Meany people see the world degrading, enclosure accelerating. They see climate, politics, media all bending toward extraction. And even when they can see the trajectory, they feel powerless, so they cope by optimise their careers. They scroll. They argue. They consume. They retreat into irony. From birth, we’re trained into one core assumption: There Is No Alternative (#TINA).
Not because it’s true, but because every dominant institution reinforces it:
Schools train compliance.
Media normalises enclosure.
Platforms reward performance over substance.
Workplaces absorb our creative energy into extractive systems.
The message is subtle but constant:
“You can’t change anything.”
“Radicals just break things.”
“Be reasonable. Fit in.”
For builders, this message hits differently, because we know alternatives are possible, we’ve already built them. This is the #FOSS Paradox, as free and open source software proves collaboration without enclosure works, commons-based production works, open standards work and distributed governance can work. Yet somehow, the infrastructure we helped build keeps being enclosed.
The #openweb became the #dotcons, protocols became platforms and communities became markets. Not because we failed technically, but because we underestimated scale, incentives, and capture. And too often, we built tools without building parallel social power. The real trap isn’t rebellion – It’s drift – The #mainstreaming system doesn’t survive by crushing everyone loudly. It survives by absorbing alternatives, funding safe versions of dissent, steering energy into manageable channels and exhausting people with maintenance and precarity
Gatekeeping doesn’t always look like repression, more it looks like grants, partnerships, “best practices,” and institutional legitimacy. The result is that talented builders end up reinforcing the systems they once set out to replace. Not out of malice more from survival.
This Is where #OMN and #4opens come In, it isn’t only ranting about what’s broken, it’s about rebuilding missing layers:
Trust
Shared infrastructure
Media flows outside algorithmic capture
Governance rooted in actual participants
The #4opens are not branding, they are structural safeguards:
Open data
Open source
Open standards
Open process
Without all four, enclosure can creep back in, slowly, politely and inevitably.
This Is not about individual heroics, the myth of the lone hacker is part of the problem. What we need for the new “common sense” is that #stupidindividualism is a dead end. Few people escape extractive systems alone, no one builds durable alternatives alone. Collective infrastructure helps build counterweight to centralised power.
That’s what the #Fediverse gestures toward, what the #openweb once promised, and what needs strengthening now. A first step is to stop pretending we’re powerless. If you’re in #FOSS, you already have:
skills
networks
literacy in decentralised systems
experience with commons governance
What’s missing isn’t capability, it’s coordination and shared direction. The first step isn’t dramatic, it’s simple, reject the #NGO path to:
Find your people.
Support projects aligned with the #4opens.
Build flows, not just features.
Connect tools to real communities.
Refuse quite capture.
Do something – anything – that strengthens commons infrastructure instead of platform enclosure. The biggest lie Is that there’s no choice, when we keep repeating “this is just how things are,” eventually it becomes self-fulfilling. But history says otherwise, every dominant system looks permanent, until it isn’t.
The real outsiders aren’t the loudest rebels, they’re the ones who quietly stop reinforcing broken systems and start building viable alternatives. That’s what this moment asks of the #FOSS community is not #blocking outrage, not purity and not only collapse fantasies.
So, please stop waiting for permission, build systems that align with human autonomy and biophysical reality by strengthening commons before they’re erased. Because alternatives don’t appear, they’re built, and if we don’t build them, enclosure wins by default.
Treating the Fediverse as #stupidindividualism is a kind of blindness, yes, individuals matter, but the #Fediverse only works because of shared culture, shared norms, and collective responsibility. Without this social layer, federation becomes fragmentation – lots of voices, but little shared direction to hold together.
Since the #twittermigration of a few years ago, many of us are feeling the signal-to-noise shift. New people bring energy, creativity, and different expectations – but also habits shaped by algorithmic platforms. The result is a changing “tribal” self-image in Fediverse spaces. This change is not automatically bad. But it does mean we need to actively strengthen #openweb culture if we want the transition to be two-way rather than simply importing #dotcons habits into decentralised spaces.
Remember the people lived through this so will be traumatized, so be kind if you can.
Some conversations frame this as individualism vs collectivism, that’s too simple. Healthy networks hold both, individuals with autonomy, creativity and communities with shared norms and mutual responsibility.
Too much individualism → fragmentation and noise.
Too much collectivism → rigidity and exclusion.
The Fediverse works when it behaves more like a murmuration – many independent actors moving with shared awareness.
The “village vs city” problem. When we started on this path, as Mastodon and other Fediverse instances grow, the experience shifted from small instances feeling like villages, to the wider network feeling like a city. What the huge influx of mainstreaming “common sense” did not bring with them, is that tiny or very large instances alone cannot solve signal-to-noise at scale.
Social structures must evolve alongside technical federation. We are now out of balance on this path, and we need to actively find our way back. Some practical paths are to this balance is by creating and boosting thematic tag cultures (#openweb, #4opens, etc.) as social filters, like watering a garden to help it grow.
The old strategies are still good, though now largely blocked on the #dotcons. Publish from independent platforms first, then syndicate outward (self-hosting as roots, social networks as branches). Encourage open, transparent filtering tools – not hidden algorithms but user-visible choices. Curated flows (human moderation, thematic feeds, affinity groups) instead of purely chronological chaos as networks grow.
Back to the risk of importing “closed” habits. One danger of rapid migration is the unconscious push toward familiar “closed” solutions of hidden moderation logic, opaque ranking systems and defensive blocking cultures replacing mediation. Common sense from closed platforms often fails in open environments.
Open systems are harder, they require active participation, shared stewardship, and cultural literacy. If we don’t defend these values, the #openweb reboot risks recreating the same problems we tried to escape.
Judge by the #4opens as a simple compass to use to evaluate projects before boosting them. Not as purity tests, but as practical signals for long-term resilience. The goal isn’t gatekeeping, to grow a living ecosystem where openness survives scaling.
Please boost this #openweb culture content, not as nostalgia, but as active infrastructure. Remember, individual vs collective is false opposition, so please don’t be a prat on this subject, thanks.
Everywhere we look – what we see, touch, and use – we are living inside systems shaped by decades of economic and technological assumptions. This isn’t only something happening “out there”. It has been normalised and internalised over the last forty years.
The dominance of #stupidindividualism, combined with rigid economic dogma, influenced how we design technology, how we organise communities, and how we imagine progress itself. The outcomes are now starkly visible: #climatechaos, social fragmentation, and a weakening of collective sense-making.
The internet reflects this reality. Online and offline are no longer separate spaces; they feed back and reinforce each other. Recognising this isn’t only about blame, it’s more importantly about understanding the terrain we’re all navigating. These are the technology limits of the current path and why we continue to repeat familiar patterns. New platforms emerge, new interfaces are launched, yet the underlying values remain unchanged. The result does feel like endless churn to people who notice, innovation that rearranges surfaces while leaving deeper structures intact.
This isn’t simply the fault of individuals or communities. Many developers, especially within #FOSS and the #fediverse, are actively trying to build alternatives. But the broader ecosystem still pushes toward centralisation, scaling, and extraction because those are the dominant incentives of the wider paths.
So recognising our #geekproblem isn’t about rejecting technical culture – it’s about expanding it. Technical excellence alone cannot solve social problems without grounding in alt collective needs and lived social realities. This is what the #openweb means, it’s more than #blinded nostalgia for the early internet. It represents a shared direction many communities are already moving toward.
The #openweb is an internet where #4opens information is accessible regardless of platform or location, content can be shared, linked, and reused, participation is not gated by proprietary control. It’s basic: open data, open source, open standards, and open processes.
The growth of the Fediverse demonstrates that alternatives like these are possible. Decentralised social networks, community-run servers, and cooperative governance models show glimpses of a healthier digital ecosystem. Yet within these paths, tensions remain between “native” grassroots values and pressures toward #NGO#mainstreaming and power politics institutionalisation.
For this space to grow, we need to keep moving beyond false choices. On institutional paths, many proposed solutions focus solely on regulation or institutional reform, imagining that better rules will fix systemic problems. While governance matters, relying exclusively on top-down solutions risks becoming another form of dependency to add to the mess.
Another path exists alongside institutional change: horizontal, grassroots approaches rooted in #DIY practice, #4opens shared infrastructure. This path is imperfect and often messy, but it keeps agency within communities rather than outsourcing change to distant structures.
The goal is not purity, it is balance, the #OMN approach grows from this perspective. Grassroots, #DIY, non-corporate, human-scale, not disruption for its own sake, not scaling driven by venture logic. Instead, building social technology that serve collective needs while respecting individual agency. Many people within #FOSS and the Fediverse are already working toward these goals, even if they use different languages. The opportunity now is to deepen collaboration, connect projects that share values, and strengthen the social foundations alongside the technical ones.
So the path we need is about finding each other, it’s the path we made work for a while then failed on socialhub, so I need to repeat, the question isn’t whether alternatives exist, they do. The challenge is finding alignment among people who are already trying to move in similar directions, but feel isolated or fragmented.
Who recognises that technology must serve communities rather than extract from them. If you see value in grassroots, cooperative approaches to technology – if you believe the #openweb is still worth building – then the invitation is simple. Stop churning, start building. Who is ready to move beyond endless reinvention toward shared infrastructure and shared purpose?
Seeds, Safety, and the Chicken-and-Egg Problem – A Q&A on Practical Building vs Intellectual #Blocking. This explores a recurring tension in grassroots technology projects: the gap between practical historical paths and fresh “intellectual” critique, it reflects on a broader patterns seen in #openweb, #FOSS, and #DIY spaces.
Q: What is the “shared path” and why describe it as a seed?
A: The shared path is a practical response to repeated historical failure. It is not a finished solution, a moral demand, or a complete alternative system. It begins as a seed, something small, imperfect, and grounded. If you judge a seed by whether it is already a tree, nothing will ever grow. The idea is to start building despite uncertainty and allow structure to emerge rooted organically through practice.
Q: What is the main critique of this “seed” approach?
A: Critics argue that metaphors like seeds and growth avoid addressing concrete mechanisms. They focus on first-step effects: What signals are being sent? Who carries risk or unpaid labour? What moral pressures are created? What happens when survivability is deferred? From this perspective, issues must be addressed at the beginning rather than grown from the seed.
Q: Why does this debate often become circular?
A: Because both sides are asking different questions. Practical builders ask: Where do the resources come from to implement safety before anything exists? Critics ask: How do we prevent harm if we begin without safeguards? Without answering the resource question, discussions loop endlessly between ethics and feasibility.
Q: What is the “chicken-and-egg” problem here?
A: Many grassroots projects face a structural paradox: You need resources, tools, and commitment to build sustainable alternatives. But those resources only appear after something exists and demonstrates use value, agenst mainstreaming pushback Waiting for perfect conditions prevents starting; starting without resources has risks, but it’s the only thing that can grow change and challenge.
Q: What work is actually happening in practice?
A: Practical work often remains messy, distributed, and unpaid. Examples include: Supporting student journalists in rebooting grassroots media projects like Oxford #Indymedia. Motivating unfunded technical communities to collaborate on shared codebases such as #indymediaback. Maintaining ongoing organisational and community infrastructure through long-term volunteer labour. These efforts are naturally invisible and impossible to summarise because they work organically rather than following formal project structures.
Q: Why is documentation itself a source of conflict?
A: Critics ask for clear summaries or structured documentation of ongoing work. Builders simply see this as additional unpaid labour imposed on already stretched contributors. External demands that assume others should organise information for them, creates friction between expectations of accessibility and the working realities of #4opens and #DIY grassroots work.
A: In #DIY culture, participation is active rather than observational. If someone believes something needs improvement – documentation, tools, funding guides – the expectation is that they step in and contribute rather than stand outside only pointing critique. Critique without participation is too often lazy negative pressure rather than constructive help on “native” DIY paths.
Q: Is this simply a disagreement about ethics?
A: Not entirely. Both sides often share ethical concerns. The deeper disagreement is about sequence: Should, impossible and irrelevant in a practical sense, safety and compensation frameworks exist before building begins? Or can these frameworks emerge better through #DIY messy real-world working practice?
Q: What is the takeaway?
A: Grassroots building requires balancing, ethical awareness and practical starting points. Intellectual critique can help identify risks, but when detached from material constraints it too often unintentionally blocks action at best or turn into trolling at worst. Likewise, practical work can benefit from reflection, but cannot wait for perfect theoretical clarity.
The challenge is to compost both approaches into something that moves forward.
The individual, their freedom, and their capacity for reason are products of social relationships, not independent origins. Society is not built from isolated individuals; individuals arise from shared culture, history, and collective life. As society grows richer and more humane, individuals gain the conditions needed for deeper development and freedom emerges from this shared foundation.
What’s really at stake is power. The shift has to be away from private ownership and toward the commons – not just in licensing, but in governance, culture, and decision-making. The whole #OMN project is grounded in this understanding. It’s about building shared infrastructure that people can actually use, shape, and grow trust.
One of the great ironies of many “alternative” spaces is that people believe they’re resisting power, yet by locking everything down – secret decisions, closed processes, gatekeeping – they end up recreating the systems they claim to oppose. The result is stasis, nothing moves or grows, everything fragments.
Paranoia is one of the biggest blocking forces in alt-tech and radical spaces. It breeds mistrust, isolation, and internal sabotage, making collective action almost impossible. Some caution is necessary, we’re not naïve, but when paranoia becomes the default posture, it hardens into control. At that point, it stops being defensive and starts being corrupting.
The #4opens is a direct antidote to this. Transparency punctures paranoia. When decisions, processes, and networks are open, there’s less space for suspicion to fester. Trust isn’t built through secrecy or technical cleverness; it’s built through visible, accountable practice over time. Open process beats “good intentions” every time.
This is also why letting technical people make final product decisions is a mistake, overemphasizing technology then underplaying the social problems we’re actually trying to solve. We end up designing better mousetraps without ever asking whether we’re even trying to catch mice. Tech becomes the point, rather than a tool.
This is where the #fashernista problem kicks in, being seen to hold the correct stance replaces doing the work. But staying “right” while nothing changes is another form of failure. If we want alternatives that function, we have to move past paranoia, reopen flows, and accept that trust is something you build, not something you secure with walls.
The uncomfortable truth is that it’s easy to be “right” in theory. It’s much harder to take part in the compromises that building anything real requires. Most people prefer the comfort of ideological purity over the messiness of collective practice, especially when dealing with complex social truths. That’s the trap.
#OMN is often critiqued as if it were a finished system, a moral framework, or an alternative economy. It is none of those things. We need to be clear about scope, sequence, and intent if discussion is going to move forward instead of circling the same ground.
#OMN is a commons-first, tool-building project. It exists to create shared infrastructure, processes, and cultural practices that can grow non-extractive media and communication. It prioritizes shared ownership, open process (#4opens), and reducing capture in order to build the needed public-first infrastructure. It’s about creating conditions, not declaring outcomes.
It’s an early-phase project, an affinity-building space to create tools and governance to reconnect fragmented activist and media histories. It is not claiming to already provide economic survivability, stable long-term livelihoods, or a full replacement for existing systems. Confusing the step with the destination is the root of most disagreement.
It’s grounded in lived historical practice. #OMN grows out of more than 30 years of real projects – Indymedia, grassroots media, squatting and DIY cultures, trust-based networks – and a clear view of where #NGO-driven paths have failed. This history matters. The path is not speculative theory, it’s an attempt to compost what worked, acknowledge what failed, and try again with better tools.
That’s based on a simple historical reality, society does not pay people to challenge itself. Early change is driven by passion, not wages, and support structures emerge after commons exist, not before. This isn’t a moral claim, it’s an observation drawn from experience. #OMN is also a space where tone is a process tool. Friction is used to slow things down, open space for challenge, and form affinity where none yet exists. This is messy by design, not a finished social contract.
We don’t set out to solve how everyone is paid, how risk is evenly distributed, or how long-term security is guaranteed. These are unsolved problems, not denied ones. #OMN exists because these tools do not yet exist, so expecting it to already provide them misunderstands its scope and phase. Participation is voluntary, alignment is practical, not moral. Funding may be used tactically, but OMN is not structured around chasing it.
This is not a safe, smooth, or finished space. The path is unfinished, uneven, and sometimes uncomfortable. If a project has to be safe, stable, and fully funded before it can exist, it will never challenge anything.
The core misunderstanding is that the #OMN is judged for failing to deliver something it has never claimed to already be. What we are doing is building the tools that make survivability possible later, without reproducing the failures that keep repeating. That work is slow, messy, and incomplete – because it has to be.
The shared path is a practical response to repeated historical failure. It is not a promise, a moral demand, or a finished alternative. If you judge a seed by whether it is already a tree, you will never grow anything.
Why groups matter, in our “common sense” we like to pretend society is made up of strong, independent individuals who freely choose everything about their lives. That story is comforting, but it’s also mostly false, humans are group creatures first. People don’t start as individuals. We are born into families, cultures, languages, histories. Our values, assumptions, and sense of what’s “normal” are learned socially long before we ever get a chance to reflect on them. Groups aren’t an add-on to human life – they’re the foundation.
Individual identity is hard work, as modern culture tells us we must be ourselves, define our own path, build a unique identity. But doing that alone is exhausting, being an “individual” means constant self-definition, self-presentation, self-justification. You’re never finished as you’re always proving who you are, to employers, platforms, institutions, and peers.
That permanent uncertainty is what people mean when they talk about burnout, anxiety, and imposter syndrome. Groups reduce that pressure, as belonging to a group shares the load, with values, purpose, norms, responsibility. You don’t have to invent everything from scratch, you’re part of something that existed before you and will continue after you. This isn’t about conformity, it’s about being human, support and continuity.
The current #deathcult myth of pure individual freedom, where individuals are fully free and self-made #KISS serves power. When people are isolated, all problems look personal instead of structural, failure feels like a moral flaw and collective solutions disappear. You can’t organise if everyone thinks and acts as if they’re alone.
Healthy groups vs. toxic groups, yep, groups aren’t automatically good. Some are rigid, exclusionary and authoritarian. Healthy groups are porous and open to change, allow disagreement, are based on trust, not fear and exist to serve their members, not control them. The solution to bad groups isn’t no groups – it’s better ones.
Why this matters for media and the web? The #openweb wasn’t built by isolated individuals chasing personal brands. It grew out of horizontal’ish communities, shared tools, and mutual aid. What broke it, was pushing of individual status, platforms replacing communities then metrics replacing relationships. Projects like #OMN are about rebuilding group-based publishing, shared infrastructure, and collective voice, not amplifying lone influencers.
In short, (stupid) Individualism puts people in a permanent liminal state – alone, unstable, competing. Groups give people grounding, belonging, continuity, and the ability to act together. If we want social change, resilient media, and a future beyond the current mess, we on balance don’t need better individuals, we need better groups.
I proposed a long time ago that #openweb is a less tribal, more expansive framing than #fediverse socially and technically. It’s also #nothingnew, which is honestly a breath of fresh air. We can (and should) use both terms, but if we want meaningful change and challenge to the #mainstreaming mess, we need to foreground the more generic one.
Predictably, this gets pushback from two directions: the non-political #FOSS crowd, and the mainstreaming crew. And yes, when you bring #NGO behaviour into the #fediverse, there’s going to be friction. Try being #openweb-native on this, please.
People are going to keep doing self- and socially-destructive things. That’s a human problem, not a branding one. But the language we choose does shape how we respond to it.
One of the reasons we use a #4opens process is to balance the reality that people often arrive with strong opinions before understanding the history, context, or existing work. The process isn’t there to exclude anyone, it’s there to slow things down just enough so people can orient themselves before trying to reshape what already exists.
At the moment this only works partially, because some people still interpret being asked to explore existing materials as dismissal. For example “You have sent me on a ride through Mastodon posts and two repos while not providing direct answers.”
What may feel like dismissal is actually part of a #DIY open process. The intention is to encourage people to engage with the work already done so conversations can move forward from shared context rather than restarting the same debates repeatedly.
Similarly: “Why assume blog archaeology is the right approach instead of presenting everything in a more processed way?” In grassroots projects, documentation is often messy, organic, and evolving rather than packaged into clean summaries. Exploring this material isn’t busywork, it’s a way to understand the social and historical layers that shape the project. Without that grounding, discussions can unintentionally repeat old loops to propose changes that have already been explored.
And when people say: “Most people don’t have time or energy for this.” That’s a real constraint, but it also highlights the core challenge. Open, collective projects rely on participants investing some effort to understand shared context. Without that, the burden shifts onto existing contributors to repeatedly re-explain the basics, which keeps stalling progress.
The aim here is not gatekeeping or dismissal. It’s #KISS: keep the process simple, open, and grounded in shared effort. If something needs improving – documentation, summaries, onboarding – the most constructive path in a #DIY culture is to step in and help build that improvement together.
Part of the shitty mess we’re in comes from the failure of #DIY culture and the rise of #stupidindividualism as the common sense path. #stupidindividualism is completely unscalable in social terms. It fragments, isolates, and exhausts. That isn’t accidental, it’s a classic divide-and-control strategy of the #deathcult. And we need to consciously step away, and away, and far away from this.
An example, over the last 20 years, I’ve answered the same questions individually, over and over. But the point of #DIY culture was never one-to-one hand-holding. You don’t need to stress personal connections just to begin. The hashtags are links – they exist to let you start the process yourself.
You can do this by #KISS following the flow, not by demanding individual explanations. Click the #hashtag links. Read the background posts. Trace the project history. Use a search engine. Learn how the process works before pulling people into one-on-one clarification. This is basic #DIY practice, grounded in the #4opens.
You need a second example, looking back, remember how many of our activist friends ran workshops on how to use #dotcons social media as a campaign tool? How to organise activism through corporate platforms? While this was happening, our own independent media was being ripped apart internally, ossified by process, and then abandoned by the same #fashionista activists.
This mess is the devil child of #postmodernism and #neoliberalism, all surface, no grounding, all individual expression, no shared responsibility. We know the names and URLs of many of the people who did this. It’s the legacy we’re dealing with. Our projects like #indymediaback exists because of this history.
If you’re serious about changing society, you have to think your way past this common sense #blocking. That means rebuilding collective pathways, shared knowledge, and common processes, not endlessly repeating the same individual conversations. The tools are here. The links are here. The work starts when we stop pretending this is a personal problem and recognise it as a social one.
Capitalism grew from historical processes rooted in enclosure, extraction, and the exploitation of people and nature. Liberal politics stabilise rather than challenge this, while promoting forms of (stupid)individualism that fragment collective power, making it harder for people to organise together against entrenched control.
The individual, their freedom, and their capacity for reason are products of social relationships, not independent origins. Society is not built from isolated individuals; individuals grow from shared culture, history, and collective life. As society grows richer and more humane, individuals gain the conditions needed for deeper development – and real freedom emerges from this shared foundation.
Let’s be honest about something we usually skate around. Many of our #fluffy activist friends are not fighting for change. They are fighting for equality of access to the existing system. That system is the #deathcult – growth, extraction, hierarchy, control – and most progressive mainstream activism is about making that worship fairer, nicer, more inclusive. More seats in the temple, better language on the altar, safer rituals for those already kneeling. This is not transformation, it is managed inclusion.
And yes, this work can have real, immediate value for people suffering now. That matters. But we need to stop pretending it is the same thing as change and challenge. Equality within a system is not the same as escaping the system.
Most #mainstreaming activism, accepts capitalism as inevitable, state power as the horizon, extraction as the price of living, climate collapse as something to be “managed”, this leads them to except platforms, NGOs, and institutions as arbiters of legitimacy. Then the limit is to ask politely for representation, protections, funding, visibility. This is reformist harm reduction, not the liberation we need. We need to say this out loud, more, because this “confusion” currently is #blocking real alternatives. When people who want out are constantly blindly told to slow down, be safer, be nicer, be more legible, be more fundable, the result is paralysis.
The #OMN path is not about polishing this mess, or making oppression more diverse, it’s in no way about optimising injustice. It’s about walking out of the temple, even when that feels irresponsible, unsafe, or unrealistic.
This Is where the friction comes from: pushing for messy governance and mediation instead of blocking, use-value over branding, affinity over scale, action over commentary. We are simply refusing to confuse survival within the system with escape from it. That refusal makes people uncomfortable – especially those whose activism is already recognised, funded and socially rewarded.
A simple test: Ask this of any project, campaign, or platform – Does this help people stop worshipping the #deathcult? Or does it help them worship it more safely? If the answer is the second, be honest about it, don’t lie by call it radical, don’t call it transformative, don’t call it challenge. Be honest, call it what it is, continuity, for all our sakes we need to say this clearly, even if it costs social comfort.
Because real change and challenge has always been unpopular – especially with those most invested in making the current mess feel livable.
We need to balance this mess – a diversity of agendas ≠ winner-takes-all politics. Different projects are based on different agendas – and that diversity is not a weakness, it’s a survival trait. Winner-takes-all politics (electoral, market, platform, narrative) flattens this into a single metric of success: scale, growth, legitimacy, dominance. That logic is a social and ecological disaster, as it pushes everything toward monoculture, and monocultures always collapse.
The mistake is assuming that coordination requires uniformity – it doesn’t – what it requires is tolerance of difference plus shared boundaries. This is what “diversity of tactics” originally meant before it was watered down into a slogan. This is why: “acceptable rebels” are celebrated after they succeed, “useful weirdos” are allowed once they prove value to the system, everyone else gets disciplined, marginalised, or erased.
But what really matters is social context, not the tool. The problem now is that: individual self-destructiveness has scaled up, systems amplify harm faster than reflection, ecosystems are the casualty. This is why “just let people choose” no longer works, choice without structure leads to collapse.
In this mess, the #stupidindividualism reaction of #blocking is just displaced survival energy, blocking energy that takes up the space that needs to be filled with creativity. Blocking is not strength, it’s defensive overload.
In most cases, blocking emerges from damaged or threatened sense of self, lack of any working mediation structures leading to fear of being overwhelmed or erased. This happens when people don’t trust processes, they rely instead on hard personal boundaries, then when people don’t trust themselves, they externalise control.
#Blocking becomes a way to regain agency, stop cognitive overload, avoid unresolved conflict and preserve identity under pressure. It’s not a moral failure, as much as a systemic trauma response. But it is also creativity-killing.
Why blocking scales and creativity doesn’t. Blocking scales easily: fast, binary, emotionally satisfying, requires no social labour. Where creativity is slow: relational, risky, ambiguous and requires trust and time. So in high-stress environments, #blocking wins by default. This is why systems that rely on blocking alone cannot generate alternatives, they only fragment.
A weak sense of self? Yes, but it’s socially produced, not individual pathology, it’s produced by: platform hostility, collapse of community memory, loss of intergenerational skill transfer, constant precarity leading to only performative politics replacing any lived practice.
People are asked to be everything – safe, radical, inclusive, legible, pure – with no tools like the #OMN to manage contradiction. Blocking becomes the last remaining control lever.
In this mess, how do we communicate “diversity of tactics”? Not only as tolerance, as ideology, but more usefully as infrastructure like the #OMN projects which have soft boundaries before hard ones, based on affinity as much as agreement, you don’t need shared beliefs to work together, you need shared purpose locally.
This leads to the uncomfortable truth, that creativity doesn’t emerge from safety, it emerges from bounded risk. Too much danger = collapse. Too much safety = stagnation. What we have too much of today is safety theatre covering structural fear. The path out of this is that people need to develop a stronger, not weaker, sense of self, one that can survive disagreement without disappearing. That’s the real work.
Have you noticed how, over the last few decades, many sentences are repeated so often they start to become “common sense”? “You need to love yourself” is one of these, it sounds harmless, kind, even progressive. But this sentence didn’t only reshape how we feel about ourselves – it reshapes how the economy works. This is a story about how “self-esteem” become an engine of #stupidindividualism, that helped produce the explosion of inequality and mess we now live inside.
Today, self-esteem is treated as a universal good. The cure for anxiety, failure, loneliness, precarity. If you’re struggling, the message is simple: look inward. Fix yourself. Believe harder. And that’s the trick, this isn’t about telling people to hate themselves. It’s about noticing that something deeply political has been smuggled into something that looks purely personal.
For most of human history, self-esteem wasn’t a virtue, it was a vice. Across Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, pride was seen as dangerous. The seed of arrogance, ignorance, suffering. Fulfilment came from humility, mutual obligation, and limits, not self-celebration. The very idea of “loving yourself” would have sounded morally wrong, not empowering. So how did pride get rebranded as progress?
In part this is a #geekproblem, in an industrialising world obsessed with measurement: output per worker, profit per hour, value per share. Humans were no longer judged by moral contribution, but by performance, self-esteem quietly became an economic variable.
Drum roll – we had the #neoliberal turn – market ideology glorifies selfishness, despises solidarity, and frames empathy as weakness. This mess was used to increase the push for common sense #mainstreaming heroes to be lone geniuses, the media meme helped to drive the invisible destruction of any shared social structures. Then helped to obfuscate when western economies dismantling welfare states, deregulating markets, outsourcing industrial labour and rebranding citizens as entrepreneurs of the self. This was not a coincidence.
With this ideological turn, structural problems were redefined as personal psychological failures. If you’re poor, anxious, unemployed – the problem isn’t the system – it’s your mindset. This become self-esteem as labour discipline. As blue-collar work paths closed and white-collar “service” work expanded, confidence became currency, not skill, care or competence.
To day in the daily grind, work rewards presentation, persuasion, and performance. Self-esteem became professional armour. Bragging outperformed quiet skill. Selling yourself matters more than doing the work. This is where #stupidindividualism hardens:
Success looks personal
Failure looks personal
Solidarity disappears
Power becomes invisible
Outside the office – consumerism becomes about buying self-worth. Advertising doesn’t sell products. It sells reassurance. A handbag isn’t a bag, a car isn’t transport, a platform isn’t communication. They’re proof that you matter, until the next upgrade. Self-esteem – the kind that depends on validation, status, and visibility – is never satisfied, which makes it incredibly profitable. Self-esteem becomes something you only can rent from the market.
Then we have the rule of the #nastyfew, the #CEO as narcissist-priest. Research shows corporate leadership selects for narcissistic traits: grandiosity, risk-taking, obsession with image, contempt for limits. These “leaders” chase metrics that look like success – stock price, media praise, personal compensation – while hollowing out organisations and communities we need to live and push the change and challenge we need in the era of #climatchaos and social break down. In this mess, confidence replaces accountability, performance replaces reality. Collapse soon follows.
In this mess, the easy to understand #KISS lie is that the quiet violence of the self-esteem ideology tells people to solve systemic harm as only personal feelings. It tells us to love ourselves inside conditions designed to grind us down. This is why self-esteem culture is the drug feeding us precarious work, algorithmic management, influencer economies and endless competition. It makes people blame themselves instead of the structures exploiting them.
What we can do – the #OMNhashtag story names this as #stupidindividualism: Radical inwardness paired with radical powerlessness, emotional self-management instead of collective change, narcissism dressed up as empowerment. That self-esteem like this is divorced from community, becomes a control system.
So, to say again, get off your knees, we don’t need more self-love slogans, we need shared power where native paths are about confidence that does not come from mainstreaming affirmations, rather from shared competence, mutual aid and belonging.
The project we need, the #OMN is not about polishing the self, instead it is a path to rebuild the commons which “self-esteem” was used to dismantle. So please stop worshipping yourself, start standing with others, this is how we compost this mess.
Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult – it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters.
But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people off their knees to challenge the altar to stop the sacrifice. It rearranges the seating in the temple, feeding the deeper problem, obedience. Progressive mainstreaming accepts the frame, accepts the metrics, accepts the economy of extraction and then argues about distribution. It negotiates better terms with a machine that is killing us. That is not transformation, it’s managed decline.
The project of real change and challenge – the work the #OMN exists for – starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with people standing up and walking away. Walking out of the temple of the #deathcult we all live in, not in purity, utopia or comfort. But into mess, cooperation, unfinished tools, shared risk, and actual agency. This isn’t about better policies inside the system. It’s about building outside it, under it, alongside it – until the system hollowed itself out and no longer matters.
It’s about people picking up shovels, composting the wreckage, and growing something that can actually sustain life. This is simplicity #KISS#OMN
We have already seen the failures: lived through #Indymedia, the #NGO turn, the #dotcons capture, the #Fediverse repeating old mistakes. When we talk about #OMN, we’re trying to stop people from re-learning the same lessons by losing again. Silence would be complicity.
The #OMN is where critique becomes agency. It’s not about “promoting a project”, if we don’t talk about this without something like #OMN, critique collapses into doom, aesthetics, or personal exits. #OMN is a way to, act collectively, without lying about power, money, or governance.
Forgetting is how capture happens, the moment people stop naming alternatives, the space fills with managerial language, funding logic, and fear-based control. We talk about #OMN to keep the space open enough for something human to grow.
The #OMN is a path that resists #stupidindividualism, where most contemporary “solutions” reinforce isolation, personal brands, and individual safety strategies. #OMN starts from the assumption that survival and meaning are collective. We need to keep talking about this because almost nobody else does.
It’s unfinished – and that matters. It’s not about defending a polished system, instead, it’s about holding open a process. Talking about #OMN is how we invite others into the compost rather than presenting them with a finished product to consume.
We talk about #OMN because it’s a native way of saying: “We don’t have to repeat this. We can build differently, together, if we remember what already worked.”*
It’s not evangelism, it’s stewardship.
A few of us have been working on real, positive, horizontal social and technological solutions for over twenty years. Not hypotheticals, not vibes, things that actually work.
We know they work locally, we know they work socially. And after more than a decade building on the #fediverse, we know they can work in tech, at scale without going vertical, corporate, or authoritarian.
This isn’t speculative any more. Our creative task now – the #nothingnew work – is simply to combine what already works: Horizontal social practice, federated #openweb tech, trust-based governance. We already have a slate of projects waiting to be built: #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback and #makinghistory. What’s missing is not ideas, it is people willing to show up and implement.
And here’s the hard truth: every time we try to talk about radical or progressive language, power, or structure, people retreat into #blocking and ignoring. The same unresolved tensions get replayed endlessly, nothing is mediated, nothing is grounded. Bad will accumulates, the social commons rots.
This rot isn’t accidental – it’s structural – To work our way out of this mess, we need both #fluff and #spiky. We need broad categories to think clearly, the #mainstreaming#fashernista rejection of this isn’t sophistication – it’s submission. It’s a soft, polite form of #deathcult worship.
You don’t dismantle a #deathcult by being nicer to it, you dismantle it by stopping your participation and building something better.
So this is the question, not rhetorical, not theoretical: Are you going to help make this happen? Are you going to pick up a shovel? Or are you going to stay on your knees, arguing about tone while the ground burns?
There is such a thing as society. The entire #openweb is built on that assumption 🙂 Deny it, and everything collapses into noise, power grabs, and enclosure. That denial, dressed up today as “post-truth” – is killing us.
Our current media ecology is broken. So called #AI and Google are no longer a useful way to find information about most things that actually matter. This isn’t accidental; it’s a structural #dotcons problem. Extraction, advertising, and algorithmic manipulation have replaced human discovery, context, and trust.
The same sickness runs through much of today’s open-source and free software world. Its governance models are still rooted in medieval political ideas: aristocrats, benevolent dictators, kings and courts. That might have muddled through in the 20th century, but it is obviously useless for the world we now live in.
The last twenty years trying to mediate this with neoliberal #stupidindividualism has only made things worse. The result is towering piles of steaming #techshit, endlessly churned, rarely useful, and increasingly disconnected from any healthy social reality. This is the #geekproblem made in: code, silicon and concrete.
The #mainstreaming disaster driven by #dotcons is obvious. We don’t need to relitigate it every five minutes. For motivation and clarity, let’s put them to one side and focus on what we can actually change. Our own tech culture is still hopelessly mired in the #geekproblem. So yes, we need to compost a lot of our own mess.
The path out of both the #closedweb and the geek cul-de-sac is not new. It’s old, boring, and powerful: trust, shared responsibility, and human-scale democracy. If we are serious, the #openweb has to be rebooted with grassroots democracy at its core. Social tech needs social governance. Without that, we are just recreating vertical power with nicer licences.
This is where #OGB (Open Governance Bodies) matter. With real democratic process, it becomes relatively simple to push the #dotcons back out of spaces they currently dominate by default. Without democracy, they will always win, not because they are smarter, but because they are organised.
Right now, we are drowning in the #mainstreaming mess. And worse, we are still adding to it. Every pointless project, every ego-driven fork, every governance-free platform accelerates #techchurn and deepens the rot. We need to stop pretending this is neutral.
Yes, “open standards” are a mess, always have been, but they are the mess we must build on until enough of the #openweb is rebooted – including democratic decision-making – to rejuvenate and civilise the standards bodies themselves. Strong democracy changes the game. With it, enclosure becomes contestable. Without it, we just get louder arguments and faster failure.
And when people doing obviously stupid things can’t understand what the #OMN hashtags mean? Click the hashtags and think, or stand and shout, then hit the block button. You get to choose 🙂 This is not rudeness, it’s focus. And focus is how we stop adding to the mess and start composting it into something that might actually grow.
Fighting #fashionistas with fashion. We have an app outline for that: iPhone or android.
Not as a lifestyle tweak, not as wellness branding, not as another individual “better habits” story. These proposed apps and the wider projects have nothing to do with self-optimisation, productivity hacks, or personal purity. Framing it that way is already defeat – that’s #stupidindividualism doing the work of the #dotcons for them.
What we’re facing in our digital mess isn’t only a failure of self-control, it’s a structural capture problem. The #dotcons platforms are designed to extract attention, shape behaviour, and enclose social space. You don’t fix that by telling isolated individuals to be stronger or more disciplined. You fix it by changing the infrastructure people live in.
That’s why this has to be collective infrastructure. Shared norms, shared limits, shared tools. Social agreements embedded in tech and process, not moral pressure dumped onto individuals. The goal is to change default behaviour at the group level, so resistance isn’t exhausting and opting out doesn’t mean disappearing.
The native #OMN path is about rebuilding the commons: tools that assume trust, reciprocity, transparency, and accountability from the start. Defaults that slow extraction, not accelerate it. Processes that make manipulation visible and contestable. Mediation instead of opaque algorithms. Human-scale flows instead of infinite feeds.
We do need to keep lighting, this isn’t self-control, it’s collective self-defence. Anything on the normal path is simply dresses up surrender as “wellness” and calls it choice, it is just more head down, worshipping the #deatcult.
The core idea: The buddy method. You don’t fight addiction alone, don’t detox alone, you don’t escape algorithmic capture alone, you do it with another human.
App 1: Digital Detox Buddy
A simple app that sits on top of existing child lock / screen time APIs. No dark magic, spyware, behavioural profiling. Instead, simple:Just process, consent, and friction.
Defaults matter. Default allowance: 4 hours per day on #dotcons, when time runs out: You get a 10-minute grace extension button. Extending beyond this requires talking to your buddy
To permanently end limits: You must unbuddy (an explicit social action). This creates pause, reflection, conversation – the opposite of dopamine scroll loops.
Time reduction is gradual, a soft landing, not punishment. Start at 4 hours/day, reduce by 1 hour per week/month. People can stabilise or reverse with buddy agreement. This is about retraining habits, not moral purity.
What Is counted (and what Is not)? Metered: Phone screen time (total). Time spent on #dotcons platforms. Unmetered: Web browsing, #FOSS apps, Reading tools, Local-first utilities, Creative tools.
The framing is explicit: The problem is not only “screen time”. The problem is extractive platforms.
Privacy + accountability balance, Aggregated stats are public (community-level visibility, cultural pressure). Exact stats are buddy-only (trust-based accountability)
Public stats answer: Average phone use, average #dotcons use, detox participation trends
This is #DemocracyOfReach applied to behaviour change – cultural signal without surveillance.
Architecture: First version: client–server is OK, preferably designed for #p2p later
Buddy relationship is explicit, revocable, symmetric, no central behavioural scoring, no advertising, no data resale, this is infrastructure, not a product.
App 2: Consumerism Detox Buddy
Same logic. Different addiction.
Consumerism Is also a platform problem, endless consumption isn’t “choice”. It’s nudging, targeting, and engineered impulse. This second app mirrors the first but focuses on shopping behaviour. How it works, uses geolocation, identifies time spent in: shopping centres, large retail chains, branded consumption spaces,
Same buddy rules: time limits, soft extensions, explicit social negotiation. Local markets, repair, reuse, libraries, commons spaces are excluded or positively weighted.
This is people to people anti-#deathcult economics made concrete in apps.
This is why it belongs on the #OMN path, and why it is not about personal optimisation, quantified-self nonsense, wellness capitalism, #NGO nudging, or behavioural surveillance.
A clear path about collective governance of attention. With explicit social process, open defaults, visible culture change. Tools that support people talking to each other, not being silently managed.
The apps don’t “fix” people, they change the environment people live in. This is striving to mediate what matters now: digital addiction and consumerism aren’t side effects. They are core pillars of the #deathcult. If we can’t or won’t build ways to step out together, all we get is isolated “self-help”.
These apps are p2p, gentle, federated, human-scale refusal, not banning, shaming or preaching. Its #KISS “Let’s do less of this – together.” If we can build social media apps, we can build #dotcons exit apps. A #OMN-native path.
Before you ask, the second stage, step, is to socialise the first step, offline.
It is about the Invisible Commons, every programmer – from hobbyists hacking together weekend scripts to the coders inside Microsoft, Google, Meta – relies on open-source software. It’s the compost layer under everything. Between 70% and 90% of every app, service, and system we use is built on shared, public #FOSS code. Nobody starts from scratch, everyone pulls from libraries on GitHub/GitLab, built and maintained by people who believe in the commons.
Developers spend two-thirds of their time adapting open code to their needs. This means when there’s a flaw in that shared layer, everyone is exposed, from the #dotcons: Apple, Meta, governments, banks, critical infrastructure., to native grassroots projects. That’s the reality, the real digital world runs on a fragile but beautiful commons.
The problem is the same old one, everyone depends on it, nobody feels responsible for it. This is classic #deathcult economics. Extract, use, profit, but don’t maintain the foundations because maintenance isn’t “exciting” or “competitive.” Just like bridges or water systems, nobody “important”, no elitists, cares until they collapse.
Open-source developers have been holding this mess together for decades in their spare time, after work, unpaid, because they care. That’s the horizontal path. But the vertical world -companies, governments, institutions – have been happy to feed from that commons without nurturing it.
This is where the idea of supporting projects like the #OMN comes in, to build out, public stewardship of the shared digital foundations we all rely on.
We as people need to wake up from our denialism of digital abdication fugue dispar, its common sense that software is infrastructure, as critical as roads, bridges, or power grids. Neglect it, and society festers and stumbles to collapse in slow motion. The #OMN has been saying this for 30 years.
To keep the digital commons alive, we need to become the forces pulling together. Volunteers and grassroots maintainers, the people who keep the foundations alive out of care, not profit. They are the heart, but they can’t carry the whole world forever. We need people and communities or action to grow to rebuilding public digital infrastructure from the bottom up. This is as much about cultural as it is about tech.
But culture needs code, needs maintainers, need support. And right now we’re still facing the same #blocking of all of these. People and funding are needed, not corporate capture, not venture capital, not #NGO “managed change,” but real contributors who care about public-first tech. What we need to say clearly, is that open source (#FOSS) is a global commons, everyone uses it, no one truly maintains it, vertical institutions, like the #dotcons, depend on horizontal labour.
Without care, this digital ecosystem will rot, so projects like the #OMN is one path to restoring balance. On the #maisntreamin paths, yes, regulation will come, It unthinkingly has to. Companies exploiting shared infrastructure without feeding it is theft – from the public, from the future, from the commons.
The message for outreach, is if we want digital tools that are public, trustworthy, sustainable, and resilient, then we must invest in the shared foundations. We must move from #stupidindividualism to collective stewardship. From extraction to maintenance. From shiny platforms to compostable infrastructure.
The #OMN hashtag story gives us a language, the codebases give us the tools, the community gives us the power, now we need the crew to sprout the seeds. Let’s build the public digital foundations before they collapse beneath us.
Outreach for the #OMN path, for the past year, the hashtag story has taken shape, not as branding, not as marketing, but as a shared language for navigating the mess we’re in. Each tag is compost: lived experience, memory of struggle, lessons from broken movements, glimpses of collective futures. Together they form a map of where we have been and the ground we are trying to rebuild.
This story is now done enough to act as a tool: a framework that connects all the projects, all the struggles, all the seeds of the #openweb still alive beneath the concrete of the #dotcons. It is the cultural layer that makes the technical layer possible.
But culture alone doesn’t run servers. Ideas alone don’t federate. And stories alone don’t build the future. We are at the point where the #OMN needs hands, skills, and messy collaboration to move from compost to sprouts.
Why this matters now, the last decades have been dominated by #stupidindividualism, a value system that believes progress comes from isolated actors, personal brands, and vertical structures. It produced a brittle world where resilience is outsourced, where every commons is pushed to monetise, and where the #deathcult logic of extraction is treated as “normal.”
Our work – the hashtag ecosystem, the #4opens, the #OGB, the #OMN – is a counter-current. Not a product, not an app, not a platform chasing hype cycles, it is a path toward:
Public-first networks
Permissionless publishing
Collective governance
Local autonomy woven into global flows
This isn’t nostalgia, it’s urgently needed #KISS survival. If we do not rebuild horizontal infrastructure now, the coming decades of #climatechaos will be shaped entirely by closed systems, proprietary protocols, and “solutions” that cannot be questioned.
The Hashtag Story as outreach tool, the hashtag system functions as a shared vocabulary, a way for people to step into the conversation without needing insider history.
#stupidindividualism, #openweb, #deathcult, #climatechaos, #OMN, #OGB, #4opens, #techshit, #nothingnew. These are not memes, they’re a lexicon for agency. The next phase is to combine this cultural layer with working codebases. Once one of the #OMN implementations is stable, the hashtag-combination tools will become transformative. They allow:
networked meaning-making
distributed editorial processes
peer governance
cross-platform, public-first publishing
local instances that connect into a wider commons without central control
This is the infrastructure the last generation of movements never had. What is blocking? People and Resources, yes, the same old story, funding and people. Here in Oxford, the search for a tech crew hasn’t turned up much yet. The bigger truth is that many potential contributors are scattered, burnt out, or trapped inside the #dotcons economy where every hour of labour must be monetised.
But there are people out there who still believe in the commons. People who want to build rather than brand. People who understand that open infrastructure is not optional.
This manifesto is an invitation to those people. If you want to #KISS work on:
federated, non-corporate publishing
governance without gatekeepers
open metadata and community sorting
tools that strengthen movements instead of extracting from them
infrastructures that grow like ecosystems rather than like empires
Then the #OMN path is open, we are not looking for heroes, we are looking for collaborators, for people who can work in the open, for people who understand that messy is healthy, for people who know that compost is more valuable than hype.
If that’s you, step forward. Bring code, or time, or testing, or critique, or even just curiosity. The groundwork is laid, hashtags are seeded, what we need now is the crew to grow the next layer.
Let’s build the commons, reboot the #openwebm to make the #OMN real.
