People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty

What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea – people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively – is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible.

So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the process, most of the time, it’s the people – and, more importantly, the tools and cultures we bring with us. The is simplicity underneath – #Oxfordboaters is doing three things:

Sharing information about what’s happening

Building a shared understanding of that information

Acting together based on that understanding

That’s it, strip away the noise, and that’s the whole system. It’s classic #actavisam: publish, discuss, act. You don’t need layers of management theory or complex governance frameworks to make that work. You need #KISS trust, visibility, and participation.

But we rarely get to operate at this level of clarity, the difficulty creeps in as people bring baggage – Everyone arrives with habits shaped by the #mainstreaming worshipping of the #deathcult that leads to the imposing of unthinking expectation of hierarchy (“who’s in charge?”) and fear of speaking openly (“will this be used against me?”) leading to the desire for control (“we need to manage the message”) this “common sense” mess leads to focus on avoidance of conflict (“let’s keep it positive and not rock the boat”).

These aren’t individual personal failings, they’re social learned behaviours. That distort simple processes into complicated ones. This mess is amplified by a second “common sense” problem, that the tools we use shape behaviour, the #dotcons platforms we “use” default push us in particular mess making directions:

Chat tools fragment conversations into noise

Social media rewards reaction over reflection

Instead of supporting collective clarity, these tools amplify confusion, they make it harder to see what’s actually going on, and easier for misunderstandings to spiral. One tool we have is process but is it a tool or weapon? Process can either help people work together, or it can be used to block this work. Some processes are designed to:

Encourage participation

Make decisions visible

Build shared ownership

Others – often unintentionally – end up:

Slowing everything down

Creating gatekeepers

Hiding power behind “procedure”

You can see this clearly when something urgent comes up – healthy process helps people respond quickly and collectively, were a broken one turns into endless discussion, deferral, and inaction. Same situation, same people – different outcome depending on the process.

At #Oxfordboaters, the work itself is straightforward: There’s an issue affecting the river community – People gather information about it – That information is shared – A response is organised. But what makes it hard? People are different – Disagreements about tone (fluffy vs spiky), uncertainty about who should act and fragmented communication across platforms leading to #blocking of action.

None of these are about the actual goal, they’re all about how people relate to each other and the structures they’re working within. The illusion of complexity is one of the biggest traps – mistaking this friction for complexity. When something feels hard, we assume the solution is to add more structure, more meetings, more rules, more #dotcons tools. But this “common sense” just adds another layer of blockage, it treats the symptoms, not the cause.

The reality is harsher the system is simple, but we as a community are messy. So how can we work better in this mess? The answer isn’t to eliminate the mess – that’s impossible. It’s to design processes that work with it instead of against it. That means accepting disagreement as normal, making conflict visible rather than suppressing it. Keeping structures lightweight and adaptable, we need to prioritise clarity over control. In #OMN terms, this is where the #4opens come in:

Open data → everyone can see what’s happening

Open process → decisions aren’t hidden

Open source → tools can be adapted

Open standards → systems interconnect

These don’t remove human complexity, but they stop it from becoming opaque and blocking. So what do we mean by blocking vs enabling. You can tell the health of a project by a simple test – Does the process help people act, or stop them from acting? If people feel empowered to contribute → the process is working. Hesitant, confused, or sidelined → the process is blocking.

At #Oxfordboaters, like many grassroots efforts, both dynamics exist at the same time. That’s normal. The work is to shift the balance toward enabling. So the hard truth is this the challenge isn’t building the perfect system, it’s growing the relationships that allow the #4opens path to function. That’s slower, messier, and far less comfortable than designing a neat process diagram, but it’s the only thing that actually works.

Keep it simple (#KISS) – when things get messy, the instinct is to add complexity. The better move is usually the opposite by striping things back to focus on what actually needs to happen. Make it easier for people to take part, because underneath all the noise, the work is still simple. People, talking to each other, deciding to act. Everything else is either helping that – or getting in the way.

What we’re growing at Oxford Boaters is simple

From the towpath at dawn to moonlit moorings at dusk, Oxford’s boating community is not a curiosity, it’s part of the city’s living fabric. Generations of people have chosen to make their homes on the water, creating a culture rooted in community, care, and independence. This is a quieter Oxford, rarely captured in guidebooks but felt by anyone who walks the river or canal: a human-scale world of shared tea, passing conversations, and everyday presence. In a city shaped by wealth and exclusion, the river remains one of the few places where real social diversity still exists, where people live side by side not because of status, but because they’ve chosen a different way of life.

This matters because the boating community doesn’t just live on the river, it sustains it. Their daily presence keeps the towpath safer, more welcoming, and alive. They act as informal stewards, noticing changes in the water, caring for the banks, and maintaining a relationship with the environment that no institution can replicate. Remove this community, and you don’t just lose homes, you lose Oxford’s character, its openness, its lived connection to the river. The waterway becomes quieter, more managed, less human. What looks, from a distance, like a marginal issue is in central, a question of whether #Oxford remains a living city, or becomes more controlled, polished and diminished.

How can we protect that space?

We want to protect a shared space, keep the river livable, and organize ourselves to have a voice. None of that is technically complicated, the difficulty isn’t the goal, it’s the people, and the tools we use to try and work together. No matter what process we choose, it always comes back to the people who make it work, or the people make it stall. Some processes recognise this and work with human reality – trust, conflict, misunderstanding, ego, care. Other processes ignore it, and end up being used (consciously or not) as blocking. Let’s look at a few grounded examples of this.

We’ve already seen this clearly, in a face-to-face meeting (the “whispering fire”), trust rises fast. People read each other, soften, find common ground. You can go from 50% to 70–90% trust in a couple of hours. Move the same conversation to online chat, and trust collapses. Tone gets lost, small disagreements escalate, and people start pulling things apart. You drop to 20–30% trust, sometimes lower. Completely different outcomes, it’s not a failure of individuals, it’s a mismatch between tools and human communication.

The website vs the chat is another clear split. The website (or any structured space) holds higher trust, but lower participation. The chat holds high participation, but low trust – knowledge isn’t captured properly, decisions aren’t visible and new people can’t easily get up to speed. Result: constant rehashing, frustration, and burnout leading to momentum loss.

There’s a temptation to design the perfect structure with formal agendas, strict procedures and detailed governance. On paper, this looks like progress, in practice, it becomes a brake. As people use “hard” process to delay decisions (“we need another meeting”), avoid responsibility (“that’s not my role”) and assert control (“this isn’t the proper channel”). Instead of enabling action, the process becomes a gatekeeper, leading to the same basic issues resurface again and again. Not because people are stupid, because the basic social fabric isn’t being maintained.

Processes that work can see this cycle and design around it so as not to keep restarting from zero. So what actually works? The path isn’t finding a “perfect” process, it’s choosing #4opens processes that fit people as they are. That usually means prioritising face-to-face (or close equivalents) for trust building. Keeping structures simple (#KISS) so they don’t become tools of control. Capturing shared knowledge clearly (FAQ, summaries, decisions). Accepting mess as normal, but making sure it composts rather than festers. Balancing fluffy and spiky – you need both to move forward

And most importantly recognizing that process is never neutral, every structure we put in place will either help people collaborate or give them ways to block each other. Often both at the same time. So yes, what #Oxfordboaters is trying to do is on the surface easy, but what makes it hard is human complexity, mismatched tools and blinded pushing processes that don’t align with either. When we get those bits even slightly more right, everything else becomes possible.

If we don’t, even the simplest goals turn into a grind, that’s the real work.

Closed systems protect individuals, but they rarely build movements

Trust and fear – the spiky/fluff debate – OxfordBoaters

Closed systems protect individuals, but they rarely build movements

People fight against or/and ignore the #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach in tech because simplicity exposes power. Complexity, jargon, and process give cover – they make control look like competence. When paths are simple and transparent, everyone can see who’s blocking, who’s hoarding, who’s acting in bad faith. Many “experts” and institutions are emotionally and professionally invested in keeping things complicated; simplicity threatens their authority, their funding, and their identity.

All the #OMN projects are not directly about social change – they’re about making social change possible. That distinction matters as people don’t step into change unless they first believe change can happen. If the world feels fixed, locked, inevitable, then nothing moves. Our role is simpler, and maybe more important, to open that door a crack, to show that different paths exist.

Think of #OMN as a helping hand, not dragging people forward, not telling them what to do – just making it easier for them to take that first step when they’re ready. But to do this, we need to think more clearly – and more fundamentally – about technology itself. As most of the current “open paths” are cosplay at best, we need a network that links them as flows for there use to be unlocked from the current limits of #stupidindividualism shaping them – to become a native part of the expanding #openweb reboot.

I’ve been working on this for over 20 years, and one thing keeps proving true: we need roughly 90% open and 10% closed, the balance matters. As the current push from the #encryptionists flips this – aiming for 90% closed and 10% open. That isn’t a solution, it’s a retreat. It breaks the social fabric that makes collective tools usable and meaningful. It fragments, isolates, and ultimately shrinks the space where shared culture can exist.

Yes, privacy matters, yes, some things should be closed, that’s the 10%. But the commons – the space where we meet, talk, organise, and build trust – has to be open. Without that, there is no network, just silos. Take a simple example: you’re reading this via #activitypub. That’s a system built on being mostly open, with just enough closure to function safely. And it works, people are here, conversations happen, networks grow.

Compare that to more closed, encryption-heavy systems like old school Diaspora. Technically interesting, sure, but socially? Empty, few people, little flow, no impact. That’s the core point: this isn’t just about functions or features, it’s about culture.

Open federated, networked systems create the possibility of shared culture, and from that, the possibility of social change. Closed systems protect individuals, but they rarely build movements. We need both – but we need to get the balance right. Right now, too many people are getting it the wrong way round.

This Isn’t New: Decentralisation Was the Point All Along

Decentralised servers – what we now call the #Fediverse – are often talked about as if they’re some new, radical innovation. They’re not, they’re a return to the original design of the network. The early internet wasn’t built to be controlled, it was built to survive. The core idea was simple: if parts of the network were destroyed – even something as extreme as a nuclear strike – the rest would keep functioning. No centre, single point of failure or “off switch.”

That’s what decentralisation actually means. And this thinking didn’t even start with the #openweb. Systems like Usenet already embodied this approach: distributed, federated, run by many, owned by none. Messy? Yes. But resilient, open, and hard to capture.

What we’ve been living through for the last 20+ years – the rise of the #dotcons – is the opposite of this. Centralised platforms with single points of control. Easy to use for control and monetise, easy to manipulate, easy to shut down. We didn’t lose the #openweb by accident, we blindly traded it away for this convenience.

What we’re seeing now with the #Fediverse, #ActivityPub, and related projects isn’t innovation in the common sense. It’s a reboot, a return to the path we were on before we derailed it. The difference is that now we’re trying to rebuild this in a world that has spent decades normalising centralisation and control. 40 years of death cult worship has changed people, institutions, social groups and our very internal selves. That’s where the friction comes from, people arrive expecting #dotcons platforms, what they find is networks. People expect control, what they get is responsibility. People expect “free” what they face is shared cost and care.

So, it was never about the tech, the mistake we keep making is ONLY thinking this is a technical shift, it’s not, it’s cultural. You can spin up a decentralised server in minutes, that’s not the hard part, the hard part is everything around it:

Who runs it

Who pays for it

How decisions are made

How conflict is handled

How trust is built and maintained

This is the work the #dotcons hide from us, they wrap control as “free services” paid for with surveillance, extraction, and control. Now that we’re back on the #openweb path, that work becomes visible again, and yes – it’s harder.

Why this matters (Again). Resilience isn’t an abstract idea anymore as we’re living through cascading crises: political instability, #climatechaos, infrastructure fragility. A centralised network fails catastrophically were a decentralised network degrades – but keeps going. That’s the difference between a system you depend on and a system you can trust.

We don’t need to overcomplicate this – Keep It Simple (#KISS)

The #openweb is decentralised

The #dotcons are centralised

One builds commons, the other extracts value, everything else is detail. And yes nobody thinks the Fediverse is not messy, uneven, (yet) match the polish of corporate platforms. That’s fine, mess is where growth happens – if we compost it properly.

The #OMN view, we’re not trying to invent something new. We’re trying to make what already works usable at scale for media, trust, and collective action. The infrastructure is there, the protocols exist, the history is long. What’s missing is the shared layer – the commons – where information flows in ways people can actually rely on, that’s what we’re building.

If decentralisation feels radical, it’s only because we’ve spent so long inside systems that forgot #OMN #openweb #KISS

Trust and fear – the spiky/fluff debate – OxfordBoaters

People fight against or/and ignore the #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach to social movements because simplicity can expose power. Complexity gives cover, making control look like competence. When paths are simple and transparent, everyone can see who’s blocking, who’s hoarding, who’s acting in bad faith. Many “experts” and institutions are emotionally and professionally invested in keeping things complicated as simplicity threatens their authority and their identity.

As second step in change and challenge we need to face some uncomfortable roots: fear of death, fear of the “other.” Fear, as the man said, is the mind killer. Too few people trying to change the world bother to look at the psychological ground they’re standing on. Our social mess isn’t random, it grows from somewhere. If we don’t deal with the roots, we just keep trimming the leaves and wondering why the weeds grow back.

At the centre of this is trust, it is what makes social change possible. It’s the messy, ongoing tussle between horizontal and vertical forces, between collective process and imposed control. Take Oxford boaters as a lived example, this is observational, based on 40 years of doing this kind of work.

Face-to-face meetings? They start at maybe 50% trust and can rise to 70% without too much trouble. That’s because the people who show up are self-selecting – a mix of fluffy and spiky, but open enough to engage. You get debate, but also movement.

Then we go back online were trust drops fast – down to 20–30%, sometimes even into negative territory. That becomes the dominant tone as things splinter. Work that was built collaboratively offline gets pulled apart, the focus doesn’t hold.

On the open collective website, trust is actually high – but usage is low, again, self-selecting. So rollout stalls, no shared space, no shared understanding, no momentum.

So we call another face-to-face, the “whisper fire.” Trust shoots up – 90%, easy. People align, decisions get made, it feels like progress. But then everyone goes home, the next day? Momentum evaporates, as few people feel responsible for carrying things forward. And very quickly, we slide back into the low-trust dynamics of online chat.

Meanwhile, the group has grown, more people from offline outreach and leafleting. But the website is still stalled, so there’s nowhere to hold shared knowledge. We keep re-arguing basics, we don’t even have a solid FAQ. Trust drops again.

Next meeting: bigger pool, smaller turnout. Trust starts at near zero, the first half is rough – people filtering out, clashing, posturing. Slowly, some shared ground emerges and trust crawls up to maybe 50% but still, nothing concrete gets resolved. A few working groups are seeded. Environment sort of functions. Media splinters from the start, but manages a press release, but without any clear #4opens process. Beyond that, the next steps remain unanswered.

Back online? Trust gets ripped apart again. The whisper fire is supposed to be every week, but we have lost focus, but we try agen – half-heartedly at first. Poor turnout, then people drift in after a couple of hours. Trust rebuilds to around 70%. Real decisions get made, consensus emerges, it starts to feel like an actual working affinity group.

But the chat? Still toxic, low trust, constant tearing-down, fixation on side issues, and a push toward rushed bureaucratic structures that crumble under their own weight. The only thing that actually works is the consensus built in the whisper fire – because that’s what people really agree on, underneath the passive-aggressive noise. But after each cycle, trust in the online chat drops again, down below 30% on the surface. Maybe 40% underneath, if you’re generous.

And now we hit the next stage: formal process, bureaucracy, decisions that actually matter, where it gets real. And because online trust is still so low, everything becomes harder than it needs to be, friction everywhere, misunderstanding as default.

But – and this is the hopeful bit – offline trust is slowly growing. So maybe, just maybe, we can carry that through, if we don’t let the chat tear it apart first.

Individual fears

So how do we mediate this fear?

Process is what gives legitimacy

#OxfordBoaters

We keep making mess, then wondering why everything smells

A big part of this is the language we use, when we unthinkingly spread #mainstreaming terms, we push the worldview that comes with them, and that worldview is usually rooted in fear, control, and market logic.

Take “digital sovereignty.” it sounds solid, sensible, progressive. But, it’s a made-up term trying to frame the internet in nation-state and market terms – ownership, borders, competition. It’s a liberal answer to a fear-based economy: “how do we control this thing so it doesn’t threaten us?” That framing is the problem, because the #openweb was never built on control. It was built on trust, shared standards, and open process – the #4opens:

open data
open source
open standards
open process

That’s the native soil, when we blindly shift to language like “sovereignty,” we drag in assumptions that don’t belong. We start thinking in terms of ownership instead of participation, control instead of collaboration. And that creates mess – conceptual, political, and technical Then we spend years trying to “fix” that mess, composting it.

But it’s much better if we don’t make that mess in the first place #KISS, by staying grounded in #openweb values. We don’t need to retrofit control structures onto something that was designed to work without them. We don’t need layers of governance theatre to simulate trust, we can build trust directly through open processes.

This is why clarity, clear language matters, if we keep pushing borrowed language from the #deathcult, we’ll keep rebuilding its logic, no matter how good our intentions are. So yes, we need to talk more clearly about stopping importing broken concepts, stop framing open systems in closed terms and stop making more mess we then have to compost.

Start from the roots, grow from there, please.

The #dotcons, #mainstreaming, and Build to Walk Away

Three years ago I was trying to explain something simple in language liberals might actually hear. They talk about “platform capitalism.” Fine. But I’ve been calling it the #dotcons for 20 years – because that’s what it is – a con.

The last 30 years of tech hasn’t just drifted into this mess. It’s been shaped, step by step, enclosure by enclosure, into systems designed to extract value from us. What we now call the internet is, in large part, a machine built to manipulate, capture, and profit.

The old #openweb got fenced in, and most people, especially polite liberal society, went along with it. So we need to talk about the return and the problem. Now we have a shift of the #mainstreaming is flowing back toward the #openweb, that should be a good thing. But there is a problem: people don’t leave the #dotcons behind when they move, they bring the culture with them.

What we’re seeing is a flood of the same patterns – extractive behaviour, ego performance, status games. Not from one “side,” but from everywhere. The habits built inside the #dotcons don’t magically disappear just because the platform changes.

So the real issue isn’t technical, it’s cultural. If we don’t actively mediate this influx, we won’t rebuild the #openweb – we’ll just recreate the same broken systems in slightly different code.

So why do I talk so much about compost, and mess not being the problem. Mess is necessary, but only if it composts – if it breaks down into something fertile. Right now, we’re mostly just piling it higher.

This is where projects like #indymediaback and #OGB matter. They’re not perfect, but they are native to the #openweb path: grounded in trust, process, and the #4opens rather than control, branding, and capture.

The question isn’t whether #mainstreaming is good or bad. The question is: how do we hold the cultural line so that what grows is something genuinely different? Because if we don’t, the #dotcons don’t need to defeat us. We’ll blindly rebuild them ourselves.

So why do I argue we can’t just leave the #dotcons? This is where people get it wrong, every time the #dotcons tighten control – censoring, tweaking algorithms, shifting rules – the reaction is the same: leave, build the #openweb.

Yes, build the #openweb, but the idea that we should stop organizing inside the #dotcons right now? That’s a trap, because billions of people are still there. The conversations, the communities, the movements, they haven’t magically migrated. Walking away doesn’t free those people, it abandons them, leaving the space to be shaped entirely by the #deathcult and the forces already in control.

This is #nothingnew. The #dotcons are #closedweb infrastructure. They serve power because they were built to serve power. Expecting anything else is misunderstanding the system. The real question has never been: are these platforms good? It’s: what do we do, given that this is where people are?

The #geekproblem and the exodus fantasy, is a persistent fantasy – a classic #geekproblem – that if we just build better tools, people will come. They won’t, not on their own. A clean exodus to the #fediverse or any #openweb space doesn’t happen because we post about it. Movement-building has never worked like that, people move through relationships, trust, and shared struggle – not technical superiority.

So if you abandon the spaces where people already are, you cut those pathways. The #OMN approach has always been simple to use the #dotcons as a bridge, not a home, seed organizing where people already are while focusing energy on building the #openweb in parallel to clearly keep your foundations in the #4opens.

This isn’t about purity, it’s about effectiveness, don’t fall into #stupidindividualism, the idea that personal withdrawal is more important than collective reach. This is about infrastructure and grounding, if the #dotcons can switch you off at any moment, they cannot be your foundation.

That’s why we need:

indymediaback as publishing roots
activitypub and the #fediverse as distributed infrastructure
OMN as a bridge between cultures and spaces

This is the practical expression of the #4opens: not just open code, but open process and open trust. Don’t build your house on someone else’s land, but don’t stop talking to the people still living there either. Stay in the fight, when the #dotcons clamp down, it’s not a surprise, it’s a signal of what they are, and what they’ve always been.

The answer isn’t to run away, it’s to root ourselves somewhere that can’t be shut down, while continuing to show up where the people are.

Build the #openweb, stay in the fight, keep it simple #KISS

Toward Healthier Digital Public Spaces: A Cultural and Structural Challenge

From a practical perspective, the challenges in digital and social technology are not technical, they are cultural. This may seem obvious, but it is often overlooked in policy and implementation. At a basic level, there are two broad approaches to handling disagreement and complexity in online spaces:

Exclusion-focused approaches (e.g. blocking, filtering, silencing), which reduce immediate friction but reinforce fragmentation and polarisation.

Engagement approaches (e.g. dialogue, questioning, listening, and iterative response), which are more demanding but can, over time, reduce conflict and build shared understanding.

In the current mess – shaped by strong norms of individualism and personal optimisation – the first dysfunctional approach dominates. This grows increasingly fragmented discourse, where communities become isolated and less resilient.

Understanding this we can start to show the limits of “Common Sense” in today’s mess, were governance relies on this “common sense.” Over the past four decades, economic and cultural frameworks – market-driven individualism – has controlled how we design and use digital systems contributing to:

Increased social fragmentation

Growing economic inequality

Incentive structures prioritising engagement over well-being

Environmental and social externalities (including visible #climatechaos impacts)

These outcomes tell us that existing models are not sufficient for building sustainable digital public spaces, so we need to #KISS revisit platform dynamics and structural Incentives.

The dominant digital platforms (the #dotcons) operate on business models that prioritise data extraction, engagement metrics, and advertising revenue. These incentives shape what information is amplified, how users interact and which behaviours are rewarded. While these systems are effective at scaling control, they are not in any way aligned with public interest outcomes such as trust, accountability, or democratic participation.

Current trends – ranging from disinformation to polarisation and environmental stress – highlight the limits of systems based purely on competitive, self-interested models. At the same time, alternative approaches – such as the #openweb and federated systems – offer more aligned values but face basic challenges of coordination, usability, and governance. So we need to move from fragmentation to constructive engagement, to reframe the problem, from crisis to stewardship.

This more sustainable approach emphasises stewardship over extraction, collaboration over isolation to help build resilience over short-term optimisation. This does not mean abandoning innovation or individual freedom, but rather #KISS balancing these with responsibility for shared outcomes. As the current challenges in digital spaces are not only the result of “bad actors” or isolated failures. In simple terms we need to move from systems that amplify division toward systems that support understanding and the common good.

To compost this mess we need a willingness to engage with complexity and a commitment to building systems (technical and social) that prioritise long-term public value over short-term individual gains. This is not easy work – but it is necessary if digital infrastructure is to support healthy, democratic societies.

KISS – Keep it simple, sustainable, and focused on the common good.

Why you should help

The internet’s public square is privatised, algorithmically controlled for “engagement” over any idea of truth, and placed under the control of a handful of American corporations with no accountability to European citizens or values. The #Fediverse is the most credible existing alternative – but it lacks the shared infrastructure to function as a native commons for news and media. #OMN builds that infrastructure: trust-based, community-controlled, transparent, reversible, and owned by nobody. At €45,000 for a proof of concept, it is one of the cheapest possible investments in the long-term health of European digital public life. If it works – and the technical and social groundwork suggests it will – it becomes the plumbing for a Fediverse that can actually be used to serve democratic societies rather than more #techshit alongside the current #dotcons platforms that undermine them.

Why this matters – because the #WWW was stolen – Designed as commons at CERN, decentralised, open, nobody in charge. What we have today is instead is five American corporations controlling the information diet of billions of people. Facebook decides what news you see. YouTube’s algorithm decides which voices get amplified. Twitter/X decides who gets banned. None of these decisions are transparent, accountable, or reversible. They are made by private entities in pursuit of control, advertising revenue and engagement metrics – not truth, not public interest, not democracy.

The #Fediverse exists as a rejection of this, it’s the largest real functioning alternative to corporate social media, with millions of people on thousands of servers, federated together, nobody owning the whole thing. It works. It’s growing. But it has a weakness: it’s kinda fragmented at the commons layer. There’s no shared infrastructure for how news and media actually flows across the network in any trustworthy and coherent way.

That’s the gap #OMN fills, but why? Most people don’t think about internet infrastructure. They think about whether they can trust what they read. Whether the news they see is real. Whether the platform they’re on is working for them or selling them. Whether they can do anything when something goes wrong.

Right now the answer to all of those is: it depends entirely on decisions made by people you’ll never meet, for reasons you’ll never know. OMN proposes something different. If your community trusts a source, a trust flow, you see it. If they don’t, you don’t. And that decision is yours, reversible, transparent, locally controlled.

For a journalist in a small country trying to get independent news out, this is the difference between having infrastructure that works for them and being at the mercy of a platform that can deplatform them overnight. For a community archive trying to keep historical memory alive and accessible, this is the difference between dependence on Google’s goodwill and owning your own distribution. For an ordinary person trying to figure out what’s true, this is the difference between an algorithm designed to maximise your outrage and a network shaped by people you actually trust.

Bureaucracies fund things slowly, in ways that often serve existing power structures rather than challenging them. But digital sovereignty is an existential European concern. The EU has spent years trying to regulate American platforms – GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act – and the platforms have responded with compliance theatre, token gestures, and armies of lawyers. Regulation of concentrated private power is a losing path. The only actual answer is to build the alternative infrastructure so that people have somewhere else to go. That’s what the NGI Commons Fund is for and what #OMN does.

The EU should not only be funding products, it needs to fund commons infrastructure – the plumbing that nobody owns and everyone can use. Like funding roads rather than funding a logistics company. The outputs are open source, meaning any European media organisation, any local community, any public institution can pick this up and use it. No lock-in. No dependency on a vendor who will be acquired or shut down.

It’s cheap, with the second stage scaling across Europe with institutional partners, building on European strengths. The Fediverse is disproportionately European. Mastodon was built by a German developer. The culture of digital commons, open standards, and public interest technology is stronger in Europe than anywhere else. This project is native to that tradition. It’s not asking Europe to compete with Silicon Valley on Silicon Valley’s terms – it’s asking Europe to build the alternative on its own terms.

The problem #OMN solves is getting worse, not better. Disinformation, algorithmic radicalisation, platform capture of public discourse – these are not abstract threats. They are actively destabilising European democracies. Funding the technical infrastructure for trustworthy, community-controlled information flows is not a nice-to-have. It is digital public health infrastructure.

#KISS

Thematic call: NGI Zero Commons Fund

Organisation: Open Media Network (unincorporated community project, fiscal hosting in Belgium via OpenCollective) Country: United Kingdom General Project Information Proposal name: Trust-Based Media Flows for the Fediverse (#OMN) Website / wiki: https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/Open-Media-Network

Abstract

Can you explain the whole project and its expected outcome(s)?

The Open Media Network (#OMN) is a protocol-driven, federated media infrastructure built on top of ActivityPub and the Emissary codebase (emissary.dev). It addresses a real gap in the current Fediverse: while platforms like Mastodon, PeerTube, and Lemmy are federated at the instance level, there is little coherent cross-platform layer for trust-based content flows, moderation, or news aggregation. Each instance operates largely as its own silo, moderation is hierarchical and per-server, and there is no shared commons model for media distribution across the ecosystem. #OMN proposes a minimal, compostable interaction model – the Five Functions (#5F): Publish, Subscribe, Moderate, Rollback, and Edit Metadata – implemented as a flow layer on top of existing Fediverse infrastructure. Content moves through the network as objects flowing through pipes and holding tanks, filtered and shaped by trust relationships between nodes rather than by opaque algorithms or centralised authority.

The central R&D question is: can trust-based moderation and distribution flows replace algorithmic amplification in a federated news ecosystem? Expected outcomes of this first-stage grant: By Month 3: A technical specification of the flow architecture; a prototype flow service routing ActivityPub objects between two instances; documentation of existing Fediverse flow patterns; early integration with one platform (likely PeerTube). By Month 6: A cross-platform prototype connecting at least two Fediverse systems; a working demonstration of trust-based moderation flows; a public code repository and documentation; and a user-facing prototype via the #makinghistory test environment (https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/MakingHistory). All outputs will be released under recognised open source licences. The project follows the #4opens framework: open data, open source, open standards, and open process.

Have you been involved with projects or organisations relevant to this project before?

Yes. The project lead, Hamish Campbell, has over 40 years of experience in grassroots media and technology, including early involvement with Indymedia – the pioneering open publishing news network – and more than 8 years working directly with the Fediverse and ActivityPub community. The #OMN conceptual framework has been developed over this time and is documented extensively in the project wiki, SocialHub, and at https://hamishcampbell.com. Developer Michael has contributed to #OMN concepts and logic for 10 years and is currently building the #makinghistory reference implementation. Ben, the core developer of Emissary, brings specific expertise in the codebase that will form the technical foundation of the project. Alex brings potential DAT/distributed storage support, and IKA will work on testing and rollout.

Requested Support Requested Amount: €45,000

Explain what the requested budget will be used for. Does the project have other funding sources, both past and present? A breakdown in the main tasks with associated effort is appreciated. Make rates explicit. The budget covers a lean, seed-stage proof of concept with no prior external funding. There are currently no other funding sources. The budget breakdown can be found in the attached PDF (funding). Roles: Hamish Campbell (project lead, coordination, documentation, community engagement) and Michael Saunders (primary development, UX, system logic). Additional contributors (Ben, Alex, IKA) are contributing on a voluntary/community basis during this seed phase. Work packages and approximate effort: WP1 Research & Specification (Months 1–2, ~25% of effort): Architecture design, gap analysis of existing Fediverse tools and flows (PeerTube, Lemmy, Mastodon), and documentation of trust-flow patterns. Output: Technical design document. WP2 Core Development (Months 2–5, ~45% of effort): Flow service implementation on top of Emissary; ActivityPub integration for the #5F model; and a trust-based moderation layer extending Emissary’s existing block/flag capabilities. Output: Working prototype codebase. WP3 UX & Prototype (Months 3–5, ~20% of effort): #makinghistory user interface; dual-layer UX (simple and advanced modes); and WCAG 2.1 accessibility compliance. Output: Testable user prototype. WP4 Testing & Documentation (Months 5–6, ~10% of effort): Community testing and iteration; public documentation and reports; and an open knowledge base of what works and what fails. Output: Public documentation, reports, and reusable design patterns. LINK PDF and wiki

Compare your own project with existing or historical efforts.

The closest existing efforts are: Mastodon’s built-in moderation tools: per-instance block lists and the Fediblock community blocklist. These are instance-level tools – they do not create cross-platform trust flows or shared content aggregation. #OMN operates at the network layer, not the instance layer. Fediseer: a trust registry allowing instances to vouch for each other. Fediseer addresses instance-level reputation but does not implement content flow logic, rollback, or metadata editing as network functions. #OMN builds a compostable flow model on top of the kind of trust signals that Fediseer represents. GNU Social / Friendica: older federated social platforms with some aggregation capability. These predate ActivityPub’s consolidation as the dominant standard and do not address the cross-platform news/media commons use case. Indymedia (1999–2010s): the historical precedent for open publishing federated media. Within the wider project, #OMN explicitly revives and modernises the Indymedia model for the ActivityPub era via the #indymediaback reference implementation, addressing the unfinished work of that tradition. The #makinghistory project grows from, and shares, this same established workflow. Bonfire networks: likely related, but unclear in scope and function. Attempts to install and use it have not clarified its approach. It may be trying to address similar problems, but this remains uncertain. The key difference of #OMN: it is not building a new platform. It is building a protocol-level flow layer that works across existing Fediverse platforms, implementing trust-based content propagation as commons infrastructure rather than as a product. See included PDFs.

What are significant technical challenges you expect to solve during the project?

Trust flow implementation: Designing and implementing a data model for trust relationships between federated nodes that is lightweight, compostable, and expressible via or alongside ActivityPub. Trust is local and subjective – the system must allow different communities to apply different trust filters to the same content flow without requiring global consensus.
Rollback across federated state: Implementing the rollback function (re-evaluating and reshaping historical content visibility) in a distributed system where content has already propagated to multiple nodes. This requires a time-aware, local re-indexing approach rather than a global delete mechanism.
Cross-platform content normalisation: Aggregating content objects from Mastodon (short-form social), PeerTube (video), and Lemmy (forum) into a common JSON-LD content model with a consistent trust trail, despite these platforms having different ActivityPub implementations and object schemas.
Search actors as push feeds: Implementing the “content finds you” model – where a defined search query becomes a persistent ActivityPub actor that pushes matching new content to subscribers – requires extending Emissary’s existing subscribable search engine capability.

Describe the ecosystem of the project, and how you will engage with relevant actors and promote the outcomes.

The primary ecosystem is the Fediverse: the network of federated, open-source social platforms running ActivityPub, including Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, Friendica, and many others. This ecosystem has grown substantially (estimated 10+ million active users across thousands of instances) but remains technically fragmented at the commons/media layer. The project builds directly on the Emissary codebase (https://emissary.dev), an existing ActivityPub-native Go application. Engagement with the Emissary community is embedded in the team through Ben’s mentoring role.

Wider ecosystem engagement:

The project will contribute design patterns and documentation back to the broader Fediverse developer community via public code repositories, the project wiki, and events. The #makinghistory test phase connects us to existing archives such as Bishupsgate, Maydyroom, the Peace Museum, and the Campbell Family Archive, providing access to extensive datasets as well as outreach to their administrators and users. The five community events included in the budget are specifically designed to recruit contributors, gather real-world feedback, and expand the network of participating nodes.

Promotion of outcomes:

Outcomes will be shared through the Fediverse itself (maintaining an active presence on ActivityPub-native platforms and legacy social media), via open-licensed documentation, and through NGI/NLnet networks and events. This first-stage grant is explicitly designed as a seed and proof-of-concept phase, with a larger second-stage proposal planned to deliver a fully production-ready system once the core architecture is validated.

See attached PDFs.
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Technical Specification Download

Answering the small print for funding Download

Funding Download

Would like to thank all the meany people who helped with this.

How things can change

Hope this helps compost some of the mess building up. It’s something we all need to do and have responsibility for.

Groups don’t usually fail because of external pressure, they fail because they turn inward and burn energy on themselves. If you want a calm, #KISS path that actually holds diversity without collapsing, we need a few simple lived – traditions and mythos – not heavy governance, not ideology battles, just grounded #KISS practice:

Keep the core action very small and clear – a shared purpose. If people can’t easily answer “what are we doing?”, drift and conflict creep in.

In twine “doing” with “talking” Most infighting comes from too much abstract discussion. Doing space – Talking space – Don’t let one swamp the other.

Protect focus like it’s fragile (because it is), the biggest risk isn’t disagreement – it’s distraction. When things start spiralling bring it back to “what are we building this week?” if it doesn’t help, park it

Default to trust, but design for friction, diversity is strength. But unbalanced diversity = chaos. So let people approach things differently, but require shared outputs – If it doesn’t produce something, it doesn’t dominate attention.

No purity tests, this is where diversity dies. People will come with different politics, paths (fluffy vs spiky) and have different priorities, that’s fine – as long as they don’t block others doing the work.

Make conflict low-energy, not zero-conflict – we won’t avoid disagreements. Trying repression = explosion later. Instead, keep arguments short, move unresolved tension into parallel paths (“try both”) and let results decide, not personalities. This is the “compost” approach we need to talk about – don’t fight the mess, process it.

Grow by doing, not convincing, you don’t need everyone to agree. You need visible, working examples. Let people see it working – that’s what grows a community of action.

What we are sketching and building is the hard middle path of not rigid control (kills growth) and not total openness (creates chaos). But a light structure that keeps things moving.

#Oxford example:
Oxford boaters are sovereign, keeping the free-flowing life of the river, not bound by the old rules of the landlords.

#Fediverse example:
The Fediverse is native to the #openweb path. We judge by the #4opens, and walk with power.

Rebuilding Journalism as Commons (not a product)

News culture on the Fediverse

It should be obvious that we need a path back to good journalism – journalism that sheds light on facts, connects the dots, and lets people trace those dots back to sources. This is what allows us to share, question, and discuss within our own trusted communities, and then spread that knowledge outward through federation, always linking back to the source.

Right now, the #mainstreaming path is broken. It’s sometimes hard for people to see this because the decline has been slow, a gradual death of journalism. Since the early days of the internet, we’ve been told the same story: “People expect news for free, so quality journalism is no longer economically viable.” There’s truth in that. Good journalism is expensive. It takes time, skill, trust, and institutional memory.

But that’s only half the story. What actually happened is this: people kept consuming familiar “news brands,” and those brands were bought, consolidated, and financialised until shareholder value replaced any sense of public value. Slowly, investigative journalists were cut and sidelined, editorial independence eroded, and content shifted toward ads, PR, and narrative management. What we now call “news” is marketing, agenda-setting, and reputation management – a distraction. Journalism, as a public good, has been hollowed out, in part through our own passive acceptance of this shift.

Today, we can see more clearly that if you do real journalism – the kind that challenges power – you have no real career path and face risks: #dotcons blocking, right-wing co-option, and at worst, isolation, exile, prison, or worse. The result is a broken landscape: corporate media that won’t tell the truth, and under-resourced independent media that carries high risk for little or no reward. In that situation, who chooses journalism as a life path?

The deeper problem is articulation and power. The world is complex, most people don’t have the time, energy, or tools to fully articulate what they see, feel, and experience. Into that gap step politicians, corporations, and #fashernista influencers. They have the resources – especially through the #dotcons – to articulate reality, but in ways that divide people, flatten complexity into conflict, and steer perception to serve power and profit. This isn’t just misinformation. It’s structured narrative control.

Why the old models won’t come back, we can’t simply “fix” legacy media. It is structurally tied to advertising, concentrated ownership, and political influence. And we can’t rely on heroic individuals either, that path is too fragile, too dangerous, and too easy to suppress. If journalism is going to survive, it won’t look like the past.

A different path: journalism as networked commons. At #OMN, we’re outlining a different approach decentralised, collective path. Think of it as a second coming of #Indymedia, but more resilient, more sustainable, and better integrated with current networks.

This is where the #openweb and the #Fediverse matter. With protocols like ActivityPub, we already have the foundations for distributed publishing, shared visibility, and cross-community discussion. But tech alone isn’t enough, the missing layer is trust and flow. To rebuild journalism, we need to focus on how information flows socially, not just how it’s published.

This is where #OMN comes in:

Content flows between communities
Trust is applied locally, not imposed globally
Metadata (tags, context, sources, warnings) travels with stories
People can trace information back through the flow

Instead of one “authoritative source,” we get many sources, with visible relationships between them, shaped through community trust and discussion. This is journalism people can actually use to follow a story back to its sources, add context and local knowledge and share and challenge it within trusted spaces.

That’s how we rebuild public understanding – not just publish articles – but from product to process. Journalism should not be a product to consume, it needs to be a process we participate in. When it’s treated as a product it’s optimised for clicks, shaped by incentives and in the end controlled by owners. When it becomes a process it becomes collective, accountable and thus resilient.

So composting the mess, we’re not starting from nothing, we have the ruins of legacy media, the lessons of projects like #Indymedia and the living infrastructure of the #Fediverse. This is compost, from it, we can grow something new – grounded in the #4opens, simple enough to understand (#KISS), and social at its core, not just technical.

The real question isn’t “How do we save journalism?” It’s: How do we rebuild the social systems that make truth-telling possible? Because without those paths, journalism doesn’t just struggle –
it disappears.

Oxford – Boaters & Landowners: A Simple Path Forward (#KISS)

In Oxford we are currently at a recurring stress in how river space is shared between boaters, landowners, and other users (such as rowers and towpath communities). The direction we take will shape not just access, but the character and sustainability of the boating community itself.

Best vs Worst Outcomes

Best outcome is a consensus synergy between boaters and landowners.

* Builds trust and cooperation

* Encourages better self-management within the boating community

* Strengthens a shared sense of stewardship over the river

Worst outcome is the spread of static, paid moorings.

* Prices out existing boaters

* Replaces a living community with “posh houseboats”

* Leads to the destruction of the current, diverse boating culture

A Practical Middle Path

Rather than conflict or heavy regulation, we propose a simple, collective approach based on shared good practice. What would this look like in practice? A lightweight, voluntary “covenant” of good boater behaviour:

* Leave at least 2 metres between moored boats to allow safe exit from the water

* Keep boats and the towpath tidy and welcoming for all users

* Respect visitor moorings – do not overstay

* Avoid leaving empty boats unattended over winter

* Share the river space, including moving boats when needed for rowing events

This Approach:

* #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): simple guidelines over complex enforcement

* Collective responsibility: community-led, not imposed from above

* Open process: visible, understandable, and adaptable

This does not legally bind boaters, but it:

* Encourages better collective behaviour

* Demonstrates responsibility to landowners and authorities (e.g. EA)

* Reduces pressure for restrictive regulation

Role of Landowners & Trusts

For balance, landowners also have a role to play:

* Provide at least two visitor moorings on their stretch of river

* Set a recommended capacity (not rigid limits) for boat numbers

* Engage in ongoing dialogue with the boating community

Open Questions for Discussion

* How do we encourage adoption of this covenant without enforcement?

* What is a fair balance between flexibility and responsibility?

* How can boaters and landowners maintain ongoing communication?

* What practical steps can we take now to move toward this “best outcome”?

This is a light-touch, community-first aimed at avoiding the worst outcome while building toward the best. If we act collectively and simply, we can preserve both access and community – without defaulting to exclusion, pricing out, or over-regulation.

Why do this – Boaters & Landowners

Framing the problem matters, we’re in a familiar pattern pressure builds → calls for regulation → community gets squeezed. This draft is about interrupting that cycle, the aim is simple:

* Give “them” something (landowners, authorities, rowers)

* Strengthen “us” as a visible, responsible community

* Untick the boxes that they use to justify intervention

* And in doing so, slow or deflect heavy-handed regulation

Not by confrontation (yet), but by being seen to act. The strategy is instead of waiting to be regulated, we act collectively to show responsibility to create a visible “good enough” standard. This gives everyone something to point to and say “Something is being done.” That alone often reduces the push for stricter control. Yes, there are multiple directions we could take:

1. Do Nothing (Status Quo)

* No shared standards

* Continued friction with landowners and other users

* High likelihood of imposed regulation

Low effort, high long-term risk

2. Top-Down Regulation

* Paid moorings

* Strict enforcement

* External control of boat numbers and behaviour

High control, loss of community, exclusion of existing boaters

3. Soft self-governance (Proposed path)

* Voluntary guidelines

* Visible collective responsibility

* Ongoing dialogue with stakeholders

Low bureaucracy, preserves culture, reduces pressure

4. Formalised self- organisation

* Boater associations or councils

* Agreed codes with some internal enforcement

* Recognised representation in negotiations

Stronger voice, but risk of internal gatekeeping and drift into bureaucracy, in the end the current community would be priced out anyway.

5. Hybrid Model

* Light self-governance + minimal agreed regulation

* Shared responsibility between boaters and landowners

* Periodic review rather than fixed rules

Balanced, but requires trust and ongoing effort and is unlikely to have a good outcome due to shifting priorates we have no power over.

So filling the gaps (What’s missing). To make the “soft self-governance” path credible, we need better visibility – A simple public-facing statement of principles, something landowners and authorities can point to. I suggest we create a open collective (I can look into this https://opencollective.com/search?q=UK&isHost=true&country=GB )

Encouraging good behaviour through norms, quietly discouraging behaviour that causes conflict. Framing boaters as stewards, not problems by emphasising contribution to river life and culture

Some questions for feedback:

* Does this feel like enough to shift perception?

* What would make landowners actually trust this approach?

* Where does this fall down in practice?

* What’s missing that would make this work on the ground?

* Which path do people actually think is realistic?

Gates vs Bridges: the obscure politics of the #geekproblem

In the #geekproblem mindset, crossing a protocol flow is a gateway were in #openweb terms, it’s a bridge. That difference is not technical – it’s social – the difference between CONTROL and TRUST. A gate is something you lock, permission, authentication, enforcement were a bridge is something you cross, connection, flow, relationship. In the physical world, we don’t put gates on bridges as a default, but in software, we keep rebuilding them, and then wondering why things fragment.

RSS is a bridge.

Closed APIs are gates.

This should be obvious, but it keeps getting lost inside coding culture.

This isn’t just a #mainstreaming problem, if this critique only applied to Big Tech (#dotcons), it would be easy, but it doesn’t. From 30 years of building in alt-tech spaces – hundreds of projects, no bosses, no corporate control – the same pattern keeps reappearing. Control creeps in, what’s striking is that this cuts across both mainstreaming “professional” engineering culture and radical, horizontal, “alternative” tech spaces. That’s why it’s an overarching #geekproblem, the shared cultural bias toward CONTROL in both code and community design.

The deeper issue is social blindness, at the root of this is something uncomfortable – A lack of joined-up social thinking – when a relatively small technical minority designs systems based on limited social experience, abstract models of human behaviour and little grounding in historical or grassroots movements.

When these systems scale globally, the result is tools fail to support humane, collective use, and undermine trust instead of building it, they reproduce the same power dynamics they claim to escape. This feeds the wider #dotcons worldview – even when the intent is “alternative”. It’s not just “the spirit of the age” it’s a worldview of a narrow culture that has become infrastructural. We’re all, to some extent, still operating inside this #deathcult logic, even when we think we’re critiquing it.

So a good first step is looking at who is funding the problem, this is where foundations and FOSS funding bodies need to look closely. A lot of funding unintentionally reinforces gate-based architectures, complexity that centralises control and abstract innovation over lived social practice. We keep funding new gates, then asking why the #openweb doesn’t grow. It #KISS that if people cannot mentally model a system, they cannot govern it, if they cannot govern it, power centralises every time.

A different path is bridges and flows. Projects like #OMN and #indymediaback take this different approach of start with flows, not platforms, building bridges, not gateways. The focus is on keeping systems simple enough to understand (#KISS) to grow trust as social and visible, not hidden in code. Using the #4opens as grounding, not branding, we understand none of this is new, that’s the value of #nothingnew. As I keep pointing out it’s how RSS worked, early Indymedia worked and large parts of the existing Fediverse still work (when not over-engineered).

On #blocking and conflict – Yes, it’s sometimes necessary, but often it’s a symptom of deeper failure of rigid, internalised worldviews, lack of shared mediation tools and systems designed for exclusion rather than negotiation. It’s easy to block, it’s much harder to build bridges, so the real question is how do we design systems that reduce pointless conflict without exhausting the people inside them? Food for thought (and compost).

We’re all carrying some of this mess, it’s fine – it’s compost. But if we don’t consciously shift from gates to bridges, we’ll keep rebuilding the same broken systems, just with nicer branding. As bridges scale trust – Gates scale control, to mediate this mess, the hard question we need to ask the #mainstreaming is which one are they funding?

#openweb #4opens #OMN