Tag: mainstreaming

A fresh look at the mess we need to compost

Anything that starts as a real idea – community, freedom, or independence – gets picked up, processed, and turned into something hollow. Not just by “the other side,” but by the entire modern media and tech machine. Good ideas go in, slogans come out, you’ve seen it: “freedom” becomes branding, “community” becomes marketing and resently “sovereignty” becomes a funding pitch.

This is the trap, when ideas get flattened into talking points, they stop doing anything real. They become easy to repeat, to weaponise and impossible to build with. And once that happens, it doesn’t matter who started the idea, it’s no longer yours. So the question isn’t only left vs right. It’s how do you keep ideas grounded so they can’t be hijacked and sold back to us?

One answer is structure, the #4opens approach is simple, a way to stop things being quietly twisted behind closed doors. If you can see how something works, it’s harder to fake. If you can take part, it’s harder to capture.

The other answer is mess (the good kind), the #OMN hashtag approach doesn’t try to clean everything up into a single message. It keeps things local, contextual, a bit rough around the edges. That “mess” is protection, because systems that are too neat, too polished, too uniform… are exactly the ones that get captured, repackaged, and pushed back at you.

In plain terms if an idea can be turned into a neat slogan, it can be taken over. If it stays tied to real people, real places, and real processes, it’s much harder to fake. This is the difference between something you can live with and something that gets sold to you. Call it compost if you like – You break things down, keep what’s real, and grow from that.

One example: Tactical Tech is a Berlin-based nonprofit that’s been around since the early 2000s, working on tech, activism, media, and education. Their core thing is:

  • building digital literacy + critical thinking tools
  • producing toolkits, exhibitions, and guides (like The Glass Room, Data Detox Kit)
  • working with civil society orgs, journalists, activists, educators
  • focusing on how tech shapes power, politics, and society

They’re not grassroots infrastructure builders, they’re capacity builders and narrative shapers, working through partnership networks, funding, and “field building” – classic NGO patterns.

In #OMN view they sit squarely in what we call the #NGO / #mainstreaming layer of the #openweb story. In that they don’t build the soil (infrastructure, protocols, messy grassroots tools). They build the interpretation layer (how people think about tech). They push this into narratives + toolkits that travel across institutions. That’s why they’ve lasted 20+ years – they’re adaptable mediators, not in anyway rooted projects.

So why dose it feels like “they create mess”? The friction comes from this pattern the balance of abstraction over grounding in that they translate messy realities into frameworks, exhibitions and “kits”. This flatten lived complexity into safer portable concepts, in to language production. They are part of the ecosystem that generates terms like digital literacy, resilience and sovereignty (adjacent space). These become floating signifiers – useful for funding and policy, messy in practice.

They collaborate with foundations, governments and large NGOs. So their outputs are shaped to be fundable, presentable and non-threatening enough to circulate. That’s where the “compost” instinct kicks in – because this layer detaches language from practice.

But it’s not just negative, if were honest (and it’s worth being), groups like this do some real things. They’ve help millions engage “critically” with tech issues to make complex problems accessible (privacy, AI, influence systems). They might create bridges between activists, educators, and institutions. So they’re not empty, they’re just not where the roots are.

The real tension, the problem isn’t that they exist, it’s where they sit in the ecology. They are compost producers, but they mistake themselves for gardeners. Or more sharply

  • They circulate meaning rather than anchor it
  • They mediate change rather than enact it
  • They stabilize narratives that should sometimes stay unstable

So yes – they create “mess” …but it’s a different kind of mess than grassroots paths. Grassroots mess = fertile, emergent – #NGO mess = abstracted, packaged, drifting.

Projects like Tactical Tech can be a part of the same ecosystem we need – but they sit one layer up from where change actually happens. Their outputs duse need composting because they generalize lived practice into frameworks, turn struggle into language and then feed that language back into systems which tends to blunt its edges.

The task isn’t only to reject them, it’s to ground what they produce back into lived, messy, trust-based practice – the bit they can’t really do. Once you see this pattern, a lot of the confusion in the #openweb space makes sense.

• Soil layer → messy, native, trust-based (#indymediaback, grassroots, actual users)
• Infrastructure layer → protocols, servers, code (#ActivityPub, Fediverse devs)
• Mediation layer → governance, coordination (#OGB-type thinking)
• Narrative/NGO layer → language, framing, funding-facing outputs
• Power layer → states, corporations, capital (#dotcons)

Most confusion comes from people mixing these layers up, Here are a few examples of these groups and organisation.

Tactical Tech – Layer: Narrative / NGO
Role: Translator of tech → society
What they do (in practice)
• Turn complex tech issues into stories, exhibitions, toolkits
• Shape how civil society talks about tech
• Build “awareness” rather than infrastructure

In #OMN terms they produce processable compost input, but often pre-packaged into neat bags. This problem pattern flattens messy reality into clean narratives to encourages passive understanding over active building. So what is there value? Good at onboarding people, opens doors into the conversation. But risk is people stop at understanding instead of doing.

Mozilla Foundation – Layer: Narrative + Funding + Soft Infrastructure
Role: Bridge between grassroots + institutions
What they do is fund projects to run advocacy campaigns (AI, privacy, etc.) that maintains a symbolic connection to the #openweb. In #OMN terms they gate keep legitimacy to define what is “acceptable open”. This is a problem pattern because of NGO gravity → safe, fundable ideas win, radical edges softened into “trustworthy AI” and “ethical tech”. So what is the value? Real money → keeps projects alive and visibility → amplifies issues. The risk is common sense #mainstreaming capture that shapes agenda toward what institutions tolerate. Makeing only more mess to compost.

Open Society Foundation – Layer: Power / Funding
Role: Macro-level agenda shaping
What they do is fund civil society globally to influence policy, rights frameworks, governance. In #OMN terms its a part of the liberal wing of the #deathcult. Problem being funding creates dependency, agenda alignment when movements adapt to grant logic. Value is it enables work that wouldn’t exist otherwise to support rights-based infrastructure. The risk is it turns movements into professionalised NGOs and risk-averse actors.

Sovereign Tech Agency – Layer: State / Infrastructure funding
Role: Stabiliser of critical open tech
What they do is fund maintenance of open-source infrastructure with a focus on “digital sovereignty” In #OMN terms they are trying to support the infrastructure layer by using state-language framing. Its a problem pattern as language like “sovereignty” pulls toward state/control logic and away from commons/trust logic. What is the value? It pays for the essential work to keeps #FOSS tools alive. But it risks reframes the #openweb as national infrastructure instead of shared commons.

NLnet Foundation – Layer: Infrastructure funding (closer to soil)
Role: Rare “good compost feeder”
What they do is fund small, weird, early-stage open projects with minimal interference. In #OMN terms one of the few funding bodies that, could in theory not over-shape outputs to respect messy innovation. But the are problem pattern of limited scaling and still within funding constraints, Value is they enables actual building and possibly supports non-mainstream ideas. The risk is the normal that they still are pulled into NGO gravity over time.

Electronic Frontier Foundation – Layer: Advocacy / Legal
Role: Defensive shield
What they do – Legal battles, policy advocacy and civil liberties protection. In #OMN terms they protects space for the #openweb to exist. But the are problem patterns, the focus on defence, not creation that only works inside existing legal frameworks. Value they are absolutely necessary to stops things getting worse. The risk is they doesn’t build alternatives = slowing decline, not transformation.


The pattern, is all these orgs sit above the soil. They translate, fund, shape, defend. But they rarely grow rooted communities of sustaining messy trust networks or live with the consequences. So why dose this create “mess” it is because language drifts away from practice. Ideas come and go: “digital sovereignty”, “trustworthy AI” or “resilience”. These sound solid, but float free of lived reality, then incentives bend behaviour. Funding → reporting → metrics → simplification is when mess gets cleaned up too early or packaged instead of composted

The #geekproblem + NGO problem merge, you get geeks wanting to tidy systems and #NGOs wanting to tidy narratives. The result is over-simplified systems + over-simplified stories. The #OMN position is clear and grounded, we don’t reject these orgs, we place them correctly: Useful → yes, Central → no and ground truth → never.

The simple way to say this (#KISS) These organisations sometimes help explain, fund, and defend the world, but they do not remake it. If we mistake them for the source of change, we end up with only better words and worse reality. The next stage is a practical progression from “mapping the mess” → “building something that can survive it”.

To make anything work we need to stop confusing layers (cognitive clarity) – Before anything technical the path needs to never treat NGO / funding / advocacy layer as if it is THE system. This is the correction, in #OMN terms:

  • NGOs ≠ infrastructure
  • funding ≠ governance
  • narratives ≠ reality
  • protocols ≠ politics

The outcome is people stop trying to “fix the web” by only better policy decks, better ethical frameworks, better terminology (like “digital sovereignty”). And start asking “What is actually being built, and by whom?”

How to do this? we need to build the soil layer first (not apps, not orgs) as this is where most projects fail. The soil layer is trust groups, working collectives, repeated interaction spaces and small-scale publishing + coordination. In #OMN framing #indymediaback style groups, #OGB governance spaces and local + affinity networks. If it doesn’t survive social breakdown, it isn’t infrastructure.

Define “failure as feature” systems, is one of the strongest #OMN ideas. Instead of perfect systems that must not break – We grow systems that fail into human repair. What that means in practice is moderation doesn’t escalate → it returns to people, governance doesn’t lock → it re-opens, conflicts don’t freeze → they surface into trust spaces. The principle is breakage must increase human contact, not reduce it, this directly counters the platform logic (#dotcons), #NGO sanitisation logic and geek “perfect system” logic.

Build mediation layers (not control layers). This is where #OGB thinking fits. Mediation layer ≠ governance authority, is translation between groups, conflict visibility, trust routing and decision recording (not decision ownership). We don’t centralise power – we route attention. This is the difference between bureaucracy (control) and federation (flow).

Define “trust as infrastructure” this is the “missing” technical core. Most systems assume identity, verification and thus control. #OMN flips this to assume partial trust, local trust, evolving trust and broken trust. So native systems must record trust signals (lightweight) to allow contradiction, allow decay and allow repair. Trust is not a certificate, it is a living flow.

Explicitly resist “narrative capture”. This is where orgs like Tactical Tech / Mozilla / OSF become relevant. The patterns to avoid – messy reality emerges, #NGO translates it, funding aligns around translation and original practice disappears. #OMN counter-path is if it can be fully explained in a funding report, it is likely already dying. So we maintain ambiguity, partial documentation and lived process > polished narrative.

Build dual-stack reality (critical stage). This is essential, you always run:

Native stack (real community power)

  • trust networks
  • local groups
  • Fediverse-native tooling
  • #4opens processes

Interface stack ( individual survival layer)

  • NGO language when needed
  • funding language when needed
  • policy translation when needed

The path is never confuse the interface with the infrastructure.

So what are composting failures? Instead of discarding failed projects, rewriting history and blaming actors. We need to explicitly turn failure into reusable material. Compost includes:

  • broken governance attempts
  • failed funding models
  • collapsed communities
  • conflict histories

Output:

  • patterns
  • lessons
  • reused structures
  • new trust layers

This is where the “mess is valuable” idea becomes operational.

Anti-capture safeguards – Every healthy #OMN system needs resistance to #NGO capture, funding capture, geek capture and ideological capture. Mechanisms:

  • lose roles
  • refuse most permanent authority
  • keep systems reversible
  • enforce transparency (#4opens)
  • limit scale before complexity dominates

The long game is federated commons, at scale, the goal is not a platforms, it is many overlapping, messy, partially connected commons. Not one Fediverse or one governance model, not one truth layer. But overlapping trust regions, with shared protocols and local autonomy to weak global coupling.

The summary (#KISS version). If you compress all of this:

  1. Stop confusing explanation with infrastructure
  2. Build trust-first “soil systems”
  3. Design failure that returns to people
  4. Keep governance as mediation, not control
  5. Treat trust as a living system
  6. Resist narrative capture
  7. Run dual-stack (native + interface)
  8. Compost failure, don’t hide it
  9. Prevent capture structurally, not morally
  10. Scale as messy federated commons, not platforms

The shift is from “understanding the system” → to “acting in a small part of it without being captured” This means choosing a river, a locality, a topic, or a community and committing to working inside its mess without trying to abstract it into a universal model too early. #OMN path is if it doesn’t exist in a place, it doesn’t exist at all. This is where a lot of NGO / narrative layer work fails – it stays placeless.

Build “thin infrastructure”, the #OMN correction to both NGO thinking and geek thinking is that wrong instinct is to build full systems, design complete governance models, define everything upfront. #OMN instinct is to build the minimum structure that lets humans keep adjusting it together. Thin infrastructure = simple publishing tools, basic coordination spaces, visible decision trails and lightweight identity/trust signals. Nothing heavy, nothing “final”, because heavy systems attract control, thin systems attract use.

Make conflict visible, not resolved. This is where #NGO culture diverges hardest from native systems. NGO pattern is to resolve conflict, smooth disagreement and force consensus narrative. #OMN pattern is surface conflict so it can be worked with socially. Why, because in real networks conflict is information, disagreement is structure and tension is direction. The compost is if conflict disappears, it hasn’t been solved – it has been buried. Buried conflict always returns, festers, later as system failure.

Build “trust scaffolding”, not trust systems. This is subtle but crucial, you cannot design trust, you can only create conditions where trust can form and where it can fail safely. Trust scaffolding includes repeated interaction spaces, low-stakes collaboration, visible contribution histories and reversible decisions with clear exit paths. The path to trust is an emergent behaviour of stable mess, not a product of design. This directly opposes #mainstreaming ideas of identity systems, certification systems and techbro reputation scoring systems.

Explicitly reject “clean governance” as this is where most of well-meaning systems collapse. The trap is people try to build clean voting systems, formal representation and universal rule sets. But in messy reality governance is not clean – it is negotiated, situated, and constantly patched. #OMN path is instead of clean governance, we grow layered responsibility, overlapping legitimacy with temporary authority and visible disagreement. Think of governance as weather, not architecture.

Anti-scale principles (very important). Most systems fail because they assume more scale = more success The #OMN flips this with a path of scale should be resisted until coordination proves it is needed. Because scale introduces abstraction, funding dependency, narrative capture, bureaucratic drift. So instead we grow horizontally first, federate slowly and allow divergence to tolerate inconsistency.

Build “failure memory” as infrastructure, its one of the most underused ideas in the whole space. Most ecosystems forget failures, hide conflict history and rewrite past attempts. #OMN path is about failure is the most valuable dataset. So you build public failure logs, conflict histories and abandoned project archives with “why this didn’t work” notes. Not as shame, but as compost. Because systems that cannot remember failure are forced to repeat it.

Soil layer (real life)

trust groups
lived coordination
actual practice

Infrastructure layer

tools
protocols
servers

Mediation layer

conflict handling
coordination
routing

Narrative layer

NGOs
funding language
public explanation

Power layer

states
capital
platforms

On this working group path no layer is allowed to pretend it is another layer, the core anti-confusion mechanism.

So what is the actual #OMN outcomes, when this all works, you don’t get a platform, a movement or a unified system. You get a living field of partially connected commons that can adapt without central control, yes it looks messy from outside – and that’s correct. Because coherence is not the goal, survivability and humain flourishing is. lets reduce the whole thing to operational clarity: Build small, stay local. Keep systems thin, let conflict stay visible, treat trust as emergent. Avoid clean narratives, resist scale, remember failure. Separate layers to never centralise experimentation into control.

That’s where theory finally has to become dirt-under-the-fingernails practice, where the abstraction has to survive contact with reality. Lets look at some example work flows, different angles of the same living loop.

What a real example #OMN #oxfordboaters river project looks like day-to-day. The river communerty is not an organisation. It’s a persistent coordination affinity around a real place/problem/ecology (a river in this case). Daily reality looks like this:

Morning layer (signal gathering) when people notice things:

  • water quality change
  • planning notices
  • blocked access points
  • local council updates
  • photos from walks
  • stories from anglers / walkers / residents

This is not formal reporting, It’s messy input that lands in:

  • Fediverse posts
  • local group chats
  • simple shared logs

Mid layer (sensemaking) is when a few people (DIY, not fixed) do:

  • cluster reports (“this looks like sewage spike again”)
  • link patterns (“this happened upstream last month”)
  • tag relevance (#pollution #access #planning)

No authority – just attention shaping (or focalising).

Action layer (light coordination) is made up of small, reversible actions:

  • someone emails council
  • someone visits site
  • someone talks to landowner
  • someone checks data source
  • someone posts explainer thread

Crucially no one needs permission to act, only visibility into what others are doing

Weekly rhythm (social compression) is a loose gathering (online or physical):

  • “what changed?”
  • “what patterns are forming?”
  • “what are we missing?”
  • “what broke this week?”

No authority, rather shared memory and process. The river project is not a formal group. It is a shared affinity flow. That’s why it works (when it works) – it stays situated, porous, and continuously re-formed.

Lets look at a second example, how #OGB decision flows actually operate, it is not voting or governance in the institutional sense. It is a routing system for trust, conflict, and attention.

Step 1 – Issue appears, something surfaces

  • conflict
  • proposal
  • blockage
  • uncertainty

It is posted publicly (default open).

Step 2 – Context attaches, people attach:

  • experience (“this happened before”)
  • local knowledge
  • technical input
  • historical memory
  • disagreement

Important – contradiction is allowed and expected

Step 3 – Clustering happens (not authority). Instead of leaders deciding clusters of alignment form naturally, disagreement clusters remain visible and minority views persist. Think weather systems, not committees

Step 4 – Decision emerges as a path, not a vote – a “decision” is a visible “common” path of action with acknowledged alternatives still open. So nothing is deleted, nothing is finalised, nothing is owned

Step 5 – Follow-through is voluntary, but visible. People act based on trust in community, reasoning based on proximity and capacity. And they report back into the same system. The native path is the #OGB doesn’t only decide things – it makes decision pressure visible.

What a Fediverse-native governance loop feels like is where it becomes felt reality rather than structure. It feels like slow public thinking, less meetings, less agendas. More like threads that evolve over days, posts that accumulate context and replies that become infrastructure

Persistent memory in the stream, nothing disappears old decisions are still linkable, conflict history is visible and prior attempts remain accessible. So governance is navigation through lived memory. Weak coordination, strong transparency as no one is forced to agree. But disagreement is visible, reasoning is public and action is observable. This produces accountability without authority to grow temporary gravity centres.

Certain threads or instances become coordination hubs, discussion anchors and action nodes. But they fade naturally – nothing, but memmery is permanent. It feels like thinking in public with other people who sometimes act on what emerges. Not bureaucracy, not formal consensus culture. More like shared situational awareness that occasionally crystallises into action.

OMN / #OGB model is: surface → act → observe → remember → re-surface. It is governance more as continuous ecological process, less a fixed control structure.

Think that is anufe for today, please ask in comments to help finsh this.

“Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

The servent of the #nastyfew wispering in the ear of the #deathcult ists liberals

From a #OMN perspective, the mess isn’t just the wording – it’s the ideology embedded in the wording, and how that shapes behaviour over time. “Digital sovereignty” sounds harmless, progressive in a liberal policy context. But if you run this through a #KISS ideological lens, its more mess rooted in control, borders, and authority – concepts historically tied to state power. That’s why it’s so easy for the #mainstreaming crew to reuse the language without friction. When they launch something like a “Sovereign Tech fund,” they’re not inventing a new narrative, they’re tapping into one that was already compatible with their narrow worldview.

That’s the problem we need to keep composting – #mainstreaming language carries “common sense” ideological defaults. So what how can we shovel this mess – Liberals adopt a term to make ideas legible to institutions and funding. But obviously the term carries right-leaning assumptions (control, territory, hierarchy) – assumptions that quietly reshape the thinking and direction of projects. Then right-wing actors step in and feel completely at home using the same language.

At that point, it’s already too much mess, you’re not just “using” the language, you’ve internalised the worldview – “Sovereignty” is about defensive, fear-based framing (“protecting against others”) that clashes directly with #openweb values of networks over borders, trust over control and interoperability over enclosure. Our native world view is commons over ownership, so even if the intent is good, the term pulls thinking in the wrong direction. Its #KISS we need to shift focus from states → to people and communities, from control → to capability, from fear → to empowerment.

But here, #OMN pushes much harder – if you need mainstream policy language to explain what you’re doing, you’re already halfway into the #closedweb logic. The #openweb path doesn’t start from sovereignty, autonomy, or even agency. It starts from something simpler – shared standards, visible processes and trust networks (#4opens). That’s why the #OMN path matters, the more abstract the language gets, the easier it is to smuggle in ideology without noticing.

So what do we do with this mess? Yes, “digital sovereignty” is a dead-end term for open, trust-based politics. Yes, alternatives like “autonomy” are an improvement, but the real work is stepping outside that whole framing, instead of arguing over better words, focus on building systems that demonstrate openness, using language grounded in practice, not policy fashion.

Bluntly, this is mess we need to compost, it’s the normal mess of “blinded” liberals laying the groundwork – unintentionally – by adopting language that was never native to the #openweb. That’s the messy pattern – #OMN keeps pointing at, if you build with messy concepts, you will get messy outcomes. So yes – compost it. And next time, start from cleaner soil please.

The recurring theme is digital & social decay – A “trust collapse” resulting from bad faith and disempowerment online. The Goal is #KISS moving beyond individualistic #stupidindividualism, ” common sense to create a balanced collective, community-controlled alternatives.

The #OMN hashtag story is a shovel to “compost mess” to turn toxic digital decay into valuable, new growth rather than pretending the stinking mess doesn’t exist, the second step is acknowledging that disagreements are not to be avoided but used constructively to build stronger, more empathetic, and more transparent communities.

Do you notice a recurring theme and issue here? Read and use the hashtag story to help compost this.

The hashtag story is messy, that’s the Point

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 surface the process, most of the time, it’s the people – and, more importantly, the tools and cultures we bring with us. The path we need 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 default tools amplify confusion, they make it harder to see what’s actually going on, and thus 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 easily 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” push to often 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 work against it. That means accepting disagreement as normal, making conflict visible rather than suppressing it. Keeping structures lightweight and adaptable, in the end it’s about prioritising 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 can mediate 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.

      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

      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.

      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

      The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb

      YOU can’t do social change or challenge without annoying people If you think you can, you’re probably play-acting – and part of the problem – does that annoy you? If it does… maybe sit with that. 🙂 Food for thought, #4opens is a shovel for composting.

      The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb. The tech – like ActivityPub – grew out of that culture. It wasn’t built by #mainstreaming interests.

      Now money is flowing in, and with it comes risk of dilution of culture, capture of direction and loss of the commons. As more #mainstreaming users return to the #openweb, we need better tools and processes to handle the mess this brings.

      And yes – sometimes the problem is us – when people inside our own spaces act badly, we need ways to respond, mediate, and move forward – without falling into cycles of negativity. That’s part of the work, part of #OMN.

      The #Fediverse is native to #openweb thinking, it works. It will likely destroy billions of dollars of #CONTROL, and create billions in actual human value in return. But like the early #openweb, it can also be captured and pulled back into the same old control systems, this is the balance.

      So the question is, are you on the side of CONTROL or TRUST?

      Our obsession with control is doing real damage, it’s fed by dead-end ideology (#postmodernism), and amplified by #fashernistas pushing surface over substance.
      Yes – it’s messy. Yes – it’s complex, but ignoring that just makes it worse.

      #stupidindividualism and the #deathcult are building an inhuman world, we can do better – but only if we’re willing to do the uncomfortable work.

      Individual fears

      What We Can Learn from Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders

      In #mainstreaming and alt political cultures there’s a constant call in messy times for “strong leaders” to cut through the chaos, but this is the wrong path. What Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders actually show is something more uncomfortable and more useful that real change doesn’t come from strong individuals – it comes from movements we don’t fully control. They were signals, not saviours.

      Both figures emerged on the left because something deeper was already shifting with widespread discontent, a break from #mainstreaming politics and a hunger for alternatives to 40 years of #deathcult worshipping. They didn’t create these conditions – they channelled them. “Weakness” is often misnamed, Corbyn in particular was constantly framed as weak, but what was actually happening? When people treat them as failed “leaders,” they miss the point, at best they were interfaces to movements, rather than top-down commanders. They:

      • Hold together fragile, diverse coalition
      • Refusal to impose top-down control
      • Emphasis on process, participation, and consensus

      In a stable system, this might look slow, in a fragile system, it’s often the only thing preventing collapse. In the open vs closed battle, it’s not as simple as it looks – especially in the mess we’re in.

      CLOSED → conservative / fear / control
      OPEN → progressive / hope / trust

      We need to keep looking at the underlying path when deciding which way to push the balance.

      Where the demand for “strength” usually means more control, less democracy. That path tends to deepen the mess, not fix it, as personality politics is a dead end. When media and institutions focus on personalities where movements are about issues and structures. This mismatch is fatal if your politics depends on a person you are attacked through that person – we all collapse when they falter. You never build lasting power, it is the trap both campaigns fell into, despite trying to avoid it.

      Movements without structure (hard or soft) stall, is the harder truth – Horizontal energy alone isn’t enough – Electoral politics alone isn’t enough. Both Corbyn and Sanders mobilised huge grassroots energy, but institutions resisted, internal fragmentation grew – the energy wasn’t fully translated into durable paths, and they fell through the gap.

      From a #OMN perspective, the takeaway is clear – Don’t look for better leaders – Don’t rely on existing institutions – Build commons-based infrastructure that movements can stand on. This means: Media we control (#indymedia paths), Governance we participate in (#OGB) and tech that reflects trust, not control (#openweb, #Fediverse)

      So in messy times, don’t reach for “Strong Leaders” as this comes from fear, frustration and the desire for simple solutions, history – from left and right – shows where that road leads. In poisoned times, the work is slower, to build trust, to stay grounded in shared issues.

      Corbyn and Sanders didn’t fail because they were too weak, they struggled because we don’t yet have the social, technical, and institutional commons needed to carry the kind of change they pointed toward. That’s the work, and it’s not about finding the right leader –
      it’s about becoming the movement that doesn’t need one.

      #OMN

      The Digital Commons: The Ground We Already Stand On

      At #NOAW event I talked a lot about the digital commons so thought it might be useful to write a post grounding this. The digital commons are not a future vision, it’s something we already have. At its simplest, the digital commons are the widely used #4opens digital resources of software, knowledge, data, and culture created collectively, governed by communities, and made available for public (re)use. This is the native path of the #openweb it’s been around for a long time, it might be hard to see but just about all of our current #dotcons mess is built on top of this layer.

      There is a long history of commons in wider society. But mostly today we focus on the licences that protect reuse and sharing. None of this is abstract theory, it’s making the practical, working infrastructure that underpins much of what people still find useful online. One of the roots of the current digital commons go back to the 1980s and the emergence of the free software movement, led by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. This was not just about code, it was a social and political project:

      • Software should be shared
      • Users should have control
      • Improvements should remain in the commons

      The creation of the GNU General Public Licence was the first step, enforcing a simple rule that if you benefit from the commons, you give back to the commons. The commons isn’t one thing, it’s an ecosystem – Some #KISS examples include:

      • Wikis – collectively written and maintained knowledge (#Wikipedia)
      • Open source software – built in public, shared freely (#FOSS)
      • Public code repositories like GitHub used to be (name one)
      • Open licensing systems like Creative Commons
      • Federated social tools built on ActivityPub (#Mastodon)

      The Path is governance by the people who use it. What makes the digital commons different from “just free stuff” is this the people building it can shape how it works, a key distinction it’s not just access – it’s agency. The commons are non-exclusive (available to others), oriented toward use and reuse and governed by its participants, this is why it matters politically.

      Today, much of the internet still runs on the digital commons, but the visible layer is dominated by #dotcons platforms. This creates a split of Commons layers → open, slow, sustainable and Platform layers → closed, extractive, growth-driven. People still rely on the commons, but interact through closed systems, this contradiction is unstable.

      Policy is our current-missed opportunity, as our institutions see only the surface value. The European Union’s European Commission has pushed open source strategies as part of digital sovereignty, particularly through programmes like Horizon Europe. The idea is native – Share code – Collaborate openly – Build public infrastructure. But in practice, most of this gets lost in #NGO process, bureaucracy, and capture. The money flows, but the commons don’t grow.

      The “Tragedy” of the Digital Commons. Like any commons, in the mess we live in today commons can be degraded from overuse (infrastructure strain), pollution (spam, low-quality content, noise) and information overload. The result is a corrupted signal-to-noise ratio, it is a real issue – but it’s to often used as an excuse to centralise control. This is largely solved by horizontal vs virtical scaling, if people can take this real native path.

      There are social gaps. The commons reflects the culture that builds it, yes gender imbalance persists, access is uneven, and geek culture is too often exclusionary (#geekproblem). But the bigger problem we face is capture and drift. We’ve already seen it happen once: Free software → “open source” (politics stripped out). Commons → #dotcons platform capture.

      Now we see this happening in the #Fediverse and #openweb reboot spaces with the last few years of vertical agendas dominating to meany outreach spaces, #NGO mediation and thus diluten is pushing native grassroots agency out, this is an old cycle repeating – the cycle that we need to compost.

      OK, despite all the #mainstreaming mess, the digital commons are still the most viable path we have, we need to see this path not as hypothetical – more as it just works, but is underresourced. From a #OMN perspective, the digital commons are not only infrastructure, it’s the soil. You don’t build movements on platforms, you grow them in commons, but this growth needs care:

      • Protection from capture
      • Active governance
      • Social grounding, not just technical process

      And most importantly the commons only survives if people act as commoners. The challenge now isn’t only to explain the digital commons, it’s to defend, rebuild, and extend it. That means funding native projects, keeping governance in the hands of participants to bridge activism, development, and real-world use as a path to push back against the continuing #mainstreaming capture.

      This is not about nostalgia, it’s about #KISS recognising that we already have the tools we need, then caring enough not to only exploit them. Please try and be better than the current #mainstreaming on this, thanks.

      Proposal – from #NOAW

      Proposal – from #NOAW

      This is the open-source – split – FOSS moment for the Fediverse. We’ve seen this before. When “open source” was carved out of Free Software politics, it made the space more business-friendly – but at a cost, the movement never fully recovered from this. The result was a long-term weakening of the social and political grounding that made FOSS meaningful in the first place. We are in real danger of repeating this pattern in the Fediverse.

      Vertical agendas – loud, well-funded, and institutionally backed – dominate conversations and displace the native horizontalism that defines the Fediverse and the #openweb. These agendas will ultimately fail, but not before they push out the grassroots energy that actually makes things work.

      A Practical Intervention

      One leverage point is funding – specifically, how funding is framed, distributed, and justified within the #mainstreaming process.

      So the question is: how do we intervene effectively? It’s a simple classic path: mess – opening – implement.

      Create an EU-Focused Consortium

      Build a working consortium with three balanced pillars:

      * Activism – holding the political line and pushing for real change

      * #NGO layer – interfacing with bureaucracy and policy structures

      * Grassroots #FOSS builders – creating and maintaining commons-based code

      The goal is simple, to deliver real, native #openweb tools that create meaningful social change, not just online, but in the wider world.

      Strategy

      1. Discredit the Current Waste

      Document and publicize the massive misallocation of public funds:

      * Hundreds of millions wasted on blockchain projects

      * The same pattern now repeating with AI funding

      This isn’t just critique, it’s strategic pressure. It weakens the legitimacy of the current funding agenda.

      2. Open a Gap

      By exposing this waste, you temporarily sideline parts of the “blocking class”, those who dominate but do not deliver. This creates a window of opportunity.

      3. Seed the Commons

      Use that opening to:

      * Channel small, strategic funding (“cents on the euro”) into multiple grassroots projects

      * Fund at least three parallel codebases per call.

      * Expect two to be captured or fail

      * Ensure one remains viable and native

      Because these projects are built on ActivityPub, even “failed” or captured projects can still interoperate within the Fediverse ecosystem and thus can maybe grow to become meaningful. Diversity is good.

      Outcome

      This approach nudges EU technology policy – maybe programs like Horizon Europe – toward:

      * Practical, working tools, native research. Based on meany “#Nlnet” like federated working paths.

      * Federated, interoperable systems

      * Socially grounded infrastructure

      #OMN Fit

      The #OMN already has four native commons projects that align directly with this strategy:

      * Governance

      * Media

      * Historical memory

      * Digital addiction

      These are not abstract ideas, they are ready-to-grow seeds for a healthier #openweb ecosystem.

      Feel free to add to this in the comments I will update the text with feedback.

      UPDATE: for me the failer mode of this is the 3 groups won’t be able to stay together: Activism – holding the political line and pushing for real change. NGO layer – interfacing with bureaucracy and policy structures. Grassroots #FOSS builders – creating and maintaining commons-based code.

      It’s the snip problem, people will cut off pieces of the whole for there short term survival or career building, the coalition will splinter, and then fail. I think the above strategy is good apart from this hole – how do we fill or at least mediate this?

      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 01

      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:

      • 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 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 02

      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.

      Workshop 03

      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.

      Public Money, Public Communication, Public Infrastructure

      Public institutions are funded by taxpayers. Their role is to serve the public. So it should be obvious that their communication systems are open, accessible, and accountable to everyone -without requiring people to sign up to proprietary, for-profit platforms.

      Yet this is not the world we live in. Today, much of public communication is effectively outsourced to the #dotcons. If you want to follow government updates, participate in consultations, or even access timely public information, you are often expected to create an account on a closed platform – designed for profit, data extraction, and behavioural manipulation. That alone should raise serious questions.

      This contradiction is especially stark in Europe as they regularly speak about digital sovereignty, data protection and public accountability. And yet, at the same time, they rely on U.S.-based corporate platforms to communicate with their own citizens. It’s a strange situation:

      • Public institutions, funded by European taxpayers, using foreign, proprietary infrastructure to mediate public communication.
      • Not only does this create dependency, it also places public discourse inside systems that are not governed by public interest.
      • It’s not just ironic. It’s structurally broken, we should think about prosicuting the people who have made this happen.

      The access problem, useing closed platforms to access public communication creates real barriers: Not everyone wants to create or maintain dotcons social media accounts. Some people are excluded for ethical, political, or practical reasons. Algorithms decide what is seen and what is not. Public information becomes entangled with advertising and engagement metrics. This undermines a basic democratic principle that public communication should be universally accessible, without conditions.

      We already have an alternative to this curupt mess, the #DIY #OpenWeb comes from europe, it offers a different path. Instead of #closedweb platform dependency, it builds on open standards, interoperable systems with multiple access points, no user lock-in. This is not a new path, it is how the web was originally created to work in the EU.

      An example project that contines this native mission and supports this is the #OMN whitch creates spaces where public institutions and public communities can meet on equal terms, without one dominating the other, and without relying on closed corporate systems. If institutions instead invest in and support the wider #OMN ecosystem, they help build something fundamentally different, a public communication infrastructure that is open by default, accessible to all, resilient and distributed and aligned with democratic values.

      A simple principle, if it is funded by the public, it should be accessible to the public – without restriction. No accounts required, no platform dependency and no hidden gatekeepers.

      We need to organise a call to act. Public institutions need to move beyond simply using the #Fediverse. They need to help build and sustain the commons that makes open communication possible. That means, supporting open infrastructure projects, funding shared ecosystems like the #OMN and building real, not facke PR commitment to public-first communication practices.

      This is not just a technical shift, it is a political and cultural choice.

      A simple #KISS way forward is to shift public social communication onto the #Fediverse. This is already a significant improvement on current platform dependency. However, I want to raise a point that may sound controversial at first, but is actually quite practical: public institutions should not rely exclusively on the existing codebases.

      Most current Fediverse platforms have done vital groundwork – particularly in establishing shared protocols, interoperability, and a working culture of federation. That contribution is important and should be recognised. However, many of these tools evolved shaped by the same assumptions as #dotcons and constrained by #NGO project models. As a result, they can be complex, difficult to maintain, and not always well aligned with the long-term needs of public institutions or commons-based infrastructure.

      A constructive path forward would be to fund the development of a small number of new, purpose-built codebases focused on commons publishing. Not one, but three parallel implementations.

      Why three? Because diversity reduces risk. In practice, not every project will succeed – this is normal and expected. Funding multiple approaches ensures resilience, encourages innovation, and avoids over-reliance on a single solution. The cost of doing this would be minimal relative to existing public digital budgets, yet the potential long-term value is significant.

      Importantly, this is not about replacing the existing ecosystem. Because the Fediverse is built on shared protocols, any new tools would remain fully interoperable with current platforms. This means users of existing services can still interact seamlessly, while the overall ecosystem becomes stronger, more diverse, and better aligned with public service values.

      In short: build on what exists, but don’t be constrained by it. By investing modestly in new, commons-oriented infrastructure alongside the current tools, public institutions can shape a more robust, sustainable, and genuinely public digital communication space.

      #KISS

      Outreach to @newsmast interesting to see the #NGO view of the real alt path we need to take https://hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of-workshops-to-run-at-nodes-on-a-web-noaw-unconference/ you guys might be interested in working on the 3ed workshop outline. The 3 codebase need to be 1) mainstreaming, 2) radical #NGO and 3) native messy grassroots. You guys could be the second codebase. We do need diversity, best not to keep blindly messing up this path in the current globe mess.

      Why It’s Difficult to Build the #OMN – and What We Can Do About It
      Growing the #openweb – Notes for Composting the #dotcons (and growing an #OMN)

      Stopped going to in-person general tech conferences around 15 years ago – they’d become beyond pointless. Since then, I’ve stuck to more focused online events.

      Now heading back to an in-person one. Curious what I’ll actually find.

      I have a feeling it’ll be about 75% pointless, 20% narrow geek, academic and #NGO-focused (slightly useful), and maybe 5% – probably less – actually useful.

      Let’s see how that shifts after the event.

      UPDATE: The event was posative, people were looking for change.