The wall of funding silence

In the sprouting landscape of #openweb infrastructure, it’s not just code that gets ignored, it’s the possibility of change itself. Projects like #makeinghistory, part of the wider Open Media Network (#OMN), aren’t asking for much. They’re not flashy. They’re not political in the #mainstreaming sense. They just quietly build the back-end tools that allow people to document their histories, publish from the grassroots, and hold space for the memory of struggle that shape our progressive liberalism. But that seems to be too much.

The wall of funding silence – We’ve submitted funding proposals – dozens over the years, to every channel supposedly set up to fund the #openweb non-mainstream side of tech. From #NLnet to #NGI, from “open futures” to the latest EU moonshots. Most of the time, the response is a polite no, a vague shrug, or silence.

Sometimes, we get honesty – “This kind of effort is very hard to seek grants for” or “I don’t have an obvious candidate for you.” What they don’t say is what’s really going on: The system does fund this kind of work, look at the bonfire fresco as an example, but only when it’s a shadow of the status quo.

There’s a path through this, if we’re honest about the rules of the game. One such route is the #makeinghistory project, a non-threatening, archive-based approach that doesn’t scream radical, but quietly lays the groundwork for deeper change. What funders may not realize (or perhaps they do) is that by supporting it, they also enable development on #indymediaback and the metadata “soup” back-ends of the OMN, the very infrastructure needed to reboot truly grassroots media.

It’s a shadow funding path. And yes, that might feel cynical. But if you’re unwilling to fund change directly, maybe you’ll fund the shadows of change. Sometimes the only way to sneak truth past the gatekeepers is through the side door.

We do need to get past this broken balance, the hard part is that many of these funders do think they’re doing good. And to be fair, they are, a little. But the balance is broken. That imbalance is invisible to most, especially those inside the comfort of stable institutions. When we push back, it looks like we’re hitting “good” people with little sticks. It’s messy, and it’s easy for them to just turn away. We get told to be grateful. To celebrate, the seedling being planted in the foreground, while bulldozers level the rest of the forest behind it.

Stick or Carrot? So what do we do? We talk about sticks and carrots. The truth is, our sticks are tiny, dwarfed by corporate lobbying, government inertia, and internal conservatism. The peaceful, hippy route changes nothing long-term, but conflict isn’t working either. We’re stuck in between, too radical for the boardroom, too polite for the barricades.

But here’s a thought: maybe it’s not about the size of the stick, but where we aim it. We’re not here to fight good people. We’re here to point out that a little good is not enough, not when the stakes are this high. If we don’t build space for change, it won’t happen. And if funders like #NLnet want to be the change they speak of, then they need to fund the infrastructure that makes it possible, even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if it’s messy. Even if it’s indirect…

What Now? We’ll give it a month. Then maybe we nudge a bit harder. But no shame, no blame. Just a call for balance, for trust, for a shift in what “doing good” really means.

The pushing of doomed projects

#OMN #makeinghistory #indymediaback #NGI #NLnet #NGIzero #openweb #4opens #deathcult #mainstreaming #funding #changechallenge

Governance, the mess of AI tech-fix paths

Seminar Reflection: Philosophy, AI, and Innovation – Week 6
Topic: AI Deliberation at Scale
Speakers: Chris Summerfield (Oxford & AI Safety Institute), MH Tessler (Google DeepMind)
Key texts: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (excerpt) and Summerfield et al., “AI Can Help Humans Find Common Ground in Democratic Deliberation”

This seminar focus is on scaling democratic deliberation via AI. The example proposal is the #HabermasMachine a test projects to facilitate large-scale consensus using #LLMs (Large Language Models). The framing, unsurprisingly, is drawn from the elitist tech sector – Google DeepMind and Oxford – with a focus on “safety” and “moderation” over human messiness and agency.

The problem we face is that this #techshit path might work, but for who is the question, what kind of “public sphere” is this #AI recreating, and who holds the power to shape it? These are strongly top-down, technocratic proposals, rooted in a narrow utilitarian logic. The underlying assumption is that human decision-making is flawed and must be mediated, and ultimately managed, by algorithmic systems. Consensus is determined not through lived human to human dialogue or, as I like to say – mess, but through an AI that quietly nudges discussions to centrist consensuses.

There is no meaningful eye-to-eye group interaction in this project, no room for DIY, #bottom up agency. Participants become data points in a system that claims to “listen,” but acts through elitist mediation. It is consensus without community, and safety without solidarity. What’s missing is the power of mess, the presenter ignores this central question: Can we build messy, human-scale deliberation that doesn’t rely on top-down interventions?

Projects like this are not grassroots governance, rather it’s governance-by-black-box, mainstreaming by design, the incentive model is telling: ideas that align with the status quo or dominant narratives are rewarded with more money. Consensus is guided not by grassroots engagement or dissenting voices, but by what the algorithm (and its funders) consider “productive.” This is the quiet suffocating hand of #mainstreaming, cloaked in neutral code.

#TechFixes paths like this are about stability at all costs, yet we live in a time when stability is the problem, with #ClimateChaos threatening billions, the demand is for transformation, not moderation.

This is AI as intermediary, not a facilitator of the commons paths we need. Transparency? Not here, no one knows how the #AI reaches consensus. The models are proprietary, the tweaks are political, and the outcomes are mediated by those already in power. The system becomes an unaccountable broker, not of truth, but of what power is willing to hear.

We need to be wary of any system that claims to represent us without us being meaningfully involved. This is a curated spectacle of consensus, delivered by machines, funded by corporations, and mediated by invisible hands. What we need is human to human projects like the #OGB, not tech managed consensus. This #mainstreaming path isn’t compost. It’s simply more #techshit to be composted, mess is a feature, not a bug.

In the #OMN (Open Media Network), we explore paths rooted in trust, openness, and peer-to-peer process. Not asking for power to listen, but taking space to act. We compost the mess; we don’t pretend it can be sanitized by top-down coding.

#Oxford #AI #techshit #dotcons

The story: power, truth, and walking the fun path

Our powerlessness feeds our desire to hate. This is not a personal failing – it’s a social design flaw. A path built on alienation and distraction will always funnel frustration into polarisation. That’s why the controversy-driven algorithms of the #dotcons (corporate social media platforms) are not just annoying, but actively harmful. They feed on our despair, and we, often unknowingly, feed on the drama they serve back to us.

It’s a closed loop of spectacle and spite, profitable to the #nastyfew but corrosive to us, the meany. An extractive business model built on social breakdown. And yet, many of us know this. So why do we stay? Because stepping away from this mess is hard. It takes more than wishful thinking. It takes movement. Not only that, but it takes organising. It takes the kind of networked activism and lived alternatives the Open Media Network (#OMN) has been building and trying to seed for the last ten years

Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us.

Truth isn’t declared, it’s built. #Postmodernism taught us that truth is slippery. That’s fine, but in the hands of #mainstreaming culture, that slipperiness has become a tool of endless distraction and decay. People say things like they are true because they feel true. They build tech platforms because they believe in them. They sell movements as brands because it looks like change. But let’s be honest: wishing something into truth does not make it true.

What makes things true is collective struggle, shared purpose, and concrete acts of solidarity. A load of social work, grounded activism, and careful trust-building make something true. This is the hard path, but it’s also the only one worth walking, and when we do it together with joy it’s the happy path.

Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.

The #geekproblem, again, is too often a part of this mess. Writing code is seen as a kind of truth declaration. “Look, it runs! So it must be real!” But a thing that compiles is not the same as a thing that lives. Tech without community is a corpse. For anything to matter, you need people. And to keep people, you need some rough-and-ready PR. You need actual engagement. You need trust, time, and probably a bit of music and food too. We can’t engineer our way out of this crisis. We have to organise our way out.

The #Lifecult vs. the #Deathcult. What we’re up against isn’t just bad ideas, it’s a worship of stability, spectacle, and control, the illusion of movement through aesthetic alone, no real challenge to the dominant system. It feels warm. It promises safety. But it leaves no room for difference, contradiction, or rebellion, this is inside both “cult”.

It requires less mental effort to condemn than to think

This is why we don’t need worship, we need practical action. Change and challenge are not side effects of our projects – they are the sharp point. We don’t do this work to be liked, we do it because there is no other way to make things true. And if we do this together, it becomes fun and meaningful – we create social “truth”.

Working with the #Eurocrats (and other impossible people). Let’s talk about the institutions. The #EU. Local governments. #NGOs. Big tech “allies.” They are hopelessly incompetent when it comes to grassroots tech and progressive social change. But here’s the thing, they will not go away on their own. If we don’t push, the right-wing will step in and push harder. That’s mess is already happening.

Revolution is but thought carried into action.

So we take the harder path, we show up, try to guide. We keep the door open even when it slams in our face. And yes, it’s exhausting. We’ve tried to work with #mainstreaming people. Many are unbelievably vile, and worst of all, they have no idea they’re behaving badly. They don’t see their role in the decay. They don’t see the crisis, because the spectacle of control makes everything look fine.

But we see it, and we are not powerless, refusing the mess is about rebuilding the commons. Yes, the current #mainstreaming is a mess. A deep, systemic, soul-grinding mess. But we should not put up with it. That’s what #OMN is for. That’s what projects like #indymediaback, #OGB (Open Governance Body), and the broader #openweb movement are trying to hold space for.

We don’t need more hype. We need slow, messy, grounded work:

Listen more than we preach.
Read each other’s code, politics, and history before rewriting.
Talk about our failures honestly.
Grow media and networks that are native to community, not layered on top like #dotcons digital colonialism.
Build up our own cultures of care and collaboration in the #openweb to replace the dying ones.

This is fun, not a strategy of purity or perfection, it’s a strategy of survival, and even joy.
Ideas? Responses? This is not a closed story, it’s a beginning. If you’re reading this and feeling the weight of it, good. That’s where we start from. But let’s not stop there. Come build, talk, and argue. Come plant seeds, come help make the mess into compost.

All the quotes are from Emma Goldman

Collaborative futures “Go Outside”

A brief literary diversion to get back to our coding and #UX design. In the book News from Nowhere, William Morris invites us to dream, but more than that, he asks us to build. Written in 1890, this visionary novel imagines a world beyond capitalism: no money, no bosses, no state, just people living together in beauty and cooperation, with practical labour, shared resources, and a deep reverence for the land.

For the Open Media Network (#OMN), Morris’s imagined future is not a quaint artifact of socialist utopianism. It offers living lessons, tools, for those of us rebuilding the balance of collective systems of media, communication, and trust from the ground up.

But these lessons come with a challenge, theory is easy, communication is hard. Morris wasn’t naïve about the criticisms he’d face. In News from Nowhere, he playfully mocks the kind of rigid, #mainstreaming or book-bound political thinking that critiques from a distance. In one scene, a bookish character is told off:

“You have so muddled your head with mathematics, and with grubbing into those idiotic books about political economy (he he!), that you scarcely know how to behave… It is about time for you to take some open-air work, so that you may clear away the cobwebs from your brain.”

This is more than a literary joke. It’s a call to stop abstracting and start relating, to the world, to each other, to the work in front of us.

Let’s get back to focusing on coding in grassroots tech and media paths where we are trying to move beyond the current #mainstreaming, we face a similar issue: we to often fall back on rewriting. If a project doesn’t make sense, or if it feels messy or “badly coded,” we’re tempted to scrap it and start over. It’s always easier to build something from scratch than to understand and contribute to a shared vision.

But that instinct, while human, is deadly to collaboration. Reading code is like reading a community, you’re presented with a program someone else wrote, and for whatever reason, you need to understand it, whether to fix something or build something bigger, it will likely be painful. Their choices, habits, or style might seem opaque or even “wrong” to you. But if you rewrite instead of understand, you lose something deeper than code: you lose continuity, you lose trust, you lose the opportunity to actually work together.

This problem isn’t just about software, it’s cultural, it runs through all grassroots movements, including the #OMN. We don’t need another polished platform or a perfect protocol. What we need is the maturity and humility to read each other’s work – whether it’s code, writing, media, or mutual aid projects – and find ways to extend it, rather than erase it.

Morris never intended News from Nowhere to be a literal map of the future. It was always a provocation, a reminder that theory must live in the real world, among people with needs, desires, and contradictions. His “utopia” isn’t managed by frameworks or protocols. It’s governed by relationships. Trust and care are its foundation, not abstract “rules.”

This is crucial for how we approach governance in the #openweb and the society it needs to shape. Rather than getting stuck in ideological loops or trying to design the “perfect” horizontal system, we need to stay grounded. We must treat organising like reading someone else’s program: with patience, attention, and empathy. Don’t rewrite from scratch, build on what’s already alive, collaborative maturity is radical.

The #OMN isn’t about shiny apps or new stacks. It’s about a culture of maintenance and shared ownership, of federated messiness. To get there, we have to often let go of (stupid) individual ego, the idea that our code, our writing, our instance is the one that will “win.” Instead, we aspire to be the kind of people who can join a network not by dominating it, but by understanding it. By reading what came before, by contributing to a path that strengthens the whole.

As in Morris’s world, the future doesn’t arrive through force. It grows in the commons. It thrives when people take the time to learn each other’s language, even if that language is clumsy, half-broken, or unfamiliar. This is the path from utopia to everyday practice, what News from Nowhere offers the #OMN and any grassroots horizontal movement today:

Understand before rewriting. Your time is better spent in solidarity than in solitude.
Theory without practice is noise. Go outside. Apply ideas in real communities.
Culture matters more than code. Values, trust, and shared rituals hold systems together.
Slow is not bad. Messy is not failure. These are signs of life, not dysfunction.

Let’s be very clear, building any shared future isn’t easy. But if we can move past the reflex to rewrite, and instead read, listen, and extend, then we’re not just writing better code or building better media, we’re building the kind of world past thinkers like Morris dreamed of. One worth the hard, meaningful work that is at the centre of the value streams in the book. This can be fun.

William Morris – Bridging Theory and Practice in News from Nowhere

This post is from being a part of this Oxford reading group. Feedback on William Morris, his life and books, which doesn’t only critique capitalism and dream about its collapse, but also offers a compelling vision of what comes after. Imagines a society without money, coercion, or hierarchical governance. Power is radically distributed, labour is voluntary and meaningful, and the commons is at the centre of life. It’s not a managerial future, it’s an organic one, shaped by lived values. This mirrors the path of the #OMN, building tools, processes, and networks that support autonomy and participation, not through top-down control or commercial funding, but through collective action and care.

With a little bit of historical context, it is clear why William Morris prods his critics, he anticipates the scepticism from theoretically thinkers, especially those following in the tradition of Marx and Engels. In one exchange, Morris inserts a moment of humour to push back against armchair critics. The narrator, William Guest, is exploring a utopian future guided by Dick, a cheerful and capable local. They encounter Bob, a character marked by his outdated bookishness and preference for abstract theory over lived experience. When Guest accidentally slips up, forgetting he’s meant to be posing as someone from overseas rather than from the past, Bob calls him out. Dick steps in with a scathing but playful remark:

“The fact is, I begin to think that you have so muddled your head with mathematics, and with grubbing into those idiotic books about political economy (he he!), that you scarcely know how to behave. Really, it is about time for you to take some open-air work, so that you may clear away the cobwebs from your brain.”

The laughter after “political economy” is key. Morris isn’t just poking fun, he’s positioning his vision as something deliberately different. Rather than being a blueprint built from existing leftist theory, his utopia grows out of lived practice and collective labour. He acknowledges the critiques Marxist thinkers might level, but counters with a subtle provocation: leave the theory room and go outside. Work with your hands. Test your ideas in the open air.

Theory is not dismissed outright, but it is secondary to active participation in community life. Morris invites readers to imagine a world shaped not only by critique, but by doing. His utopia isn’t a perfect extrapolation from Marxist doctrine; it’s an imaginative leap into what might happen when people stop only theorising and start building together.

This is core to the #OMN story, the #openweb failed in part because it became a playground for commercial, #geekproblem abstraction or academic debates, or worse, captured by institutions that fear mess and openness. Morris reminds us that we need doing, not just thinking – and that horizontal systems only thrive when they’re lived and felt, not just diagrammed.

This is a vision without dogma, unlike the rigid structures of Marxist utopia or the technocratic dreams of platform capitalism, Morris offers a soft, slow, human-scale path. It’s full of contradiction, it’s messy, and it values beauty, leisure, and craft. It’s grounded in love for place, people, and cooperative labour.

Horizontal organising as culture, not system, governance happens through conversation, relationships, and shared values. There are no formal elections or bureaucracies. Everything operates on trust, accountability, and mutual care, built over time, not imposed from above. This is a needed lesson for grassroots organising.

The #OMN doesn’t need polished governance frameworks before people act. It needs lived participation, native cultures of trust, and tools that reflect those values. Morris shows that horizontal organising isn’t a tech stack or a voting app, it’s a culture. Projects like the #OGB are about reclaiming this messiness. The idea is not to replace one form of control with another (just more “open”), but to nurture space where real community publishing, trust, and difference can coexist. Like Morris’s vision, it’s a lived, imperfect commons, not a polished platform.

What people in the #OMN path can learn is that utopia is not a blueprint, it’s a compass. Use it to orient, not to dictate. Theory must be grounded in doing. Don’t build systems people can’t live in. Trust is built in the day-to-day and governance starts in how we relate to each other. Beauty, leisure, and joy matter, alternative systems fail when they forget to be human.

News from Nowhere is not a fantasy novel, It’s better to see it as an early manual for how to feel our way into better futures, this path aligns with the #OMN mission of rebuilding media and communication from the ground up, with openness, care, and community at its core.

https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

#Oxford

Finally, make the most of my attention, I’ll be blunt, you don’t have my attention for long

The #OMN (Open Media Network) is a radical rebooting of what a working grassroot “news” network can be. It’s not another tech platform chasing the latest hype cycle or VC buzzword. It’s grounded in 30+ years of real-world, on-the-ground activist experience, built explicitly on the #4opens

One of the advantages of this path is that we’ve been here before, and we’ve watched it fail, repeatedly. I’ve personally seen projects just like this fail 10–15 times over the last two decades. Brilliant ideas, sometimes beautiful tech, all eventually collapse under the weight of poor social foundations, bad governance, and chasing #geekproblem dreams and #fashionista paths that have nothing to do with real people’s needs. That’s why, from this experience, we’re not doing this as another #techshit project.

We’re not building toys just for geeks, nor another doomed tool for #NGO grant cycles. We’re building a living media network, grounded in the organic, messy, grassroots communities that made independent media, with projects like indymedia and undercurrents, powerful in the first place, It’s where the value is, let’s use this opening to not just walk the same broken paths again.

One thing we don’t need is more #techshit to compost, we’ve got a whole graveyard of it already. Scuttlebutt, Diaspora, SecureDrop, and dozens of others, all had pieces of the puzzle, but lacked cohesive, social-embedded foundations. We don’t want to add to this pile, instead, let’s focus on building something that lasts because it is:

Rooted in existing communities paths

Built for human needs, not dev ego

Simple where it matters (#KISS)

Modular, federated, and easy to adopt

This isn’t about building – The Next Big Thing™, it’s about building something, working, local, resilient, and useful, something people can use and adapt without waiting for permission from gatekeepers or corporations.

Finally, make the most of my attention, I’ll be blunt, you don’t have my attention for long. I’ve seen too much, and I’m tired of false starts. So if we’re going to do this, let’s get real, move fast, and avoid ego traps. Make your work count, keep it grounded, build bridges, not silos. The #OMN is already moving, join in, you can fork it latter and go your own way. But whatever you do, let’s not waste another decade repeating the same tired mistakes. We don’t have that kind of time any more.

And PS. please try not to be a prat.

Telegram messaging app is dieing

Telegram partnering with Elon’s #AI to distribute #Grok inside chats is a clear line crossed. This matters because private data ≠ training fodder, bringing Grok (or any #LLM) into messaging apps opens the door to pervasive data harvesting and normalization of surveillance.

This is an example of platform drift: Telegram was always sketchy (proprietary, central control, opaque funding), but this is active betrayal of its user base, especially those in repressive regions who relied on it.

Any #LLM like Grok in chats = always-on observer: Even if “optional,” it becomes a trojan horse for ambient monitoring and a normalization vector for AI-injected communication.

“Would be better if we had not spent 20 years building our lives and societies around them first.”

That’s the #openweb lesson in a sentence, that the #dotcons will kill themselves. This is what we mean by “use and abuse” of these platforms which have been driven by centralization, adtech, and data extraction, that they inevitably destroy the trust that made them popular. It’s entropy baked into their #DNA. As Doctorow calls this #enshitification, the tragedy is how much time, emotion, and culture we invested in them – only to have to scramble for alternatives once they inevitably betray us.

What to do now, first step, remove data from your account then delete telegram app, not just for principle, but for your own safety. Move to alternatives – #Signal for encrypted, centralized messaging (trusted but closed server). There are other more #geekproblem options in the #FOSS world but like #XMPP, #RetroShare, or good old email+GPG can work too, but they can be isolating, so stick to #signal if you’re at all #mainstreaming.

Then the second step, build parallel #4opens paths by supporting and develop alt infrastructure like the #Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.), #OMN (Open Media Network – decentralized media), XMPP and #p2p-first protocols, #DAT/#Hypercore, #IPFS, or #Nostr etc.

Yeah, things will get worse before they get better, what we’re seeing now is the terminal phase of the #dotcons era. These companies are devouring themselves and will eventually collapse under the weight of their contradictions. The question is, will we have built anything to replace them?

If not, authoritarian tech (like Elon’s empire) fills the void. That’s why we rebuild the “native” #openweb, even if it’s slow, messy, and underground. That’s why projects like #OMN and #Fediverse matter. If you’re reading this, you’re early to the rebuild, welcome, let’s do better this time.

Maybe we don’t then get the guillotine out…

Because current #mainstreaming, centrism, comfy pointless political “maturity” worked out so well, the last time we had a hard shift to the far right in the 1930s. Those “well-meaning” liberals at the time were patted on the back for their reasoned takes and rewarded for their civility right before it ended in a world war. That’s the dirty compost of history we’re all standing in today.

Fast-forward 100 years and today’s centrist are pretending not to smell the rot, their “middle path” has been disintegrating for the last 40 years. The old #mainstreaming legacy parties are crumbling into irrelevance, the dried leaves of the 40 years of #neoliberal wind. In the US, the corporate Democrats are led by animated corpses propped up by PR necromancy, while the #MAGA right eats their roting corpses, dresses in their cloth and steals their path, and without a blink of “common sense” gets away with calling it a revolution.

Meanwhile, people, the compost for real change, are screaming about inequality, rent, inflation, broken healthcare, unusable digital #dotcons infrastructure, and corporate theft of public services. But centrists hear all this and mutter: “Hmm, interesting. Now what could the problem be?” Western centrists stare into the rising far-right tide and scratch their heads, “shocked” that a decade of ignoring propaganda and letting fascists organize on #dotcons led to… #fascism. A real surprise outcome… Who knew that letting lies shout louder than truth in the “free market of ideas” might be a real problem?

Into that empty vacuum steps the hard right, waving ethnic nationalism and promising a future soaked in nostalgia and fear. What we need to say clearly is this is just another side of the same #nastyfew elitists hoarding wealth while selling fascism to the angry and disillusioned.

The only serious force that still tries to push back? The #fashernista fragmented, much-smeared left. In Germany, in France, even in the UK (before being gutted by #NGO centrists). What do our liberal centrists do? They blow smoke and mirrors, equating the left with the right: “One wants to redistribute wealth and build homes; the other wants to criminalize poor people and deport anyone not white. Clearly, both are equally extreme.” This is simply more mess to compost

So what’s the current centrist path? Steal the far right’s policies – but do it “sensibly.” In the UK, Starmer’s “Labour” has become Farage’s reform UK in a red tie. Deportations, austerity, privatisation, all served with a smug banal centrist grin. The outcome, voters, seeing no real alternative, just go for the real fascists instead of the fake centrist “liberal” remix. More mess to compost.

Macron did the same in France by burned his own coalition to stop any shift to the left, claiming they’re just as bad as Le Pen’s mess. Why? Because one side wants public housing and the other wants a racial purge. Yes the same.

So, why won’t centrists move left? The answer is simple, billionaires fund the centre. The left wants to tax them, so the rich choose death – not their own, of course, but ours. A sacrifice the 1% #nastyfew are happy to make from both the right and the “centre”. This is more than mess to compost, the old solution was a guillotine, do we have a different path this time?

Another alt centrist path? Imagine if grassroots parties dared to compost the past instead of embalming it. Imagine if they moved left, rebuilt public services, reversed neoliberal theft, and honoured the postwar social contract, you work, you live with dignity. This is in part what the #OMN is about: composting the #deathcult, seeding native projects with #4opens, growing radical alternatives in the cracks.

What everyone can now see is that the old centre is collapsing. What comes next? People urgently need to see is that we don’t need to move right with the claps of the centre, what we do need is to dig down, get messy, and grow something new – rooted, trust-based, and open. Because we’re not choosing between liberal decay and fascist fire. We’re making compost. And from compost, the future grows.

Maybe we don’t then get the guillotine out…

The Mess – If You Don’t Value Things, You Destroy Them

We live inside and meany of us under a system for 200 years, global capitalism, where value is determined not by care, connection, or any collective well-being, but by market logic. If something is not valued in that narrow logic, it is treated as waste. This means that if you don’t actively value the alternatives – you will “accidentally” destroy them. This applies to tech, culture, nature, and community.

In this, tech, has a problem of misplaced value, people still keep using #mainstreaming tools – the platforms and apps of the #dotcons – because they’re easy, because everyone else does, or simply out of habit. But this actively erodes the alternatives we’ve built: It disempowers projects like #visionontv, #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback. It centralizes control, disconnects us from human-scale governance, and reinforces #stupidindividualism.

This highlights the balance of social change vs. technological change. We must be clear: social change without tech will stall, and tech change without social grounding will fail or harm. With the #OMN projects, the #OGB is designed to bridge this divide. It’s not dogmatic, so no rigid ideology fully owns it. But it’s balanced, so many groups can come to accept it, if we can just get it implemented by a committed few.

But this implementation is hard, because we’re all facing BLOCKING, #BLOCKING and the #deathcult. We all BLOCK, we all turn away from truths that feel uncomfortable: Liberals block radical alternatives. Dogmatists block flexible, balanced ones. Most people just block anything that complicates their worldview.

And after 40 years of #neoliberalism, this #deathcult logic is deep inside us all, a vicious cycle of #stupidindividualism. Without community ownership, without collective vision, our tools fail: Projects decay into power politics and people retreat into passivity or purity spirals. And the worship of “personal freedom” just becomes fuel for the fire. We’re trapped in a feedback loop of: Individualism → Disconnection → Destruction → Fear → More individualism.

Change is messy, it’s supposed to be, that’s why we need to give/take ownership of our #openweb infrastructure. We need democratic instincts, not clean #PR. We need value-driven mess, not market-driven clarity. We need to embrace the #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) path – precisely because it’s the hardest thing for people to do in this world of shiny distractions.

Final point is you are part of this, a lot of people are passive, lazy, even stupid – but not because they’re bad, more because the system makes them this way, because it rewards disinterest. And many of them – many of you – can’t even see the problem, because you’re so deep inside it. That’s the trap, the invisible BLOCK we must face. That’s what the #OMN and #OGB try to push through. So yes – I’m probably pointing the finger at YOU. But also inviting you to build, to grow, to compost the myths and grow something more real, more humanistic.

#KISS

Looking at building #OMN projects

An overview of projects

#Indymedia Classic

Most of the data is a common. Core flows:

Newswire (public, chronological): Anyone can post – and it will appear if they are trusted. It goes to moderation if they are not. This is mostly populated by editorial collective chosen trusted flows into the instance
Features (curated): Promoted stories written by the editorial collective from the newswire resources.
Hidden (private): Moderated view, not visible publicly unless let through by collective to newswire.

View Structure: Mostly fixed: Three flows, with some tag-based navigation as optional/secondary, so can think of this as a “fixed” news landing page with flows. A button to consume and create tag flows, the #makinghistory #UX

Editorial model: Collective moderation, through affinity group consensus.

Metaphor: Like a river (Newswire) feeding into a reservoir (Features), with a dam (Hidden) filtering out toxic waste.

#MakingHistory

Most of the data is a common. Core Structure:

Media object (any format) fragments?

Stories: Everything starts as a crafted piece (linked original fragments).
Tag-based flows: Rich tagging creates multiple dynamic timelines/streams of stories and fragments?
Moderation (private): Curators can review, prioritise, or archive
Interface: Inspired by Tweet Deck-style dashboards: multiple parallel tag/stream views.

Emphasis: Encourages narrative threading, historical context, and thematic clustering over time.

Metaphor: A garden of stories with paths (tags) between plots – some bloom, others get composted behind the scenes.

Shared DNA (and how #OMN fits)

Both: Are people-powered publishing systems. Use a public/private split for moderation and trust-building. Emphasize non-corporate, grassroots communication.

The #OMN acts as a bridge: letting projects like Indymedia and MakingHistory interoperate, share flows, and build trust networks across platforms – all within the ethos of the #4opens.

To be thought about:

The codebase/ActivityPub/OMN all have assumptions that likely need bridging.

Do we use groups to implement collective data – commons – we give admin rights over data by group membership? Then we keep legacy admin roles, but try and push them into the background and plan for them to fade away in the end.

Trusted/untrusted is this based on groups/instances/individuals/tag flow from source or general?

We need to add metadata to objects…

We need every object to be a wiki… This includes the articles – we end up with the Wikipedia of news based on organic trust groups and grassroots street news views rebuilding what it is to be #mainstreaming

Stop chasing tech cults and start growing rooted alternatives

#Musk is a useful example of the #nastyfew: wealthy technocrats wrapping themselves in the cloak of progress while undermining the foundations of any, let alone a just future. These stories and narratives about innovation are a high-tech rebrand of green capitalism, a slick façade masking the same old decaying systems of extraction, inequality, and authoritarianism.

The problem they push is that instead of confronting the #KISS causes of our social and planetary crises, these people offer us distraction: electric cars for the elitists, fantasies of Mars colonies, and #AI overlords dressed up as saviours. This isn’t transformation – it’s #deathcult worshiping continuity in crisis.

People like Musk are useful to the #deathcult because they peddle a seductive, market-friendly myth: that we don’t need to change our behaviour, our economics, or our power structures, we just need to upgrade our tech. Comforting, isn’t it? For those who benefit from the status quo, it’s the perfect nasty con.

He personally embodies the worst of the #geekproblem: the cult of the engineer, disconnected from social reality, obsessed with “fixing” the world through code and hardware while ignoring the human systems that create the problems in the first place. This is dead libertarian ideology dressed in the shrowed of innovation.

We urgently need to compost these myths. Not just resist them, actively decompose them, mix them with grounded knowledge, and grow something better from this soil.

That’s where projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) come in – a project seeded in the messy, composted soil of decades of grassroots media and digital commons. Unlike the sleek towers of technocratic illusion, #OMN is rooted in public-first values: transparency, participation, autonomy, and trust. It’s not about building new silos or chasing the next unicorn, it’s about connecting the islands of resistance, amplifying local grassroots voices to rebuild public infrastructure for storytelling, organising, and governance.

The #OMN isn’t anti-tech – it’s pro-human. It’s a network built with people, for people – not for investors or ego-driven billionaires. It draws from the radical legacy of projects like #indymediaback, and threads in tools like #OGB to bring coherence and shared narrative to the fractured #openweb reboot. So please stop chasing tech cults and start growing rooted alternatives.

“Use and abuse” is a good strategy for dealing with the #dotcons while they continue to dominate our digital and social infrastructure. Why? Because refusing to engage with these platforms outright is the equivalent of shouting into the void – or living in a cave. And caves, while romantic to a certain type of purist, are never effective social solutions.

The truth is this #dotcons are still where the #mainstreaming people live, and mainstream attention is power, even if borrowed. As radicals or progressives, using their platforms to push counter-narratives, while simultaneously undermining their legitimacy and building our own independent infrastructure, is both necessary and strategic. Think of it as exiting from within by using their reach to grow the seeds of your alt-path.

The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil

We need to keep highlighting an old but still urgent tension: the intersection of technology and social change. In this too often unspoken divide, one side leans heavily on practical, technical problem-solving. They want working code, functioning systems, and tangible results, not abstract debates. To them, critiques about capitalism shaping code sound like distractions from the “real work.” The other side insists that technical problems are social problems. They argue that all code is written by people, shaped by culture, power, and history. Ignoring the social dynamics behind technology guarantees we repeat the same failures.

This divide plays out constantly in movements trying to bridge the worlds of #AltTech and social transformation. You see it in tensions between the tech-focused “geek” communities and broader #mainstreaming society. And both sides have blind spots.

The geek camp often falls into the #geekproblem: over-prioritizing tech innovation while ignoring the human and social context. Meanwhile, the #mainstreaming crowd tends to embrace vague social ideals while underestimating the soft power – and necessity – of building real technical infrastructure to support those ideals. Neither side alone can solve anything meaningful, especially not something as vast as rebooting the #openweb or to even start to touch on #climatechaos.

We need bridges, that’s what projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB, #IndymediaBack, and #MakingHistory are about: building trust-based, grounded, people-powered platforms that can span the divide between tech and society.

But let’s be honest, there’s a lot of very bad behaviour on all sides of the #openweb reboot. Blocking progress, gatekeeping, aggression, virtue signalling… it’s all too common. Let’s try not to become prats, it’s easy to start, and hard to stop. Mess breeds more mess, prat-ish behaviour comes in waves. It aligns with waves of #mainstreaming and the reactive “alt” backlash, these tides bring a lot of flotsam, it’s up to us to shovel and compost what we can.

Our biggest block right now? The culture war postmodernist fog that has drifted through radical spaces over the past decades. It’s slippery, full of “common sense” that doesn’t hold up, but hard to challenge because it feels right. Composting this will be difficult, but necessary.

The #Fediverse is built on people-to-people relationships. Trust, not just tech, is the foundation. That’s why there’s a healthy pushback against “tech fixes” that try to replace social trust, a path that is much more common in places like #Nostr and #Bluesky, where algorithms and cryptography are too often seen as the solution to everything.

Yes, in reality, we need a balance of both. The debate is fluffy in places, spiky in others. But if we build tech-bridges to span this messy social terrain, we might actually get somewhere. This brings us to the hard green question: how do you scale local, eco-conscious solutions to a disinterested – and sometimes hostile – global population? Green progressives often promote small-scale, ethical living. That’s great for the 1% who can afford to live that way. But what about the other 99%?

Let’s be blunt: some people will die from #climatechaos. Maybe 9%, maybe more. But 90% will still be here, and they will need different kinds of solutions. Right now, the options on the table look like this: A rebooted, green-infused social democracy (the old Corbyn project was an example). A slide into eco-fascism and top-down “solutions” (the Trump path). Or doing nothing, and let #climatechaos run wild (the current #mainstreaming).

One thing is likely, a wartime economy is coming within 20 years, where there’s will be little room for the last 40 years of #neoliberalism, and “soft” liberalism will likely play a secondary role at best, the political landscape is shifting fast. The new #mainstreaming question is which side will you be on?

Because we need more than clean branding and good vibes – we need bold, practical, radical action rooted in both tech and human trust. We don’t just need freedom from the state and the #dotcons – We need freedom from our own dogmas.

The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil where openness can grow, thrive, and renew. We need compost, and not just as a metaphor.