The Open Media Network: More Than Just a Tech Project

At first glance, the #OMN (Open Media Network) might look like a stalled technical project, a collection of code, standards, and protocols. But to think of it only this way is to miss the point entirely.

What we’re building is a social and technological fabric for the #openweb, woven together by shared values and practical needs. Yes, there’s tech, but the tools and standards we develop are not neutral. They lean, by design, toward openness, transparency, collaboration, and grassroots control, the principles of the #4opens.

These standards are not delivered from on high by lone developers or institutional committees. They emerge from the lived, everyday use of technology, from how communities interact, what they need, and how they grow together. They evolve from practice, leading to theory.

The code is nothing without people. The protocol withers without participation.

So, we’re not only building tech, we’re growing a community, and that community gives the technology life. It’s a symbiotic process: the social side shapes the tech, and the tech enables new social formations. One cannot thrive without the other. If you treat it only as a technical solution, it will fail, no matter how elegant the code. If you treat it only as a social project, it will stall, no matter how good the intentions. We have to hold both in balance. In that balance, real change becomes possible.

In this spirit, the #OMN is not just an infrastructure project. It’s a call to those who want to reboot the web from the grassroots up, reclaiming the digital commons from #dotcons and #deathcult systems. Let’s get to build it together, simple, federated, and open.

We all know the current state of independent and grassroots media: scattered, under-resourced, and mostly invisible to the wider public. While the content exists, the connection between producers, platforms, and audiences is too often broken. Meanwhile, corporate platforms like #Failbook, Google, and YouTube work for a few, they continue to dominate how people access and experience media and use this to push down any real radical change.

We need a reset, not by building shiny new silos or reinventing the wheel, but by connecting what already exists into a living network. This is where the Open Media Network (#OMN) comes in. The core idea is to link together the fragments of the #openweb. Rather than replace everything, OMN builds bridges between existing activist sites, blogs, podcasts, and alt media using open standards and simple, low-barrier tools.

The idea is simple: Producers publish content on their existing sites (blogs, podcasts, etc.). Aggregators bring it all together, curating, tagging, and redistributing content through RSS, ActivityPub and metadata flows.

What this means for people is easy discovery of relevant content on the topics they care about. A gateway back to the #openweb – away from algorithmic manipulation and ads. A better browsing experience than siloed social media.

What it means for media producers: Syndication, content appears on dozens or hundreds of relevant sites. More traffic, more engagement, and better visibility without having to chase algorithms. Simple tools to embed rivers of content from others, so you give back to the network while benefiting from it. In short, publish once, appear everywhere, no need to grind content for each individual silo.

Why this works, all content remains owned by the original publishers. The system simply connects and enhances what’s already there. It’s not a new platform, it’s the missing glue between platforms. Why this matters socially, we’ve been burned by both: The #geekproblem of over complication and privacy tunnel-vision and the NGO/foundation/brand-washing of horizontal, activist culture

OMN avoids both by hardcoding openness and cooperation into the foundations, using the #4opens as a social and technical guide. This isn’t a system that can be easily captured or siloed. It’s designed to move faster than co-option, and built for people who want to do, not just talk.

If this sounds old-fashioned, that’s because it is, and it works, we don’t need innovation for its own sake, we need media compost, not just another layer of glossy tech bling. We’re creating the soil for tomorrow’s social movements. Want to help us shovel the #techshit and start planting?

Join the project: https://unite.openworlds.info
Learn more: http://hamishcampbell.com
Spread the word: #OMN #openweb #4opens #grassrootsmedia #reboot

The #Hashtags Tell a Story: Building Trust in a Messy World

We live in a time of crisis. Climate, community, communication, all are breaking down. Our tools and platforms no longer serve us. To make sense of this, we need to tell stories. And in the digital world, hashtags are one of the most powerful ways we do this. But our hashtags don’t just tag, they trace the roots of our problems, and signpost paths out. Each one is a seed. Together, they are a map.

#dotcons – From #openweb to walled gardens. Once, the internet was a place of openness, built on free tools, shared protocols, and community spirit. Then came the #dotcom era, where profit became the driving force. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, what we call the #dotcons, reshaped the web to lock us in and sell us out. A handful of corporations own the highways of our communication, and their algorithms guide what we see, say, and believe.

#dotcon = profit for a few, con for the rest.

#stupidindividualism – A trap we set for ourselves, we were promised empowerment. But what we got was individualism without solidarity. We’re told: brand yourself, hustle alone, curate your reality. But without community, there is no resilience. Without cooperation, there is no change.

#stupidindividualism is the cultural poison that tells you “you’re on your own.” It weakens us from the inside.

#deathcult – Forty years of neoliberalism. The last four decades have been shaped by a ruthless ideology, that markets solve everything, government should step back, and people must compete, not care. This is the #deathcult – a term for the deadly logic of late-stage capitalism. It’s taken over politics, media, even our sense of self.

Climate denial, gig work precarity, housing crises, mental health collapse - these are all symptoms.

#geekproblem – The failure of trust in tech. Even our allies, the people building tech to fix things, fall into a trap. The #geekproblem is when developers replace trust with control, more permissions, more encryption, more complexity. Instead of building with people, they build over them. The result? More unusable tools, more silos, more #techshit that ends up needing to be composted in abandoned GitHub repos.

#4opens is a way out of the mess, we need this new paths, based on simplicity, humility, and openness, a compass. If a project doesn’t pass the #4opens, it’s not building for the commons, it’s just making another silo.

#OMN, shovels and compost, we already have the tools, projects that build media flows, not platforms. To connect blogs and podcasts into open rivers of content, using simple tech instead of complicated “Web3” vaporware or #dotcons mess.

We’ve built up piles of #techshit. It’s time to pick up our #shovels, compost the waste, and grow something new.

Hashtags = Soft tools for hard times. We use soft metaphors because we live in soft systems: culture, emotion, trust. You can’t “solve” these with code alone. You need care, community, and storytelling. Yes, many demand hard, scientific “proofs” or “frameworks.” But if someone can’t feel the metaphor, they’re probably not ready for the work of rebuilding. We need to focus on those who can, who’ve seen that a different world is possible.

If you can understand that different ideologies shape different realities, then these hashtags will start to speak to you.

Let’s recap the key tags in the story:

#dotcons – Corporations that own and fence in our web

#failbook – Facebook and its culture of manipulation

#openweb – The decentralized, people-powered internet

#4opens – A compass for ethical, sustainable tech

#geekproblem – Tech that controls instead of empowers

#stupidindividualism – Isolation sold as freedom

#deathcult – Forty years of neoliberalism and its collapse

#OMN – Building networks, not silos

#techshit – All the unusable tools that ignore real needs

#shovels – The work we must do

#compost – Making good soil from past mistakes

We don’t need heroes, we need gardeners, grab a shovel, let’s build a future please.

Talking About the #geekproblem in Funding

Funding the #openweb is a political act, yet most funding decisions today are framed in technical terms only, dominated by what we call the #geekproblem – a worldview where infrastructure is king, user needs are secondary, and social context is largely ignored.

Let’s unpack this with real-world examples and look at how we keep falling into this trap, and what we could do to climb out. The call-out for funding is phrased in social language, to build privacy-preserving tools, improve the commons, empower communities, decentralize infrastructure. But the funded projects rarely reach or empower actual communities. This is the disconnect, a cultural blind spot that stems from the #geekproblem.

We need to fund the social layer, as a strong backend is necessary, nobody is saying otherwise. But it’s not sufficient, the #openweb is not failing because of lack of backends. It’s failing because almost nobody knows they exist, cares, or knows how to use them. Take ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon and the #fediverse. It had existed in various forms for years, but it only took off because:

Mastodon made it social.

It had good UX for regular people.

There was media buzz and community-building.

It offered emotional utility — a real alternative to Twitter at the moment people needed it.

Without this social glue, ActivityPub would have been another elegant-but-abandoned standard. A backend sitting on a shelf, this is the lesson:

To have an #openweb because we need to fund the people and projects who do social UX, onboarding, design, documentation, evangelism, and community organizing.

We currently keep building plumbing and call it a house, we then blame people for not living in it, feeding the #dotcons. Here’s a bitter irony:

Funding backend tools with no regard for adoption pathways just helps #dotcons.

The corporate world happily scoops up open source backend work (including ActivityPub) and wraps it in slick UX, marketing, and control. That’s how:

Meta is building Threads with ActivityPub.

Google funds protocol work to feed proprietary services.

Microsoft contributes to open source, then wraps it in Azure services.

They have the social layer, #PR, onboarding, monetization, network effects, and we hand them the backend work for free. We build the roads, they put up the toll booths.

The Fediverse is not a collection of protocols, it’s not a stack of servers, it’s a culture – or it was. And that culture is in crisis:

Burnout among developers.

Fractured community governance.

Rising influence of #NGOs and foundations pushing vertical, institutional models.

Selling out to mainstreaming partnerships (ex: EU outreach, Threads integration).

Social stagnation as microblogging dominates over creativity, curation, and real collaboration.

There is still potential, a web of relationships, tools, and practices built on trust rather than control, but we are not funding that potential. We are, instead, funding more tools, more protocols, more #techchurn.

What’s the pat out of this mess? We need to rebalance, right now funding overwhelmingly goes toward:

Code (especially backend)

Security and cryptography

Infrastructure-level "innovation"

We need to start funding:

Onboarding, documentation, UX

Social features, not just tech protocols

Network-building between grassroots media and communities

Outreach that isn’t just evangelism, but relationship-building

Public education, not just developer conferences

Human infrastructure — the people doing the messy, unglamorous work of care and connection

Think about projects like: The Open Media Network (OMN) – which builds out real linking between alt-media producers using existing standards like RSS and ActivityPub. It’s boring tech, but socially radical. This project aren’t shiny, but it matters.

We cannot build future paths by pretending the problem is just technical. The #geekproblem is a cultural blindness, the belief that the social will magically emerge once the tech is “good enough.” It won’t.

If you want a flourishing #openweb, you need to fund the people with shovels — the ones doing the care work, building bridges, and holding space for non-geek communities.

Until we do that, the #openweb will remain a ghost town of beautiful ruins – and a free R&D lab for the next generation of #dotcons.

#NGI #NLnet #NGIzero

Building Alt/Grassroots Media Networks to Challenge and Widen Traditional Media

The current ecosystem of alternative and grassroots media is too narrow in its imagination of what media could, and should, be. There’s a persistent naivety or, in some cases, a self-serving dishonesty. Many of the most “successful” progressive media groups continue to mimic #traditionalmedia without understanding, or addressing, the fact that they do not control their distribution. In effect, they’re renting space in someone else’s empire.

This is not just a mistake. It’s the same mistake that corporate media has been making for years: relying entirely on the #dotcons, especially Google/Meta/Facebook, to reach people. The algorithms shape the message. The gatekeepers never disappeared, they were replaced by code, powered by ad dollars.

Where are we now? Most grassroots and alt-media outlets do have websites, which means they technically sit on the #openweb. But their sites rarely, if ever, link to other alt-media projects. Despite the rhetoric of solidarity, there is little visible network of mutual support, not even basic hyperlinking between allies.

They podcast, another foot in the #openweb. Yet their outreach and engagement still happen inside #silos like Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts. In practice, this reinforces the #deathcult’s control of visibility. You can’t build a new world inside the structures of the old, not if the old is designed to undermine you. Why is this mess happening? Two dominant forces are shaping this failure:

On the big scale, we have the #Fashernista embrace of the #dotcons

Many alt-media producers came of age inside the mainstream tech stack. They built their platforms and careers inside the same closed systems they claim to challenge. Their political commitments might be radical, but their infrastructure choices are entirely conventional. This is the liberal, capitalist version of #mainstreaming – reform, not replacement.

On the small scale, #Encryptionist obsession and the #geekproblem

At the other extreme, we have alt-tech projects so obsessed with privacy and control that they create pointless parallel networks that no one uses. They fetishize encryption and “clean standards” over actual human use. The result is tech that is “safe” but irrelevant, drifting into a shrinking ghetto of #stupidindividualism. This is the libertarian version of #mainstreaming – escape, not engagement.

The has been practical work on the ground, over the last years an #openweb tech revolution built around ActivityPub and Fediverse, with projects like Mastodon, which in theory is guided by the #4opens. Yet, despite this, we still hit a wall of self-interest, naivety, and careerist short-termism from the media groups and meany individuals inside this movement.

What can we do? The web is made of links, the #openweb dies without them. If alt/grassroots media want to be part of the solution, they must start acting like a network. A simple step is to start linking to each other. Publicly. Repeatedly. On websites. On blogs. On Fediverse accounts. Use hashtags. Use lists. Tag each other. Cross-publish when relevant. This one act can change the ecosystem.

To solidify this, it’s past time for a new alt-media reboot, a small crew of linked-up, working examples that can pull others onto a sustainable, #openweb path. A real, living network of trust and mutual visibility. If we can show what’s possible, by doing it, we might begin to shift the culture. Let’s find the hopeful, grounded people to help shovel this forward.

If you’re interested in building the open media commons, join the #OMN conversation at https://unite.openworlds.info/explore/organizations to “Make the world you want to see.” or splash some dosh here https://opencollective.com/open-media-network we will make good use of it

The #OMN really complex? It’s not in the code – it’s in us. Let’s be blunt:

The Outside Threats:

The #dotcons (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.)

Surveillance capitalism

Attention farming

Closed distribution algorithms

Platform lock-in

The Internal Saboteurs:

Encryptionist geeks obsessed with crypto but forgetting human users

NGO social media managers who talk community but build silos

Process vampires who kill projects by committee

Fashionistas who follow hype cycles and abandon working tools for shiny vaporware

The #OMN is native to none of these tribes. That’s its strength. But also why it’s often ignored or misunderstood. No permissions, no gatekeeping, no central database. It just works. That’s the #KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

None of the usual suspects like this: Geeks: Don’t like using old tools like RSS or thinking socially. Politicos: Prefer being seen at the cutting edge, even if it leads nowhere. NGOs: Want measurable outcomes, not messy grassroots growth. But we need to stop building castles in the sky. Start building bridges instead.

The real block? The mental model of our tech and political culture. We’re still thinking in terms of silos, ownership, and control.

If we close everything, we are left with the evil – A bad outcome

What should be open? What is okay to be closed?

Let’s begin from a traditional liberal framing: Most social interactions should be OPEN, some private or sensitive interactions may be CLOSED.

This isn’t radical. It’s been a functional principle across free societies. But in our current digital culture, this simple framing is often flipped or ignored. Many developers, activists, and even funders uncritically push for closure, often in the name of privacy, safety and control, without recognizing what’s lost when everything becomes closed.

The power of OPEN is all good forms of social power and progress come from open processes:

Transparency builds trust.

Sharing creates knowledge and community.

Federation gives us alternatives to centralized control.

From the printing press to Wikipedia, openness has always been a powerful force for liberation, creativity, and justice. Meanwhile, much of the worst abuse and corruption festers in the dark:

Hidden surveillance (NSA/Five Eyes).

Closed algorithms (Facebook/YouTube).

Closed decision-making in opaque NGOs and foundations.

If we push everything into private silos or lock it behind paywalls, we kill the very culture that allows us to challenge and change the system. We are left with only the closed, and that’s not a world we want to live in.

A real-world example is needed? Let’s talk about the Diaspora project, 15 years ago, in response to Facebook’s rise, a group of well-meaning devs built a “privacy-first” social network. They rejected the openness of RSS and federated tech like XMPP and Atom. They wanted to start from scratch, build their own private network, and lock down data flows, for safety.

The result was a very predictable mess, Diaspora burned brightly and briefly, but never built a vibrant network. In contrast, existing open networks were shouted down, de-funded, and ignored. Ten years passed. Then, we had to reinvent the same open path with ActivityPub to get back to what #RSS and other open tools were already doing.

This is the #geekproblem, the idea that you can throw away working social infrastructure because it’s not “clean” or “cool”, and replace it with abstract, closed systems… usually ends in failure. Worse, it delays progress by a decade. Encryptionism, privacy dogma, and the closing of the commons.

Yes, privacy is important, nobody is arguing otherwise, but what many #encryptionists miss is that building only for privacy is building only for fear. You can’t build a shared culture on fear alone, you need to balance this with trust, transparency, and cooperation too. These require openness. When everything defaults to closed, the commons dies, and without the commons, there is no #openweb.

A politics of openness, is not just technical. it’s deeply social and political. It touches on human nature, ideology, and power. If you’re new to these ideas, start with some reading of the basics of Sociology (Wikipedia) and Political ideologies then ask what assumptions are built into this tech? Who does it empower? Who does it exclude?

Where to begin, to understand motivations and outcomes in #openweb development, it helps to name the ideological currents at play:

Conservatism → favors stability, hierarchy, closure.

Liberalism → favors rights, transparency, and balance.

Anarchism → favors decentralization, autonomy, and openness.

Much of the Fediverse, despite the tech mess, is functionally anarchist in ethos. But this is rarely understood or spoken aloud. We have the A (Anarchy) but not yet the O (Order). Let’s fix this by building the O in the Fediverse, rather than let the default path be imposed, where #NGOs and #foundations bring closed governance models wrapped in the fig leaf of “participation”, we should be working now to build native, open forms of governance.

That’s what the Open Governance Body (#OGB) is trying to do, to creating soft structure for an open culture. That’s what the #4opens help guide: basic principles for transparency and shared power. Let’s support these paths, as if we default to closure – either because of fear, control, or ideology – we kill the #openweb before it can grow.

Let’s remember, we are the stewards of the future commons, let’s keep the doors opens. Thoughts? Examples? Let’s keep this conversation alive, in the open.

Should we do something native in the Fediverse?

And what would that actually look like? Let’s be honest about what the #Fediverse is, despite all the code and standards talk, the heart of the Fediverse is anarchism – not in the chaos sense, but in the older meaning:

The letter A for anarkhia (‘without ruler’), circled by an O that stands for order or organization.

We have plenty of the A with decentralization, voluntary cooperation and resistance to imposed authority. But where’s the O? Of clear coordination, transparent process and federated trust and mediation?

Right now, we’re herding cats – each server, dev group, and community running off on their own, building tools and protocols, often without clear ways to connect, share governance, or defend against capture. This worked when we were small, it will not work now the big boys have arrived.

Warning from experience: The #EU outreach failure, we had a direct taste of this during the 2023–24 EU outreach process. It worked, but was quickly transitioned to the infrastructure of the #Fediverse without its soul. This isn’t theoretical, it is what happened to #FOSS transitioning to #opensource in the 2010s. This is what happens if we keep doing nothing? If we don’t act:

The foundation model is imposed — not built.

The fig leaf of “community governance” will be ignored.

A self-selecting oligarchy will form — friendly faces, perhaps, but still an eliteist power cleqe.

The Fediverse will be co-opted — just like we watched Google and Microsoft do to open source over the last 20 years.

Yes, #ActivityPub is “open” but openness alone doesn’t stop capture. Ask the #FSF, or look at meany #NGO paths in tech.

What would “native” governance look like? Built from our values, not imported from the institutions we’re resisting.

Soft Structure – Not no structure. The #OGB (Open Governance Body) project is one possible model: https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody It’s based on the #4opens and rooted in the real history of grassroots organising, not rigid control, but visible, participatory trust-based structure.
Real federation of trust -Imagine something like “trust instances”, each instance or org can choose to endorse certain process and values (e.g., 4opens, PGA hallmarks), creating a visible network of aligned projects. Not a central body, but a web of consent, the #OMN is an example of this.
Self-accountability + Diversity of tactics. Everyone agrees to transparency and openness. Everyone chooses their own path. Nobody is forced, but the community can see what you’re doing. This is essential for resisting #NGO co-option without creating more gatekeeping elitists

Are Platform Co-ops the Answer? Maybe, but… proceed with caution. Many tech co-op projects I’ve seen:

Become ossified in bureaucratic process

Elevate process geeks over users and communities

Reproduce #NGO behaviours under a different name

We’ve seen this in the #techcoop movement, especially in the UK, where platform co-ops often start with radical aims and drift into “doing B2B consulting for ethical startups.” Fine, but not the revolution we worked for. The stakes are real, we’re not just talking about tech here, we’re talking about:

Climate collapse

Social fragmentation

The rise of digital authoritarianism

We need an #openweb that reflects our values, #fediverse governance that protects the commons, and to move from just the A to the full A inside the O – the anarchist circle of voluntary structure. Let’s not wait for another hijacking, we need to build something native to the Fediverse before it’s too late.

The signal-to-noise problem of our #geekproblem in the #fediverse and the wider #openweb. Let’s be clear: platforms like #Mastodon and the #Fediverse are native openweb projects. They embody the values of the #4opens — open data, open source, open process, and open standards.

The value here is not in hardening and securing these systems to the teeth. People who are pushing for hyper-“security” are missing the point entirely. This isn’t about “common sense” dev practice. It’s about use-case. Public media content should be open — and that’s what the Fediverse is good at. It’s media. It’s conversation. It’s public dialogue. That’s what #ActivityPub is designed for. For private communication, we already have mature and well-tested encrypted tools: #Matrix, #Briar, #Signal, etc. Use those for whistleblowing, direct action, or anything sensitive.

Trying to bolt high-security models onto public communication tools breaks the value of the #Fediverse – its simplicity, accessibility, and low barrier to entry. Right now, the #Fediverse is a functional part of the #OMN – it’s a mesh of many small pieces, loosely joined, low-barrier, easy to host, easy to adapt, easy to grow. This is a fragile ecosystem, not a fortress. By pushing unnecessary “security” requirements, this #geekproblem are:

Scaring away potential users and admins

Raising technical barriers

Spreading #FUD

And most dangerously — undermining real-world activists who rely on open visibility and reach, not secrecy.

The #geekproblem, pushing complexity, abstraction, and fear over usability and trust, has been blocking the alt-tech world for over 20 years, it’s happening again. Let’s not let them smother this moment, the open web works when it’s messy, simple, and human.

You can help here https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

Why most #geekproblem software fails: Trust vs. control

Almost all of our #geekproblem software fails because it’s built with a mindset of control.

Control over users.
Control over systems.
Control over outcomes.

But all good societies, and all durable communities, are based on trust. When we ignore this, we don’t just write bad code, we produce #techshit that nobody uses, that burns out developers, and that confuses users. Then we start over… and call it “innovation.” That’s #techchurn.

Control-driven projects: Examples of failure

Diaspora
Touted as a Facebook alternative, it focused too much on cryptographic control and data silos — and forgot the social UX that makes people actually want to use social media. It never recovered from this early design flaw.

GNOME Online Accounts
Supposed to be a bridge between the desktop and online services. Instead, it became a privacy puzzle with unclear consent and broken trust. Control was enforced without social understanding.

Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB)
A radical peer-to-peer network, very promising. But became increasingly unusable due to overcomplicated trust mechanics and lack of simple social pathways for onboarding new users. The community stalled.

Matrix / Element
Still pushing forward, but has constant friction because it replicates many centralised “control” models in the name of “choice.” Powerful, yes. But still struggles with real decentralised trust outside geek bubbles.

🌱 Trust-Based Systems: What Works?

Fediverse / Mastodon
It works because it’s socially familiar and based on human trust over algorithmic control. You choose who to follow, what server you trust. And it grew because of this — not in spite of it.

Signal (Early Days)
Before turning more into a consumer app, Signal succeeded by focusing on trusted networks — your phonebook — and making end-to-end encryption invisible. It was about trust, not just security.

The real problem is in part to do it money and the funding of the wrong side of tech, in that most funding goes to things that feel safe:

Protocol development

Core backend infrastructure

“Governance” initiatives run by “neutral” NGOs

These are important up to a point, but this “safe” money ONLY reproduces the #geekproblem:

Building tech without communities

Tools without culture

Features without stories

When we do try to fund the social side, the interfaces, user onboarding, documentation, actual relationships, it too often gets handed to parasite #NGOs with no grassroots accountability. Just look at the endless pilot projects by digital rights NGOs that are abandoned 18 months later. Or the “governance frameworks” that never go anywhere. It’s a cycle of buzzwords over boots-on-the-ground.

The people with shovels, in a messy world, the only thing that might work is messy people with shovels, people who compost the shit, clean the broken tools, and patch the networks to keep things going.

These people are rarely funded.
They’re not “scalable.”
They don’t write grant-friendly proposals.
But without them, none of the tools work.

Who funds them?

A call to action: If we want an #openweb that survives the coming waves of #climatechaos and #mainstreaming sellouts… We need to fund trust, not control, to support social infrastructure, not just servers and specs, to back messy doers, not polished whitepapers. We need to talk about this, fund this, and build on this, or we’re just making more compost for the next #dotcons to grow from.

A conversation about money and the #openweb

#NLnet #NGI #NGIzero #EU #funding

Talking about the #geekproblem in #openweb funding

Let’s be honest: we have a real and ongoing #geekproblem in how funding is allocated in the alt-tech and #openweb space, and it’s holding us back. The current push for infrastructure is important, but it’s not enough.

Yes, backend infrastructure is vital. You can’t build sustainable alternatives to #dotcons without solid plumbing. Funding projects like mesh networks, free firmware, and decentralised protocols, as #NLnet and others often do, is necessary work. BUT… If no one uses the infrastructure, or if it simply gets absorbed back into corporate platforms, then we’re just building tools for the next round of tech enclosures. That’s the pattern we’ve been trapped in for 20+ years.

Take the example of #ActivityPub. It would have remained a marginal protocol if #Mastodon hadn’t wrapped it in good UX, approachable design, and a culture people actually wanted to be part of. It was this social work, not just the code, that made the #Fediverse grow. That success was accidental, not structural, and we’re now coasting off that one cultural leap forward while backend devs get all the attention and funding. Culture first, code second is the hard truth:

The Fediverse is a culture first, and a standard second.

Where is the real funding for building sustainable social tools, interfaces, and communities? Where is the funding for actual alternatives to #dotcons that real people can use? This is one of the things we mean by the #geekproblem, the over-prioritisation of backend infrastructure in a vacuum, without acknowledging the social, political, and cultural layers needed for real systemic change. What’s the Risk? It’s that we end up with:

Endless dev churn.

Great tech no one uses.

A cultural vacuum that’s quickly filled by bad actors or subsumed by corporate rebranding.

Sound familiar? So what do we do?

Balance the Funding. Yes to infrastructure, but also fund user-facing projects, UI/UX work, community engagement, moderation tooling, multilingual outreach, and federated editorial practices. In other words, fund culture-building.
Support “Soft” Projects That Matter. There’s very little funding for projects like #OMN, #indymediaback, or #openwebgovernancebody because they don’t look like “innovation.” But these are the organic, lived tools that connect radical tech to real social movements.
Fund social protocols, not just transport protocols.

#4opens, the #PGA hallmarks, and trust-based governance are protocols too, just not the kind that compile into binaries. They help mediate conflict, keep projects focused, and build human networks that last.

Funding only “safe” backend tech guarantees it will either be: Irrelevant, co-opted, or turned into the next closed platform. We have to fund risky, visible, social alternatives if we want a different outcome. None of this is new, I like meany people been banging this drum since the #indymedia days and writing about it for decades. On this path, the #geekproblem isn’t about individuals, it’s a systemic blind spot. Let’s please take the time to balance funding tech AND the culture to finally move toward more humanistic paths.

Everything we build sits on standards

An example of the #geekproblem is the refusal, or failure, to engage seriously with standards. In tech, as in life, nothing exists in isolation. Every app, every protocol, every line of code rests on a foundation of inherited agreements: protocols, languages, schemas, and governance systems. These are the invisible scaffolding of the digital world, we call them standards, and whether people like it or not, everything you’re building is already part of an industrial web of standards.

Now, here’s the issue, some people like building sandcastles, it’s fun, creative, and ephemeral and that’s fine for a beach. But when you’re trying to build something social, collective, public, sandcastles don’t last. Tech built without engagement with standards is just that, fantasy castles doomed to wash away with the tide. The #geekproblem is this tendency, to act like you’re inventing from scratch, when you’re just ignoring the foundations that are already holding you up.

So, what is an “Open Industrial Standard”? Think of it this way:

An industrial standard is a shared agreement that enables interoperation. Think HTTP, HTML, RSS, USB, SQL, IP, ActivityPub. These let different things talk to each other, without asking permission.

An open standard means anyone can read it, implement it, and improve it — without a license fee or gatekeeper.

When it works well, it becomes a public commons — infrastructure we all use without even thinking about it.

That’s the real power of the #openweb, these boring, beautiful agreements that allow radically different people and machines to cooperate at scale. And yes, the process of defining them can be nebulous and political. There are gatekeepers, old boys’ clubs, turf wars (just ask anyone who’s fought through the W3C or IETF). But without engaging with these processes, you’re not doing tech that scales, you’re doing cosplay.

Tribalism vs standards, some geeks mistake tribal loyalty for technical innovation. They reject standards because they didn’t write them, or because they’re seen as “corporate,” or because it’s not their language/community. This is understandable, but it’s also deeply destructive when building shared tools. This tribalism can be:

Beautiful — as identity, passion, and solidarity.

Problematic — when it blocks interconnection, growth, and real-world relevance.

And yes, nationalism is another form of this, some #dotcons are more powerful than countries, so perhaps it’s a useful metaphor. If Amazon or Meta can out-legislate half of Europe, then tribal structures and state structures start to blur. The violence of exclusion, whether through passport or platform ban, operates in similar ways.

The #geekproblem is a 20th-century hangover, a part of the tech tribe that’s clung to personal purity, control, and isolation. But this path is real damage: #climatechaos worsened by inefficient or extractive systems, #failbook dominating sociality through centralised design, #diaspora outreach falling apart from internal ego wars.

The #geekproblem refuses the hard, messy work of social coding, open standards, federation, collective governance. It prefers to build new silos rather than inhabit and improve shared space. We see this constantly. New protocols, platforms, forks. Few links, no bridges. We need to talk about this, as it’s not personal, it’s structural. But people get very personal when you point this out, that’s the #stupidindividualism talking. Instead of building relationships and cooperation, they build sandcastles and expect others to admire them from afar. Meanwhile, the world burns, and tech could be helping, but mostly it isn’t.

In Summary: Open industrial standards are the foundations of anything that actually works at scale. The #geekproblem is a block when it pretends these don’t matter. Sandcastles are nice, but you can’t build a future on them. Let’s engage, not isolate. Link, not fork. Share, not hoard.
That’s the path to a real #openweb, that resists the #deathcult and has a shot at making lasting change.

I’ve been fighting this for 20 years. I wrote this in 2005, and it still holds:

“It’s going slow but we are getting there… One of the main problems seems to be a dysfunctional idea of division of labour – ie. Everyone seems to think I should do everything – as I am pretty useless at many things it’s no wonder it is going so slow… If you wanna see something miraculous happen you gotta wave your arms around a bit and mutter some arcane words… Go on you can do something… Just look at the blog page to see what.”

What Do We Do With Our #Mainstreaming Alt-People?

This is an old and familiar problem: people who say they want change but consistently choose the path that neutralises it. Welcome to the “common sense” #NGO worldview, currently being repackaged in the #Fediverse as things like the Fedi Foundation. It’s not new. It’s not empowering. It’s a tired institutional gravity that drags every radical project into a fog of bureaucracy, branding, and paid careers.

In contrast, we have the “nativist” #openweb crew – grassroots people working with messy horizontalism and free tools, trying to keep the fire alive. See the more grounded reflections like What would a fediverse “governance” body look like?.

And then, sitting awkwardly in between, we have the #geekproblem, coders who are working hard on technical processes like the FEPs (Fediverse Enhancement Proposals) but who avoid touching anything political. They’ve been pushing the #fep process for years now, and while technically interesting, they often ignore the deep political questions of governance and power. That’s fine. But it leaves a vacuum.

The risk: If native paths don’t move, the NGO model will win by default is the hard truth, if the “native” #openweb people don’t move beyond our tired leftist divisions and infinite internal critique, then the #NGO model will be imposed. History tells us this, over and over again. Nature abhors a vacuum. Institutions are always waiting to fill the space with “best practices,” dull forms, and “inclusive” hierarchy. It’s just what happens when there’s a failure to organise from below.

And here’s the problem, the argument between “structure” and “lack of structure” is largely a strawman. Most functioning grassroots projects have lots of structure, it’s just soft structure: relational, implicit, culturally encoded, emergent. The #OGB project (Open Governance Body), for instance, grew from the #EU outreach work and shows this kind of structure in action. It’s not rigid like an NGO. It’s not anarcho-chaos either. It’s #KISS structure, small, practical, and adaptable. But people often miss this because they’ve been taught to only see hard structure: constitutions, charters, legal entities, chairs, and trustees. This blindness is a serious block.

On coops, NGOs, and the shadows of the #Deathcult. A note on coops: They’re often cited as a model alternative. And yes, coops can be good. But many have been co-opted. They function more like bureaucratic relics than vibrant counter-systems.

Examples:

The Coop supermarket hired Tesco managers to “turn it around,” resulting in soviet-style shopping and a full embrace of corporate logics.

The Coop Bank? Try dealing with them — they’re functionally broken through bureaucracy.

1970s wholefood coops had potential — many evolved into neoliberal health shops in the 1990s, selling overpriced turmeric capsules to middle-class wellness seekers.

In contrast, activist organising – even when messy, clumsy, and exhausting – is a better bet. It rarely becomes the shadow of the #deathcult because it is in active struggle against that system. NGOs and formalised coops often become the shadow by default.

What should we do?

Name the problem without being prats about it. People drift into #mainstreaming by habit, not usually by conspiracy. But habits can kill movements. Name them. Push back gently but firmly.
Embrace diversity of organising models. Don’t push coops or NGOs as a one-size-fits-all. Sometimes a loose affinity group or soft network is better. Sometimes a coop makes sense. But don’t dogmatise structures that we know often fail.
Build soft structure, not rigid rules. Ask simple questions like “How does this work with the #4opens?” or “Does this strengthen the PGA Hallmarks?” This builds accountability without shutting down creativity.
Support native projects like #indymediaback, #OGB, and the #OMN, these are based on working structures, rooted in radical history, and built by people with lived experience of doing the work.
Don’t confuse visibility with substance. Just because a foundation or NGO gets press or looks shiny, doesn’t mean they’re doing anything real. Look under the hood.
Compost what needs composting. Don’t let failed or flawed projects keep clogging up energy space. Say goodbye, thank them for their lessons, and move on. We have enough shit to shovel already.

In summary, we don’t need to choose between chaos and bureaucracy. There’s a third path of soft, relational, rooted organising with shared values, proven history, and practical tools. But we have to fight for it. Because if we don’t, the NGO train will keep rolling through, colonising everything with HR-speak and grant metrics. And we’ll be stuck rebuilding, again and again. Let’s not waste more time on that.

The roadblocks to change are #Stupidindividualism and the #Deathcult that breeds it

If you’ve ever tried to build something radical, collective, and actually useful, you’ve run into strong #blocking forces. They’re not just annoying, they’re dangerous, structural, and they always show up. This post is about naming those, calling them what they are, and understanding how they’re entangled in the wider problem:

A culture that valorizes individualism, feeds on careerism, and bows to the false “common sense” of the neoliberal #deathcult.

The #NGO agenda: Careerism in activist clothing, highlights how too many grassroots projects are co-opted by well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) NGOs and their functionaries, who come waving grant forms and talking about partnerships. But really, they’re selling a diluted, bureaucratic version of change that fits inside capitalist institutions, with jobs and funding flows to protect.

At best, they water down radicalism into “deliverables.” At worst, they actively trample grassroots horizontality to build careers. They normalize the #dotcons. They manage, rather than transform. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s structure. And we need to build outside this deadened swamp.

What keeps this hard to see is the petty politics and personal grudges, as micro-level sabotage, let’s be honest, some people would burn the future to win a petty feud. This is the everyday rot of #stupidindividualism, where narrow self-preservation and shallow ego become more important than collective progress.

Projects like #indymediaback, which depend on shared vision and mutual respect, break down when people refuse to grow beyond grudges. These behaviours reflect deeper cultural damage, we’ve been trained to see each other as threats, not collaborators. #KISS we can’t build anything real if we don’t actively mediate this. That means talking it through, holding space, calling it in, before it derails the work.

The liberal trap is about dogma masquerading as “common sense”. I’ll say something unfashionable, I have respect for old-school liberalism. It gave us social safety nets, education, some rights, a lot of good stuff came out of liberal traditions. But today’s dogmatic liberals, clinging to broken institutions and smearing “common sense” over radical action, are a drain on movement energy. Their default is always compromise, always moderation, even when the world is on fire. We’re stuck negotiating with people who believe the future is a reformed version of the past. It isn’t. We need to move forward, not beg to stay where we are.

The #geekproblem is about control, complexity, and disconnection. We’ve talked about this before, and it keeps coming up. The #geekproblem is when technologists build tools for control rather than empowerment, for complexity rather than access, for themselves rather than people. Often dressed in “neutral” language or “perfect systems,” these tools lock out users, deny social context, and kill collaboration with arrogant assumptions. The fix? Build for people, not machines. Use the #4opens. Work from #DIY practice, not just theory. Centre community. Make it work for the bottom, not only the top.

The path we need is compost isn’t about perfection. We need to admit we’ve all played roles in the mess. The key is naming it, owning it, and moving differently. Tools like #OMN, #indymediaback, and #OGB are not ONLY shiny new things. They’re grounded in lived practice, built to solve real problems. They don’t pretend to be magic fixes, they are basic shovels, to compost the current mess, to old space to grow something better.

Let’s get on with composting the #tecsit. We don’t need another app, another platform, another paper. We need to build trust-based networks, support each other, and get our hands dirty together. If we work for it, a humanistic future is still possible, to make this happen we need to stop feeding the #deathcult and start feeding the soil.

Add your thoughts in the comments: What Blocks the progressive path? We need to name these issues clearly, not to shame individuals, but to make them visible as systemic patterns we all get caught in. So tell me: what else is holding us back? What sabotages collective projects from within? Let’s document the patterns so we can start composting them.

#grassroots #DIY #openweb #4opens #nothingnew #postcapitalism #stupidindividualism #culturewars #commoning

Why most radical tech is pointless, and why #indymediaback isn’t

Almost everything built in today’s alt-radical tech scene is, bluntly, pointless. Despite good intentions, most of it ends up feeding the endless cycle of #fashernista churn, flashy new platforms, bleeding-edge protocols, or encrypted communication tools nobody uses, built by isolated teams disconnected from real-world needs or history. This is the #geekproblem: a culture where novelty is fetishized, and social usefulness is an afterthought, if it appears at all.

Examples:

Secure scrolling tools: Every few months we see new chat apps, usually cryptographic fortresses with no communities. No one’s asking what these tools are for beyond vague abstractions like “privacy” or “freedom.” Tools without context.
Peer-to-peer silos: Projects like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) or many DAT spin-offs build entirely new social ecosystems that demand complete buy-in, rather than integrate into existing networks. What results is islands of lonely idealists yelling into empty timelines.
Protocol over people: Many Fediverse projects argue endlessly over specs like #ActivityPub or #Nostr, often prioritizing purity over pragmatism. What good is a protocol if no one actually uses it beyond a few devs congratulating themselves?

Why #indymediaback isn’t a pointless tech project, it offers something truly different. It is not “new.” It doesn’t pretend to invent a whole new ecosystem. It is an act of digital memory, a revival of the still-needed infrastructure that once helped build radical networks globally. #Indymedia worked. It published resistance. It distributed power. It was embedded in real communities and real movements. This is #nothingnew done right.

The #nothingnew approach mediates against the churn by reusing workflows, social trust, and existing cultural practices. It doesn’t ignore tech, it grounds tech. Examples:

#indymediaback uses simple publish-form-comment workflows, already familiar. No #AI, no #blockchain, no obscure identity layer. Just people posting and curating stories.

It connects to existing radical spaces: housing co-ops, street kitchens, climate camps—places where digital tools are needed right now, and where the point isn’t building a unicorn startup but having a place to publish the truth when the cops are lying again.

Why copying #dotcons isn’t enough, in the #fediverse we so far have replicate Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram — Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed. This is useful, to a point. But all code is ideology. Copying capitalist infrastructure dose smuggle in capitalist logic. Copying invites the #deathcult right back in through the side door.

indymediaback avoids this trap. It doesn’t replicate any#dotcons logic or UX patterns. It revives a publishing common that worked before Silicon Valley captured this path. And more importantly, it’s embedded in a set of radical social practices: the #PGA hallmarks, the #4opens, and the messy, beautiful legacy of grassroots movements who already knew how to organize.

The value of #indymediaback isn’t just in tech. It’s in trust-based social continuity, the hidden glue of any working movement. Without this, you don’t have a radical tech project. You have a ghost repo on GitHub. That’s the central point, without real community, without continuity, without trust, radical tech is a dead end.

This is the carrot and stick we need now. If you care about the #openweb as a human value network, not just a protocol playground, you have to build things people can use today, and that people want to use, not because it’s encrypted or federated, but because it serves a purpose they already have.

This is where the wider #OMN (Open Media Network) comes in. It’s not another protocol war. It’s a shovel to compost the inhuman mess we’ve inherited. It’s a framework built with the #4opens, to grow digital commons that don’t depend on VC, control freaks, or fashion. It’s where we build bridges between radical tech projects, rather than isolate ourselves in yet another Git-based castle.

In short, it’s a path of people over product, process over platform. We don’t need more “solutions.” We need to stop being prats, pick up the tools we already have, and start rebuilding.

Food for thought, and action.