Thinking of workshops to run at “Nodes On A Web” #NOAW unconference

Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, decentralisation, and horizontal collaboration. Through writing, workshops, and practical projects, he argues that the future of the Fediverse depends as much on culture, governance, and shared infrastructure as it does on code.

Workshop 1

The #Mainstreaming Problem in the Fediverse

Purpose is to open conversation that many people feel but rarely articulate: the tension between grassroots culture and institutional capture. Start with your simple distinction:

Good #mainstreaming → openweb values spreading outward

Bad #mainstreaming → corporate/NGO structures reshaping the Fediverse

Then ask: “Which direction are we currently moving?”

Discussion topics – funding and governance, foundations and institutional capture, developer vs user power, infrastructure vs platforms. How to avoid repeating Web 2.0

Activity is to ask participants to map three layers: Grassroots – NGO / institutional – Corporate. To discuss where power currently sits and what healthy balance might look like.

Outcome is people leave with language to understand the tensions they are experiencing in the Fediverse.

Workshop 2

Maybe a second one on why #makeinghistory is needed? Translating #OMN from “activist infrastructure” into “missing public digital infrastructure.” That language is what this event is trying to figure out. The Open Media Network (#OMN) proposes a model where grassroots publishing, community moderation, and institutional participation are balanced. Participants can discuss how institutions support shared infrastructure rather than just deploying isolated platforms.

Many institutions are experimenting with the Fediverse as an alternative to #dotcons corporate social media. However, simply running institutional servers risks reproducing the same platform dynamics in a federated form. We need workshops that explore the broader ecosystem of public-interest media infrastructure.

“What happens after institutions join the Fediverse?” The #KISS answer is they need to support the commons infrastructure that makes it socially viable. Running Mastodon is not enough, institutions need to support the wider open media ecosystem.

Talking about #openweb culture in a constructive way is tricky because most #FOSS and Fediverse conversations default to technical framing: code quality, scalability, moderation tooling, and #UX. These things matter, but they are not the foundation that determines whether a network lives or dies.

Maybe a useful way to open the conversation is to shift the starting point. Instead of saying “culture is important too”, say something stronger but practical: The success or failure of open systems is primarily a cultural question, not a technical one. The code only expresses the culture behind it.

Start with a simple historical observation. Many technically strong systems failed because the social layer was weak, while some technically rough systems succeeded because the community culture worked.

Examples from the open web – early open source projects that thrived because communities shared norms of collaboration. Grassroots networks like Indymedia worked socially even when the software was messy. Corporate platforms that succeeded not because they were technically better, but because they built powerful social gravity.

The pattern is clear, that technology enables networks, but culture sustains them. This is the missing step in most Fediverse conversations. Right now to meany discussions focus on: scaling servers, moderation tools, interface design and onboarding. These are all necessary but insufficient.

What way to often goes missing is the deeper questions – What culture are we actually trying to grow? Without answering that, the system tends to drift toward the dominant internet culture, which today is shaped by the #dotcon platform model of engagement optimisation, algorithmic attention markets, influencer dynamics and centralised power. When that culture seeps into the Fediverse, the result is a federated copy of the same problems.

So why is culture harder than code? Code can be written by a few developers, culture requires shared understanding across thousands of people. To grow this we need native governance norms, trust networks, moderation values and expectations about ownership and participation to hold to native paths for how conflict is handled. These things cannot simply be implemented in software, they must be grown socially, fail to address this is why many technically strong projects fail, they assume the social layer will somehow emerge automatically. It rarely does.

To make this constructive, it helps to clearly describe what we mean by #openweb culture. Some core values historically included public-first communication rather than platform ownership, decentralised responsibility instead of central moderation authority, commons thinking rather than product thinking to nurture horizontal participation rather than audience/influencer hierarchies, this need clear #4opens processes rather than opaque decision-making.

These values were never perfect, but they created a different social environment from today’s corporate social media. If we do not actively cultivate these values, the surrounding internet culture will slowly overwrite them. If the Fediverse continues to grow without addressing culture as it currently is, the most likely outcome is large institutional instances dominate, smaller community spaces struggle leading to more moderation being centralised. This all shifts user expectations toward platform-style experiences.

At that point, the system may still be technically federated, but the culture will have drifted back toward Web 2.0. The code will be open, but the social dynamics will not be.

So the “extra step” is simply, we must talk about culture as deliberately as we talk about software architecture. That means asking questions like: What social norms should Fediverse communities encourage? What governance models support open participation? How do we keep the ecosystem diverse rather than dominated by large actors? What responsibilities come with running infrastructure in a commons network?

These conversations are sometimes uncomfortable, because they move beyond engineering into politics, sociology, and ethics. But avoiding them does not make them disappear, it simply means the culture will be shaped by default forces instead of conscious choices.

A simple way to frame this – A phrase that often works well in discussion is – “Code builds the network, but culture decides what the network becomes.” If we want the #openweb to remain something different from the #closedweb platform internet, we need to invest as much thought into the culture as we do into the code and #UX. Otherwise, the technology may succeed technically, but the social project behind it will quietly fail.

https://hamishcampbell.com/the-wall-of-funding-silence/ I am going to “Nodes On A Web” #NOAW to try and have this conversation in a polite way.

A Note to #FOSS Maintainers and Funders: The Problem With #Mainstreaming

There is a point that often gets misunderstood in conversations about the future of the #openweb and #FOSS that #mainstreaming itself is not inherently good or bad. What matters is who is influencing whom. We can think of it in two very different directions.

Good #mainstreaming is when the values of the #openweb move outward into the wider world: Transparency, decentralization, cooperation, shared infrastructure and community governance. In this case, mainstream society learns from the cultures that grew around free software and open networks. But there is another direction.

Bad #mainstreaming happens when the mainstream flows inward and reshapes the open ecosystem in its own image. The values that arrive tend to look like this: corporate control, surveillance capitalism, hierarchical governance, branding over substance leading to growth and extraction over community. In this case, the #openweb is not influencing the mainstream, the mainstream is absorbing and reshaping the openweb. And historically, that absorption rarely ends well.

This second bad option of co-option Is the default, in the current context, mainstreaming tends to dilute radical alternatives into market-friendly compromises. This is not accidental, the system many of us are working inside – what I often call the #deathcult of neoliberalism – does not absorb things in good faith, it absorbs them in order to neutralize them.

We have seen this pattern repeatedly when open communities become venture-backed platforms, cooperative tools become monetized services, grassroots networks become brands. What begins as a commons to often ends as a product. For people building or funding #FOSS infrastructure, this pattern should be familiar.

Because of this messy dynamic, we need active mediation when interacting with mainstream institutions. Not blanket rejection, but not naïve acceptance either. The question is always contextual: Is the mainstream being influenced by open values or are open communities being reshaped to fit mainstream power structures? Right now, the balance is heavily tilted toward the latter, which means the priority is not endless integration. The priority is protecting and strengthening the roots of the #openweb.

Thinking about this kinda mess making helps to highlight the problem of the #NGO Path, where the NGO layer becomes problematic. The people involved are sometimes well-meaning, many think they are genuinely trying to help. But the institutional incentives they operate under reshape projects in subtle but powerful ways.

Our #FOSS funding structures push toward professionalization, opaque centralized governance, brand management, risk avoidance that is compatibility with existing power structures. Over time, this acts like a kind of social poison inside grassroots ecosystems. That might sound harsh, but it is simply a reality of social dynamics and institutional gravity. People working within those systems carry those assumptions with them, often without realizing it.

For the health of the ecosystem, we need to mediate our intake of that poison. This is not about demonizing individuals, it is about recognizing structural effects. There is no contradiction in saying both things at once: They may be good people – Their institutional logic still damages grassroots culture. So a useful rule of thumb is simple is don’t drink too deeply from the #mainstreaming.

Visibility Matters – Another issue for #FOSS projects is much more practical – Grassroots infrastructure often stays invisible. If people don’t know a project exists, they cannot adopt it. And when that happens, the public will naturally drift toward the next “ethical” platform marketed by the very companies reproducing the #dotcons model. The difference is that those companies have huge PR budgets. If open projects do not communicate what they are building and why it matters, the narrative will be written elsewhere and it will not favour the commons.

The real value of the #OpenWeb at its simplest, the #openweb path does something very straightforward in that it empowers horizontal, DIY culture and dis-empowers vertical, closed systems. That shift alone has enormous value.

It changes who gets to publish.
It changes who controls infrastructure.
It changes who participates in shaping the network.

Yet one of the strangest things in the current moment is how many people actively reject or ignore this possibility. Part of that blindness comes from habit, part from career incentives, part from the cultural gravity of the mainstream. But the result is the same: the tools that could strengthen public digital space are sidelined in favour of systems designed primarily for profit.

So what can maintainers and funders do? If you maintain or fund #FOSS infrastructure, there are a few practical steps that can help strengthen the ecosystem:

Fund the commons, not just products. Support infrastructure that serves communities, even if it does not generate revenue.
Protect open governance. Funding models should strengthen community decision-making rather than centralizing power.
Support grassroots visibility. Help projects communicate what they are building and why it matters.
Resist quite capture. Watch for subtle shifts where open projects become shaped by market logic or branding priorities.
Invest in horizontal ecosystems. The long-term health of the web depends on many small interconnected projects, not a few dominant platforms.

The choice in front of us is the future of the #openweb will not be decided by technology alone. It will be decided by culture, governance, and resource flows. If the current trend continues, open infrastructure will increasingly be absorbed into corporate platforms, #NGO programs, and venture ecosystems.

But there is another path, slower one, messier, more grassroots one. One that keeps the web as a commons rather than a marketplace. Whether that path survives depends heavily on the choices made by #FOSS maintainers and the people who fund the work.

Disciplined curiosity beats IQ, Oxford

There is a persistent myth pushed in our culture that intelligence – high IQ, academic credentials, elitist education – leads naturally to clear thinking. My organic experience suggests the opposite, what matters is disciplined, skeptical, freethinking curiosity. Without that, intelligence simply becomes a tool for defending whatever assumptions people already hold.

This is one of the reasons many academic environments produce people who are, bluntly, credulous. Not because they lack intelligence, but because the institutional structures around them reward conformity and reputation management far more than genuine curiosity.

Over the last two years I’ve been spending time in and around the university culture in Oxford, participating in discussions, events, and academic life. The experience has been instructive, if in the end frustrating. You would expect a place associated with University of Oxford to be a centre of open intellectual challenge. In practice, it feels like something else: a system that filters, polishes, and reproduces existing assumptions.

This is not universal, some of the hard scientific disciplines still cultivate a form of disciplined skepticism, experiments fail, evidence contradicts theory, so you are expected to question results. The process encourages a narrow but very real culture of doubt, but outside those narrow areas, skepticism to often fades.

Instead, you find intellectual fashion cycles building reputational alliances that push institutional caution based on #blinded ideological signalling. The result can be a strange mix of high intelligence and low #blocking curiosity. People who are good at working inside established frameworks, but much less comfortable questioning the foundations of privilege those frameworks rest on.

This matters for the #openweb and projects like #OMN. I got nowhere here as many of the institutions that might have supported open digital infrastructure – universities, NGOs, research centres – have shifted toward the same #deathcult #mainstreaming #blocking that dominates the wider tech world. Funding cycles shape research priorities, institutional partnerships shape acceptable ideas and career incentives shape what can safely be questioned.

So even where intelligence and resources exist, the culture of disciplined curiosity that drives the needed real innovation is thin if it exists at all. The irony is that the early internet grew out of exactly the same institutions, but with opposite culture. The original World Wide Web ecosystem, the hacker and #FOSS communities, and early grassroots media projects like #indymedia were built by people who combined technical curiosity with deep skepticism about centralised control.

They didn’t wait for institutional approval, they experimented, built #DIY tools that broke things and rebuilt them. That spirit is what projects like #OMN are trying to revive. The goal is not to outcompete corporate #dotcons platforms or impress #NGO academic institutions. The goal is simpler: to build open media infrastructure that communities can use based on small nodes, trust networks and open metadata flows. Simple tools that allow people to publish, share, and connect.

This is a working #KISS approach to rebuilding grassroots media. If the last twenty years of the web have taught us anything, it’s that intelligence alone doesn’t produce healthy systems. You can have brilliant engineers building platforms that clearly undermine democratic communication, it’s the mess that shapes the current #dotcons world.

What makes the difference is curiosity combined with skepticism, the willingness to question the structures that shape our digital lives. Without that, even the smartest institutions drift into the same patterns of credulity and conformity, which is why rebuilding the #openweb is not just a technical project, it’s a cultural one.

For some reflections from the last couple of years around Oxford life and technology culture, see: https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/oxford/

#Oxford #academic #elitist

Why does it feel like so many people have become intolerant prats? A blunt observation: it increasingly feels like many people today are intolerant prats. And worse, this behaviour has started to feel normal. You see it everywhere. Online discussions collapse quickly into hostility. Small disagreements become unthinking moral #blocking were people retreat into camps where any challenge is treated as an attack.

This isn’t just a social media problem, though the #dotcons have certainly amplified it, it’s a deeper cultural shift. For decades the dominant systems shaping our culture have encouraged competition, individualism, and personal branding. The result is what I often call #stupidindividualism – a worldview where the individual ego becomes the centre of everything. In that environment, disagreement stops being part of learning and becomes a threat to identity, so people react defensively, aggressively or dismissively. What used to be debate becomes performance.

The platform problem is when the #dotcons platforms are designed to amplify this behaviour where algorithms reward outrage, tribal loyalty and moral signalling to push conflict to drive engagement. They do not reward patience, nuance, or curiosity, in other words, they are structurally optimised to turn ordinary people into worse versions of themselves. Over time this becomes cultural habit, people start to assume that hostility is normal conversation.

Another factor is the slow collapse of collective spaces. When communities interact face-to-face, or in smaller trust networks, people have to deal with each other as human beings. Relationships create friction but also accountability. In large anonymous digital environments, those social checks weaken. People become avatars and opinions rather than neighbours, this makes it much easier, “natural” to treat each other badly.

Why this matters for the #openweb. If we are trying to rebuild grassroots media and communication infrastructure, we need to recognise that these cultural habits have already spread into many communities, including the tech and activist spaces that should be alternatives. This is one reason projects fragment so easily as small disagreements spiral, people assume bad faith and thus trust collapses.

You end up with endless internal conflict instead of collective building. This isn’t just a personality problem, it’s the legacy of systems that reward attention and conflict rather than cooperation.

A different path can be grown in projects like #OMN which is partly about rebuilding infrastructure, but they are also about rebuilding culture. The idea is simple: smaller networks, trust-based publishing, open metadata flows and simple tools people can run themselves. A #KISS approach to communication infrastructure.

But technology alone doesn’t solve the deeper issue, what actually makes communities work is something much older and simpler: tolerance and curiosity. The ability to disagree without instantly turning disagreement into war. The ability to assume that the other person might have something worth hearing. Without those habits, no infrastructure – open or closed – will function well for long.

Composting the mess – the current online culture is a mess. A lot of the behaviour we see today is the product of twenty years of #dotcons platform design. But mess is also compost, it shows us clearly what doesn’t work. The next generation of the #openweb has an opportunity to build systems that encourage something better: slower conversation, local trust networks, collective responsibility, shared media infrastructure. Less shouting, more listening.

It won’t magically make people perfect. Some people will still be intolerant prats. But at least we won’t be running the entire communication system of society on platforms designed to encourage it.

#KISS

This Oxford mess is a shadow of a larger mess. We were told the story of Prometheus: fire stolen from the gods and given to humans – our first real piece of technology. The myth asks a simple question: what do we do with power once we have it?

In democratic society why do we put up gig work and side hustles, endless surveillance platforms pushing algorithmic attention traps, housing crises and climate collapse all pushed by a handful of billionaires controlling huge parts of the economy. Why do we put up with What with the mess of technocratic oligarchy – a system where technological infrastructure concentrates power instead of distributing it?

The #mainstreaming mythology of the tech founder helped this happen. The “visionary genius” narrative around people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk turned corporate executives into cultural heroes. This mess is simply #KISS oligarchy with better marketing.

Even ancient thinkers warned about this. Plato and Aristotle described how societies cycle through forms of power, and how rule by the wealthy tends to serve the wealthy above everyone else. The irony is that many of today’s tech elitists think of themselves as the new aristocracy – the “smartest people in the room” guiding humanity forward.

Yet the future they’ve built is #techshit platform #feudalism with people monitored constantly, economic life mediated by a few #dotcons platforms. Infrastructure owned by private empires and democratic institutions bought out then sidelined.

The tragedy isn’t that technology failed, it is more that we let our technological imagination be captured by oligarchs. Prometheus gave humanity fire so we could build civilization together, not so a tiny #nastyfew tech CEOs can privatise the flame and sell back the light.

The real question isn’t whether technology will shape the future, it’s who controls it.

#OMN #OpenWeb #TechPower #Oligarchy #Future #Compost

Shovels, Hashtags, and Revolutions: Roots of the #openweb

It’s obvious to everyone paying attention that the relentless push of #mainstreaming over the last forty years has not made society healthier or more stable. Quite the opposite, the result has been accelerating social disintegration and the rapid expansion of #climatechaos.

When the current trajectory continues, the consequences are catastrophic. Over the next fifty years we are looking at millions dead and billions displaced by climate breakdown, ecological collapse, and the political instability that follows. Flooded cities, failing agriculture, collapsing states, mass migration, these are no longer speculative futures. They are already visible on the horizon.

What makes this situation so disturbing is not ignorance. For the last decade, the consequences have been very clear. Climate science, ecological data, and lived experience have converged into a single message, that the system driving this crisis cannot continue. Yet those with the power to change course continue pushing the same policies, the same economic logic, and the same institutional inertia that produced the crisis in the first place.

This is not simply failure, it is knowing failure. And that raises an uncomfortable question of when does systemic negligence become a crime? For forty years the dominant ideology has been the worship of endless growth, deregulation, privatization, and extraction – what many people now recognize as the #DeathCult of #neoliberalism. On this path, ecosystems are treated as expendable, communities are hollowed out, and public institutions are dismantled in the name of “efficiency”.

The result is the hollowing-out of social structures and the destabilization of the planet itself. This isn’t an accident, the evidence has been overwhelming for decades. From early climate warnings in the 1980s to the now constant stream of scientific reports and disasters, we have known were this path leads. And yet the machine keeps running.

At some point we have to confront the idea that what we are witnessing is not just bad policy but something closer to systemic criminality. When leaders, corporations, and institutions knowingly pursue actions that will cause mass death and displacement, we enter the territory of #CrimeAgainstHumanity. The historical analogy that needs resurfacing is Nuremberg.

After the Second World War, the world established that individuals in positions of power could be held legally responsible for crimes that harmed humanity as a whole. The principle was simple: “just following the system” is not a defence. Today we face a different kind of global crime – slower, more bureaucratic, wrapped in economic language – but far larger in scale.

If millions die and billions are displaced because decision-makers continued destructive policies long after the dangers are clear, then if social democracy survives, future generations will have every reason to enforce people as accountable? This is not about vengeance, it’s about accountability and the possibility of changing course before the worst outcomes arrive.

The tragedy is that alongside this destructive path there have always been alternatives – social, technological, and cultural. Grassroots networks, commons-based governance, cooperative systems, and the original ideals of the #openweb all point toward more resilient and humane ways of organising society. But these paths have been buried under forty years of blinded #mainstreaming, where every institution, including our own #NGO people, force alignment with this narrow economic logic.

Digging out of this mess requires more than better technology or better policy papers, it requires collective action, memory, and courage. In other words: Shovels. Hashtags. And revolutions. Because the first step in changing the future is digging up the truth about how we got here.

#OMN #techshit #compost

What projects like #OMN can learn from history

The lesson from the Leonid Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union is simple but brutal that stability is not strength. From the outside the system looked powerful – armies, rockets, space stations. But internally it had stopped being able to correct itself, criticism became dangerous, information was distorted, and the leadership focused on maintaining control rather than fixing problems. The result was a long, slow decay that only became obvious once collapse was already underway.

For projects like #OMN and the wider #openweb, there are some clear lessons. A system must be able to criticise itself, when criticism is blocked, systems rot quietly. In political systems this shows up as propaganda and falsified reports, in tech projects it shows up as closed decision-making, defensive leadership with performative openness, leading to communities where criticism gets socially punished.

The #4opens matter because they institutionalise self-correction: open code → people can inspect, open data → people can verify, open process → people can challenge decisions and open standards → people can fork and build alternatives. Forking is the equivalent of democratic opposition, without it, stagnation creeps in.

What we can learn is simple don’t trade dynamism for comfort. What we learn from history, a big part of the Brezhnev problem was that the leadership chose predictability over adaptation. The same thing happens in tech ecosystems when projects shift from experimentation to → brand protection, messy community → managed messaging leading to failing grassroots growth → to institutional control. You end up with stagnation.

For something like #OMN, the messy grassroots stage is not a weakness, it is the source of vitality, it’s about having a space were we can compost the institutions that tend to prioritise survival over purpose.

This is a universal pattern, over time, organisations start to exist to maintain themselves, not to achieve their original mission. You can see this in NGOs that avoid challenging power because they depend on funding, tech foundations that prioritise corporate partnerships and projects that optimise for grants rather than any usefulness. The danger for #openweb projects is #mainstreaming without accountability. When institutions become the goal, the commons become secondary.

Back to history, we find that information rot is deadly, the Soviet system increasingly relied on false reporting maintaining the illusion of success. Tech ecosystems have their own version with inflated user numbers exaggerating adoption claims, marketing replacing real development leading to blocking #NGO conferences replacing working infrastructure. Healthy ecosystems need ground truth, it’s another reason the #4opens matter, they make it harder to fake progress.

Real strength is distributed, the Soviet model concentrated authority at the top. That made correction impossible. The #openweb path is at best the opposite with distributed infrastructure, federated governance leading to multiple independent actors feeding the ability to fork and diverge. Resilience comes from diversity and redundancy, not central authority.

Collapse often looks stable until suddenly it isn’t, the lesson from the Brezhnev period is that decline can look like stability for a long time. You see signs only if you look closely at empty shelves, falsified reports, ageing leadership squatting rigid institutions.

In the current #dotcons web ecosystem the equivalents might be shrinking trust in platforms, centralised control of communication, developer burnout, communities drifting away from corporate spaces. The surface can still look powerful while the foundations are weakening.

The practical lesson for #OMN is that we need to keep focus as anti-Brezhnev systems. That means building structures that encourage criticism, experimentation, decentralisation, transparency and community power over institutional control. The goal is not stability, its living systems that can correct themselves. Because once a system loses that ability, the future is already written – it just takes a while before everyone else notices.

Policy churn, selective memory, and the mess on repeat

There’s a familiar pattern in foreign policy debates: outrage at the current regime, amnesia about how it got there. Yes, the current government of #Iran is repressive. It crushes dissent, restricts freedoms, and enforces authoritarian rule. None of that needs soft-pedalling, but if we’re at all serious about understanding the world – rather than just reacting to #fashernista headlines – we also have to look at how situation came to be.

In 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was removed in a coup orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency and MI6. The reason wasn’t hidden. Mosaddegh had nationalised Iran’s oil industry, which had been dominated by British interests. Oil, not democracy, was the priority.

The coup, coup d’état, dismantled a native government with a democratic mandate and reinstalled Mohammad Reza Pahlavi an authoritarian monarch, backed by the United States and the United Kingdom. His regime relied on repression, secret police, and heavy Western support to maintain control. That repression didn’t produce stability, it produced rage. In 1979, the backlash came in the form of the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the Shah and replaced him with a theocratic system that remains in power today.

This is the #churn, Western powers intervene blindly for strategic and economic gain. They undermine any democratic movements that natively conflict with corporate and geopolitical greed. The installed regime rules repressively, public anger builds, eventually, it explodes – often empowering forces that are more hostile, more radical, and less aligned with Western interests than the government that was overthrown. Then we act surprised and circle back to the same mess.

None of this excuses the Iranian regime’s actions, but pretending history began in 1979 is dishonest. If we want fewer authoritarian states and fewer hostile stand-offs, we need to start by acknowledging how “defending freedom” has meant undermining it. Policy churn without accountability simply produces the next crisis, and then the next one. We need to compost this mess.

In the #mainstreaming mess, international relations (#IR), energy has always been about power and security as much as economics. The modern system was built around chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, where a disruption can shake global markets overnight.

With this in mind, when we step to a different subject, the framing renewables as “unreliable” misses this wider point: oil and gas are only “reliable” so long as fragile geopolitical routes remain open and militarily secured. Wind and solar don’t sail through Hormuz; they are generated locally, distributed across grids, and not hostage to a single naval blockade. From a security perspective, decentralised renewables reduce exposure to exactly the kind of chokepoint crisis that has defined fossil-fuel geopolitics for decades.

There are meany resigns to compost this kind of mess.

The #IR view of how to survive in a hostile world

Public Money, Private Hype: From Blockchain to AI – and the #FOSS Path Less Taken

In tech funding, over the last decade, the #EU poured hundreds of millions of euros into the #blockchain mess. The promise has proven to be illusion, we built no working transformation: trustless systems, frictionless governance or new economic layers for Europe. The reality? By any honest social metric, 99.9% of that public funding was poured straight down the drain.

Now we are lining up to do the same with AI. Another wave of hundreds of millions, based on another cycle of hype, feeding frenzy for consultants, startups, and policy conferences. And if we are realistic, 99% of this funding will follow the same path: absorbed into closed, corporate-driven ecosystems with minimal public return, poured down the drain.

In between these two hype cycles, we invested comparatively little in the #openweb and #FOSS. And yet that is where we actually saw meaningful results. Even if we are conservative and say 70% of public funding for #openweb and Free and Open Source Software was wasted, that still leaves 30% that worked. Thirty percent that built tools people use. Thirty percent that created infrastructure that continues to function. Thirty percent that delivered measurable social good.

Compared to less than 0.001% meaningful return from blockchain projects (and that’s being generous), and perhaps 1% from AI funding (also generous), this is an extraordinary success rate. So why aren’t we talking more about this?

The Pattern: Funding the Closed, Ignoring the Commons

The problem is not technology, it’s political economy. Public money is repeatedly funnelled into closed ecosystems. #Blockchain projects were built around proprietary platforms, based on financialisation. They all failed to deliver public infrastructure, most were simply vehicles for extraction.

#AI is following the same pattern. Instead of building public infrastructure rooted in openness, transparency, and shared governance, we are too often simply subsidising closed models and corporate consolidation. The result will be the same: dependency, vendor lock-in, and very little democratic control.

Meanwhile, the #4opens and #FOSS quietly power the world.

Servers run on open-source operating systems.
The web runs on open protocols.
Community platforms run on federated code.
Critical infrastructure depends on open libraries.

And yet funding for these projects remains very marginal, precarious, and treated, if at all, as an afterthought.

Why This Matters

This is not only about waste, it is about direction. We are living in an era of climate breakdown, democratic fragility, and accelerating inequality. Public investment needs to strengthen commons-based infrastructure, not deepen dependency on mess of speculative and corporate-controlled #dotcons. When we fund the #fashionista hype cycles we increase centralisation, reduce public oversight and lock ourselves into closed ecosystems, which hollow out our needed local capacity.

When we fund #openweb and #FOSS we build shared infrastructure, increase resilience, enable local innovation to create tools that can be forked, adapted, and reused. Even a poor 30% success rate in commons-based funding creates compounding social value. Code written once can be reused globally. Infrastructure built openly becomes a foundation others can extend. Knowledge stays in the public sphere.

Closed projects don’t compound in the same way. They expire, pivot, get acquired, and then disappear behind paywalls.

The Incentive Problem

So why does this mess keep happening? Because hype is easier to support than maintenance. The current #mainstreaming is to blind, Blockchain and AI come with glossy narratives of disruption and geopolitical competition. They promise growth, dominance, strategic autonomy. They flatter policymakers with the illusion of being at the frontier.

The #openweb and #FOSS, by contrast, are mundane. They are about maintenance, collaboration, and long-term stewardship. They don’t produce any unicorn valuations, the smoke and mirrors that feed splashy policy headlines. But they work, and in public policy, “working” should be the gold standard.

What We Need to Talk About

We need to keep asking direct #spiky questions about what percentage of publicly funded tech projects remain usable five years later? How many are open, forkable, and independently maintainable? Who owns the infrastructure we are building with public money? And does this investment strengthen the commons or subsidise enclosure? If we measured blockchain funding by long-term public utility, it would be exposed as a massive misallocation at best and fraud at worst. If we measure AI funding the same way in five years, we may reach the same conclusion. We #KISS need structural change:

Default to #4opens – Public funding #KISS should require open licenses, open standards, and transparent governance.
Fund Maintenance – Not just #fashionista projects, but long-term stewardship of critical open infrastructure.
Measure Social Value – Not hype, not valuation, not patents, but actual public use and resilience.
Grassroots tech as seedlings – to be open to real change and challenge in tech.
Support Commons Governance – Fund communities, not more startups.

Why We Need to Act

If we do not challenge the current messy #techshit cycle, we keep pushing ourselves into a future defined by the #dotcons, closed platforms with extractive models. To say this is not anti-technology, it is pro-public infrastructure. The choice is simple, do we keep pouring public money into, closed ecosystems with near-zero public return or invest systematically in the messy, imperfect, but functioning #openweb commons.

The data – even by generous estimates – is clear. Thirty percent real return beats 0.001% every time. We need to stop funding hype, we need to fund what works, and we need to say this loudly, before the next billion euros disappears down the same drain.

Why good faith is a technical requirement for #FOSS

If you’ve spent years in #FOSS, you’ve likely developed a strong allergy to vague political language. You care about licenses, reproducibility, governance models, and whether something actually runs. Good. That discipline is why free software exists at all.

But here’s the uncomfortable question, what if the biggest blocker to the #openweb right now isn’t technical debt – but social debt? And what if “good faith” is not a moral nicety, but a core infrastructure requirement?

The problem is when activism meets the #geekproblem. Anyone who pushes for change – especially against #mainstreaming pressures – develops a recurring relationship with bad faith. You see this when:

Corporate actors adopt the language of openness while enclosing the commons.

Institutions celebrate “community” while centralizing control.

Projects technically comply with openness while culturally gatekeeping participation.

This isn’t new, but the scale is new, in the age of #dotcons, #NGO enclosure is polished, funded, and normalized. Resistance generally fragmented, exhausted, and defensive as years of platform manipulation and extractive models have left people burnt out and cynical. In that climate, good faith is fragile, yet without it, nothing decentralized works. Good faith is infrastructure, decentralized systems cannot rely on coercion at scale. They rely on:

Trust

Transparency

Shared norms

The assumption is that participants are not actively trying to sabotage the commons, as when bad faith dominates, decentralized governance collapses into:

Endless meta arguments

Capture by the loudest actors

Drift toward hierarchy “for efficiency”

Sound familiar? This is why good faith isn’t sentimental, it’s structural. If you’ve ever tried to maintain a FOSS project while navigating trolls, corporate opportunists, and purity politics, you already know this.

To help the #4opens is a practical test, not a vibe. The #4opens framework exists precisely to operationalize good faith. It asks four simple questions of any grassroots tech project:

Is the data open?

Is the source open?

Are the processes open?

Are the standards open?

This extends beyond traditional open data initiatives (often institutional, often cosmetic). It covers the entire ecosystem of a project, not just its outputs. The value is not ideological purity, it’s resilience. When data, code, process, and standards are open:

Capture becomes harder.

Forking remains possible.

Governance can be contested transparently.

Communities can leave without losing everything.

That’s not abstract politics, it’s survival architecture. Composting the current rot is why #OMN exists as a project. We are living in a digital environment thick with enclosure and manipulation. Years of bad faith, disempowerment, and algorithmic extraction have created social decay. The instinct of many geeks is to build a cleaner stack and hope people migrate. But the problem isn’t just software, it’s trust collapse.

If the #openweb is to mean anything beyond developer autonomy, it has to support collective storytelling and coordination, not just individual expression. #OMN is a shovel, not a cathedral. It’s a way to compost the mess rather than pretend it isn’t there.

The #OMN (Open Media Network) is not a shiny new protocol. It’s deliberately simple: Publish, Subscribe, Moderate, Rollback, Edit. That’s it, no engagement hacks, no growth funnels and no surveillance capitalism. It’s a #DIY, trust-based, human-moderated space. Messy, organic, built for communities, not only users.

This matters in the era of #climatechaos and social break down. As climate instability accelerates, centralized platforms will align with state and corporate power to prioritize “order” over dissent and optimize for profitability in shrinking margins.

To balance these communities will need coordination without permission, information flows that aren’t algorithmically distorted and infrastructure they can adapt locally, that’s a social demand. If #FOSS remains culturally optimized for the small minority who enjoy living inside the #geekproblem, it will not meet that demand at all.

We need to understand that the vast majority do not want to self-host, they do not want to debate licences, they do not want to live inside issue trackers. They want functioning, trustworthy spaces, if we can’t provide that, someone else will – and it won’t be #4opens.

The hard part is working with the empowered disempowered of our #fashionista class. We have a generation trained in #closed systems that reward performative critique over collective construction. On #dotcons platforms and strands of #NGO thinking, people are empowered to disempower others with common sense #blocking of call-out culture, optics over substance and branding over shared process. You get a strange anti-politics, egotistical, individualistic, allergic to long-term responsibility. A culture that critiques power while replicating it. Escaping this dynamic may be uncomfortable, it may get nasty before it stabilizes.

But here are some kinder strategies we can use:

Make contributions obvious and low-drama, clear process reduces ego battles.

Reward maintenance, not only innovation, culture follows incentives.

Default to transparency over suspicion, sunlight reduces paranoia looping.

Design for groups, not influencers, collective accounts, shared moderation, distributed ownership.

Keep it simple (#KISS), as complexity amplifies gatekeeping.

None of this eliminates conflict, but it shifts the terrain from personality warfare to shared work.

An invitation to the sceptics, you don’t need to buy the rhetoric, maybe ask instead does this increase forkability? Reduce capture risk? Does it lower dependence on extractive infrastructure to strengthen collective agency? If the answers are yes, they belong in the #FOSS conversation. The future of the #openweb will not be secured by better branding or cleverer stacks. It will be secured by projects that treat good faith as a design constraint and collective resilience as the goal.

This is not about purity, it’s about durability. We can keep polishing tools for the tiny minority who enjoy living inside the #geekproblem, but, we need to build infrastructure that ordinary communities can also use to navigate the storms ahead. The invitation stands, pick up a shovel, help compost the mess by build something that gives back more than it extracts.

#4opens #indymediaback #openweb #compostingthemess #KISS #makeinghistory #OMN

State Funding of #FOSS and Open Source: Is it a Good Idea or a Bad Idea?

The #NastyFew Are Not Hidden – They’re Integrated

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.

Fear feeds compliance

Let’s be clear, the current #mainstreaming was never a social justice path. This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s documented history, the archive is public. But when we forget history, propaganda works better. When people and communities challenge dominant economic arrangements – resource control, industrial policy, alignment with rival powers – they enter dangerous territory. And this matters, because fear feeds myth, and myth feeds compliance.

This matters for the #OMN as the battle is not military or economic, it is informational, when #mainstreaming agencies master social media aesthetics and narrative framing, the line between media and propaganda blurs further. There is no neutral “information environment.” in the #dotcons, there is infrastructure, and whoever controls it shapes perception, It’s why #4opens media matters, why memory matters. That’s why the #OMN is not only about publishing tools, but about resisting amnesia.

We live in a mess, on a planet with 8 billion people, we produce enough food for far more, yet billions are hungry – not because of scarcity, but because of distribution mediated by money. If markets fail to meet basic human needs at planetary scale, insisting that they will eventually fix themselves becomes its own form of idealism. Calling that out is not naïve utopianism, it’s structural realism.

Compost the bad myths, we don’t study history to marinate in resentment, we study it to understand power. #dotcons glamour does not erase violence, inclusion does not erase intervention and rebranding does not erase mandate. If we want an open future, we have to defend it.

Memory against amnesia, infrastructure against capture and media against propaganda. There is no such thing as “independent media” floating above power, there is media aligned with structures of power and there is media that challenges them. #OMN is a path to build the latter.

Most people sense that something is off

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.

#KISS #openweb #4opens #nothingnew #geekproblem

Scale changes everything

The tension that’s pushed back into the fediverse the last few years

DRAFT

Scale changes everything as human behaviour does not stay the same as groups scale. The instincts that helped small tribes survive – loyalty, signalling belonging, defending boundaries, competing for status, consolidating influence – functioned well within natural limits. In small groups, feedback was immediate. Consequences were visible. Power was constrained by proximity and material reality.

But when those same instincts operate at contempery social scale, inside complex technological societies, like the current #NGO fediverse, they stop stabilising systems and begin to destabilise them. What once supported survival can amplify fragmentation. What once built cohesion can produce polarisation. What once protected the group can spiral into extraction and enclosure we start to see now. This is not a moral failure of the human species, it is a predictable outcome of scale.

We now live inside systems where ancient social instincts interact with global networks, algorithmic amplification, financial abstraction, and industrial metabolism. The more-than-human crisis – climatechaos , biodiversity collapse, geopolitical fracture – is not collection of surface problems, these are symptoms.

Beneath them are recurring systemic patterns, society-scale incentives. And beneath those incentives are deep assumptions about growth, control, competition, and scarcity. We are not outside these layers, we are embedded within them. So the question becomes what does responsibility look like in a world where powerful structural incentives shape collective outcomes? Where do social thresholds appear when scale removes the natural limits that once kept us in balance? How do we avoid only treating symptoms while reinforcing the deeper forces producing them?

And if our instincts once helped seed the current fediverse, we did see for a moment what a system look like that works with human nature while balancing it against #dotcons reality. This is the path we need to get back to, to understand how the current tensions I outline, in the fediverse makes sense. Because what we are seeing there is not just a #blocking governance disagreement. It is a microcosm of the larger scale problem: how human coordination patterns behave when they move from small, trust-based communities into bigger networked infrastructures.

The fediverse is not separate from this, it is one of the places where we are actively trying to work it out. To start down this path we need to look at how the last #openweb reboot was taken from us.

The #dotcons aren’t just “big tech companies.” They’re a structural class of platforms they follow the same pattern:

Present themselves as open, liberating, participatory spaces.
Attract huge numbers of people with network effects and free access.
Gradually enclose that activity.
Monetise attention by shaping reach, visibility, and behaviour.

The “con” isn’t that they charge money, the con is the bait-and-switch:

First: open participation, organic reach, community.
Later: algorithmic throttling, pay-to-play visibility, advertising optimisation.

The “dot” is the monetisation layer – advertising markets, behavioural profiling, engagement engineering. Even the so-called ethical platforms operate on the same structural logic:

growth first
enclosure second
monetisation through mediated reach
shaping discourse toward advertiser-compatible norms.

You can swap out leadership, branding, or tone, but if the core model is:

capture network → centralise control → monetise attention

… then it sits in the same class.

Naming them 20 years ago as #dotcons isn’t about moral outrage, it’s about clarity, because if we don’t name the enclosure pattern, we end up debating personalities and features instead of structure.

Where this matters for the fediverse is simple – If we don’t consciously build flows, commons, and #4opens practices into the infrastructure and culture, the same enclosure dynamics will re-emerge – just more politely.

The difference isn’t tone, it’s structure. And being clear about what the #dotcons are helps us see what we are trying not to reproduce.

The idea and direction are broadly right (decentralised social web, commons infrastructure, alternatives to #dotcons). but the institutional reality is hollow, not enough resources going into the “native” messy grassroots work that actually keeps things alive.

People like Evan and others stepping into fediverse organisational roles are, from their perspective, trying to stabilise infrastructure, secure insitunal funding streams, reduce fragmentation and make the ecosystem legible to funders, regulators, and mainstream paths. From this side, the fear tends to be that without some coordination and institutional structure, the fediverse stays marginal or collapses under maintenance debt.

Were from the native the grassroots/activist side institutionalisation risks repeating Web 2.0 capture light – NGO-isation, depoliticisation, and slow drift toward mainstreaming and soft #blocking control.

You could see this as basically stability vs autonomy, funding vs independence, coordination vs organic growth. But better to see it for what it is a resource problem (the real bottleneck)
“ZERO resources for what we actually need” is key, and honestly widely felt. Where funding currently goes to protocol development, interoperability standards, software maintenance grants and pointless governance experiments that look credible to funders.

Where resources don’t go on balence to “native” non #NGO community organising, onboarding and social infrastructure that is not mainstreaming. Seeding and growing local/regional native networks. Alternative governance experiments outside formal org structures and most importantly public-first infrastructure (like the #OMN direction) In short technical sustainability gets funded; social sustainability struggles to grow.

#NLnet and geekproblem, #NGO dynamics tend to operate with a narrow philosophy of fund discrete, bounded technical projects that avoid any political positioning to prioritise measurable outputs (code, specs, deployments). This creates structural friction because as infrastructure projects for grassroots media and social organising doesn’t fit neat grant deliverables. Long-term community building is messy and hard to quantify. Native radical or openly political framing scares institutional funders.

So we reinforce a path where money exists, but it flows toward the wrong layers for movement-building. So when dose this balance change? This is the hard truth: systems like this rarely change because people ask, they change when people push parallel practices that make the gap obvious.

What history teaches us in the #openweb is Indymedia didn’t wait for permission, early blogs didn’t wait for foundation approval and Mastodon itself grew outside institutional planning.
Change tends to happen through parallel infrastructure, witch is how the fedivers reboot happened in the first place before our current shift to #NGO structures and people takeing over our shared direction.

So how do we get out of this mess? By finding seed funding and affinity groups to build/use alternatives that demonstrate missing pieces like public-first media networks (#OMN), social layer experiments and governance models rooted in users/admins, not foundations (#OGB). We need this narrative pressure, not just critique, re-framing “Fediverse” as one implementation of broader #openweb rather than the destination and shifting language from platform to ecology.

Resource routing from the current institutions if they are at all capable of this, or giving them a good, if polite, kicking if they are not. Not to knock them out, more to knock them aside, they are still native on balance. The uncomfortable reality we need to compost is the current institutional layer probably thinks they are solving the resource problem – just at a different level (protocol legitimacy, policy access, etc). So the conflict isn’t only “they are wrong” but they are solving a different problem than the one native actors see as urgent.

Where leverage might actually exist if our goal is shifting direction rather than just venting (which is understandable 🙂), leverage tends to come from building cross-admin alliances (server operators are a missing power bloc, framing needs in operational terms (“X infrastructure gap causes Y burnout/failure” and linking fediverse survival explicitly to native grassroots media use-cases.

To work on this it helps to see the factions currently shaping Fediverse governance., a long sometimes over lapping list

The Greybeards of every genda (early web + protocol veterans) worldview The fediverse is the continuation of the original web ethos. Protocols matter more than platforms. Stability and interoperability come first. Cultural roots are early blogging, RSS, XMPP, open standards culture and the early activist web. They are guardians of continuity.
Protocol Purists / Engineering Minimalists (Sometimes overlap with greybeards but culturally distinct.) Tend to dismiss governance and social design as “out of scope.” and tus risk reproducing libertarian-style “neutral infrastructure” assumptions. They protect the protocol but sometimes ignore the ecosystem.
NGO Pragmatists / Institutionalizers (This is likely most of current leadership structures. Think the Fediverse needs to be legible to regulators, funders, and #mainstreaming users. There cultural roots are foundation models, EU funding ecosystems and digital rights etc. Motivationed by legitimacy, policy and funding stability (for them selves, and thus the system, with them running it). There power is they can unlock resources, build bridges outside tech circles and reduce chaos perception. But suffer from very bad bind spots that affectively block by depoliticising radical roots, (un)intentionally reproduce top-down structures and prioritise optics over native needs. They are trying to make fediverse “safe enough” for mainstream adoption.
Grassroots Builders / Commons Activists (Closest to #OMN framing.) Build and support the Fediverse as a social movement, not just infrastructure with native paths. Community governance and mutual aid are core so technology must serve social transformation. Roots sprin from early Indymedia, anarchist/left activist tech, free culture and early autonomous networks. Tere mission is native to te fedives of reclaiming media infrastructure, resist #dotcons capture to rebuild collective spaces. They bring real world experience of community building, lived experimentation and resilience outside funding cycles. But have there own blind spots with resource scarcity, fragmentation and continuing mess internal ideological conflict. They carry the original radical energy but struggle with institutional power.
Instance Admins (The Hidden Power Layer) are often overlooked but crucial. Thy are te fedivers, keep servers running, manage moderation chaos, with ractical solutions over ideology spiky or fluffy. Being motivated by sustainability, reducing burnout and keeping communities healthy. Tey ave the only real operational experience and work with native distributed authority. But tend to be to blind to organising as a collective political voice as there influence is diffuse. If they coordinated, they could reshape governance overnight.
Commercial Entrants / Platform Builders with the #NGO paths becoming more powerful. They tend to a narrow non native view of the fediverse as infrastructure for scalable products and interoperability as competitive advantage. Examples would be venture-backed or startup-aligned platforms motivated by growth, monetisation models compatible with federation and early positioning before governance can settle. They have power and voice due to resources, UX focus and marketing reach. But being non native they lack “users”. Tey are blind to the risk of slow platform capture and are anatanistic to the tension with grassroots values. They introduce gravity toward mainstream web patterns.
The Silent Majority (Users) are often ignored in governance discussions. In this #NGO push they are seen as needing usable, safe social spaces and not deeply ideological. This leads to adoption patterns shaping the ecosystem more than debates do witch deeper cultural fault lines.
Large Instance Admins (network gravity), they are admins of large or historically central servers, culturally influential communities have some power with federation choices shape network topology. Blocking decisions define social boundaries. They can indirectly decide which communities thrive, what norms spread and what software gains adoption. No vote, but impact.
Narrative Shapers (discourse power) mostly the more fluffy, #NO frendly bloggers, long-term fediverse personalities, visible commentators and conference speakers define what problems are “real”, what language becomes default and try and define what counts as native and reasonable. Some example might be shifting conversation from “openweb” to “socialweb”, framing decentralisation as safety vs freedom. These narratives shape funding, developer interest, and user expectations.
Funders (hard coded steering) for most people this is slight and not seen as direct control, for others more strong directional influence. Examples include: grant bodies, research funding ecosystems, EU-aligned digital infrastructure programs. On balance the vast majority of this funding goes to corrupt insiders and is thus simply poured directly down the drain. But the stuff that works, like #NLnet has real power, funding doesn’t dictate outcomes, but it decides which problems get resourced to indirectly defines priorities. But if this is not balenced by social governance funding it quietly becomes invisible.
Bridge Figures (social connectors) are hugely underestimated. They are people with experience across multiple factions of dev + activist hybrids, long-term organisers and translators between tech and social communities. There power is in balanceing conflict, helping which conversations cross boundaries and legitimize ideas by engagement. Without them, silos harden.
Default Software UX (silent governance) The interface itself shapes behaviour were Mastodon UX norms influence culture more than policy debates, defaults create expectations. Examples: content warnings, quote-post absence/presence, moderation tools. UX becomes governance.
Momentum and path dependency is possibly the biggest hidden power. Once a protocol interpretation, a moderation norm or a deployment pattern gains early momentum… it becomes hard to change, regardless of governance discussions.

These factions aren’t just political, they divide along deeper axes.

Infrastructure vs Movement. Protocol purists + many greybeards → infrastructure-first. Grassroots → movement-first.
Stability vs Experimentation. NGOs + institutional actors → stability. grassroots + indie devs → experimentation.
Legibility vs Autonomy. NGOs seek legibility for funding/policy. grassroots value messiness and effective autonomy.
Governance vs Emergence. institutionalists want hard (oftern invisable) governance frameworks. Others believe governance should emerge (visably) organically

The insight meany people miss is that the biggest conflict is NOT what they might think left vs right or tech vs social, it is people trying to make the fediverse safe for scale vs People trying to keep it open enough for transformation. Both believe they are saving it. This is where things actually make sense, because formal governance in the fediverse is weak compared to influence networks. Most frustration comes from people arguing about structures that “don’t actually hold power”, while missing the forces that shape direction.

We need a more realistic map of the unspoken power dynamics shaping the fediverse, these are not generaly official roles – they’re influence patterns. Maintainers as gatekeepers (code gravity), who are core maintainers of major projects (Mastodon, Akkoma/Pleroma forks, Pixelfed, Lemmy, PeerTube, etc.). Protocol implementers of what ships shapes reality. What doesn’t get merged doesn’t exist. without formal authority they define the roadmap simply by deciding what is worth implementing. This has a strong hidden effect that governance debates often become irrelevant if maintainers don’t prioritise them. Some example dynamics are social governance features get ignored because they’re “not technical”. UX decisions shaping culture without explicit discussion etc.

The core dynamic that is hidden is most people assume power = foundations or organisations. Where the reality is power = maintainers + large instances + narratives + funding gravity. Formal structures, and the little native governance we have mostly follow these forces, not in any way balance them in.

So were dose the stress come from and why this creates frustration. Grassroots actors often see decisions emerging without any transparent process, norms solidifying without any affective debate and institutions appearing to “take over”.

Where institutional actors see chaos without coordination and feel deep phsicological, and self serving need for pressure to stabilise. Both misidentify where decisions actually originate. The deepest unspoken divide is people are defending different emotional survival strategies, until this is recognised, discussions loop endlessly.

What do you think, if you think about this at all?