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 these #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. 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 model.

Petty politics and personal grudges, grows 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. 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 the top.

The path we need is compost, this isn’t about perfection. 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 shiny new things. They’re grounded in lived practice, built to solve real problems. They don’t pretend to be magic fixes. But they are shovels, to compost the current mess, and grow something better.

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, if we 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.

Metadata and the #OMN Path: Who Controls the Invisible Hand?

Capitalism’s invisible hand has always relied on hidden data. In the digital age, that data is metadata the overlooked, under-the-hood information that tells us who, where, when, how often, and what next. It doesn’t matter what you say or do if someone else controls the context around it. That’s where the power lies. Let’s be clear: the battle for metadata is the battle for the future.

Three Broken Paths

Capitalism: Metadata is hoarded by the #dotcons. Google, Meta, TikTok—they thrive on extracting context from your every click. It’s not about what you say, but what your patterns say about you. They sell this to advertisers, to governments, to anyone with enough cash. Capital controls metadata, metadata controls behaviour, and behaviour keeps the system in place. This is the tech-feudalism of today—soft fascism in algorithmic form.

Chinese Communism: Here, the state doesn’t outsource metadata - it owns it. Surveillance is centralised. Social credit systems reduce people to patterns and can be used to penalise deviation. The state controls metadata, metadata controls capitalism. It’s the digitised return of the command economy.

Liberalism: Wants to privatise metadata to the individual, to revive the mythical free market of rational actors with perfect information. But this is a fantasy—metadata’s power comes from aggregation, and no individual can match corporate or state capacity to hoard it. The liberal path leads to a more blinded, slightly less abusive cage.

Anarchism and the Commons: A Fourth Way

What does anarchism want? It wants the social conditions for free association. It wants autonomy, not just individual, but community autonomy. The #4opens and the #OMN (Open Media Network) are an explicit political project to create this.

Open data: everyone can see and use.
Open metadata: the tail behind the content, telling you where it came from and how it’s been passed around.
Open process: how decisions are made is visible and changeable.
Open code: tools are modifiable and forkable.

The #OMN doesn’t pretend metadata isn’t powerful, it’s built around that power. But instead of hiding it, it makes that power visible, shared, and accountable. We’re not encrypting metadata into irrelevance. We’re composting it into trust.

Commons vs. the market, capitalism uses metadata to target, extract, and sell. We use metadata to share, trust, and build. The #OMN proposes a radical shift to replace the market with metadata commons. In capitalism, knowledge is hoarded for advantage. In the commons, it is shared for coordination. The market’s “invisible hand” becomes the commons’ visible knowledge, messy, partial, human, but rooted in mutual aid, not profit.

Hard vs. soft power, the #OMN doesn’t rely on cryptographic “hard” security. It builds “soft” trust:

You don’t need perfect encryption, you need networks of relationships that resist capture.
You don’t need top-down control, you need reputation, memory, and care.
It’s not about preventing all bad things, it’s about making good things easier to grow, and bad things harder to scale.

Yes, if the state turns fascist, they’ll try to use metadata against us. But they already do. The #OMN doesn’t pretend to offer perfect protection. What it does offer is a head start in building the infrastructure for resistance, before the rubber truncheons arrive.

This matters, metadata will happen, no matter what you do, you can’t opt out, you can only choose where the power flows:

Capitalists?

States?

Individuals?

Or communities?

We choose the commons.

And we make this chose, not in theory, but in practice. We’re building systems that work today, in browsers, on the streets, and in activist circles. This isn’t just tech. It’s a strategy. It’s a shovel for the compost. It’s a way to make new life from the old system’s rot.

A conversation on #OMN issues around metadata

What Should We Do With Metadata? A Post-Capitalist Path via #OMN

We’re in a global metadata arms race — and most people don’t even know the stakes. Here’s the current battlefield:

Capitalism wants metadata privatized — hoarded by #dotcons to manipulate markets and politics. This power now controls the state. Welcome back, fascism.

Authoritarianism (like China’s digital state) wants metadata centralized — state-controlled to command capitalism itself. The command economy returns, just digitized.

Liberalism wants metadata individualized — a libertarian dream of sovereign users and self-determined markets, it still leans into myths of meritocracy and fails to balance collective power.

But what if we chose a fourth path? Anarchism, grounded in voluntary association, mutual aid, and decentralization — this is the path #OMN walks. Using #4opens, we’re attempting a #KISS trust-based, commons-driven model for metadata.

The Commons of Metadata. In the #OMN (Open Media Network), metadata isn’t hidden or monetized. It’s open, trusted, and functional — a new kind of commons. This visibility becomes the replacement for capitalism’s “invisible hand.”

We don’t sell metadata.

We use it to replace the market.

We organize with it, not exploit it.

Metadata flows become signals of trust and connection — shaping what gets seen, valued, and shared. It’s post-capitalist infrastructure based on visibility, not secrecy.

How It Works: A Trust-Based Metadata Flow

A simplified trust model for content flows:

Link – I find your flow useful.

Trust – We’ve got a relationship.

Moderate – Let’s build that relationship.

Rollback – Something went wrong, undo it.

Unlink – This isn’t working.

We don’t just trust blindly. Metadata lets us query the trust network:

How many people I trust also trust this?

Is this source consistently reliable?

What do community tags say about this?

This keeps quality high, even when bad actors appear. If necessary: unlink, rollback, move on.

What About Surveillance and Security?

We’re honest: the #OMN network can’t protect you from a fascist state. No tech can. But we can:

Use pseudonymity with known-good peers.

Whisper in the forest before posting.

Protect sources while keeping distribution open.

Use P2P crypto for the 20% of cases that need it — not the 80% that don’t.

Unlike the #encryptionists or #geekproblem crowd, we’re not building bunkers. We’re planting gardens.

Why It Matters

If metadata is the new currency, then open metadata is the new commons. Capitalism runs on closed systems — the #OMN runs on shared knowledge and decentralized trust.

This isn’t about perfect tech. It’s about:

Human-scale trust
Community autonomy
Fast, messy, democratic distribution
Real-world resilience

It’s not utopia. It’s compost — and we’ve got the shovels.

The current media environment is heavily skewed towards establishment interests, making it difficult for progressive movements to gain any traction. Why We Need the Open Media Network (#OMN) https://hamishcampbell.com/why-we-need-the-open-media-network-omn/

What should be closed? And what should never be?

A conversation about ideology, sociology, and the #openweb. Let’s start with a basic liberal framework: “Most social interactions should happen in the open. Some personal interactions should remain private.” Seems reasonable, right? That’s the position many of us think we agree on. Yet when we look at how our technology, and by extension, our society, is being built, that balance is totally out of whack. Today, more and more of life is CLOSED:

Closed apps.

Closed data.

Closed social groups.

Closed algorithms.

Closed hardware.

Closed governance.

And on the flip side, the things that should be protected, our intimate conversations, our location, our health data, are often wide open to surveillance capitalism and state control. What the current “common sense” dogma gets wrong? What is missing is the idea that mainstream tech culture, privacy absolutists, and many crypto/anarchist types:

Almost all good social power comes from OPEN.
Most social evils take root in CLOSED spaces.

When people organize together in the open, they create commons, accountability, and momentum. They make movements. When decisions are made behind closed doors, they breed conspiracy, hierarchy, abuse, and alienation.

It’s not just about what is open or closed, it’s about who controls the boundary, and what happens on each side. If we close everything… If we follow the logic of total lockdown, of defaulting to encryption, of mistrust-by-design… then what we’re left with is only the closed. This leads to a brutal truth, the powers that dominate in closed systems are rarely the good ones.
Secrecy benefits the powerful far more than the powerless. Always has.

So when we let the #openweb collapse and treat it as naive, we’re not protecting ourselves. We’re giving up the last space where power might be accountable, where ideas might circulate freely, where we might build something together.

Examples: When openness was lost. Let’s talk about a real-world case of #Diaspora vs. #RSS. 15 years ago, Diaspora emerged with crypto-anarchist hype as the alternative to Facebook. It was secure, decentralized, and… mostly closed. It emphasized encryption and privacy, but lacked network effects, openness, and simple flows of information.

In the same era, we already had #RSS, a beautifully open, decentralized protocol. It powered blogs, podcasts, news aggregators, without permission or centralized control. But the “Young #fashionistas ” of the scene shouted down RSS as old, irrelevant, and too “open.” They wanted to start fresh, with new protocols, new silos, new power. They abandoned the working #openweb to build “secure” ghost towns.

Fast-forward a decade, and now we’re rebuilding in the Fediverse with RSS+ as #ActivityPub. The same functionality. The same ideals, just more code and more complexity. That 10-year gap is the damage caused by the #geekproblem, the failure to build with the past, and for real people.

So what is the #geekproblem? At root, it’s a worldview issue. A failure to think about human beings in real social contexts. Geeks (broadly speaking) assume:

People are adversaries or threats (thus: encrypt everything),
Centralization is evil, but decentralization is always pure (thus: build silos of one),
Social complexity can be reduced to elegant protocols (thus: design first, use later).
But technology isn’t neutral. It reflects ideologies. And if we don’t name those ideologies, they drive the project blindly.

A place to start is to map your ideology, want to understand how you think about openness vs. closedness? Start by reflecting on where you sit ideologically, not in labels, but in instincts. A quick sketch:

Conservatism: Assumes order, tradition, and authority are necessary. Values stability, hierarchy, and often privacy.

Liberalism: Believes in open society, individual freedom, transparency, and market-based solutions.

Anarchism: Rejects imposed authority, promotes mutual aid, horizontal structures, and often radical openness.

None of these are “right,” but understanding where you lean helps clarify why you walk, build or support certain tools. If you’re building tools for the #openweb, these questions matter:

Do you default to closed and secure, or open and messy?

Who do you trust with knowledge—individuals or communities?

Do you believe good things come from control, or emergence?

These are sociological questions, not just technical ones, maybe start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies. Where do we go from here? Let’s bring this back to the openweb and the projects we’re trying to build, like:

#OMN (Open Media Network)

#MakingHistory

#indymediaback

#Fediverse

#P2P tools (DAT, Nostr, SSB, etc.)

All of these projects struggle with the tension between openness and privacy, between usability and purity, between federation and anarchy. But if we start with clear values, and an honest reflection on the world we want to create, we can avoid the worst traps. Let’s say it plainly:

Not everything should be open. But if we close everything, we lose what’s worth protecting.

Let’s talk: What do you think should be closed? What must be kept open at all costs? What’s your ideological instinct, and how does it shape your view of the #openweb?

Capitalism is a hostage situation -Not an economy

Our current #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t life, it’s a trap, we need a way out. In our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t own,
Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,
Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,
Pay to breathe, because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over (inspired by). That’s not a functioning economy, it’s not freedom, it’s a hostage situation, where every basic human need is held behind a transactional barrier, and the meter is always running.

This #deathcult is late capitalism: an endless stack of paywalls enclosing what used to be public, shared, and free. It isn’t just about money, it’s about control, dependency, and isolation. It’s a system that engineers artificial scarcity, so a #nastyfew can profit while the many just try to survive.

But it wasn’t always like this, for most of human history, people lived within commons-based paths, where land was collectively stewarded, food was grown and shared within communities, tools and knowledge were passed down, not patented and governance was often local and participatory.

The last 200 years of “common sense” capitalism is an enclosure of these commons, first the physical ones (land, water, food), and now the digital and social ones (communication, culture, identity). The #openweb, like the open land before it, is being fenced off. Platform by platform. App by app. Cookie banner by paywall.

This enclosure now defines much of our tech infrastructure, every scroll, click, and share is now mediated by profit-driven platforms. Even activism – once vibrant and messy – is being swallowed by slick interfaces and the same throttled feeds. Resistance is filtered, shadowbanned, deboosted, and pushed to monetize. And “our” #NGOs fighting platform power… are doing so on those same platforms.

It’s an absurdity, and worse: it’s a trap. We need alternatives, real ones. We’re not going to “ethics workshop” our way out of this. We need to rebuild the tools of everyday life – economically, digitally, socially – from the grassroots up.

Commons-based systems, let’s turn some “common sense” on it head, instead of private ownership: stewardship. Instead of scarcity: abundance through sharing. This is where projects, like The Open Media Network (#OMN) come in as a practical framework for grassroots media infrastructure:

Built on the #4opens: open data, source, standards, and governance.

Designed to decentralize publishing, and return control to local communities.

Uses both client-server and P2P bridges for accessibility and resilience.

Encourages trust-based networks over extractive platforms.

OMN is not just theory, it’s active code, messy dev, and practical tools for people to tell their own stories, host their own content, and build alternative knowledge systems outside corporate media. These technologies make community hosting the default – not the exception. They reduce reliance on fragile or compromised #dotcons infrastructure. They’re imperfect, but they’re a step out of the enclosure.

The point isn’t just tech, It’s power, capitalism doesn’t just gate resources. It enforces relationships of power. That’s why rebuilding tech without addressing governance, ownership, and access won’t get us far. The #geekproblem is real: tech that nobody can use isn’t liberation, it’s just another dead-end.

The alternative? Keep it #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), prioritize social usability over technical elegance, build bridges, not silos, return to shared ownership and open processes. Capitalism is a hostage situation, but we can walk out the door – if we build the exit together.

You’re not powerless, and this isn’t about purity or escape. It’s about building real infrastructure for real life, so when the capitalist system keeps crumbling (as it will), we’re not left scrambling. We’ll already be living differently.

#OMN #MakingHistory #4opens #openweb #p2p #indymediaback #geekproblem #commons #decentralize #cooperative #foss #degrowth #resilience

UPDATE the seed of this post was from a toot, but can’t find the original to link to due to the #UX of mastodon updating and no functioning search on my instance to find history, sorry, add in comments if you find the original. Updated

Real world tackling the #geekproblem

With rebooting the #openweb we run headfirst into the #geekproblem, a recurring pattern where: Technically brilliant people build powerful tools …but those tools remain socially unusable …or solve only geek problems, not the needs of actual communities. It’s not malice, often it’s idealism, but it creates a dead-end culture of endless prototypes, abandoned standards, and empty tech demos. Meanwhile, the real-world crisis deepens.

The work we need is bridges building, let’s try this ere “P2P news app” built on #dat Hypercore/Hyperswarm is exciting. Yes, it’s similar to Nostr in structure: distributed relays, client-side aggregation, unstoppable flow. But as with Nostr tech isn’t enough. We are social creatures. A usable system needs:

Clear use cases rooted in human relationships – not just tech possibilities.
User-facing front-ends that invite participation, not gate it.
Interoperability with existing protocols (ActivityPub, ATProto, etc.) to avoid siloing.
Bridges between architectures – e.g. client-server ↔ P2P – so that real-world adoption is gradual and survivable.

The good news, the wider #OMN project is already a sane path forward, with a #KISS hybrid path. The plan is in bridging #P2P and client-server as a way out of this. Something like:

A lightweight server bridge that serves data to client-server users (ActivityPub, fediverse, legacy web),

While simultaneously feeding a P2P mesh, with each peer storing and distributing redundant objects,

So that over time, client-server becomes the bootstrapping layer, and #P2P becomes the long-term archive + resistance layer.

“Data is just object flows – how the user gets the object is irrelevant technically.”

This is the kind of thinking that gets us out of the traps, by moving from protocols to people. This isn’t just about code, it’s about culture. The #geekproblem won’t be solved by more architecture diagrams, it needs movements that embrace imperfection and prioritizes social use, visible, working front-ends people can contribute to and understand, documentation and tooling that builds capacity in others, not silos around the brilliant few.

What next? For the devs:

Can the p2p-news-app codebase be modularized to plug into #OMN projects as a data backend, even in a basic way?

Can we bridge shared data objects across protocols (e.g. post metadata flows from P2P → ActivityPub), even if janky at first?

Can we prototype a simple but cross protocol usable frontend, the examples is the work on #makeinghistory and #indymediaback, that lets non-geeks see and touch the network they’re part of?

Yes, for the movement, keep things messy but moving. Avoid dead ends by always asking:

"How does this empower non-technical users to organize, document, and publish together?"

Keep the tech grounded in the social fabric, the activists, journalists, organisers, and rebels this is all meant to serve. If you’re reading this and thinking, “I can help,” please step forward. There’s space in wider tech/social #OMN and #MakingHistory for everyone, coders, writers, designers, testers and storytellers.

Let’s build bridges, not silos, let’s build tools people can use, not just tools geeks can admire, let’s do this together.

Where’s the Resistance to Algorithmic Monopolies?

The big question need to be highlighted: where will pressure for meaningful regulation of #dotcons algorithmic monopolies actually come from?

Right now, it’s hard to see. Lawmakers generally have a poor grasp of the real problems, decades behind on both the tech and its corrosive social consequences. Most legislation we get is either pre-packaged by lobbyists from the #nastyfew controlled platforms causing the harm, or superficial and narrow, #fashionista focus on headline optics like “online harms” or “child safety,” instead of addressing the deeper crisis of algorithmic control, attention addiction, and social fragmentation for control.

Even worse, and this needs to be said loudly, the civil society institutions that should be resisting this mess are captured. Charities, #NGOs, media orgs, #geekproblem digital rights groups. Whether for funding, publicity, or simple convenience, they’ve tied their missions to the very tools they should be questioning. Rather than building alternatives or even naming the deeper problems, they instead focus on “using platforms better” or “more ethically”, which only serves to legitimise the #techshit they should be dismantling for composted.

This is classic #mainstreaming. It’s how radical energy gets drained, redirected, and eventually used to feed the system it once opposed. Meanwhile, into the vacuum of real critique and action steps, conspiracy-driven nonsense and cynical populism to feed the cycle.

This is why grassroots and native #openweb spaces like the #Fediverse matter, not just as “alternatives” but as active resistance. They are places where we can build different logics, embed different values, and avoid replicating the same centralising, manipulative dynamics.

It’s also why we have to defend these spaces, especially when they’re messy or imperfect. Because if we don’t build and protect something better, we’ll be left with a fight where even the so-called opposition is simply more of the same problem.

Composting the EU Tech Mess: From #NLnet to #Eurostack

Composting the EU Tech Mess: From #NLnet to #Eurostack

There’s an old rot in the heart of European tech policy – and it’s not just from the corporate lobbies. It’s also sprouting from the well-funded, #NGO-flavoured corners of what should have been grassroots. A contradiction that tells us everything we need to know about how broken the current #EU #mainstreaming crew and paths are.

Take #Eurostack for example, on paper, it looks decent: a collaborative push toward European digital sovereignty, resilience, and open-source infrastructure. The slogan is right, some of the tech might be right. But the people who will be driving it? And the people that will flood onboard to push it thought, that’s where it falls apart.

The same revolving-door #NGO actors, the same consultant-heavy think-tankers. The same polite funding circles that treat power as something to be managed, not challenged. These are not builders, these are managers of decline, politely sanding the edges off radical tech to make it presentable to policymakers, while completely ignoring the communities that could actually make it work.

And then we have #NLnet, which still has some grassroots soul left, but let’s be honest, the #geekproblem rears its head. Some of the funded projects are brilliant in technical terms but exist in complete social isolation. Beautiful protocol paths that no one will use. Decentralized stacks with zero real social onboarding. Tools solving problems that are themselves geek-invented, not in any sense real-world urgent.

So what do we get? Corporate-captured “open” projects that simply entrench the status quo, with a shine of progressive #PR (hello #Mozilla). Funded grassroots tech that is overengineered, fragile, and oblivious to social or political context it’s built for. Endless talk of “digital commons” by people who’ve never participated in one.

The result? More #techno-solutionist dead ends, more paper victories, more funding poured down the drain, to feed the empty abstracted versions of real solutions. And worse, a complete blind spot for why the #openweb is in crisis: it’s not a lack of good tech, it’s a lack of courageous, messy, trust-based social organising.

Too many of the actors at the table are blinded by the #deathcult of neoliberal governance. They don’t want alternatives – they want reforms that keep their seats at the table warm. This isn’t conspiracy talk. It’s about structural failure: the very people tasked with change have made comfort and compliance their operating system. That’s why the best thing we can do with this EU mess is compost it.

Let’s be clear: We’re not burning bridges with #NLnet or even #Eurostack. We’re building parallel paths with stronger roots, clearer intentions, and radical memory. We’re rebooting native projects like #indymediaback and the #OpenMediaNetwork not because the EU can’t help, but because it won’t, unless it’s dragged there by working alternatives. Until then, the #mainstreaming “solutions” paths will remain #PR for a status quo that’s rotting and failing with decay. Pastime for you to help to compost the lot, and grow better from the mulch.

https://unite.openworlds.info

Where’s the Resistance to Algorithmic Monopolies?

The Mess We Make (Again… and again)

Ten years ago, I remember being told, often condescendingly, with smug certainty, that hosting in the cloud was the future. That what I was working on, #DIY grassroots self and community hosted tech was the dinosaur, a dead end, old obsolete thinking, out of touch. Despite spending years pointing out the obvious flaws in this pushing, for this I got only that my “native” path was irrelevant, for Luddites, they said. Legacy thinking, dead tech walking.

Well, here we are, a decade later. And guess what the cloud: It was expensive, less performant, less secure, and a gateway to increasingly exploitative pricing models. This isn’t hindsight bias, the warning signs were always there. But many #fahernista and #geekproblem people get caught up in the glossy surface and tech hype mess, repeating the same mistake we’ve made across generations of #geekproblem tech, believing scale and #PR buzzwords were synonymous with progress.

Let’s now be clear on what actually happened.

We handed over infrastructure to a handful of giant platforms that lock us in and bleed us dry.
We lost resilience, sovereignty, and basic control over our own data.
We normalized rent-seeking as a business model.
We pushed decentralization off a cliff and called it “abstraction.”

Meanwhile, local compute got cheaper, storage exploded in affordability, bandwidth costs continued to fall, #dotcons threats increased. And guess what? Running things locally started making sense again, just like it always does when the #PR smoke clears and mess composts.

The lesson, which we need to now bring to #crypto and #AI, just because something is fashionable doesn’t make it in any way real or sustainable. That tech #PR hype cycles aren’t innovation, they’re marketing. And when you stop looking at the core trends (cost, control, resilience) and just ride the buzz, you’ll end up where we are now, mess, bloated budgets, shrinking trust, and a growing #techshit pile to clean up.

We need to re-learn the value of #KISS grounded thinking, to remember that local, #4opens, transparent, and interoperable #openweb systems aren’t retro, they’re essential. This isn’t about nostalgia for the old paths, It’s about having power over our basic infrastructure again. The cloud, at the time and in looking over our shoulders, was smoke and mirrors, a detour, it’s now past time to get back on the real progressive #Fediverse path.

History has a lot to say on the peasant revolt vs. liberal half-measures

Why Doesn’t Every City Have a Fediverse Server?

A reflection on #Oxford, the web, and the invisible gap we’re not naming. It’s a simple question, but one that says a lot about where we’re at with the #Fediverse and the broader #openweb reboot: Why doesn’t every city have its own Fediverse server?

I’ve been looking – specifically for my city: Oxford, UK. And the answer seems to be… Nope. Nothing. Not a single clearly local Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed or similar instance. This might seem trivial, but it’s actually a big red flag about where we are failing to root the #Fediverse in the real world.

Wait – Why should cities have their own servers? Because servers are more than just infrastructure, they’re community spaces. They are places where shared context matters. In a healthy #openweb ecology, you’d expect to see:

A Mastodon instance for Oxford academics and students
A Lemmy server for Oxfordshire campaigners sharing local issues
A Mobilizon instance for local events, climate actions, social meetups
A PeerTube or Castopod space archiving local talks, indie music, alt-news

These are the digital town halls we should be building. But we’re not. Why? Oxford isn’t just any city. It is where the World Wide Web first found public ground in the UK. I used the first web browser in a room set aside for “the internet” here almost 30 years ago, it was a wonder. It’s a place that is full of geeky students, hackers and programmers. With a deep history of academic freedom and radical thought, that has long served as a symbolic cradle for digital culture. If we can’t see clear Fediverse infrastructure here, something’s broken, and not just in Oxford.

What’s holding us back? Possibilities, the myth of spontaneity? We assume that because the Fediverse is “open,” it will naturally emerge everywhere. It won’t. Like any commons, it needs cultivation, volunteers, funding, attention.

Invisible technical barriers, running a Fediverse server isn’t hard, but it’s also not beginner-friendly. And even “geeky” students are under immense pressure, rents, loans, side gigs. Who’s got time to run infra?

Cultural disconnection, we have a user class and a developer class, and they rarely mix. No one’s stepping up to build for their community, because the tech feels distant, or worse, owned by someone else.

#NGO capture & misplaced focus, a lot of #FOSS energy gets eaten up by grant-funded projects that serve other bureaucratic ends. Meanwhile, grassroots needs, like “a city-based server for sharing local stuff”, get overlooked or dismissed as unscalable.

What do we do? Let’s flip the question around. Why NOT have a Fediverse server in every city? If we started treating servers like digital community gardens, then:

Local campaigns could run Lemmy or Mastodon spaces
Libraries could host Pixelfed galleries of community art
Climate groups could run Mobilizon for mutual aid and action
Neighbours could share events and info, outside of corporate silos

Oxford needs a server, so does your city. This is a callout – and a call-in, if you’re a sysadmin, activist, student, tinkerer, or just someone who cares about your city and the #openweb, start asking: where’s our server? Let’s build it. Let’s map it. Let’s make the Fediverse a place of places, not just a cloud of abstract URLs. We need to get the #Fediverse out of “nerd island” and into the towns and cities we actually live in.

On the history of the web and Oxford (BBC). Want to help start a #MastodonOxford or similar? Let’s talk. We have the tools. We just need the will.

Programming Mission: Let’s Fix the Fediverse Discovery Gap

UPDATE: On this needed path, let’s try and focus on diversity of codebases. As the is currently too much focus on vertical, #Mastodon is locked into its own trajectory, a closed loop of PR, hierarchy, and “favourites over merit”, so trying to wrestle it into something else is a waste of energy.

The smart path is to let it drift into its own #mainstreaming Fediverse while we work on the #openweb reboot without importing it mess path. The wider challenge is making sure our reboot isn’t just “not Mastodon” but actually functional, grounded, and healthy, with native governance, trust-based collaboration, and the #4opens at the core.

If we’re talking plan, I’d frame it as:

Draw the line – Publicly define what’s “native” openweb culture and what’s toxic carry-over from #geekproblem and #NGOcapture.

Build in public – Open docs, open processes, open code, open governance (#4opens), so trust compounds over time.

Seed alternative centres of gravity – Forge small, working nodes that can federate and interoperate without depending on a single code-base and Dev crew.

Culture over code – Prioritize conviviality, generosity, and horizontal decision-making before feature creep.

Pull people sideways – Attract users and devs who are frustrated with the PR-walled gardens, not by attacking mainstreaming Mastodon but by showing something that feels better to use and be part of.

Programming Mission: Let’s Fix the Fediverse Discovery Gap

Here’s a small but powerful challenge for #openweb builders – and a perfect #DIY project if you’re fed up with the current #geekproblem. I’ve been trying to find #Fediverse instances that actually cover my town, Oxford, UK, so I can help promote and grow them locally. You’d think this would be simple, right? But… nope.

Tried the standard “instance pickers”? Dead ends. Tried generic web searches? Useless #SEO sludge. Tried maps like this one, a good start https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/fediverse-near-me_828094#7/52.076/-1.714, but nothing covering Oxford.

Why is this happening? Because our current tools focus only on technical facts (server specs, software used, uptime, etc.) and ignore the uncontrolled (dangerous) metadata that actually makes discovery meaningful:

What’s the instance for?
Who does it serve?
What community does it represent?
Where is it rooted geographically or socially?

This is the #geekproblem in action: great code, but no way to find things people actually want to use. What’s the fix? Someone (maybe you?) could create a community-focused discovery tool that:

Encourages instance admins to tag with location, community, topics, etc.
Provides search/filter UI that works for real people, not sysadmins
Uses the Fediverse’s open standards (#ActivityPub + #microformats) to pull this info in
Maybe even integrates with OpenStreetMap or a simple opt-in geo-tagged registry
Outputs something friendly – like “Find your Fediverse community in your town”

This is not a hard project, it’s a weekend hack for someone who cares, but it has real social value as it helps bridge infrastructure to lived communities. That’s the core of the #openweb reboot.

So for people who can’t see why this matter. If we want the Fediverse to grow beyond techies and Twitter refugees, we need to help people find their people. Local discovery is key. Place-based communities are still powerful, especially when rebuilding trust, mutual aid, and shared media in a collapsing world.

So, want a simple mission? Build a tool that helps people find #Fediverse instances by town, city, or region. Start with Oxford, but make it global. Make it open. Make it federated. And when you do? I’ll be the first to push it out.

#Fediverse #OMN #openweb #4opens #FediverseDiscovery #programmingchallenge #Geekproblem #MutualAid #CodeForGood #FOSS #localweb #trustnotcontrol #KISS

Update: my suggestion of path, a simple UX:

A few dropdowns over the map,

Region (countries are regions, anti-nationalistic)
City/area (a county or city)
local (village, area in city)
Them maybe latter hyper local (but not for now)

Then we have subject – it would be normal to have a multi subject hashtag map, that updates on each click – adding the clicks to a list on the side – with “new button” to jump back to start.

Then you have advanced for the normal tech stuff… which currently is the front end on most pickers. This would also be displayed on the info box for each instance on the map, so still central, just not AT THE FRONT.

UPDATE: can just pull all the existing data out of the current sites like https://instances.social/list#lang=en&allowed=&prohibited=&min-users=&max-users= as these are all #4opens. So the projected site could be up and running with full data in little time. Yes, you would have to ask people to tag their installs to geolocate their instances. This could be done a hard way or a simple #KISS way like any admin in the instance adding a #hashtag with a geolocation hashtag after it. Then periodically go through the instance list and spider all admins on each instance if you find the hashtag – add the next hashtag as a geolocation or something as simple as this.

Ideas in comments, please.

UPDATE: this is this one https://fediverse.observer/map works better still nothing in Oxford – it seems to be pretty random with little relevance to subject and area, is it by IP address, that would be #geekproblem

Why Doesn’t Every City Have a Fediverse Server?

Getting through this era of collapse with anything humane intact

The discussions on sovereignty at #NGIForum2025 make me wonder: what year are we in? It’s as if we’re rebooting grassroots conversations we’ve had for decades – but without the mess, memory, or movement that gave them meaning in the first place.

A breath of clarity came from @renchap, who said it plainly:

We need to focus our efforts on funding and supporting public value network infrastructure… THAT CANNOT BE BOUGHT. 💪

Absolutely. If that idea resonates with you, try starting with the #4opens – a pragmatic path to build tech with real accountability and openness. It’s not a utopia, it’s a filter designed to push out 95% of the #techshit we’re constantly drowning in. The rest? That’s the work: compromise, community, governance.

For those curious about mapping this stuff, I appreciate the attempt to formalize governance components of digital commons here: https://commons.mattischneider.fr/2-constituants It’s useful, but my take? Still not messy enough to reflect how real-world horizontal projects actually work. As the site rightly says:

“If you already have experience in operating commons, you or your organisation will probably have specific practices that are more appropriate to your context.”

Exactly, why context matters, and why real commons need trust-based governance, not just metrics and diagrams. Let’s remember:

Tools are only useful if people use them.
And that’s our real problem right now.

Take this audience question as a clear example: What should we do when a US company acquires an EU one – like Cisco buying Slido? It hits the core issue:

Centralized, vertical control is always the endgame of VC funding and the mainstream tech stack.

What’s the mainstream response? Push more AI. Push more “innovation.” Push more #stupidindividualism. This story is heavily funded and constantly amplified. Why? Because it keeps us distracted, divided, and demobilized. We need to compost this garbage.

Let’s stop pretending #opensource is the goal. It’s only useful if it lives in common infrastructure, owned and governed collectively, with embedded solidarity, not slogans. Yes, someone pointed out that:

"Open source licensing permits continued operation of the software with an EU provider."

That’s technically true, but in practice, how many such transitions actually happen? How many of these tools become hollowed-out ghost projects after the buyout? We need the EU to fund #4opens #FOSS and commons-native projects directly, not startups chasing exit strategies.

And yes, I’ll be blunt here:

There’s likely a whole class of people who should be prosecuted for fraud.

Because the current “innovation” circuit is knowingly wasting public money on private gain under “our” banner of openness. It’s a con. A parasitic class living off the #countercultures they parasitise. So let’s call this out, not to “disrupt” for disruption’s sake, but to open up space for what actually matters:

Native projects with shared roots in code, care, and community.
Activism that isn’t tacked on for #PR, but central to the infrastructure itself.
Horizontal governance that embraces mess, rather than paving over it.

We don’t need more products, we don’t need more platforms, we don’t need more panels pushing safe #neoliberal “common sense.” What we do need is to build and protect infrastructure that can’t be bought, captured, or silenced. Because that’s the only way we’re getting through this era of collapse with anything humane intact.

#NGIForum #NGIForum25 #4opens #OMN #openweb #techshit #commonsnotplatforms #mutualaid #FOSS #trustnotcontrol #liberalcapture #activismtech #geekproblem

Oxford: Going with The Flow