The #NastyFew are not hiding in the shadows, they’re integrated. The so-called “Epstein files” are not the record of one predator. They are a snapshot of how #mainstreaming works at elitist levels, a map of proximity around the people who default-run the mess we call society.
Billionaires. Prime ministers. Cabinet officials. Tech founders. Bankers. Cultural icons.
From Bill Gates to Elon Musk. From Reid Hoffman to Peter Thiel. From Ehud Barak to Prince Andrew.
Different countries. Different parties. Different supposed ideologies.
Same choreography:
Minimise. Deny. Distance. Then quietly continue.
This isn’t a normal view of Left vs Right. It’s naked class power of capital, office, platform and narrative dominance. We are ruled by a tightly interlocked ecosystem of board members, ministers, venture capitalists, financiers, media gatekeepers, and intelligence-adjacent operators who circulate through the same rooms.
When someone like Jeffrey Epstein enters that ecosystem, the question isn’t “Is he moral?” It’s “Is he useful?” for access, introductions, money flows and information leverage. Utility beats any ethics, every time. The system Is working, If it were broken, this mess would have triggered collapse. Instead, what did we get? Public outrage cycles, partisan weaponisation, conspiracy noise, then normality. All the mainstreaming did was shrug, markets, platforms, elections and most importantly funding rounds continued. We get increasing calls that the mainstream needs to move on.
What we are experiencing is not failure, it’s design. The system functions as intended: absorb scandal, protect capital concentration, maintain continuity. Consolidation Is the real danger, it isn’t only the criminality, it’s this consolidation. Look at the overlap:
The founders of the #dotcons we use to communicate.
The investors shaping AI and data infrastructure.
The companies building surveillance tooling.
The politicians writing regulatory frameworks.
The financiers underwriting the entire stack.
When the same class controls:
Capital
Media distribution
Data infrastructure
Political influence
As more evidence surfaces, something predictable happens. Truth becomes radioactive, reasonable people back away, the conversation collapses into culture-war sludge, signal drowns in noise. Information overload stabilises the system, not an accident that while we argue, the #NastyFew consolidate.
You cannot reform a system that protects itself through structural interdependence. Accountability becomes theatre, you can only build outside its smoke, mirrors, and radioactive truth. The hard part is waiting becomes consent, and we keep waiting for the courts, elections, investigations, journalists and for platforms to regulate themselves. But those institutions are staffed, funded, and structurally influenced by the same #nastyfew class. Waiting is not neutral, it is consent via inertia.
To start to compost this mess we need to get back to rebooting an alternative, for twenty years I’ve been arguing that we urgently need to reboot a working alternative. A good place to start is the #openweb as the mainstream web is dominated by corporate platforms tightly coupled to capital and intelligence ecosystems. We cannot keep debating inside systems owned by the #NastyFew and expect any structural change.
We need #4opens publishing infrastructure, federated networks with transparent governance and community hosting to build protocol-level resilience infrastructure. Not hobby projects, this is where projects like the #OMN come in – Replace, Don’t Rage – If the top layer is structurally compromised, the answer isn’t endless outrage, it’s replacement. But not with another billionaire, another charismatic founder or “ethical” walled garden. But with #KISS open protocols building shared distributed control for memory that cannot be quietly buried.
Because the real lesson here isn’t just that elitist protects elitists, it’s that centralised systems protect concentration of power, and concentration of power always protects itself. We need to build the alternative before the #NastyFew finish locking the doors.
Why use strong words, because there are parasites and shit to shovel. Why this is helpful? Because it gives the people who currently being default parasitic a chance not to be, and the people who are creating #techshit space to compost some of this mess making. If they do, fantastic, a kindness has been done. If they don’t, we can compost the #fuckwits ourselves to grow something better #KISS.
“Impossible” is a horizon, not a boundary, not a fantasy, it is a pattern in history – abolition was “impossible.”, Universal suffrage was “impossible.”, Worker self-organisation was “impossible.” An open, global communication network outside state control was “impossible.” Until people acted as if it weren’t.
The function of calling something impossible is too often, political, about narrowing imagination and disciplining ambition, to keep demands within the limits of what current power structures find tolerable.
But structural shifts rarely start as “reasonable proposals.” they start as overreach – commons infrastructure, resisting enclosure, pushing back on identity-gated speech, building beyond scarcity logic – If we only aim for what seems immediately feasible within existing incentives, we tend to only reinforce those incentives.
If we aim beyond them, we can change the terrain, we may not reach the “impossible” goal, but we shift what becomes possible next. That’s the wager, it’s not utopian perfection or strategic overreach, historically, it’s acturly #KISS how the boundaries move.
With this firmly in mind, it’s useful to talk in metaphors, the poetry of life balances communication with blunt truth. Let’s look at current mess making. Open spaces attract life, they also attract parasites, that’s ecology. The #openweb and #4opens spaces generate value:
code
trust
collaboration
legitimacy
cultural capital
Composting Is real work, when drift sets in, someone has to shovel. It’s messy, exhausting, unpaid and constant, because digital commons produce nutrients – and institutional actors are trained to harvest nutrients. If nobody composts the shit, the projects choke.
Where value accumulates, extraction follows, the “parasite class” in tech isn’t evil masterminds. They tend to come from a layer of actors – often institutional, often NGO-aligned, often career-professional – who attach themselves to commons projects and redirect energy toward grant cycles, branding positioning and compliance governance trends. They don’t build the soil, they feed on it.
One of the Infections is digital scarcity, the most common parasite logic is simple, “Everyone should pay their way.” It sounds responsible, mature, it sounds sustainable. It’s also a direct import from market ideology. Digital infrastructure is non-rivalrous. It can be shared at near-zero marginal cost. But scarcity logic is reintroduced through:
subscriptions
premium tiers
paywalled functionality
SaaS dependency
professional gatekeeping
That’s enclosure wearing a cardigan, not building commons, it’s rebuilding platforms with nicer vibes.
The #NGO layer brings its own metabolism of risk aversion, soferned by consensus theatre. This is about measurable outputs, depoliticised language and in the end branding as reputational management. Again, not directly evil, but structurally parasitic to native grassroots paths. Because the moment legitimacy becomes more important than usefulness, the centre of gravity shifts. You start designing for funders instead of participants. You optimise optics instead of flows. You’re protecting the brand instead of the commons.
So it’s useful to ask why this keeps happening? Because the commons produce surplus of trust, energy, attention and infrastructure. Institutional actors are trained to capture surplus. They don’t see themselves as parasites. They see themselves as stabilisers. But when their survival depends on control by managing narratives, they can’t help bending the project toward those needs. That’s structural parasitism.
The real questions, where the value is, are you building soil or feeding off soil someone else built? Are you increasing abundance or reintroducing scarcity through “sustainable” monetisation? Are you decentralising power materially or professionalising it? Be honest.
The shovel test is are you building out the commons, or are you feeding on commons energy. Commons infrastructure should reduce dependence on gatekeepers, not multiply them.
The spiky bottom line: Yes, there are parasites. Yes, there’s shit to shovel. No, pretending everything is collaborative harmony doesn’t help. The work of the #OMN and #4opens isn’t trend-chasing or NGO alignment. It’s building resilient soil, designing against digital scarcity, protecting flows from enclosure by keeping governance open and messy.
If that makes institutional actors uncomfortable, that’s fine. Composting always smells bad before it becomes fertile. The question is whether we’re willing to pick up the shovel – or whether we’d rather keep pretending the pile isn’t growing.
Stop burning out alone, the number of good people burning out right now is not accidental. It’s what happens when systemic problems are framed as personal responsibility.
Collective infrastructure is weak and crisis is constant. No one can carry that alone, and no one should try.
The solution isn’t heroic effort, it’s shared architecture. In #FOSS terms: if the system keeps crashing, stop blaming the users. Redesign the stack, that’s the composting we actually need to do.
Meany people see the world degrading, enclosure accelerating. They see climate, politics, media all bending toward extraction. And even when they can see the trajectory, they feel powerless, so they cope by optimise their careers. They scroll. They argue. They consume. They retreat into irony. From birth, we’re trained into one core assumption: There Is No Alternative (#TINA).
Not because it’s true, but because every dominant institution reinforces it:
Schools train compliance.
Media normalises enclosure.
Platforms reward performance over substance.
Workplaces absorb our creative energy into extractive systems.
The message is subtle but constant:
“You can’t change anything.”
“Radicals just break things.”
“Be reasonable. Fit in.”
For builders, this message hits differently, because we know alternatives are possible, we’ve already built them. This is the #FOSS Paradox, as free and open source software proves collaboration without enclosure works, commons-based production works, open standards work and distributed governance can work. Yet somehow, the infrastructure we helped build keeps being enclosed.
The #openweb became the #dotcons, protocols became platforms and communities became markets. Not because we failed technically, but because we underestimated scale, incentives, and capture. And too often, we built tools without building parallel social power. The real trap isn’t rebellion – It’s drift – The #mainstreaming system doesn’t survive by crushing everyone loudly. It survives by absorbing alternatives, funding safe versions of dissent, steering energy into manageable channels and exhausting people with maintenance and precarity
Gatekeeping doesn’t always look like repression, more it looks like grants, partnerships, “best practices,” and institutional legitimacy. The result is that talented builders end up reinforcing the systems they once set out to replace. Not out of malice more from survival.
This Is where #OMN and #4opens come In, it isn’t only ranting about what’s broken, it’s about rebuilding missing layers:
Trust
Shared infrastructure
Media flows outside algorithmic capture
Governance rooted in actual participants
The #4opens are not branding, they are structural safeguards:
Open data
Open source
Open standards
Open process
Without all four, enclosure can creep back in, slowly, politely and inevitably.
This Is not about individual heroics, the myth of the lone hacker is part of the problem. What we need for the new “common sense” is that #stupidindividualism is a dead end. Few people escape extractive systems alone, no one builds durable alternatives alone. Collective infrastructure helps build counterweight to centralised power.
That’s what the #Fediverse gestures toward, what the #openweb once promised, and what needs strengthening now. A first step is to stop pretending we’re powerless. If you’re in #FOSS, you already have:
skills
networks
literacy in decentralised systems
experience with commons governance
What’s missing isn’t capability, it’s coordination and shared direction. The first step isn’t dramatic, it’s simple, reject the #NGO path to:
Find your people.
Support projects aligned with the #4opens.
Build flows, not just features.
Connect tools to real communities.
Refuse quite capture.
Do something – anything – that strengthens commons infrastructure instead of platform enclosure. The biggest lie Is that there’s no choice, when we keep repeating “this is just how things are,” eventually it becomes self-fulfilling. But history says otherwise, every dominant system looks permanent, until it isn’t.
The real outsiders aren’t the loudest rebels, they’re the ones who quietly stop reinforcing broken systems and start building viable alternatives. That’s what this moment asks of the #FOSS community is not #blocking outrage, not purity and not only collapse fantasies.
So, please stop waiting for permission, build systems that align with human autonomy and biophysical reality by strengthening commons before they’re erased. Because alternatives don’t appear, they’re built, and if we don’t build them, enclosure wins by default.
Ten years ago – and honestly long before that – there were endless conversations on #failbook about how useful it was for campaigning. The dominant view back then was simple: it’s just cat memes, it’s just tooling, it isn’t political so we can use it harmlessly. Before Snowden, this wasn’t a fringe view – it was probably a 90% consensus, especially among activists, and #fashionista tech communities. I’m not pointing fingers here, as this was normal. Many of us – including friends and collaborators – believed this.
And that’s exactly why we need to remember it. If we forget, we repeat, if we scapegoat, we learn nothing and become no better than the trolls. The problem isn’t individuals – it’s collective amnesia. The is an issue of responsibility and historical memory, that when people deny their own history of responsibility, they disconnect from reality. That’s how too meany people drift into the same “post-truth” space we criticise in figures like Trump or Stammer, where inconvenient past positions are quietly erased.
The uncomfortable truth is that many of us argued that #dotcons were neutral platforms, engagement was empowerment, memes were harmless cultural glue. Meanwhile, our healthier #openweb tools were neglected and dismantled, community infrastructure withered, while the #closedweb platform economy consolidated power. Looking back isn’t about blame. It’s about understanding how we arrived at this mess.
The campaigning trap? Ironically, many tech-minded activists used to run workshops teaching people how to campaign on #dotcons – even as we recognise that these platforms structurally undermine autonomy, community governance, and sustainable organising. This didn’t only happen because people were stupid or malicious. It happened because convenience replaced infrastructure building, the #geekproblem undervalued usability and social design and short-term reach trumped long-term resilience. The result is a paradox: we built our movements inside systems that weakened them.
But spreading more shit without composting it – just makes alternative spaces smell worse and drives people away. This mess is not history, it’s now. This conversation isn’t nostalgia or score-settling. It’s about the present and future. Looking back is how we understand structural mistakes to rebuild shared memory and #KISS avoid repeating cycles of platform capture.
The compost metaphor is useful, #OMN is a spade not a weapon – a tool. A spade digs, turns soil to compost what came before. The mess we helped create – the attention traps, the algorithmic silos, the dependency on corporate platforms – isn’t something to deny or hide, it’s material to compost into something better.
The choices we made then still shape the terrain we stand on today. It’s the #fashernista problem, one of the biggest blocks to building real alternatives is this #fashernista dynamic – activism as aesthetic performance rather than infrastructure building. It looks radical, It feels good, but it rarely produces durable tools or collective power. Real alternatives require slower, less glamorous work of maintaining systems, building trust networks to support messy grassroots processes and designing for longevity rather than attention spikes.
A bridge forward? As I keep saying, this isn’t about shame or purity politics. Almost everyone followed the same path because the incentives pointed that way. The real question is that now that we know better, what do we build next?
#OMN isn’t nostalgia for a lost web – it’s an attempt to learn from past failures and construct a media infrastructure that remembers history to support collective agency and avoids repeating the mistakes that led to the current #dotcons landscape.
This message is a shovel. The question is whether we use it to dig trenches against each other – or to prepare soil where something better can grow.
We are feeling a cultural current many of us recognise but rarely name clearly. A feeling that something fundamental has gone wrong, not just politically or economically, but culturally. An experience that imagination has narrowed, participation has thinned, and people are increasingly pushed into the role of spectators rather than participants in shaping the world.
This didn’t appear overnight. It grew out of decades of #neoliberal restructuring that reshaped culture, technology, and social life. Collective institutions were hollowed out, public spaces became marketplaces, creativity became branding and community became “audience”. Instead of shared projects, we were offered platforms, instead of commons, we were given services, instead of any participation, metrics.
This cultural shift produced a generation who feel the weight of a system that seems unavoidable – a reality that presents itself as permanent even as it fails to meet human needs. People sense the limits, but struggle to imagine alternatives because the cultural language for collective agency has been systematically eroded.
This is the environment the #dotcons thrive in, where the #closedweb turns culture into extraction and participation becomes only more engagement metrics. Community, user base, conversation content streams are where cooperation is #blocked due to competition for visibility.
And over time, this reshapes what people think about organising itself. Grassroots action begins to look unrealistic, messy, and inefficient compared to polished controlled platform experiences. Then trust disappears, replaced by algorithmic mediation and institutional management.
Yet beneath this dominant culture, another current has always existed, the #openweb culture, rooted in collaboration, experimentation, shared stewardship, and imperfect but real participation. IP protocol stack built on mailing lists, wikis, federated systems, grassroots media, DIY infrastructures, spaces where people build together rather than consume.
This culture never fully disappeared, as it was needed by the mainstreaming, it was just pushed to the margins. The #OMN project grows from this undercurrent, not as a reaction against technology, as a continuation of the parts of internet culture that treated technology as commons rather than a commodity. It #KISS recognises that infrastructure shapes social behaviour, and that rebuilding a healthier culture requires rebuilding the spaces where people meet, publish, and organise.
The difference is social logic, from social platform ownership grows to shared protocols, from central moderation to community mediation, from passive users to active participants. It’s the change from scale-as-growth to scale-as-federation.
Importantly, this isn’t nostalgia or any path to purity politics. The culture that produces #OMN understands that systems are messy. Grassroots projects fail, fork, and struggle. But instead of seeing this as weakness, it treats messiness as the natural process of collective growth. Composting rather than perfection.
The mistake of both corporate platforms and #NGO approaches is trying to engineer clean solutions to fundamentally social problems. The #geekproblem looks for perfect systems; the grassroots path builds resilient ones through ongoing practice.
This is why affinity groups, federated networks, and the #4opens matter. They create structures where trust emerges from shared action rather than imposed authority. The culture behind #OMN is not defined by ideology alone, it is defined by lived practice of people who build together and communities that govern themselves, to remain open to change
In a world that tells us “there is no alternative,” the simple act of building functioning alternatives becomes quietly radical. And when enough small, federated efforts connect, what once felt impossible begins to look normal again. That is how cultural change happens, not through grand declarations, but through many small working examples growing from shared soil.
For sceptical #FOSS engineers, this isn’t an argument for abandoning structure, security, or technical rigour, it’s the opposite. The lesson from decades of open-source development is that trust does not mean naïveté; it means building systems where failure modes are expected and mitigated through transparency, modularity, and federation. #OMN applies these same engineering principles socially: small loosely-coupled groups instead of monoliths, open protocols instead of platform lock-in, observable processes instead of hidden governance.
If “pure trust” sounds unrealistic, think instead of reproducible builds, version control, and peer review, trust emerges from verifiable processes and shared ownership. The goal isn’t utopian social engineering; it’s creating resilient sociotechnical systems where collaboration scales horizontally because no single node becomes a point of failure or control.
A practical bridge-building approach for the #openweb / #OMN – for grassroots organisers, Fediverse communities, and sceptical #FOSS engineers.
An affinity group is not simply “a group of people who agree.” It is a functional social tool: small enough to build trust, structured enough to act, and open enough to grow.
A working path is to start with purpose, not only ideology. The biggest mistake is forming around identity or theory rather than function. Affinity groups work when they are built around shared work, not shared labels. So for #OMN, instead of saying “let’s build an affinity group for radical media,” we try something concrete like: “a small group committed to building and testing OMN publishing workflows for real users.” A clear, practical purpose lowers defensive reactions and creates common ground.
Ideal size and composition matter. Affinity groups historically work best with around 4–8 people – large enough for diversity, small enough for trust. This avoids both NGO-style bureaucracy and lone-founder burnout. Useful roles include: builder (technical), organiser (social process), storyteller or documenter, critic/tester (essential for reducing groupthink), and connector (linking to the wider network). These are roles, not hierarchy.
Trust must be built through practice. Many people distrust grassroots projects because they have seen “pure trust” models fail. So don’t rely only on ideological alignment, build procedural trust instead. Examples include small, regular deliverables (“what did we actually ship?”), rotating facilitation, transparent public logs where possible, and shared infrastructure ownership, so no single person holds control. Trust grows from repeated, visible action.
Clear boundary rules prevent both NGO capture and chaos. Without boundaries, affinity groups dissolve. Keep rules simple and aligned with #KISS: anyone can observe, participation requires contribution, decisions are made by consent or rough consensus, and there are no permanent leaders, focus more on rotating roles. Forking is allowed, following federation principles. This mirrors ActivityPub socially as well as technically.
Mediation is built into #OMN. Use soft mediation practices such as assuming good faith but verifying through actions, and asking whether behaviour supports the shared task. When conflicts cannot be resolved, allow parallel experiments rather than endless arguments. This avoids the classic problem of well-meaning people unintentionally derailing collective work.
Avoid the #NGO trap from the start. Instead of mission statements, boards, and strategic documents, focus on working notes, small experiments, and iterative prototypes. Document reality rather than intentions. NGO structures often push power upward; affinity groups keep power at the edges.
Bridge-building with #FOSS and Fediverse communities is essential for adoption. Frame #OMN affinity groups as neither anti-engineering nor anti-structure, but anti-centralised control. Messaging like “we’re applying federation principles socially, not just technically” resonates strongly with #ActivityPub builders and open-source contributors.
Growth should happen through replication, not scaling. The affinity group is not the movement – it is a seed node. New participants do not simply accumulate; instead, new affinity groups form. Groups coordinate through federation via shared protocols and culture. This approach mirrors #Indymedia nodes, the early Fediverse, and many successful activist networks.
Concrete first steps: identify 3–5 people already doing related work; define one narrow OMN goal; hold a weekly 60–90-minute working session with a public log; rotate facilitation from the beginning; and ship something small within two weeks. Momentum builds legitimacy.
Affinity groups solve three problems simultaneously: they prevent NGO-style centralisation, reduce lone-founder burnout through shared responsibility, and resist #dotcons growth-for-growth’s-sake logic. In many ways, they are the social equivalent of federation.
If we want meaningful change rather than internal noise, it helps to talk less about individual personalities and more about roles, structures, and class. Individuals come and go, but the patterns they operate within repeat. Shifting focus this way isn’t about avoiding accountability, it’s about understanding the dynamics that shape behaviour across projects and communities.
When we centre individuals, discussions drift into blame or hero narratives, which generates more temporary heat than permanent light. When we look more at structural incentives, cultural habits, and class dynamics, we start to see why the same problems reappear across different spaces – from grassroots projects to NGOs to #FOSS communities.
This is a signal-to-noise issue. A #KISS approach helps: keep analysis simple, structural, and grounded in shared experience. By reducing personalisation and increasing systemic understanding, we create more room for collaboration, learning, and mediation, which is important when building sustainable paths like the #openweb and #OMN.
What we then need to compost. It’s a normal mainstreaming augment that systems built primarily on trust will inevitably rot, decay, and collapse. That concern is understandable. Many people’s lived experience tells them that without strong control structures, things fall apart. And honestly – sometimes they do.
But the story is more complicated than that. First, there are long-term examples of trust-based or grassroots systems working, though they rarely look neat or institutional enough to be recognised as “successful” by mainstream standards. The difficulty is that these systems are best understood through participation rather than observation. They are lived processes, not static models. I document some of this history on my site, but reading alone rarely communicates the full reality, experience does.
Second, yes, grassroots projects can be damaged by well-meaning people. That isn’t paranoia; it’s everyday reality. Social dynamics, unconscious habits from institutional culture, and imported control patterns all create friction. The #OMN approach accepts this and builds mediation strategies directly into projects. These strategies are imperfect, and we often get things wrong, but acknowledging the problem openly is part of making the work sustainable.
And to the harder question: if good intentions can cause disruption, what happens when bad actors show up? The answer is that no system is immune. Control-heavy systems fail too – sometimes more dramatically because their rigidity hides problems until they become catastrophic. The goal isn’t to create a perfect system (the classic #geekproblem), but to build a more humane messy system that can adapt, respond, and recover.
All functioning social systems are messy. Trying to eliminate that mess usually creates more fragility, not less. Instead, the path forward is to embrace smaller, resilient units that federate horizontally, many small experiments linked together rather than one central structure trying to manage everything. This is where the #fediverse and projects like #OMN become interesting: we now have technologies that allow small-scale trust networks to interconnect without collapsing into centralized control.
Will people try to take control or undermine these spaces? Of course. That’s part of reality. The work is to build cultures and processes that mediate this continuously, rather than pretending it can be eliminated.
What we maybe need to convince sceptical engineers is not ideology but demonstrated failure modes and working counter-patterns. Trust-based systems are not naive if they are designed with clear threat models, transparent processes, and layered social/technical safeguards. The question is not “can grassroots projects fail?” – all systems fail – but whether they fail visibly, recover ably, and without capture.
Long-lived commons like Wikipedia moderation structures, Debian governance, early Apache development, and parts of the Fediverse show that in tech messy, trust-anchored collaboration can operate for decades when legitimacy is distributed and process is open. #OMN is not proposing blind trust; it proposes observable trust – where actions, history, and reputation are legible through open process (#4opens), allowing engineers to audit the social layer much like they audit code.
The real engineering challenge is not eliminating messiness (a classic #geekproblem trap), but designing systems where messiness becomes resilient rather than brittle. Nobody said it would be easy, but difficulty doesn’t mean impossibility. It means the work is social as much as technical.
None of this new – as Bakunin put it, “The peoples’ revolution will arrange its revolutionary organization from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.” Whether or not we use the language of revolution, the underlying insight is practical rather than ideological: durable systems grow from lived participation outward, not from abstract design imposed from above.
In #openweb and #OMN thinking, this means building structures that enable agency at the edges while allowing coordination to emerge through federation and shared practice. The goal isn’t purity or perfection, but resilient networks where trust, mediation, and collective responsibility evolve through use – messy, iterative, and grounded in real communities rather than centralized control.
We need to describe a real structural problem that shows up again and again in grassroots projects. Well-meaning people arrive claiming to help “community”, but operate through control patterns learned from institutions, #dotcons platforms and professional #NGO culture. They work very hard, believe they are doing good, and unintentionally damage horizontal processes they want to become a part of.
This isn’t primarily a personal problem – it’s a culture clash problem. And yes, mediation, especially embedded mediation, is what we’re building into #OMN to correct direction. Let’s break this down in to practical approaches that actually work in messy grassroots ecosystems. First we need to name the real tension clearly, the conflict is NOT good people vs bad people, activists vs NGOs and grassroots vs professionals. The real tension is: Control logic vs Trust logic
Control logic (learned from #dotcons / NGO structures) is about optimising for risk reduction by centralise decision-making to push standardisation. They measure success through outputs and metrics, and assume governance must prevent failure.
Trust logic (#DIY / grassroots / early #openweb) is about optimise for participation and learning by distributed responsibility and messy iteration. Success is measured by living community, where governance supports emergence rather than preventing mistakes.
Most people don’t consciously choose control, they import it because it’s what they know. So #OMN mediation starts by framing this as different operating paths, not moral failure. We build “translation layers” instead of confrontation, the worst outcome is ideological escalation, leading to #blocking
Instead, we try to create structures that translate between cultures. Examples: Write governance docs describing WHY things are messy, explicitly explain “social messiness is intentional design”. We to do this to frame openness as resilience, not lack of structure.
People from institutional backgrounds need permission to stop controlling. We can try and use process friction as onboarding. Maybe sending people through archaeology (reading posts, repos, etc). Might be actually GOOD – but only if framed constructively. Instead of “read this before asking questions” we could try “The project is built through shared learning – exploring this material helps you understand why we work this way.” Make friction educational, intentional, welcoming but firm. Not defensive.
One contradictory thing is that we need to recognise is the hardest workers are risk points, the worst ones work the hardest. Yes, because control-oriented people express care through effort, effort becomes legitimacy, legitimacy becomes informal authority. What’s the solution maybe to balance effort and decision power, decisions require some consensus and transparent process, not only labour contribution. We can also help by make invisible labour visible (care work, mediation, maintenance).
On this path, we need to introduce “soft boundaries” instead of hard blocking, as hard blocking only escalates conflict. Instead, we can focus on redirecting energy into specific roles or tasks, channel control impulses into infrastructure or documentation. Example: “That’s an interesting governance idea, can you prototype it in a parallel working group?”. This, preserves autonomy, avoids direct rejection and tests ideas in practice.
What works if you have the resources and patience is to teach #DIY culture implicitly, not by argument. Many problems come from lack of exposure to horizontal culture. Best not to lecture about #DIY, instead make participation experiential, let people see how trust works through doing. Design processes where newcomers experience collective decision-making, and failure is visible but safe.
Structural mediation patterns for #OMN are strengthened by regularly asking:
Are we slipping into control patterns?
Are we excluding through complexity?
Are we drifting too far into informal hierarchy?
Make this normal so that multiple pathways allow for experimental edges, stable core infrastructure and messy periphery. People can self-select into environments matching their comfort level.
We should always be making visible social values, not just technical #4opens. This needs to be explicit: openness to disagreement, expectation of plural narratives, composting failure, a powerful governance guidance – Compost works because decomposition is allowed, friction produces transformation, nothing is wasted, but everything changes form. Translating into policy – that conflict is expected, critique is welcomed but must produce something, few things are sacred – but everything is documented.
The deep strategic insight (important) is the goal is NOT to eliminate control-oriented people. We need them as healthy ecosystems require institutional thinkers (stability), grassroots experimenters (innovation), activists (accountability) and bridge-builders (translation). The problem occurs when one mode dominates. So mediation is about maintaining ecological balance.
Let’s look at an example of how belief systems shape political reality. Some people still deliberately conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This confusion isn’t neutral, it shapes how discussions are framed, who gets silenced, and which political paths remain possible. Let’s be clear:
Anti-Semitism is racism. It targets Jewish people as a people. It is hate, exclusion, and violence, and it must be opposed wherever it appears.
Anti-Zionism is political opposition to a state ideology and to actions carried out in its name, particularly when that ideology manifests as ethnic nationalism, apartheid, and genocide. Criticising state power and political structures is not racism; it is part of political accountability.
Much of the current framing is not about honest thinking, it is about strategy. By collapsing these two terms together, critics of state violence can be delegitimised without engaging with what they are actually saying. Debate is shifted away from material realities and toward defensive arguments about identity.
We need to refuse this mess-making. Instead of getting trapped in endless semantic battles, shift the focus toward power and consequences of who holds power? Who is being harmed? What structures enable that harm? Then, how do we build paths toward justice that do not reproduce oppression?
Moments of political rupture – scandals, revelations, shifting alliances – expose how #mainstreaming narratives are constructed and maintained. When these moments occur, people become more open to questioning “common sense.” That creates opportunities for real social change and challenge.
The goal is not to win rhetorical battles inside broken frames, but to move discussion toward ethical clarity and collective responsibility. Focus on actions, structures, and outcomes, not weaponised labels designed to shut conversation down.
This dynamic reflects a broader pattern. People often live inside belief systems that function like religions, even when they present themselves as purely rational. These systems shape what appears normal, possible, or inevitable, and define which questions are allowed.
Modern economics is one of the most powerful of these belief systems. Despite presenting itself as objective and scientific, much contemporary economic thinking has only a tenuous connection to physical reality – ecosystems, material limits, social relationships, and lived community experience. Instead, it operates through abstract models centred on growth, competition, and individual optimisation. These abstractions become controlling myths of markets become invisible gods, “efficiency” becomes moral virtue and growth becomes salvation.
Humans have always created symbolic systems to understand complexity. The problem emerges when these systems detach from the material world. When that happens, distorted decision-making becomes inevitable. Ethnic cleansing, #climatechaos, ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, and recurring conflict are not anomalies, they are predictable outcomes of a worldview that treats nature and community as externalities.
One of the deepest misunderstandings reinforced by liberal ideology is the belief that society is simply the sum of independent individuals. In reality, the individual – their freedom, reason, and identity – emerges from social relationships. Strong individuals are produced by healthy collective structures, not opposed to them.
This insight sits at the heart of anarchist and commons-based traditions, and it was central to the original spirit of the #openweb. This is why the open web – and #OMN – matter, they represent a break from economic fundamentalism because they treat infrastructure as commons rather than commodities by prioritises interoperability, shared stewardship, and collective agency over enclosure and extraction.
By strong contrast, the #mainstreaming#closedweb (#dotcons platforms) reflects economic dogma of enclosure instead of openness, surveillance instead of trust and platform ownership instead of shared governance leading to individual extraction instead of collective flourishing.
The tragedy is that many “alternatives” risk reproducing the same patterns because they inherit the same assumptions. This is why #OMN matters, it isn’t simply another technical project, it is a shifting of the underlying social logic from product thinking to ecosystem thinking, from institutional control to community process (#4opens), from scale as success to resilience as success, to move from abstract models to lived social reality
If modern economics functions as a religion disconnected from nature, then grassroots digital commons are a form of re-grounding. They reconnect technology with human needs, ecological awareness, and collective agency.
We need to be composting the myths. Across both examples – geopolitical narratives and economic ideology – the task is similar: compost the myths. Recognise which assumptions no longer serve us so that new forms can grow. That means questioning inherited narratives, rejecting reactionary nationalism, and building alternatives rooted in shared stewardship and open process.
The #openweb, at its best, is not nostalgia or utopian fantasy. It is a recognition that healthy systems grow from real communities and collective care. And perhaps the most radical step is simply this: step outside our inherited belief systems long enough to remember that we built the web together – and we can rebuild it differently.
It’s interesting to think about the idea of good and bad faith when dealing with people in change and challenge interactions. If you spend time in life doing activism, this will be an ongoing, unpleasant reacuringing relationship. When pushing aside, pushing back #mainstreaming there will be a lot of bad faith coming at you, your good faith is the best and likely only defence.
The individual, their freedom, and their capacity for reason are products of social relationships, not independent origins. Society is not built from isolated individuals; individuals arise from shared culture, history, and collective life. As society grows richer and more humane, individuals gain the conditions needed for deeper development and freedom emerges from this shared foundation.
What’s really at stake is power. The shift has to be away from private ownership and toward the commons – not just in licensing, but in governance, culture, and decision-making. The whole #OMN project is grounded in this understanding. It’s about building shared infrastructure that people can actually use, shape, and grow trust.
One of the great ironies of many “alternative” spaces is that people believe they’re resisting power, yet by locking everything down – secret decisions, closed processes, gatekeeping – they end up recreating the systems they claim to oppose. The result is stasis, nothing moves or grows, everything fragments.
Paranoia is one of the biggest blocking forces in alt-tech and radical spaces. It breeds mistrust, isolation, and internal sabotage, making collective action almost impossible. Some caution is necessary, we’re not naïve, but when paranoia becomes the default posture, it hardens into control. At that point, it stops being defensive and starts being corrupting.
The #4opens is a direct antidote to this. Transparency punctures paranoia. When decisions, processes, and networks are open, there’s less space for suspicion to fester. Trust isn’t built through secrecy or technical cleverness; it’s built through visible, accountable practice over time. Open process beats “good intentions” every time.
This is also why letting technical people make final product decisions is a mistake, overemphasizing technology then underplaying the social problems we’re actually trying to solve. We end up designing better mousetraps without ever asking whether we’re even trying to catch mice. Tech becomes the point, rather than a tool.
This is where the #fashernista problem kicks in, being seen to hold the correct stance replaces doing the work. But staying “right” while nothing changes is another form of failure. If we want alternatives that function, we have to move past paranoia, reopen flows, and accept that trust is something you build, not something you secure with walls.
The uncomfortable truth is that it’s easy to be “right” in theory. It’s much harder to take part in the compromises that building anything real requires. Most people prefer the comfort of ideological purity over the messiness of collective practice, especially when dealing with complex social truths. That’s the trap.
#OMN is often critiqued as if it were a finished system, a moral framework, or an alternative economy. It is none of those things. We need to be clear about scope, sequence, and intent if discussion is going to move forward instead of circling the same ground.
#OMN is a commons-first, tool-building project. It exists to create shared infrastructure, processes, and cultural practices that can grow non-extractive media and communication. It prioritizes shared ownership, open process (#4opens), and reducing capture in order to build the needed public-first infrastructure. It’s about creating conditions, not declaring outcomes.
It’s an early-phase project, an affinity-building space to create tools and governance to reconnect fragmented activist and media histories. It is not claiming to already provide economic survivability, stable long-term livelihoods, or a full replacement for existing systems. Confusing the step with the destination is the root of most disagreement.
It’s grounded in lived historical practice. #OMN grows out of more than 30 years of real projects – Indymedia, grassroots media, squatting and DIY cultures, trust-based networks – and a clear view of where #NGO-driven paths have failed. This history matters. The path is not speculative theory, it’s an attempt to compost what worked, acknowledge what failed, and try again with better tools.
That’s based on a simple historical reality, society does not pay people to challenge itself. Early change is driven by passion, not wages, and support structures emerge after commons exist, not before. This isn’t a moral claim, it’s an observation drawn from experience. #OMN is also a space where tone is a process tool. Friction is used to slow things down, open space for challenge, and form affinity where none yet exists. This is messy by design, not a finished social contract.
We don’t set out to solve how everyone is paid, how risk is evenly distributed, or how long-term security is guaranteed. These are unsolved problems, not denied ones. #OMN exists because these tools do not yet exist, so expecting it to already provide them misunderstands its scope and phase. Participation is voluntary, alignment is practical, not moral. Funding may be used tactically, but OMN is not structured around chasing it.
This is not a safe, smooth, or finished space. The path is unfinished, uneven, and sometimes uncomfortable. If a project has to be safe, stable, and fully funded before it can exist, it will never challenge anything.
The core misunderstanding is that the #OMN is judged for failing to deliver something it has never claimed to already be. What we are doing is building the tools that make survivability possible later, without reproducing the failures that keep repeating. That work is slow, messy, and incomplete – because it has to be.
The shared path is a practical response to repeated historical failure. It is not a promise, a moral demand, or a finished alternative. If you judge a seed by whether it is already a tree, you will never grow anything.
Why groups matter, in our “common sense” we like to pretend society is made up of strong, independent individuals who freely choose everything about their lives. That story is comforting, but it’s also mostly false, humans are group creatures first. People don’t start as individuals. We are born into families, cultures, languages, histories. Our values, assumptions, and sense of what’s “normal” are learned socially long before we ever get a chance to reflect on them. Groups aren’t an add-on to human life – they’re the foundation.
Individual identity is hard work, as modern culture tells us we must be ourselves, define our own path, build a unique identity. But doing that alone is exhausting, being an “individual” means constant self-definition, self-presentation, self-justification. You’re never finished as you’re always proving who you are, to employers, platforms, institutions, and peers.
That permanent uncertainty is what people mean when they talk about burnout, anxiety, and imposter syndrome. Groups reduce that pressure, as belonging to a group shares the load, with values, purpose, norms, responsibility. You don’t have to invent everything from scratch, you’re part of something that existed before you and will continue after you. This isn’t about conformity, it’s about being human, support and continuity.
The current #deathcult myth of pure individual freedom, where individuals are fully free and self-made #KISS serves power. When people are isolated, all problems look personal instead of structural, failure feels like a moral flaw and collective solutions disappear. You can’t organise if everyone thinks and acts as if they’re alone.
Healthy groups vs. toxic groups, yep, groups aren’t automatically good. Some are rigid, exclusionary and authoritarian. Healthy groups are porous and open to change, allow disagreement, are based on trust, not fear and exist to serve their members, not control them. The solution to bad groups isn’t no groups – it’s better ones.
Why this matters for media and the web? The #openweb wasn’t built by isolated individuals chasing personal brands. It grew out of horizontal’ish communities, shared tools, and mutual aid. What broke it, was pushing of individual status, platforms replacing communities then metrics replacing relationships. Projects like #OMN are about rebuilding group-based publishing, shared infrastructure, and collective voice, not amplifying lone influencers.
In short, (stupid) Individualism puts people in a permanent liminal state – alone, unstable, competing. Groups give people grounding, belonging, continuity, and the ability to act together. If we want social change, resilient media, and a future beyond the current mess, we on balance don’t need better individuals, we need better groups.
I proposed a long time ago that #openweb is a less tribal, more expansive framing than #fediverse socially and technically. It’s also #nothingnew, which is honestly a breath of fresh air. We can (and should) use both terms, but if we want meaningful change and challenge to the #mainstreaming mess, we need to foreground the more generic one.
Predictably, this gets pushback from two directions: the non-political #FOSS crowd, and the mainstreaming crew. And yes, when you bring #NGO behaviour into the #fediverse, there’s going to be friction. Try being #openweb-native on this, please.
People are going to keep doing self- and socially-destructive things. That’s a human problem, not a branding one. But the language we choose does shape how we respond to it.
One of the reasons we use a #4opens process is to balance the reality that people often arrive with strong opinions before understanding the history, context, or existing work. The process isn’t there to exclude anyone, it’s there to slow things down just enough so people can orient themselves before trying to reshape what already exists.
At the moment this only works partially, because some people still interpret being asked to explore existing materials as dismissal. For example “You have sent me on a ride through Mastodon posts and two repos while not providing direct answers.”
What may feel like dismissal is actually part of a #DIY open process. The intention is to encourage people to engage with the work already done so conversations can move forward from shared context rather than restarting the same debates repeatedly.
Similarly: “Why assume blog archaeology is the right approach instead of presenting everything in a more processed way?” In grassroots projects, documentation is often messy, organic, and evolving rather than packaged into clean summaries. Exploring this material isn’t busywork, it’s a way to understand the social and historical layers that shape the project. Without that grounding, discussions can unintentionally repeat old loops to propose changes that have already been explored.
And when people say: “Most people don’t have time or energy for this.” That’s a real constraint, but it also highlights the core challenge. Open, collective projects rely on participants investing some effort to understand shared context. Without that, the burden shifts onto existing contributors to repeatedly re-explain the basics, which keeps stalling progress.
The aim here is not gatekeeping or dismissal. It’s #KISS: keep the process simple, open, and grounded in shared effort. If something needs improving – documentation, summaries, onboarding – the most constructive path in a #DIY culture is to step in and help build that improvement together.
The new #NGO generation are in the process of the second sell-out of the #openweb. These people are eather new or are comeing back to this “native” space, have stepped stright into running the current reboot after the original grassroots path burned out and was pushed aside. This new “NGO generation” holds strong views, their perspective, is that they already lived through a catastrophic failure once, and they are determined not to repeat there version of it.
Their mostly blinded story goes something like this: “We tried radical openness, tried informal governance, trusting culture to hold things together, It didn’t survive scale, money, or power. The result was capture by corporations far worse than anything we imagined, we can’t afford another naïve collapse.” This trauma – not betrayal – is their common sense starting point. Many of these people genuinely believe they were burned by “idealism”.
From this NGO insider view, they did watched Flickr get eaten by Yahoo, Twitter go from a playful commons to authoritarian infrastructure, and Facebook hollow “community” into extraction. They watched # fashernista volunteer governance implode under harassment, burnout, and capture, but what they did not see was the intolernce of the internal imploshern.
From that self inflicted wreckage, they did not conclude that capitalism is the problem, they concluded that informality does not scale and gets eaten alive by capitalism. So when they hear words like commons, grassroots, trust-based, or we’ll figure it out as we go, what they actually hear is: “We’re about to lose everything again, but faster this time.” That fear shapes everything in the current takeover path they push us down in the Fediverse.
They, think they are OK, and see themselves as harm reducers, rather than visionaries or builders of a new world. In their mindset, “real alternative talk” is too often how bad actors slip in. Their self-image is closer to #mainstreaming than the alt they are trying to manage, thus are think inside the current system, the alt is working to change and challange.
Platforms exist – you can’t wish them away
Capital exists – you can’t abolish it from a policy office
States exist – and they will regulate you whether you like it or not
So their question isn’t “What world do we want?” It’s “How do we prevent the worst outcomes in the world we actually have?” That’s why their tools are regulation, standards bodies, foundations, charters, boards of the great and the good (or at least the less bad). To them, this is adult responsibility, not what we see in the alt as sell-out.
So why do NGO paths feel “inevitable” to them? They believe power only listens to things that look like power, that, what matters, is that governments won’t talk to messy collectives, anonymous affinity groups, rotating stewards and informal federations like our native #Fediverse. Funders won’t fund things without legal entities, without accountability structures or paths without named decision-makers. Media won’t quote “the commons”, “the network”, “some people on the Fediverse”. So to them the path needs foundations, and boards, which aren’t ideological to them, they’re blind to this only seeing simple translation layers in there work.
At their best, they see themselves as “Standing between chaotic grassroots energy and hostile institutions, translating one to the other, so the whole thing doesn’t get crushed.” From inside this framing, NGOs aren’t buffers, they’re shields, a polite way of saying #blocking. Where they are partly right – and where it goes wrong – is that yes, some of their fears are real. Millions of people depend on existing infrastructure, sudden collapse hurts the most vulnerable first, and power vacuums often produce authoritarianism or monopoly – not freedom.
Their nightmare scenario is not enclosure, its collapse followed by something worse. So aim for incremental change, stability (for themselves and their class), and institutional continuity, even when it’s ugly. This is dressed, with radical lipstick up as legitimacy, but, sadly, it functions as structural #blocking.
This part is uncomfortable, but central, they marginalise grassroots voices, and believe this is justified. They sincerely believe grassroots underestimate adversaries and overestimate culture, so will collapse under conflict by refusing compromise needed for staying power. They tell themselves “We’ve seen this movie. Passion burns hot, then disappears. Institutions are what remain when people move on.” So when they sideline grassroots projects as “naïve” or “unscalable”, they think they’re being pragmatic, not abusive. In there common sense they don’t see exclusion, they see triage, were they are the doctors saying who lives and dies.
Where the worldviews break is both sides are responding to real history, they just draw opposite lessons from the same wreckage. What the #NGO crew don’t see – and why this keeps looping – is that their “stability” reproduces enclosure, their “common sense” legitimacy reproduces hierarchy and professionalism produces exclusion, the obsession with safety produces stagnation.
From inside these sell-out paths, survival feels like success with funded projects, policy wins, seats at tables and published NGO frameworks. The tragedy is that both sides are trying to prevent disaster, but they are optimising against different disasters. Capitalism is very good at rewarding one of those fears while quietly #blocking the other.
From the NGO side, grassroots looks reckless, from the grassroots side, the NGO crew looks complicit. Both are partly right – but the power imbalance matters. The NGO crew controls: funding, platforms, mainstream legitimacy and narratives. Which means their fear shapes reality far more than the real hardworking people actually building change and challenge at the grassroots.
Some of the lies that keep this messy system running are “We are neutral stewards, not power holders.” This is a claim to power with NGOs and foundations acting as if they merely facilitate and convene. But they control funding flows, agenda setting, who is “in the room”, which projects are “serious” and finally which histories are remembered. That is, #KISS, power.
They must deny this because admitting it would require accountability to the commons, which they structurally cannot offer. Their accountability flows upward to funders and states, not downward to people. So when challenged, they say “we’re just trying to help” – while continuing to decide. “We represent the ecosystem.” They don’t. They represent whoever didn’t leave there process and whoever depends on their funding to make them stay.
Non-participation is treated as absence, not refusal. Blocking, muting, and burnout are erased. Their legitimacy depends on being the voice, because if they admit they’re just one actor among many, their seat evaporates. Reports about “the community” are published without recall, veto, or dissent.
“Anyone can participate.” But participation requires unpaid labour, institutional literacy, polite tone-policing, time abundance, and tolerance for bureaucratic process. Then the exclusion is reframed as personal failure. When grassroots actors disappear, the story is that “They disengaged.” Never “We made engagement unbearable.”
Formal governance, regulation, and the illusion of control is a dogma that formal structures prevents capture, its an old lie. Formalisation doesn’t prevent capture, it defines the capture interface. Once power is legible (roles, chairs, processes), it becomes fundable, lobbyable, and replaceable.
Informal power is hard to seize, formal power is easy. NGOs point to “best practice governance” while real decisions happen off-record. Likewise, regulation is not a substitute for collective ownership. Regulation manages behaviour, not incentives, shareholder obligation remains, extraction remains, enclosure remains – just slower and more polite. Abolition or ownership transfer is politically unthinkable from their position, so guardrails are celebrated while the underlying model stays untouched.
This is about scale, collapse, and conflict “Scale is necessary to matter” is another unexamined belief. Most harm on the internet comes from scale, most resilience comes from multiplicity, redundancy, and smallness. #NGOs chase scale because that’s how they survive – while dismissing small systems that actually work. Likewise, they claim “we prevent collapse” hides the truth: they mostly prevent transition, stabilises dying models long enough for capital to reconfigure and re-enter. Everything feels “temporarily stuck”, for years in there world.
And finally “Conflict harms the movement.” but in realerty, conflict is how power becomes visible. Suppressing it doesn’t remove it, it pushes it into backchannels, exits, forks, burnout, and silence. Yes, conflict scares funders, so dissent becomes “toxicity”, and #mainstreaming consensus is quietly enforced.
The deepest contradiction “We can midwife the commons without becoming its governors.” This has never been true, organisations that control resources, define legitimacy, and speak externally are exercising power, whether they admit it or not. Smiling NGOs are not outside power, they are simply power with better PR. They say they exist because they don’t trust people. They say they represent people. You cannot hold both without lying to yourself.
Compost is the right metaphor as you can’t argue someone out of a frame that keeps their institutions alive, you can only make that frame less central by growing something that actually works. That’s what the #OMN path is about – if people build it, support it, and let it grow in the spaces we work to open up, we can become the change and challenge we actually need.
The #Fediverse as a lesson, it doesn’t need representation, it needs narration (many voices), aggregation (not unification) and refusal (to be spoken for). Every attempt to “represent” it recentralises it, makes it legible to power, and prepares it for capture. So the current move, the Fediverse isn’t being captured by villains, it’s being domesticated by caretakers. And history tells us enclosure doesn’t come screaming – it comes with minutes, frameworks, and funding rounds.
So, who are today’s bad guys? The corporate eliteits, the fossil fuel barons, the billionaire class, and their pet politicians. The #neoliberals who chant ‘TINA’ while the world burns. The green-washers and compromisers who whisper that change must be ‘reasonable’ while we march off a cliff.
A few years ago, the liberation cats of the #Fediverse stopped talking to each other. Not only out of malice, mostly through burnout, distraction, and quiet withdrawal. Nature abhors a vacuum. Into that vacuum stepped the #NGO crew.
They didn’t “win” our spaces through better ideas, didn’t persuade anyone. They simply occupied every role that looked like coordination, representation, legitimacy that was funding-adjacency. That’s their native skill set, #NGO people don’t build ecosystems; they replace them with management layers then our history is sold as branding.
This isn’t accidental, it’s a familiar class of friendly parasites that reproduce by feeding on radical paths and left uninterrupted, they will kill again. The painful part is that we saw this coming, and for a moment, we did interrupt it. Projects like #OGB were attempts to embed power visibility, contestability, and trust before capture could harden. But attention drifted, coordination frayed, and then – quite literally – things were blocked.
So here we are again, the mistake, worth being blunt about, is that we keep trying to solve cultural and mythic problems with structural and procedural tools. That’s why everything feels exhausting. We say we’re doing “easy things,” then find ourselves writing documents, attending meetings, moderating tensions, negotiating legitimacy, and fighting over process.
That isn’t easy work, it’s managerial labour. And the unseen and unspoken problem is that the #NGO crew love managerial labour, it’s their home turf. Of course, they take over spaces defined by meetings, boards, frameworks, and legitimacy rituals. Meanwhile, the actual easy things – talking to each other, telling our own history, naming capture when it happens, building small, obvious, human-scale tools, refusing the respectability game – quietly disappear.
Maybe it’s time, we’re circling back to an opening, one practical path is to stop trying to win positions and instead start delegitimising them. #NGO power flows from chairs that everyone else treats as “necessary.” so #KISS name the chairs as optional, loudly, repeatedly: “This working group does not represent us.”, “This foundation is not the Fediverse.”, “This board speaks for itself, not the commons.” isn’t only confrontation, it’s calm refusal, low energy, high impact. To #KISS restarts the conversation sideways instead of head-on.
Don’t attack NGO spaces directly, they’re designed to absorb critique, instead, encircle them with parallel spaces: messy notes, half-finished proposals, visible disagreements. This is where #OMN-style media matters – aggregate instead of argue, tell the story of what’s happening without asking permission.
Use #4opens as a litmus test, not a manifesto. It works best like this: “Cool project. Let’s do a quick sanity check.” is it: Open code? Open data? Open standards? Open governance? If the answers get vague, defensive, or managerial, that’s your signal. You don’t need to argue, simply don’t invest trust or energy. Capture starves quietly when it isn’t fed.
And yes, calling “mythical people” matters, it’s the missing layer. We don’t just need more frameworks; we need shared stories that make capture feel wrong. Stories of Indymedia before NGOs. Stories of early Fediverse moments that worked. Stories of small, trust-based wins. Stories of projects that died from NGO-isation. We should ritualise these: remembering posts, anniversary threads, public post-mortems, “how we fucked this up last time” stories. This is how cultures defend themselves without rules.
A hard but hopeful truth is that we didn’t fail because the ideas were wrong, we failed because we stopped tending the compost. Compost needs turning, air, moisture, attention. The good news is that compost is forgiving. You don’t need permission to start turning it again.
Calling mythical people – if you’re out there and this still itches, we need an affinity group of people with long memories, allergic to foundations, who build and then disappear, who value trust over scale. Now would be a good time to stop ignoring each other.
Not to “fix” the #Fediverse, just to make it awkward for capture again. That alone would be a big step forward.
