The current #AI boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in #mainstreaming terms. That AI companies are not paying the real costs of what they consume. They haven’t paid for the copyrighted material they trained on. They haven’t paid the environmental costs of the water and electricity they use. They haven’t paid for the pressure they place on public infrastructure, or for the social costs of flooding the web with synthetic content.
Yet AI services are sold below their true cost, subsidised by investors gambling on future monopolies. This should sound familiar as we saw the same pattern with social media, with the gig economy, with cryptocurrency. First comes the hype, then investor money, then comes market capture, only later do the public pay the real costs.
The problem is like every time before is not the technology itself, it is that we’re allowing it to develop within the logic of the #deathcult, where growth matters more than social value, extraction matters more than care, and monopoly matters more than the commons. Simply shouting “ban AI” won’t solve this, nor will pretending everything is fine. We need to actively and democratically mediate this technology socially, which means asking (and acting on) questions the tech industry never asks.
This is where the #OMN approach matters, technology doesn’t exist outside society as every technical system embeds social values, whether intentionally or not. If we leave the current mess AI is making entirely to venture capital, Big Tech and the market, we shouldn’t be surprised when it reproduces the same inequalities and failures of those systems.
This mess is a part of our long-standing #geekproblem, that technical culture mistakes technical possibility for social progress. Yes, sometimes it is not driven by malice, more often it’s a feedback loop of arrogance and ignorance, where clever engineering is assumed to be enough, while questions of governance, trust and community are treated as secondary, or more likely ignored altogether. The result is endless #techchurn: one wave of disruption after another, each promising liberation while quietly or noisily reproducing the same concentrations of power.
We don’t need to knee-jerk reject technology, we need to compost the culture that keeps producing these #techshit outcomes. The #4opens offer one practical path, this needed path is not anti-tech, but it is pro-society. On the path we need to take, the challenge isn’t stopping progress, it is widening the culture that guides creativity, so technology can better serves people and the planet rather than the current narrow blinded interests of capital, feeding the #nastyfew.
That’s the work of the #openweb, and the path of #OMN.
What part can you play? The #openweb is one place to start, keep it simple (#KISS), build commons, compost the mess. The political centre created this mess. Four decades of neoliberal “common sense” deepened inequality, weakened democracy, privatised public goods, and pushed us beyond ecological limits. Yet much of the centre still offers only more of the same: better management of the #deathcult rather than a path beyond it.
That leaves a dangerous vacuum. If progressive movements cannot offer practical alternatives, the far right will continue to grow by presenting itself as the only force willing to confront the crisis. Their answers are built on fear, exclusion and authoritarianism – but they resonate because they acknowledge that the old system is failing, while the centre too often pretends it can be repaired.
Simply defending the status quo is not enough. Nor is retreating into abstract radicalism disconnected from everyday life. We need practical, grassroots alternatives that people can participate in and build themselves.
This same pattern appears in technology. Our #geekproblem isn’t primarily bad code – it’s a culture of arrogance and ignorance. Technical communities often reproduce the assumptions of the wider society without questioning them. They celebrate disruption while recreating centralisation. They mistake individual freedom for collective liberation, reproducing #stupidindividualism while unconsciously serving the logic of the #deathcult.
This isn’t usually malicious. It’s a feedback loop. The culture produces the technology, and the technology reinforces the culture. The answer isn’t to reject technology. It’s to mediate it socially.
Open Process ensures communities – not just developers or investors – shape the progress.
We need to use this to composting 40 Years of “Common Sense”, For the last 40 years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what passes for “common sense” in #mainstreaming society. Their influence runs so deep that many assumptions now feel natural rather than ideological. When these assumptions are challenged, people react defensively, not because they’re bad people, but because their worldview feels under attack.
This isn’t just a mainstream problem. Activist spaces reproduce the same patterns. The result is endless circular arguments, performative politics, and fragmentation rather than solidarity. Our task isn’t simply to oppose this culture, it’s to mediate it, to compost the mess rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Composting means taking the waste of the last forty years – failed assumptions, captured institutions, #techchurn, #fashionista politics, and individualism – and turning it into fertile ground for something better.
The worrying trend is that the grassroots signal is being submerged beneath an echo chamber of #mainstreaming voices. On many #fashionista threads, noise overwhelms practical action. We spend time performing politics rather than building the infrastructure movements need. That requires empathy, patience, and practical organising. It means creating spaces where people can step outside inherited “common sense” without feeling they have to defend it. It means building working alternatives instead of only criticising broken systems.
The answer isn’t to shout louder, it’s to build better spaces, better tools, and better processes. The signal-to-noise ratio can change again, but only if we do the patient work of mediation, trust-building and commons creation – The work of #OMN.
Three years ago I wrote: “I get the feeling we are running on dregs on the #fediverse dev side. Social movements come in waves; this one is ebbing into the #mainstreaming. No bad thing, but not, I think, what any of us want for ‘our’ #openweb.”
Looking back, I wonder what has actually changed – and more importantly, what have we learned? The #Fediverse has grown, more people know about decentralised social media, more organisations are paying attention, and the ideas that once lived mostly in activist and technical circles have moved closer to the #mainstreaming.
But growth always brings questions – What happens when movements become successful enough that the surrounding culture starts changing? The early #openweb was built around different assumptions that people have agency, communities shaping their own spaces, experimentation over optimisation, trust over control and commons over platforms. The #mainstreaming process brings different pressures of scale, professionalisation, funding, institutional legitimacy, standardisation and “safe” governance structures.
None of these things are automatically bad. A movement cannot stay frozen in its early phase forever, but there is a risk that the thing being scaled is only the technology, while the culture that gave it meaning gets diluted. Maybe we need to talk more about how the #openweb was never just about protocols, federation is a technical idea, living commons is a social one. Three years on, the challenge is still the same, how do we grow without losing the roots? The #OMN view has always been that we need both:
The fluffy path — welcoming people, building bridges, making things usable.
The spiky path — challenging capture, resisting enclosure, keeping power visible.
Without the fluffy path, alternatives stay small and isolated. Without the spiky path, alternatives get absorbed into the same systems they were meant to challenge. So maybe the question is not “did the Fediverse win?” The question is more what kind of victory are we building towards? A bigger version of the old internet? Or a genuinely different culture of communication? This question is still the work, the seeds are there, but are we are tending the garden, or just watching the weeds grow.
It might be useful to look at a narrow view of this. The #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) world is one of the greatest successes of the #openweb era. Without it there would be no Linux, no Apache, no Firefox, no Wikipedia-scale infrastructure, no Fediverse, and much of the internet would simply not function. The culture has produced extraordinary amounts of shared value. But from an #OMN perspective, success should not stop us looking critically at the social dynamics underneath. The question is not whether #FOSS works. The question is: who does it work for, where does it struggle, and what can we learn from both?
A resent example, from a native #openweb perspective, this non “just fork it” diatribe is not about code at all, more how we misunderstand collective work in an age of growing #stupidindividualism. The #geekproblem framing treats open source as a marketplace of sovereign individuals – I do my work. You do yours. If you don’t like it, go away and rebuild it alone. That looks like freedom, but it’s actually a deep cultural narrowing. Because what gets erased in that framing is the social fabric that makes FOSS work in the first place, yes, technically you can fork, walk away and rebuild. But socially, that’s not neutral. It assumes that collective effort is disposable and that coordination is optional. That’s where #stupidindividualism kicks in, the fantasy that all meaningful action is just isolated agents choosing between exit options.
In reality, most functioning open source systems are not built on exit, they are built on ongoing relationships between contributors, trust built through repeated interaction, informal negotiation of direction, shared norms about responsibility and maintenance and a lot of invisible care work that never shows up in the code. The “just fork it” response hides this by pretending power is symmetrical, it isn’t. Maintainers don’t just “own code” – they sit at choke points of attention, merge authority, reputation, and continuity. Forking isn’t just copying code; it’s rebuilding all of that social infrastructure from scratch. So when “just fork it” is used as a dismissal, it’s not a statement about technical freedom, it’s a way of closing down negotiation while maintaining the appearance of openness.
That’s the concern, not whether forks are possible, but how often they are used to avoid the harder work of collective problem-solving in shared space. Because there are two very different meanings of forking:
Healthy fork (fluffy) based on experimentation, divergence where needs differ, pluralism in practice and sometimes leading back to upstream collaboration.
Fragmentation fork (spiky reality of #stupidindividualism) growing from social breakdown disguised as technical freedom, loss of shared direction, duplication of effort due to failed mediation and communities replaced by isolated projects.
The distinction is not technical – it’s social coherence before the fork happens. In a healthy #openweb culture, “fork it” is a last resort after dialogue has failed, differences are irreconcilable or experimentation genuinely needs independence. Were in #stupidindividualism culture, it becomes the first reflex with disagreement → exit → rebuild alone → repeat fragmentation cycle. That cycle produces the illusion of freedom while steadily destroying any shared capacity that builds real freedom.
The real question is not “Do you have the right to fork?” Of course, you do. The real question is “Are we maintaining enough shared social infrastructure that we don’t always have to?” Because if every disagreement becomes a fork, then we don’t have ecosystems – we have atomised toolboxes with no collective memory. And at that point, the system is no longer open in any meaningful sense. It is just individualism with better licensing.
The commons → #geekproblem → meritocracy → forking → #stupidindividualism. But on a positive note from an #OMN perspective, #FOSS remains one of the healthiest cultures we have. The challenge is not to abandon it, but to compost the #geekproblem and grow stronger social practices alongside the technical ones. The future of the #openweb depends on both.
In this mess we have to keep shovelling to compost the negative smell of #fashionista – That is a socio-political and tech-subculture #hashtag used to describe performative activists, influencers, or lifestyle subcultural participants from the grassroots, open-source tech, and radical political communities who prioritize the aesthetic and language of activism over the unglamorous, foundational work of building actual structures.
Performative engagement, trendy slogans and identity-driven rhetoric over substantive, embedded organisation.
Echo chambers, exclusive, inward-facing discussions that fail to translate into any impact.
Trend hopping, between “ethical” or radical tech and social projects without committing in meaningfully ways to their development or maintenance.
A #blocking cultural tendency to adopt a radical or alternative aesthetic without understanding or participating in the unglamorous work required to enact actual change or challenge.
Let’s be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument – “you just dislike this because…” – instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed.
The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty building any shared collective action. That does not mean every idea, person or piece of work in those spaces is the same, it means we need to look at how ideas interact with power.
The question is – What helps us build collective capacity in a time of #climatechaos, inequality and the #dotcons mess? What creates commons? What creates shared action? This is the conversation.
So with that in mind lets look at the major problem with the #dotcons attention economy the advertising model. The platform logic and the attention economy are now becoming harder to simply ignore. For most of mass media history, the commercial transformation of media was hidden behind a layer of journalism, culture and public value. The advertising model was presented as simply a way to pay for content. Platforms were presented as neutral spaces for communication. Algorithms were presented as tools to help people discover what mattered.
But the #dotcons direction has now stripped this bare – the direction has become clearer, the media landscape looks less like a place for shared knowledge and more like a shopping catalogue with occasional content attached. The focus is no longer even the fig leaf of informing people, connecting communities or building public understanding. The naked goal is simple – more clicks, more engagement, more time captured, more data collected and more consumption encouraged. This is the logic of the #dotcons.
The problem with this #deathcult worshipping mess is not only that companies make money. The deeper problem is that the structures built around making money reshape our culture itself. When attention becomes the product, everything starts being measured through extraction. A story is only valuable because it generates traffic – A person is only valuable because they generate data – A community is valuable because it creates engagement – A conversation is valuable because it keeps people inside the platforms. Any, social value gets pushed aside.
The original #openweb grew from a different idea. People built websites, forums, mailing lists, software projects and communities because they wanted to share, collaborate and create. The value was not only in the information produced, the value was in the surrounding relationships. People corrected each other, developed trust, knowledge was maintained collectively.
The internet worked because there was social infrastructure around the technical infrastructure. The mess we made, was thinking that communication could simply be handed over to commercial platforms without catastrophic changing the nature of communication itself. A platform is not just a tool, it comes with incentives, has owners, rules, a business model. When every space becomes a marketplace, the culture changes.
The mess we have made is that extraction replaces participation, the #dotcons path works by turning human activity into resources. People create, platforms capture. Communities produce culture, companies monetise attention. That extraction eventually damages the thing being extracted from, creators become exhausted, communities fragmented, trust declines as people become audiences instead of participants.
The internet becomes full of “content”, but much poorer in meaning, more information does not automatically create more knowledge, more communication does not automatically create better communities, without care, context and collective responsibility, abundance becomes noise. To compost this mess we have made in the media tech path – the question is not “How do we get more people producing?” The question is “How do we build systems where what people produce strengthens the commons instead of feeding extraction?”
The fashionable people of #AI are pushing at changing the scale of content creation, lowering barriers to producing books, apps, music, legal documents and academic papers. Thus, “output” is exploding. But the #OMN second question is what happens when production grows faster than the ability to filter, discuss, trust and maintain? More books, but more noise, More apps, but more clutter. More papers, more pressure on review systems, more music, but harder to value human creativity.
The #dotcons logic says: more content = more value. The #openweb lesson is different – value comes from communities, trust, context and care. We don’t just need more production, we need better commons, better mediation and better ways to separate signal from noise.
The current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented as inevitable, the message is everywhere: adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is not neutral, as every tool carries assumptions – who benefits, who controls, what values are embedded, and what damage is accepted as “the price of progress”.
From a #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The question is what kind of society does this technology build? Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? The promise and the reality of large language models (#LLM) represent a technical development, they can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding, and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are real, if floored capabilities.
But the current #techshit hype jumps from useful assistance to much bigger claims: that these systems will replace expertise, solve social problems, revolutionise education, transform science, and create a better future. This is currently not true, and, on the LLM path will never be true as the current GenAI systems do not understand the world. They generate likely patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability, a convincing answer is not the same as a system that understands. This matters because the native #openweb was built on a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, communities, discussion, correction and shared responsibility.
The #geekproblem is confusing capability with wisdom is a recurring problem in technology culture – it is the assumption that if something can be built, it should be built. The technical question becomes “Can we?” while the social question “Should we?” gets pushed aside. This is part of what #OMN calls the #geekproblem – the tendency to reduce complex social questions into technical problems. A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the social context around the technology.
Then we come to the ecological cost of scaling, the current GenAI boom depends on enormous infrastructure. In the era of out of control #climatechaos data centres require huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware, constant replacement cycles leading to massive extraction of resources. At a time of #climatechaos, we should be asking whether increasing consumption is the only path available.
The lesson is not that technology is bad, the lesson is that technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power. The question is not “how do we make AI bigger?” more it is how do we make technology serve human communities rather than making communities serve technology control systems, it is about who controls. The current dominant systems are owned by a few powerful companies controlled by the #nastyfew actively working to destroy our ecology and societies.
The future is not decided by whether we use AI, it is decided by whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The work remains the same to build alternatives, keep processes open, grow the commons. The answer is not simply rejecting technology, the #openweb has never been anti-technology. The question is what kind of technology grows from what kind of culture. We need tools that strengthen human networks, not replace them. Tools that support commons, not enclosure, that increase agency, not dependency.
If we change this can there be an ethical AI? A socially useful technology? Possibly, but it would require a very different path, it would need many of the things the #openweb has argued for from the beginning.
The recurring argument around violence and nonviolence gets trapped in a false choice. One side says “Violence is never the answer.” the other says “Violence is the only thing that has ever changed history.” Both are truth, but both miss real working humanistic paths. So, what kind of society creates the conditions where violence becomes the only option?
A first step is looking at the systems, cultures and social infrastructure that shape how people respond to conflict. If we want people to choose nonviolent methods, then those methods have to actually work. People need meaningful ways to participate, organise, challenge power and create change. Protest without consequence, dialogue without accountability and institutions that ignore people create dangerous paths.
When people feel that peaceful routes are closed, violence becomes a real option. But there is a second social problem to look at – violence is not just a tool, it creates its own culture. A movement built around destruction can easily reproduce the same power structures it fought against. Removing one oppressive system does not automatically create a better one, without new social foundations, history shows new forms of domination grow from the ruins.
Yes, history is written through moments of confrontation, but the is deeper work happens before and after those moments – building the commons that allow people to organise differently. This is where the #openweb lesson matters, change is not only about removing something, it is about building something. The strongest movements create alternatives – new relationships – new institutions – new forms of cooperation – new ways to share knowledge and power.
To build meaningfull alternatives we have to start by compostsing commen sense mess. What meany people do not understand is that our states are based on violence, what we see as private property is based on violence, just about everything we hold and touch is founded on violence. But when we look wider, a narow posative view is the state monopoly on violence is only legitimate when the state itself remains accountable to people. When power becomes accountable only upwards – to wealth, corporations or institutions – then the monopoly becomes simply control.
The same applies to grassroots movements, a movement cannot claim liberation while creating unaccountable power inside itself. The #geekproblem appears here too, reducing social problems to technical solutions – “Use violence.” – “Never use violence.” are simple answers to complex social questions. The harder work is asking, why are people unheard? Why do peaceful methods fail? Who controls the institutions? What alternatives exist? How can we build systems where people have agency before conflict reaches breaking point?
The #OMN path is not about pretending conflict does not exist, it is about understanding that the long-term answer is not simply winning a hard short fight. It is slower, growing a culture where fewer fights become necessary. The #4opens is part of this – transparent processes, shared ownership and accountable structures are not side issues. They are a foundation that allows movements to stay democratic instead of becoming another “common sense” version of the mess they oppose.
Violence is often a symptom, the deeper question is what social conditions keep producing it.
The biggest question is not whether #AI becomes useful. It is who shapes the surrounding paths? A future controlled by a few #dotcons will reproduce the same mess we have now of centralisation, extraction, enclosure. Were a future built through #4opens paths would look different.
The #geekproblem is believing the next tool solves the old problem. But many problems are not tool problems, they are relationship problems. The next stage is not replacing humans with smarter machines, it is building better human paths that can use machines without becoming dependent on them. Beyond AI is about making communities capable, the real upgrade is not artificial intelligence, it is collective intelligence.
AI is changing the scale of content creation, but not raising the quality. Generative AI tools have lowered the barrier to producing average books, apps, music, legal documents, academic papers and endless streams of text. The result is a massive increase in output, but what happens when production grows faster than our ability to filter, discuss, trust, maintain and give meaning to what is produced?
More books, but more noise, more apps, but more clutter, more papers, but more pressure on systems of review, more music, but a harder struggle to recognise human creativity and care. The #dotcons logic says – more content = more value – were the #openweb lesson is different, value comes from communities, trust, context and care. The challenge is not creating more things, the challenge is building better commons around the things we create.
The AI question is bigger than the technology, as the current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented by our #fashionistas and there servants as inevitable. The message is everywhere to adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is never neutral, every tool carries assumptions about who benefits, who controls it, what values it embeds and what damage is accepted as the “price of progress”.
From an #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “Can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The real question is “What kind of society does this technology build?” Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? This is the wider #openweb question we should be focusing on.
Large language models (#LLM) and generative AI systems represent a real technical development. They can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are useful capabilities, but the hype jumps from assistance to much larger claims – That AI will replace expertise – That it will solve social problems – That it will transform education and science – That it will create a better future automatically.
The problem is that current AI systems do not understand the world, they generate patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability. A convincing answer is not the same thing as understanding.
The missing social layer in our narrow conversations is that the #openweb was built around a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, from communities, discussion, correction, disagreement and shared responsibility. This is where the #geekproblem appears – the tendency to confuse technical capability with social wisdom – the technical question becomes “Can we build it?” the social question “Should we?” often disappears.
A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the culture around the technology, as technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power.
This is not even touching on that the ecological cost of scale is a catastrophe in the era of #climatechaos and social backdown. The current AI boom depends on enormous infrastructure, huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware with constant replacement cycles leading to the large-scale resource extraction. At a time of #climatechaos, we should question whether endless expansion is the only possible future. The #dotcons model has always worked through scale, more users, more data, more infrastructure and more dependency. Generative AI is arriving inside the same economic system that created the catastrophic problems it claims to solve.
Then we have the open internet problem, the #openweb was built around participation, people created #4opens websites, communities, documentation, software and culture. GenAI introduces a different path, that the internet becomes raw material, this human creativity becomes training data. Communities produce knowledge, while large companies extract and monetise it. This creates a dangerous cycle were there is less support for creators → less motivation to create → less genuine knowledge → more dependence on generated content. Its #KISS to understand that healthy commons cannot survive if everything is extracted and nothing is returned.
The #Fediverse and the question of growth, a few years ago there was a feeling that the #Fediverse development culture was running on leftovers. Social movements arrived in waves, and many feared that more waves was moving into #mainstreaming. Since then, the Fediverse has grown, with more people knowing about decentralised social media, more organisations paying attention. Ideas that once lived mostly in activist and technical circles have moved closer to wider adoption.
But growth always creates a question – What happens when a movement becomes successful enough that the surrounding culture starts changing it? The early #openweb was built around different assumptions – People have agency – Communities shape their own spaces – Experimentation matters more than optimisation – Trust matters more than control and Commons matter more than platforms. #Mainstreaming brings pressures, these are not automatically bad. But there is a danger that the technology scales while the culture that created it gets diluted. Federation is a technical idea. Living commons is a social one, the challenge remains – now do we grow without losing the roots?
The narrow lesson from #FOSS – it is one of the greatest successes of the #openweb era. Without it there would be no Linux, no Apache, no Firefox, no Wikipedia-scale infrastructure and no Fediverse ecosystem as we know it. It has created extraordinary shared value, but success should not stop us asking difficult questions. The question is not whether FOSS works, the question is – Who does it work for? Where does it struggle? What social lessons can we learn? One recurring problem is the idea that open source is simply a marketplace of independent individuals.
When building the future we actually want – The question is not whether we use AI, more It’s whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The future depends on whether tools strengthen human networks or replace them. Whether they support commons or enclosure, whether they increase agency or dependency.
But what we are seeing is that the tools we need most are often the first things stressed, messy and elitist systems try to defund, discredit and dismantle. Why? Because they require uncertainty, require questioning assumptions, require admitting complexity. Those are not weaknesses, they are survival tools.
