In the #OMN we keep things simple. There are 3 main categories of content (plus a 4th, transitory chat, which we don’t cover here):
Post The main media object. This could be an article, photo, video, or podcast – the core piece of content you want to share.
Comment A flow branching off each post. This is where dialogue, debate, and reflection happen. Comments are tied to the post but flow outward as part of the network.
Feature An overview object. A feature gathers together related posts on a subject, adds context, and links both inward (to posts and hashtag flows in the #OMN) and outward (to other sources).
Together, these 3 categories form the data soup that flows through the #OMN’s pipes. Posts are the raw material, comments are the social metabolism, and features are the compost heaps where meaning is aggregated and fed back into the commons flow.
It’s all just linked objects in trust mediated flows, that’s it #KISS
We’re seeing “official” moves in the development of the #opensocialweb. Big players are turning up. Conferences in Geneva. Glossy orgs like @ProjectLiberty positioning themselves as bridge-builders between tech and governance.
On the surface, this looks like progress, recognition, and legitimacy. But let’s be brutally honest: these are completely the wrong people to be steering the direction. The problem isn’t that they show up, it’s that they try to take up all the air in the room.
Where are the bridges to activism? Where’s the link to movements that actually push change and challenge? Without those, all we have is tech-for-the-sake-of-tech, more elitist panels, more smiling faces managing decline. Looking closer, is this anything but a bunch of ****wits in suits?
The #OMN is an example project, about building the shovel factory, simple tools that anyone can pick up. Open pipes, trust flows, collective publishing. Not another empty standard, but working soil where communities can actually grow culture and power.
We can’t keep ignoring the stink, Yes, it’s nice to see recognition. But let’s not confuse recognition with change. Without shovels, glossy projects just pile up stink. No perfume, no branding exercise can hide the smell.
We need to say VERY clearly that in the native #openweb, bridges go both ways. If you build them only toward governance elitists, you’ve built a cul-de-sac. If you build them toward activism and grassroots, you create “native” flows that actually move.
The problem isn’t that people refuse to act. The problem is that most are stuck in paralysis: “What do I do?” If the only options they see are worshipping the #deathcult or reinventing the wheel, passivity looks like the safest choice.
The design challenge of the #OMN isn’t just tech – pipes, tanks, metadata – it’s rituals and rhythms that invite participation. We need a seed affinity group whose job is simple: set the shovel down in front of people.
Don’t only complain that they aren’t digging. Literally put the shovel in their hands and say:
Run a local flow.
Tag a batch of data.
Moderate one stream.
Host one screening/fire circle.
Tiny, clear tasks. The kind you can do in an hour. That’s how you turn passivity into momentum. Shifting habits into usefulness, instead of fighting people’s flaws, turn them into leverage.
#fashionistas crave visibility. Fine. Give them the role of spreading compost metaphors, making the work look alive and fresh. Let them shine light on the soil.
#geekproblem crave puzzles and edge cases. Good. Hand them the tricky parts: trust plumbing, metadata sieves, redundancy logic. Their obsessiveness is an asset if aimed at the right joints of the system.
#mainstreaming crave “safe” recognition. Use it. Frame #OMN as “the next big thing everyone will need to join.” Let them be the “early adopters” who stay safe by appearing ahead of the curve. They don’t need to lead, they just need to follow momentum.
Each group moves in circles, polishing surfaces while the compost pile rots. But if you show them something real – a flow that works, a network that breathes – they drift toward it. Shiny surface with soil beneath, puzzles that connect to lived use, recognition that feels inevitable.
The Lesson, is, don’t try to convince people in the abstract. Show them working compost. Show them trust flows in action. Show them that it’s easier to do something useful than to do nothing. That’s how we push. That’s how we turn paralysis into practice. That’s how you start to compost the #deathcult.
For this in activism, some traditions work, many do not. It’s more complex than it looks, because those traditions that “don’t work” often do work – but only for the people who push them. That’s the root of the hashtag story: a tactic, a format, a ritual can give visibility, ego, and career advancement to its promoters, while leaving the commons weaker. The tradition “works” as a personal lever, but fails as a collective tool.
We’ve all seen this: Endless meetings that build someone’s identity as a “process person,” but drain energy from action. Branding projects that make a clique look good to funders, while hollowing out grassroots trust. Campaigns designed for headlines and hashtags, not for long-term change.
The bitter truth: a tradition can succeed as a ladder while failing as a bridge. We don’t need to throw everything away. We need to compost. To ask: Who does this serve? Does it build trust, or personal power? Does it strengthen the commons, or just the clique?
The hashtag story isn’t about rejecting all rituals. It’s about refusing to confuse personal gain with collective growth. Traditions that build soil – trust, flows, openness – must be tended. Traditions that rot into self-serving traps must be turned, aerated, broken down. That’s the cycle: compost the false, nurture the living.
With the tyranny of the structureless path, every attempt to share the commons decays into a fog of personalities, cliques, and unspoken power. What needs composting here is that, at best, you end up with a smiling violent man as the backstop of governance.
Without mediating structures, what emerges is not freedom but hidden hierarchy. “Smiling violence” – the agreeable man (or clique) who insists they’re just holding things together – quietly blocks challenge, manipulates process, and reserves the final say. If you’re not paying attention, and can’t move away, you wake to find yourself living in #feudalism, with its ever-present threat of personal violence lurking behind the smile.
This is how “horizontal” spaces rot. They confuse the absence of shared structures with openness, when in fact it is poisoned soil: domination by those most willing to coerce, block, or flatter. Without functioning myths and traditions, shared trust, and open processes, what grows is not commons but personal power, one person’s will, or a small group’s grip.
The smiling violent man is not an accident. He is the inevitable product of structurelessness:
Without flows of accountability, you get bottlenecks of control.
Without mediating trust systems, you get gatekeepers posing as “protectors.”
Without a backbone, you get a backstop, a hard edge of coercion dressed in kindness.
The result: commons replaced by fiefdoms, trust replaced by muscle, care replaced by the mask of “caring the most.” Once that happens, the commons are no longer common, they are held hostage.
When I see this again and again, I sometimes say: “grow a backbone.” But this rarely lands well. So let’s pause and ask what backbone really means in social settings:
Structure / Stability: Like a spine holding the body upright, a social backbone is the framework that keeps everything from collapsing into mush. In #OMN terms: the #5F framework is the backbone, UX, UI, and culture all grow around it.
Courage / Integrity: To “have backbone” means to stand firm under pressure. For movements, this means holding the line when mainstreaming forces, fashionistas, or gatekeepers push back. Backbone is refusing co-option, staying rooted in trust.
Invisible but Essential: The backbone is not the face, not the style. It’s the quiet strength – shared trust and open processes – that allows everything else to move. Often invisible, but without it, nothing functions.
A social backbone, then, is the shared trust + open processes that holds a community upright against both internal decay and external capture. By contrast, on the progressive path the #fashionistas build style without backbone (pretty, but collapses quickly), and the #geekproblem builds bone without flesh (rigid, alienating).
Metaphors work when people use them, this might become convoluted 🙂
The comments brought up some points -When we talk about composting bad process, the stink comes from rot sealed off from air, the smiling violence holding the heap down, suffocating flows. The shovel (#OMN) exists to turn the pile, let oxygen in, keep the ecosystem alive. But the real work is done not by the shoveler but by the hidden actors: the invertebrates, fungi, and bacteria. The slow, distributed, many-voiced work of transforming mess into fertile ground. That’s us, when we build trust-based flow networks.
So let’s think about this backbone metaphor more. In biology, spines give structure, but ecosystems are held up just as much by invisible scaffolding: fungal networks, soil webs, rhizomes. In tech, the Internet “backbone” was designed with redundancy, no single node decisive, everything routing around damage. That’s closer to an exoskeleton or even a rhizome than to a rigid spine: strength through distributed paths, not central authority.
Back to the subject of tech #Mainstreaming likes to tell the story that the Internet came from the Pentagon, born a war machine. There’s truth there. But there’s also the buried history (see APC’s work) of people shaping it into a commons, a tool for organizing, a network not of command but of association. That history is the “invertebrate” path, fragile, messy, hard to see, but alive. And in truth, tech is ideology embodied: the people who built the early net built something that could survive without the state, routing around command and control. That’s a good definition of anarchy.
So the wider metaphor isn’t just backbone, but ecosystem: A scaffold that gives form (#5F of the #OMN as the bones). Shovels to aerate and mediate (#OGB as the process tools). Invertebrates and fungi (the hidden actors – users, trust webs, communities). Rhizomes and redundancy (the net’s anarchic, native design).
The danger comes when we forget this, and mistake surface style for soil depth. The #fashionistas offer flowers without roots, the #geekproblem offers bone without flesh. The commons require both – backbone and compost, scaffold and ecosystem. Otherwise, the heap stinks and collapses into fiefdoms.
The Open Media Network (#OMN) is an “anything in, anything out” network powered by a mediated trust system. Instead of one corporation or #NGO controlling the flow, the commernerty decides what happens to the data that moves through it. At its core, the #OMN is a data soup: tagged data objects flowing through channels. These flows are shaped by trust. You consume and share based on your trust relationships, not on algorithms designed to manipulate you.
Key features are built-in, not bugs: Lossy data – it doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. Redundancy – multiple instances mean resilience, not waste. Trust mediation – human-scale filters that grow communities. The #geekproblem often resists these messy but living dynamics, demanding rigid perfection. But that rigidity kills creativity. The #OMN embraces mess as the fertile ground where culture grows.
The network is built on the normal #FOSS process, #4opens – open data, open source, open process, open standards. Its focus isn’t inventing new shiny toys. It’s about weaving together what already exists into a functioning grassroots media/news commons. Others are free to build their own projects on top of the framework. What’s exciting is the flows of trust that emerge. These aren’t abstract protocols, they’re the living arteries of new communities.
In short: The #OMN is decentralized, trust-based, open by design. It empowers people and communities to take control of media, to create their own flows, their own networks, their own power.
It’s not about serving users. It’s about empowering people. It’s not about control. It’s about trust.
The #OMN is not a product. It’s a shovel. Use it to compost the #deathcult, and grow something alive.
For the more geeky – 5 Functions of the #OMN (#5F)
Think of the #OMN as plumbing for media, a system of pipes, holding tanks, and connectors. It’s designed so anyone (not just geeks) can understand and use it. Every site in the network is built from these 5 basic functions:
Link / Subscribe
Plumb a new pipe into the network. A flow of content comes in or goes out. Each pipe can connect to any other function.
Trust / Moderate
Flow passes through a sieve. Trusted content moves smoothly; noise gets filtered. You can send flows straight through, into holding tanks, or split them into new pipes.
Rollback
Empty the tank, rewind a flow, or remove specific objects. Essential for correcting errors, spam, or bad data.
Edit Metadata
Add tags or notes to the “tail” of a data object. Metadata determines how content gets sieved and aggregated. This is the backbone of news curation in the OMN.
Publish
Add new content objects into the flow. Optionally editable. Publishing is just another pipe into the system. At the core sits the storage tank: a simple database holding all the flows.
Nothing new here. This isn’t rocket science – it’s the same way plumbing works, or how power grids function, or how neurons connect in the brain. The #OMN builds on this #nothingnew principle: simple, understandable systems scaled up to empower communities.
UX/UI then sits on top of these 5 functions. That’s the “macro” – the surface layer people touch – but underneath, it’s all just pipes and tanks for flows of data.
What is #blocking this simple step away, one reason is the #mainstreaming insist you use the “proper channels” is because they own the channels. They wrote the rules. They staffed the committees. They built a maze where the end is always defeat.
That’s why they’re so confident it “won’t work.” Because it isn’t designed to. The proper channels exist to bleed energy, to bury dissent in paperwork and “stakeholder processes,” to keep power safe where it already sits.
The #OMN takes the opposite path. No hard gatekeepers. No “proper channels.” Just open flows. #4opens all the way down.
Instead of wasting years trying to squeeze through their pipes, we compost their mess and build new streams. Trust networks. Shared publishing. Messy collectives that actually do the work instead of talking it to death.
That’s what really scares the #mainstreaming people most. That we don’t need their channels at all. That we can walk away and build our own.
The deep wound a lot of people carry – and it’s not personal, it’s structural. When “you” don’t feel “respected,” when the mainstream has no time or use for “you”, it’s because their whole machine is built on efficiency of exclusion. They don’t even see “you” as a subject in the conversation – you’re treated as noise, not signal.
And when the alt paths are blocked – often by the same smiling faces, the same gatekeepers in different clothing – the feeling is doubled: shut out by the mainstream, and suffocated by those who claim to be building alternatives.
This is by design, the “common sense” mainstream wants you atomized, silenced, despairing. The #fashionistas push you into disciplined frameworks, their branding, their “proper channels.”
What happens then? Most people turn inward. Cynicism. Burnout. Bitterness. Or they retreat into bubbles that feel safe but become sterile. That’s the trap.
The composting metaphor matters here. The disrespect, the exclusion, the blocking, it’s all stink. If we don’t turn it, it just festers and poisons everything. If we do turn it together – shovel in hand – it becomes the soil of solidarity, resilience, culture.
The act of composting is, naming the disrespect (without internalizing it), pulling people back from isolation into trust networks, refusing to fight on their terrain (mainstream channels, fashionista frameworks), building small, living alternatives that don’t need their validation.
The painful truth: you will never get “respect” from #mainstreaming. The dignity comes from walking away, composting their waste, and growing something rooted in trust not division.
This is too often the normal issue of spiritual consumerism, that meany Western Buddhists treat Buddhism as a lifestyle brand, meditation apps, yoga retreats, mindfulness at work. It gets packaged and sold as “wellness,” stripped of its history, politics, and social context. It’s self-care as consumption, not transformation.
This is the normal pushing of individualism over community. Where, traditional Buddhism is about Sangha (community). Westerners, raised on #stupidindividualism, flip it into a solo project, my mindfulness, my enlightenment, my peace of mind. It’s therapy without solidarity, which fits perfectly into capitalism but cuts the heart out of the practice.
This is the path of whitewashing & cultural appropriation. To meany, Western Buddhists act like they’ve “discovered” mindfulness, ignoring or erasing Asian teachers and communities who preserved it through colonization and suppression. You get white meditation teachers charging thousands to teach what’s been freely shared for centuries. This commodified mindfulness, is in te end, confusing inner calm with social change.
This is the path of political quietism, a big one. Western Buddhists love to retreat into “it’s all impermanent” and “just observe without judgment.” This gets twisted into political apathy. Instead of facing injustice, they retreat into cushions and incense. It’s the #deathcult of neoliberalism wearing robes.
With every subculture, you find Guru Culture & its abuse. Western sanghas are riddled with power abuses, sexual exploitation, financial scams, authoritarian teachers. This happens when seekers hand over their critical thinking in search of “authentic spirituality.”
Why this matters? Western Buddhism mirrors the same flaws we’re composting in #mainstreaming tech: It sells hallucination (smiling calm while injustice burns). It reinforces individualism (your inner peace, not collective liberation). It bows to the #deathcult (capitalism, exploitation, hierarchy).
With this subculture, like the #OMN and #4opens, the task isn’t to burn it down but to compost it. Keep the fertile parts: compassion, interconnection, collective practice. Shovel away the #fashionista fluff and capitalist branding.
Yes, some “Western Buddhists” aren’t bad people, they’re just stuck in a #mainstreaming hallucination where inner calm is mistaken for social change. If we go at them only with polemics, they’ll retreat further behind incense smoke. Mediation needs a different path.
The mediation path is not about trying to drag them onto “spiky” activism ground (agitprop, polemic). Instead, more fruitful is the fluffy path of composting their illusions from within their own language.
Compassion → solidarity.
Mindfulness → awareness of systemic harm.
Sangha → commons.
It can help to frame activism as engaged compassion: suffering isn’t only in your head, it’s in the world. Reducing suffering means addressing systems, not just breathing through them. This way, they’re less likely to block, more likely to shift. Maybe, reframe blocking as attachment. When they block change, call it what it is in their own language: attachment – to comfort, to neutrality, to ego. Instead of knee-jerk attacking, reflect: “Is clinging to ‘neutrality’ helping reduce suffering, or feeding it?”
The #fashionistas are everywhere in our spaces. They look shiny, sound clever, and always seem “in the know.” But scratch the surface, and you find nothing but mirrors and buzzwords. They are hallucination machines, not listening, not dialoguing, not building, just repeating the same empty lines to hide their lack of substance.
We need to shovel the empty words into piles, turn them over, and use the stink to fertilize something real. The #OMN is one such tool. Not polished, not PR-friendly, not built for grants or press releases. It’s messy, grounded, spiky, and fluffy. A toolkit for people who actually want to build, not brand. The #fashionistas will hate it, because it doesn’t need them. Good. That’s how we know we’re on the right path.
These #fashionistas conscious or not, are about wrapping the #deathcult in a soft blanket of jargon and “professionalism”, to make exploitation sound like innovation. To turn grassroots messiness into #PR. And people keep falling for it. Why? Because the #fashionistas sell the feeling of being respectable, of being listened to by power. They dangle the bait of #NGO grants, seats at the table, and photo ops. But what they deliver is silence, blockage, and decay.
They call it communication, but it’s not dialogue, not listening, not truth. It’s hallucination: Smiling faces repeating empty words. Buzzwords to cover the rot. Smoke and mirrors to keep power safe in its head down worship.
This is the work of the #fashionistas of our spaces. They parade their new “frameworks,” their shiny “initiatives,” their endless “community guidelines.” Always dressed up, always polished, always empty. They are masters of looking good while doing nothing.
They sell hallucinations because reality frightens them. Reality is messy, full of dissent, full of challenge. Reality is compost – steaming, turning, breaking down. From compost grows life. From their hallucinations grows only more of the #deathcult. While they hold the space, communities are silenced. When they push themselves, the centre holds only rot. With their hallucinate, the #mainstreaming keeps killing the margins.
What we do not need is their delusions. We do not need their fashion “shows”. Our path is different. The path we take is composting. Shovel in hand, we turn the pile. We let the stink breathe. We break down the lies, the #PR, the shiny reports. We turn their hallucinations back into fertile ground for something real.
Not only that, but we need more projects like the #OMN on this path: open process, open data, open code, open standards. The #4opens is this compass: sunlight over secrecy, dialogue over control. The #KISS principle is our reminder: keep it simple, keep it real.
Let the #fashionistas keep their hallucinations. We need to be busy with planting the soil.
Sanity means stepping outside the churn. The obstacle is simple but heavy, people cannot see change and cannot face challenge. That blindness keeps us stuck, yes, some say what I write here is “bleeding obvious.” It is, but that’s the point, it’s not for the already converted, not for the initiated. These posts are shovels: tools to compost the #fashionistas and the #geekproblem, to turn the pile of #techshit into fertile soil.
The #OMN project grows from this compost. It’s not a theory to admire, it’s a path to move people out of #mainstreaming and into diverse subcultures where we actually live change and challenge. When rupture comes – and it always does – the strength of that diversity, the lived practice of horizontals, will be seeds for planting a future worth having.
This path is not about being “original.” It’s about being useful. About creating spiky, fluffy translations that help us step aside from the churn, shovel in hand. Use them, or lose them, please.
We keep seeing this mess. The moment grassroots energy spills over into #mainstreaming, something alive, the #fashionistas arrive to “facilitate.” Suddenly the spiky edges are dulled, the fluffy warmth is flattened, and what’s left is another empty process path, they kill with kindness, or worse, with “common sense.”
Let’s be very blunt, these people are not important as individuals. What matters is the path they push us down. The “commonsense” they sell is poison. Every time we let them set the frame, our spaces collapse back into #stupidindividualism or #NGO capture. Every time.
Raw waste → The constant flood of mainstreaming, broken promises of #dotcons, bad-faith #NGO capture, shallow “innovation theatre.” This is the smelly mess we are swimming in.
Shovel work → Activists and communities don’t just sit in the mess. We turn it over, exposing the rot, adding oxygen. This is critique, transparency, and the #4opens in action.
Aeration → Sunlight + openness turns stink into something useful. Lies are exposed, corruption made visible, hidden power structures dragged out.
Soil of change → The same waste that poisoned us becomes fertile ground for new growth, but only if we do the work of turning it. This is how trust-based networks sprout, how #OMN emerges.
What it means in practice
Don’t delete the shit – we compost it. Bad actors, bad processes, and bad tech are made visible and contextualized.
Don’t hoard the shit – silos just trap the stink. Share, federate, distribute — so communities can add their own oxygen.
Don’t wallow in the shit – critique alone is not enough. The point is to grow fertile alternatives.
The composting metaphor says: yes, we’re drowning in #techshit, but we have the tools to turn it into the soil for something humane, resilient, and alive. #KISS
The #OMN is a simple project. But simplicity is deceptive, what makes it difficult for many #fashernista and #mainstreaming people is not the code, not the servers, not even the logistics. The difficulty is that the #OMN is rooted in a different path of human nature.
It isn’t designed to fit the old path of #stupidindividualism. It isn’t built to serve the greed of #dotcons. It isn’t here to bend the knee to the #deathcult.
The #OMN is designed as a transition tool, a bridge to a different path, commons, trust, a living path. Once people arrive, they can build what they like. That’s why the #OMN isn’t just tech, it’s a toolkit for social change and challenge.
#KISS. Keep it simple. Keep it real. I’ve been building this bridge for 20 years, agenst a strong counter flows, we were all pushed off the path when we handed our voices to the #dotcons. When #openweb culture gave way to #stupidindividualism, I was ready to give up.
So I bought a boat and sailed away. #boatingeurope. Not a metaphor – survival. But then came the ActivityPub reboot. The #openweb with the #Fediverse rose again. I came back. Because there was hope. There still is.
And now – five years into this reboot – we face the next predictable crisis: #mainstreaming, the sell-outs, the “respectable voices”, the NGO parasites. It’s normal. It happens to every alt project. And now it’s happening here.
The solution? Compost the mess. Not to attack individuals – most of them aren’t important. What matters are the paths they push us down. Because their “common sense” is the true danger. These are the paths that turn living networks into dusty, dry creeks.
That’s why I keep writing the #hashtag stories: to make these hidden paths visible. So we can see what’s going on. So we can choose differently. Compost the #techshit to grow something real.
Instead of only deleting, we contextualize and critique.
This “compost” becomes fertile ground for better growth.
Grow
New media projects emerge from the toolkit.
Each can shape the #OMN path to fit their community.
A living, adaptive commons.
Principles in practice, KISS → tools stay simple, human-readable, small pieces that fit together. #4opens → open data, open code, open process, open standards. Trust-based networks → rooted in commons, not control. Resilience → many weak ties are stronger than one big silo.
The #OMN is not an app you install. It’s a set of processes + tools to move us from isolation to commons, from #dotcons back to #openweb.
The current generation of activism is crap – fragmented, self-referential, lost in identity wrangles, #NGO capture, and #fashionista online posturing. What can be learned:
Affinity and Trust > Bureaucracy and Branding
The 1990s/2000s alter-globalization movement and early #Indymedia weren’t “organisations,” they were ecosystems. Small affinity groups moved fast, trusted each other, and shared infrastructure without needing a brand deck or a funder’s approval. Lesson we can learn: build movements through trust, not paperwork. Organising should be messy but alive, not tidy and dead.
Media as Commons > Media as Market
#Indymedia: it was open “trust” based publishing, anyone could access, and no corporate ad trackers attached. Compare this to today’s #NGO “campaign media” or endless Twitter/X outrage cycles: closed, shallow, fleeting. What lessons can we learn: if you don’t own your media, you don’t own your message. The #OMN and #4opens try to restore this, we need grassroots media infrastructure, not another silo.
Direct Action > Endless Process
From anti-roads to climate camps, action mattered more than Zoom calls or social media petitions. Protest camps, blockades, squats: they disrupted the system physically, not just discursively. Lesson from this is got off the timeline. Occupy space, take risks, make it visible. Without action, all the online noise is just background music to the #deathcult.
Messy Coalitions > Purity Politics
Earlier waves brought anarchists, trade unionists, students, farmers, hackers, and faith groups into loose alliances. Today, movements too often fragment into micro-identities that cannot scale. The lesson: you don’t need to agree on everything, you just need a shared enemy and a common tactic. #KISS.
Culture Matters
Camps and protests weren’t just strategy meetings, they were lived experiments with free kitchens, pirate radio, temporary autonomous zones. Joy and play sustained the struggle. What we can learn? Activism that feels like homework will burn out. Activism that feels like life will endure.
What, can we learn from this? The current generation must relearn: activism is not a brand you attach yourself to, it’s a practice of building collective power. You don’t need permission, you don’t need a platform, you don’t need an #NGO to bless you. You need each other, and tools you can trust.
That’s the rebooting of the #openweb and the #OMN path. Compost the crap. Pick up the shovels. Plant again. To take this path seriously, we need to remember a little history. In 1933, German conservatives thought they could “manage” Hitler. Two years later, they were being shot in their own homes.
Q. is there any time in history where fascists were voted into power and then peacefully voted out? The answer is brutal. Not once. Ever.
Everyone thinks they know Germany’s story. Von Papen said, “We’ve hired him.” Within 18 months, his allies were corpses. The clever men who thought they could tame the beast were either dead, exiled, or crawling for survival.
Italy? Worse. The king could have crushed Mussolini’s blackshirts in an afternoon. Instead, he handed him the keys. Twenty years later: mass graves, partisans hanging Mussolini upside down like rotten meat.
Spain? A bloodbath. Franco staged a coup, the “democracies” wrung their hands, and fascism ruled for 39 years. He died comfortably in his bed. His victims are still being dug up in 2025.
Hungary? Orbán walked in through the ballot box in 2010. Within three years he controlled the media, the courts, the state. Fourteen years later, the EU is still “deeply concerned” while Hungary is a one-party state.
The only clean win? Finland 1932 – fascists jumped too soon, tried a coup before winning elections, and the army crushed them. That’s it. One time in a century.
The pattern is obvious:
Conservatives panic about socialism.
They ally with fascists as the “lesser evil.”
Fascists seize power.
Fascists immediately purge the conservatives.
Then you get 30–50 years of dictatorship, and mountains of corpses.
How many times did conservatives actually control the fascists they backed? Zero. How many times did the fascists purge them once in power? Every single time.
A. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: violence works for fascists. They smash their enemies while whining they’re victims. They sow chaos, then impose “order.” Meanwhile, democrats write editorials, pass resolutions, and file lawsuits – while the fascists laugh and consolidate power.
The numbers don’t lie:
Fascists removed peacefully after winning elections: 0
Average length of fascist rule: 31 years
Removed by voting: 0
Removed by asking nicely: 0
Removed by war or coups: almost all of them
The historical record gives us three choices:
Stop them before they take power.
War.
Wait for them to die.
We missed the first. The window’s not closing – it’s closed.
And this is where the truth bites: fascism isn’t some freak accident. It’s not “outside” the system. It’s the sharpest edge of the #deathcult – the same system that sells endless growth on a dying planet, that privatizes solidarity, that mainstreams cruelty while smiling about “freedom.” Fascism is not an exception, it’s the rule, 40 years of #mainstreaming is now trying to enforce as the mask slips.
If history teaches us anything, it’s this: the centre will always betray, the right will always unleash fascism, and the people will always be left to dig up the bodies.
In the tech world of social change and challenge, we’re living with a strange imbalance. Too often, the spaces we use and try and build are crowded with useless, self-destructive prats – people more interested in ego, control, and clout than in making anything grow from the roots. And when they do very rearly act, their “help” is often poison: it blocks, slows, and derails.
At the same time, the number of people doing truly useful, collective, grounded work feels small. You can see this in every grassroots project, tech or activism, whether it’s, coding radical #FOSS projects, building alternative media, running servers, or planting food forests. The people who actually show up and keep things moving are always fewer than we need.
Then into this gap steps the parasites of #mainstreaming. Yes, they look like they’re helping. They reach out, they polish up the image, they “outreach” grassroots tech projects to wider audiences. But under the surface, this isn’t really helping. What they are doing, shifts focus away from what makes grassroots powerful – trust, messy collectives, stubborn autonomy – and towards something glossy and hollow.
Real help doesn’t come from smoothing out the rough edges for palatability. Real help is messy, reciprocal, and based in care. It’s, shipping working code, turning up to maintain the server, to keep the firewood dry, to cook food for the meeting, to argue about governance without walking away. It’s staying rooted when everything pulls you towards the easy path of compromise.
The good news? The work that does happen, when it’s done by those few stubborn and lovely souls who commit to it, is real and lasting. Every #fediverse instance that survives another year, every scrappy #openweb tool that stays online, every cooperative that resists collapse – these are proof that grassroots power is alive.
So yes, most of what gets labelled as “help” from outside is damage. But the grassroots path is still there. If we keep it simple – #KISS – and keep choosing trust over polish, collectives over branding, we can tip the balance back to where it needs to be.
Let’s look at some examples:
#Indymedia worked because it was built on trust, open publishing, and direct participation. But once the dogmatic #eekproblem, the NGOs and professional activists came sniffing, the energy shifted. Gradely the rough edges, the wild openness, became a “problem to be managed” instead of a strength. And with that, the vitality drained.
Or look at the #Fediverse. It thrives when it stays scrappy, with collectives running their own servers and shaping their own cultures. But already we see #Bluesky, #Threads, and NGO-backed “Fediverse Foundations” pushing. They’ll say they’re amplifying the movement. In reality, they’re clipping its wings, taming it for the same #mainstreaming logic that gutted Indymedia.
The #OMN (Open Media Network) was always an attempt to resist this drift. Instead of begging for a seat at the mainstream table, it builds trust networks from the ground up. No gatekeeping, no branding games – just collectives #4opens sharing content, tools, and governance in open, federated ways. It’s not sexy. It doesn’t polish well for a TED talk. But it works, because it stays close to where publishing and power actually happen: at the grassroots.
I’ve seen this first-hand in my own work. On the boats at Rummelsburger Bucht, in affinity groups fighting #climatechaos, and in rebuilding #indymediaback, the same pattern repeats. The parasite #mainstreaming arrive smiling, but what matters is the stubborn few who show up with shovels, laptops, and trust. Those are the people who keep the fire burning. The #KISS truth, it doesn’t take everyone. It just takes enough of us who refuse to give in.
While it’s easy (and justified) to call out the parasitic #mainstreaming types, it’s harder (and more important) to think about how to bridge to them without being captured or co-opted.
1. Meet them on fluffy values, not hard projects. Most #mainstreaming people say they care about openness, creativity, and inclusion. Use those as starting points. Instead of hitting them with #4opens or #OGB right away, talk in simple, human terms: trust, care, mutual aid, freedom. Then show how the OMN already embodies those values with examples like: When talking about #indymedia reboot, don’t begin with federation protocols; begin with “this is a people’s newswire where communities publish, and no single organisation can control it.” Then connect that to the tech.
2. Frame the commons as abundance, not scarcity. Mainstreaming comes with a scarcity mindset (“we need funding,” “we need gatekeepers”). We counter with an abundance story: the #openweb grows by sharing, remixing, and federating. Emphasise that our strength isn’t owning the pie but baking more pies together. An example might be: OMN flows content between blogs, small sites, and #fediverse projects. This isn’t competing with “platforms,” it’s weaving a bigger web where everyone benefits.
3. Offer them low-stakes ways to join. Not everyone is ready to dive headfirst into spiky, fluffy, grassroots culture. Make lightweight on-ramps: federated publishing plugins, easy “flows not silos” demos, or spaces where they can share without having to fully sign up.
4. Keep the tone sometimes fluffy, sometimes spiky. People new to grassroots tech often get scared off by the first bit of conflict. Fluffy spaces – campfires, storytelling, art – can bring them in. The spiky edges – calling out parasitism, blocking #NGO capture – should remain, but not be the only door in.
5. Make co-creation visible. Show them that grassroots projects don’t just “talk” about collaboration – we live it. When people see decision-making without bosses, publishing without gatekeepers, and coding without silos, they realise it’s possible. An example of this can be found in #OMN wiki pages on Unite Forge which are messy, open, and collective. That’s not a bug, it’s a living record of co-creation. Point to that messiness as proof of trust-based work that they can make more “tidy”, this is work as gift.
The #bridgeing isn’t about diluting grassroots culture into “NGO-speak.” It’s about keeping our paths, our politics sharp, while offering ways for curious people to join with less fear. Some will drop off (parasites always will), but others might step over the bridge and become part of the messy, hopeful commons.
The continuing, talking to legacy alt media people, sparks off clarification. The current conversation comes from the #indieweb, rooted in individualism, the digital mirror of the lone artisan, the self-sufficient homesteader, the coder as sovereign subject. This is not a critique in itself – individualism is a core driver of creativity and experimentation. But taken as the centre of gravity, it is a politics that naturally aligns with capitalism. Each person builds their site, their stack, their micro-brand, carving out a niche within the wider marketplace of attention.
By contrast, the Fediverse is – at least in practice – a commons-based approach. It is messy, communal, and often contradictory. The culture tells a white lie about being for individual empowerment (“host your own instance, be free!”) but the reality is that the Fediverse only exists because of shared infrastructure, federated protocols, and overlapping communities of care. It is not about individuals building perfect silos, it is about rough collective spaces and imperfect federation.
This makes the Fediverse a bad fit for capitalism, which is precisely its virtue. While corporations circle like vultures trying to find a monetization model, they repeatedly stumble over the fact that the Fediverse runs on gift economies, volunteer admin work, and political commitments to #4opens data. It resists enclosure, because enclosure breaks the very thing people come for: the federation of flows.
Politics is in the protocols, so much of this comes down to unspoken politics. The indieweb protocols and culture fit comfortably with #neoliberal individualism: “build your own, control your data, be an island.” The Fediverse protocols and culture emerge from anarchist, commons-oriented traditions: “connect, federate, share, fight (mainstreaming) spam together.”
Both are #openweb native, both valuable in their own way. But only one – the Fediverse – has proven capable of scaling into an actual social movement. It is not a coincidence that working activist traditions, mutual aid groups, and alternative media collectives gravitate toward federation rather than individual silos.
Silo vs Flow. Legacy media, and many who imitate it, still think in silo terms – bounded publications, paywalls, gated submissions. They mirror the scarcity logic of print capitalism. The #openweb, on the other hand, is about flow – federation, remix, sharing, building commons. The Fediverse works because it embodies this. The #Indieweb stalls when it forgets this.
The problem we now face is that almost all of the current “leadership” both technical and social of the fedivers is pushing blinded #mainstreaming, its good that some one is doing this, dont take this wrong, but we need balence. And this is why the #OMN path matters, the Open Media Network is the logical next native step: federation all the way down, a refusal to compromise with silo logic, and a clear embrace of the commons. Instead of curating content behind walls, we curate flows in open space. Instead of asking permission, we build bridges.
The need for balence is clear: push more individualist silos – a safe fit for capitalism, but doomed to irrelevance. Or embrace federated flows – messy, communal, unprofitable, and alive. The #openweb is at this crossroads. If we do not push the commons-first path, the vultures of #mainstreaming will enclose the #Fediverse just as they did the early web. This is why we need the native #OMN path, not as a brand, but as a living commitment: federation, commons, openness, and collective care. This is not just about tech, it’s about politics. About simple #KISS whether the future of the web belongs to capital, or to the commons. And the problem we need to compost is that common sense tells us to take the wrong path.
