If you want to live a more interesting alt life, the first most important step is to stop prioritizing “making money,” you need to step away from the money economy. This isn’t abstract theory, it’s a practical need to shift how we live, relate, and create. The best way to do this? Support and build the gift economy.
In the cash economy, value is transactional. Every act is priced, every moment potentially monetized. It trains us to hoard, to calculate, to protect, not to share. The money economy is the fuel of capitalism’s exploitative engines.
But the gift economy works differently. Here, value is rooted in trust, reciprocity, and relationship. You give what you can. You receive what you need. No receipts, no invoices, just care, commitment, and collective survival.
Oxford boater towpath screening, with food and communerty
Think food co-ops, free software, mutual aid groups, open media projects, towpath film screenings. Think #FOSS, #Indymedia, #OMN. Think friends fixing each other’s bikes. These are not fringe examples, they’re real, everyday signs of a parallel economy already alive.
The more time, skills, and energy we invest in the gift economy, the less dependent we become on extraction and scarcity. The less we need to “make money” just to survive. And the freer we are to imagine other futures. Build the gift economy, it’s a path to start to live again.
We recently had an extended and thoughtful discussion on signal between collaborators working on #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory, a key issue emerged: how should we structure “actors” (ActivityPub identities) in a network where the focus is collective action, not individual performance? This question isn’t just technical. It’s political, and central to the success or failure of rebooting radical grassroots media within the #Fediverse.
The tension is about balancing the individual and the collective. In most current Fediverse platforms (like Mastodon or PeerTube), each user is an “actor” with their own inbox/outbox, mirroring the logic of the mainstream #socialweb where identity and expression are deeply individual. But for platforms rooted in collective publishing, such as a revived #Indymedia, this doesn’t map neatly.
“We are trying to balance individualism with collectivism. People already have all the individualism they can take, we need a structure to support the collective.”
That means maybe moving away from assuming every account needs to be a visible, subscribable actor. Working model: Per-instance actors first, a consensus is emerging around per-instance actors – e.g., the Newswire and Features flows of a local Indymedia site act as the primary publishable entities in the Fediverse. These represent the editorial collective’s curated output – not just anyone shouting into the void.
External trusted contributors (like info@hamishcampbell) would publish content from their own Fediverse accounts using hashtags like #oxfordindymedia, which the local Indymedia instance detects, vets, and republishes.
This brings three key benefits:
Curation over chaos – Stories don’t just flood in via hashtags; they’re filtered through trust relationships.
Permissioned federation – Only trusted flows (or untrusted but manually reviewed ones) are accepted. Hashtag spam is naturally blocked.
Maintaining editorial identity – Subscribing to an Indymedia instance means subscribing to its judgement, not just raw firehose feeds.
Do we need per-user actors? Here’s where things get messy, and interesting. Three models were debated:
Classic Fediverse model: Each user has their own actor. This supports full transparency and traceability of actions, but risks returning to individualist norms and opens the door to abuse or platform drift.
Invisible user accounts: Users exist internally for moderation or curation roles, but aren’t visible in the Fediverse as actors.
Controlled per-user actors: Users do have actors, but these are only used to publish activity logs, not posts. Think: “Editor X approved story Y”, useful for building transparency and trust within an open process.
Option 3 sits nicely with the principles of the #4opens, particularly open process and open governance. It provides a transparent audit trail without pushing users into the spotlight.
UX vs backend architecture, what becomes clear is that the user experience should foreground collective flows – Features, Newswire, Tags – while any per-user mechanics operate in the background, supporting moderation, traceability, or edge-case publishing. Whether those background accounts are AP actors or not might depend on implementation details.
“It’s not about the actors per se — it’s about what shows up in the front-end UX, and how we build trust in the process.”
Final considerations, networks like #IndymediaBack default to collective-first publishing, with user actor functionality off unless needed. #MakingHistory, by contrast, might enable user actor publishing to support mass collaborative storytelling. Both platforms rely on whitelist federation, meaning only trusted instances and users can feed directly into the editorial stream. Abuse prevention comes not just from code, but from the politics of moderation, curation, and shared norms.
We probably need per-user actors, but used sparingly and carefully.
We definitely need per-instance actors for trusted collective outputs.
Hashtags are a start, but the flow must be curated and accountable.
UX should put collectives front and centre, with user identity in the background.
This is a political choice, not just a technical one, and that’s a good thing.
Ten years ago, I remember being told, often condescendingly, with smug certainty, that hosting in the cloud was the future. That what I was working on, #DIY grassroots self and community hosted tech was the dinosaur, a dead end, old obsolete thinking, out of touch. Despite spending years pointing out the obvious flaws in this pushing, for this I got only that my “native” path was irrelevant, for Luddites, they said. Legacy thinking, dead tech walking.
Well, here we are, a decade later. And guess what the cloud: It was expensive, less performant, less secure, and a gateway to increasingly exploitative pricing models. This isn’t hindsight bias, the warning signs were always there. But many #fahernista and #geekproblem people get caught up in the glossy surface and tech hype mess, repeating the same mistake we’ve made across generations of #geekproblem tech, believing scale and #PR buzzwords were synonymous with progress.
Let’s now be clear on what actually happened.
We handed over infrastructure to a handful of giant platforms that lock us in and bleed us dry.
We lost resilience, sovereignty, and basic control over our own data.
We normalized rent-seeking as a business model.
We pushed decentralization off a cliff and called it “abstraction.”
Meanwhile, local compute got cheaper, storage exploded in affordability, bandwidth costs continued to fall, #dotcons threats increased. And guess what? Running things locally started making sense again, just like it always does when the #PR smoke clears and mess composts.
The lesson, which we need to now bring to #crypto and #AI, just because something is fashionable doesn’t make it in any way real or sustainable. That tech #PR hype cycles aren’t innovation, they’re marketing. And when you stop looking at the core trends (cost, control, resilience) and just ride the buzz, you’ll end up where we are now, mess, bloated budgets, shrinking trust, and a growing #techshit pile to clean up.
We need to re-learn the value of #KISS grounded thinking, to remember that local, #4opens, transparent, and interoperable #openweb systems aren’t retro, they’re essential. This isn’t about nostalgia for the old paths, It’s about having power over our basic infrastructure again. The cloud, at the time and in looking over our shoulders, was smoke and mirrors, a detour, it’s now past time to get back on the real progressive #Fediverse path.
For thousands of years, the demands of the oppressed have remained startlingly consistent: Erase all debts, Burn the records, redistribute the land. These weren’t radical demands. They were and are common sense for those crushed by the weight of extraction, enclosure, and empire.
Compare that to today’s to often #fashionista “leftist” rallying cry of “Tax the rich.” Let’s be honest, this is moderate, half-baked reform in the #KISS sweep of human struggle. “Tax the rich” still assumes the rich deserve to keep most of what they’ve hoarded. It doesn’t touch the foundations of power. It doesn’t challenge the right of a #nastyfew to control the lives and labour of the many, it’s simply a polite request for a fairer share of exploitation.
Let’s talk about #conservatism – not the myth, but the mechanism. It’s not in any way about preserving “traditional values.” That’s branding. It’s about conserving power. Specifically, it’s about conserving the power relationships of the #nastyfew who own and rule, while the rest of us keep our heads down, grateful for scraps. It’s about saying the rich deserve their wealth, and the poor deserve their suffering. It’s about hiding violence behind respectability, and calling it “order.”
This didn’t start yesterday, from the French Revolution to today’s food bank capitalism, conservatism has been #blocking grassroots movements work to compost this mess. And now, it masks itself in liberal #mainstreaming, progressive slogans, while cops will increasingly beat your neighbours in the street.
And yes, if they’re beating your neighbours today, they’ll be beating you tomorrow. But maybe that shouldn’t be the reason to care, maybe it should be enough that they’re beating your neighbours today. This is not about guilt, it’s about clarity, we need to remember what real justice has always meant. Not tweaks, not taxes, not “top” tables with seats for the “marginalised.” But a complete rethinking of power, because if we don’t start #KISS thinking again, we’re not challenging anything – we’re decorating to hide the smell of the #deathcult
A musical interlude about the prats running the world
So how did we get into such a mess, one vile prat sells weapons to another vile prat so he can flatten a hospital being used by another vile prat, who then returns the favour by bombing the vile prat’s power grid. Then they both turn to the cameras and declare it’s all the other’s fault, while pointing fingers and shouting: “You’re the real vile prat here!”
Yes, this is a prat, a very nasty prat
Meanwhile, the rest of us, watching from behind #dotcons screens, trapped in algorithmic echo chambers, suffer the fallout, literally and figuratively, as these vile people continue their pushing pantomime of destruction. Whole cities vanish, people starve, oceans rise, and still, the prats keep prattling on.
Then there’s a whole swarm of quieter, vile prats. These are the ones in expensive suits who sit on boards and in parliaments, nodding sagely while doing absolutely nothing. Example? The arms trade with Saudi Arabia. The world watches Yemen bleed dry while the UK and US keep shipping weapons and shrugging. Another? The climate crisis, where oil companies, vile prats with shiny logos, knew the damage decades ago and simply paid the #mainstreaming to bury the evidence. Or look at Gaza. Or Sudan. Or Myanmar. Pick a conflict, you’ll find the same prats.
Our use of tech’s is core to this mess making: the #dotcons, surveillance platforms we call “social media” feed us these nasty prats daily, empowering them while disempowering us. And the #mainstreaming pundits, journalists, and influencers #fashernistas act like this is all normal, business as usual. They’re part of the problem. A bunch of vile prats, simply.
A example of a UK prat
And because this feedback loop of prattery is normalized, people keep telling us this is how the world has to be. No alternatives. No resistance. Just sit down, shut up, and doom scroll. So here’s a humble ask: Don’t be a prat. Don’t excuse prats. Don’t promote prats. Start calling prats what they are. Vile prats.
How the world gets into this nasty mess, One vile prat supplies bombs to another vile prat so he can bomb another vile git, who then bombs the vile prat who bombed him. Then they keep being vile prats to each other and blaming each other and calling each other a vile prat for being a vile prat. And the rest of the world watches and suffers as these vile prats simply keep being vile prats. There are also many other vile prats who don’t speak up because one nasty vile prat, the biggest vile prat, has blackmail photos of them all being perverts, not in a good way.
Anyone #mainstreaming is pushing this mess. (Paraphrased from David Dayan)
An example of what happens in a nasty prat run world, to us.
And people think and act on this as normal behaver, this is why we are in such a mess, #KISS. The path out is to start composting, not feeding the mess. You don’t have to be perfect, just don’t be like everyone else, don’t be that person, thanks.
Let’s stop pretending every institution has to “go social” by building new habits, communities, and platforms from scratch. We already have a solid, simple tool that can bridge them from the #dotcons into the #Fediverse: WordPress + the ActivityPub plugin.
Institutions want control – That’s OK. Bureaucratic institutions, local councils, unions, media orgs, #NGOs, aren’t designed for fast, messy social interaction. They won’t control over moderation, messaging, and timelines. That’s how they work, the good news is that they don’t have to surrender that control to leave the exploitative corporate platforms.
There is a path to step sideways into the #openweb by using tools they already trust, #WordPress, plugging into the #Fediverse with a few small adjustments. Here is how this works:
Use WordPress as a public publishing hub, it already supports articles, media, comments, and user permissions. It’s familiar to thousands of comms and IT staff.
Install the ActivityPub plugin. This lets every post become a Fediverse-native object. Readers on Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica etc. can follow and share the content.
Keep moderation tight. Comments from the Fediverse can be held for review by default. Content inflows are closed, moderated, or opened based on trust levels.
Build distribution without chasing followers. The content flows outward. Others can quote, reply, remix – but the source stays under local control.
The alternative? Indie News, if not WordPress, the more adventures could host a dedicated Fediverse news instance (like a rebooted #IndymediaBack) or even set up a microblogging server using software like WriteFreely or Plume. These would support long-form or short-form posts, stay focused on the institution’s goals, avoid chasing engagement metrics from #dotcons. And again, comments and responses could be moderated or disabled, depending on needs. No spam tsunami. No culture wars. Just distribution and visibility – on native #openweb terms.
Why this matters, many public institutions want to move away from Facebook and Twitter, but feel locked in. They know those platforms are toxic, yet all the people are there. But what if we stopped treating the #Fediverse like a chaotic free-for-all and started showing how it can also work for structured, “responsible” publishing? WordPress already has millions of users. The ActivityPub plugin is mature, maintained, and already working. All it takes is will, and a little guidance.
Help decentralize digital infrastructure for the public good
If an institution can run a blog, it can join the Fediverse. If it can post on Facebook, it can do better. Let’s stop waiting for perfect platforms and start using the tools we already have, WordPress is an underrated bridge from the bureaucratic world into a better, fairer, and more resilient #openweb path.
A reflection on Oxford, the web, and the invisible gap we’re not naming. It’s a simple question, but one that says a lot about where we’re at with the #Fediverse and the broader #openweb reboot: Why doesn’t every city have its own Fediverse server?
I’ve been looking – specifically for my city: Oxford, UK. And the answer seems to be… Nope. Nothing. Not a single clearly local Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed or similar instance. This might seem trivial, but it’s actually a big red flag about where we are failing to root the #Fediverse in the real world.
Wait – Why should cities have their own servers? Because servers are more than just infrastructure, they’re community spaces. They are places where shared context matters. In a healthy #openweb ecology, you’d expect to see:
A Mastodon instance for Oxford academics and students
A Lemmy server for Oxfordshire campaigners sharing local issues
A Mobilizon instance for local events, climate actions, social meetups
A PeerTube or Castopod space archiving local talks, indie music, alt-news
These are the digital town halls we should be building. But we’re not. Why? Oxford isn’t just any city. It is where the World Wide Web first found public ground in the UK. I used the first web browser in a room set aside for “the internet” here almost 30 years ago, it was a wonder. It’s a place that is full of geeky students, hackers and programmers. With a deep history of academic freedom and radical thought, that has long served as a symbolic cradle for digital culture. If we can’t see clear Fediverse infrastructure here, something’s broken, and not just in Oxford.
What’s holding us back? Possibilities, the myth of spontaneity? We assume that because the Fediverse is “open,” it will naturally emerge everywhere. It won’t. Like any commons, it needs cultivation, volunteers, funding, attention.
Invisible technical barriers, running a Fediverse server isn’t hard, but it’s also not beginner-friendly. And even “geeky” students are under immense pressure, rents, loans, side gigs. Who’s got time to run infra?
Cultural disconnection, we have a user class and a developer class, and they rarely mix. No one’s stepping up to build for their community, because the tech feels distant, or worse, owned by someone else.
#NGO capture & misplaced focus, a lot of #FOSS energy gets eaten up by grant-funded projects that serve other bureaucratic ends. Meanwhile, grassroots needs, like “a city-based server for sharing local stuff”, get overlooked or dismissed as unscalable.
What do we do? Let’s flip the question around. Why NOT have a Fediverse server in every city? If we started treating servers like digital community gardens, then:
Local campaigns could run Lemmy or Mastodon spaces
Libraries could host Pixelfed galleries of community art
Climate groups could run Mobilizon for mutual aid and action
Neighbours could share events and info, outside of corporate silos
Oxford needs a server, so does your city. This is a callout – and a call-in, if you’re a sysadmin, activist, student, tinkerer, or just someone who cares about your city and the #openweb, start asking: where’s our server? Let’s build it. Let’s map it. Let’s make the Fediverse a place of places, not just a cloud of abstract URLs. We need to get the #Fediverse out of “nerd island” and into the towns and cities we actually live in.
Here’s a small but powerful challenge for #openweb builders – and a perfect #DIY project if you’re fed up with the current #geekproblem. I’ve been trying to find #Fediverse instances that actually cover my town, Oxford, UK, so I can help promote and grow them locally. You’d think this would be simple, right? But… nope.
Why is this happening? Because our current tools focus only on technical facts (server specs, software used, uptime, etc.) and ignore the uncontrolled (dangerous) metadata that actually makes discovery meaningful:
What’s the instance for?
Who does it serve?
What community does it represent?
Where is it rooted geographically or socially?
This is the #geekproblem in action: great code, but no way to find things people actually want to use. What’s the fix? Someone (maybe you?) could create a community-focused discovery tool that:
Encourages instance admins to tag with location, community, topics, etc.
Provides search/filter UI that works for real people, not sysadmins
Maybe even integrates with OpenStreetMap or a simple opt-in geo-tagged registry
Outputs something friendly – like “Find your Fediverse community in your town”
This is not a hard project, it’s a weekend hack for someone who cares, but it has real social value as it helps bridge infrastructure to lived communities. That’s the core of the #openweb reboot.
So for people who can’t see why this matter. If we want the Fediverse to grow beyond techies and Twitter refugees, we need to help people find their people. Local discovery is key. Place-based communities are still powerful, especially when rebuilding trust, mutual aid, and shared media in a collapsing world.
So, want a simple mission? Build a tool that helps people find #Fediverse instances by town, city, or region. Start with Oxford, but make it global. Make it open. Make it federated. And when you do? I’ll be the first to push it out.
Region (countries are regions, anti-nationalistic)
City/area (a county or city)
local (village, area in city)
Them maybe latter hyper local (but not for now)
Then we have subject – it would be normal to have a multi subject hashtag map, that updates on each click – adding the clicks to a list on the side – with “new button” to jump back to start.
Then you have advanced for the normal tech stuff… which currently is the front end on most pickers. This would also be displayed on the info box for each instance on the map, so still central, just not AT THE FRONT.
UPDATE: can just pull all the existing data out of the current sites like https://instances.social/list#lang=en&allowed=&prohibited=&min-users=&max-users= as these are all #4opens. So the projected site could be up and running with full data in little time. Yes, you would have to ask people to tag their installs to geolocate their instances. This could be done a hard way or a simple #KISS way like any admin in the instance adding a #hashtag with a geolocation hashtag after it. Then periodically go through the instance list and spider all admins on each instance if you find the hashtag – add the next hashtag as a geolocation or something as simple as this.
Ideas in comments, please.
UPDATE: this is this one https://fediverse.observer/map works better still nothing in Oxford – it seems to be pretty random with little relevance to subject and area, is it by IP address, that would be #geekproblem
Over the last few years, we’ve been watching a familiar story unfold, we’ve seen repeat itself in radical spaces, tech movements, and grassroots networks for decades. It starts in the grassroots with “progressive” #fashernistas (yes, them) pushing themselves into the front to speak for “us.” They talk the talk of decentralisation, care, community, and #FOSS ethics. They wear all the right hashtags: #opensocialmedia, #Fediverse, #commons, #techforgood. But when you look at how power is actually exercised behind the scenes, it’s something else entirely. This is a story of power, plain and simple. Not in the dramatic “revolutionary” sense. But in the subtle creep of careerism, institutional capture, and “safe” social capital games that flatten the radical and uplifts the “palatable”.
Let’s take a few examples from the #activertypub world, first with the #SocialHub stagnation, this open space was originally created for grassroots to shape the standards of the decentralised web, It was originally a commons, protocol-building and governance exploration space. So, what happened? The people now “leading” came from lifestyle #fashionista activism and wannabe NGO circuits, who in the end were all trying to be embedded in the institutional funding environments, or visiting from the safe academic bubble. And thus they brought with them the dogmas of safe spaces, of “emotional consensus,” “hidden affinity group governance,” and “(ex)inclusive dialogue”… that JUST SO happened to exclude the radical and messy paths that are actually native to the #openweb, the bad mess they then made, ended up only pushing the dogma of the #geekprolem as it was the ONLY path they could imagine controlling in a way that would not threaten the thin connection to the institutions they were feeding from. This behaviour so often slips into forms of parasitism, which is not a good thing at all.
Then we have the current #Fediverse outreach infrastructure capture, where we’ve seen the same class of actors attach themselves to the most visible projects – like Mastodon, ActivityPub standards, and now “Fediverse governance.” They secure seats on boards. They host conferences with glossy branding and friendly logos. They use these controlled spaces to then push out “code of conduct” documents and “safe space” branding… while closing and excluding the very messy native infrastructure of discussion and direction that is both native and needed.
Examples? #Mastodon’s GitHub, issue tracking, and moderation are all tightly controlled by a small clique around the project founder. Community voices are kinda tolerated at best, discarded at worst. The project is moving onto the #NGO path, no bad thing in its self, but with its years of pushing its own branding as THE Fediverse, it becomes a bad thing. In this, there is a very real debt of damage they need to pay back – as a part of a functioning gift economy – saying sorry and admitting mistakes is a good first step.
Then we have the example of the #FediForum events, pushing into the space blindly, with zero historical context or any actual knowledge, to represent the activertypub ecosystem. The problem is they paywalled and increasingly gate kept #NGO commercial interests are then pushed to the front to represent “us”. When the radical and experienced grassroots voices obviously don’t get involved, as they simply refuse to step over the paywall. This is an ongoing mess, that we do need to compost and not only with #fashionista outrage but with real working paths, we used to do this, but we can’t anymore – why?
Over the last few years we have had proposals for genuine horizontal governance, that could have been used to shift this mess making and to actually shifts power outward – but these were labelled “too messy,” “too political,” or “not the right time.” This is not accidental, it is liberalism functioning as control – with a smile. So… what can we do? Let’s be clear: This is a power issue. It’s not about bad intentions. It’s about how power is used, and then abused, even in the so-called “horizontal” paths.
The first thing we have to do is recognise the smell of #NGO-style liberalism that so easily hides itself in good intentions, grants, DEI language, and “process.” But it then ends up:
Disempowering community autonomy
Replacing radical potential with “professionalism”
Marginalising away activists and messy real-world projects
Recreating the same vertical hierarchies, just with better “open” branding
Composting this mess is needed to break the cycle:
Build and back native projects. The only way to push back against capture is to grow infrastructure from within our communities, like: #OMN (Open Media Network) #OGB (Open Governance Body). These must be trust-based, not credential-based. That means supporting those doing the work without demanding they translate it into pointless and most importantly powerless NGO-speak to be taken seriously.
Use the #4opens as a filter, this simple social retelling of #FOSS is designed precisely to push out the 95% of #techshit and focus energy on projects with: Open source Open data Open standards Open governance. Apply these consistently, and the parasite class will struggle to keep and find a foothold.
Push for messy, lived governance, stop waiting for perfect systems. We need to prototype imperfect, transparent, accountable governance now. It should be: Based on trust, not rules-lawyering Driven by use, not representation Grounded in solidarity, not status
Refuse the “leader class”, just because someone has a title, a grant, or a #dotcons following, doesn’t mean they speak for us. Call out the unaccountable influence. Politely or not. Let’s not let careerists write our futures.:
The Fediverse path could be the most important #openweb reboot of the commons of this decade. But it will only be that if we keep it rooted in social power, not polished #PR and #NGO mess. We don’t need new kings. We need more gardeners, to work together to compost the piles of #techshit and keep the space open and safe.
I think when our #fahernistas say to us “what have we done, please be nice to us, you’re not welcoming.” We need to reply: Am happy to be nice #KISS, just stop being a prat in this space please.
It’s really simple, please stop being (an often nasty) prat.
The discussions on sovereignty at #NGIForum2025 make me wonder: what year are we in? It’s as if we’re rebooting grassroots conversations we’ve had for decades – but without the mess, memory, or movement that gave them meaning in the first place.
A breath of clarity came from @renchap, who said it plainly:
We need to focus our efforts on funding and supporting public value network infrastructure… THAT CANNOT BE BOUGHT. 💪
Absolutely. If that idea resonates with you, try starting with the #4opens – a pragmatic path to build tech with real accountability and openness. It’s not a utopia, it’s a filter designed to push out 95% of the #techshit we’re constantly drowning in. The rest? That’s the work: compromise, community, governance.
For those curious about mapping this stuff, I appreciate the attempt to formalize governance components of digital commons here: https://commons.mattischneider.fr/2-constituants It’s useful, but my take? Still not messy enough to reflect how real-world horizontal projects actually work. As the site rightly says:
“If you already have experience in operating commons, you or your organisation will probably have specific practices that are more appropriate to your context.”
Exactly, why context matters, and why real commons need trust-based governance, not just metrics and diagrams. Let’s remember:
Tools are only useful if people use them.
And that’s our real problem right now.
Take this audience question as a clear example: What should we do when a US company acquires an EU one – like Cisco buying Slido? It hits the core issue:
Centralized, vertical control is always the endgame of VC funding and the mainstream tech stack.
What’s the mainstream response? Push more AI. Push more “innovation.” Push more #stupidindividualism. This story is heavily funded and constantly amplified. Why? Because it keeps us distracted, divided, and demobilized. We need to compost this garbage.
Let’s stop pretending #opensource is the goal. It’s only useful if it lives in common infrastructure, owned and governed collectively, with embedded solidarity, not slogans. Yes, someone pointed out that:
"Open source licensing permits continued operation of the software with an EU provider."
That’s technically true, but in practice, how many such transitions actually happen? How many of these tools become hollowed-out ghost projects after the buyout? We need the EU to fund #4opens #FOSS and commons-native projects directly, not startups chasing exit strategies.
And yes, I’ll be blunt here:
There’s likely a whole class of people who should be prosecuted for fraud.
Because the current “innovation” circuit is knowingly wasting public money on private gain under “our” banner of openness. It’s a con. A parasitic class living off the #countercultures they parasitise. So let’s call this out, not to “disrupt” for disruption’s sake, but to open up space for what actually matters:
Native projects with shared roots in code, care, and community.
Activism that isn’t tacked on for #PR, but central to the infrastructure itself.
Horizontal governance that embraces mess, rather than paving over it.
We don’t need more products, we don’t need more platforms, we don’t need more panels pushing safe #neoliberal “common sense.” What we do need is to build and protect infrastructure that can’t be bought, captured, or silenced. Because that’s the only way we’re getting through this era of collapse with anything humane intact.
It’s good to see events like #NGIFORUM2025 as it’s trying to be on the path of the #Fediverse and the wider #openweb reboot which are real forces for social good, messy, hopeful, and grounded in decades of grassroots digital culture, which we do need to support. BUT we also need to speak honestly, as these spaces are not healthy by default.
Too often, they are co-opted by #NGO and institutional actors who bring with them a dangerous kind of “common sense”, what I’ve long described as the parasite class. We see this clearly at #NGIFORUM and similar #NGO events. Despite the energy and good intentions, the dominant framing is stuck in a narrow, #neoliberal logic:
Endless discussion about scalability, compliance, branding, and “the market.”
Panels where “on-topic” needs reality-checking and “off-topic” is often the path to sense.
This is not the #openweb native path, and what we need is more shovels and composting, to grow the real grassroots native paths, with open projects from the messy soil of lived social experience. Not more polished “innovation theatre.” And crucially: we need to bring activism back into these spaces – not as token #fashernista crap, but as lived, rooted practice. We need to embed activist tech into the core of these events, not leave it in the hallway as is the current norm.
Because let’s be honest, too much of what’s being showcased is just more #techshit to compost. Take the role of NGI funding (Next Generation Internet): It could be a powerful tool to fund the future of a people-powered web. But right now? It’s structured to reward isolated hard tech with narrow deliverables, and punish anything messy, social, or disruptive. That’s upside-down.
The development side of open-source should be anti-commercial – in its process, not necessarily in its usage. That means public funding should support the huge social layer that keeps FOSS and #openweb projects alive:
Community organising.
UX design from lived needs, not compliance charts.
Onboarding and trust-building.
Accessibility work.
Documenting process for reuse and remix.
But currently these parts are entirely unfunded, and that is pushing us into the arms of the parasite class’s of all types. We are walking backward into the future, again, projects without people, users, and support are dead projects. No matter how elegant the codebase is.
One thing that the event brings up is that we need to shift policy, national governments and #EU to actively intervene in the monopolies running the current internet. Both mobile and fixed-line networks need to be opened up to allow for grassroots, peer-to-peer, and local hosting paths to flourish. The current centralised infrastructure is a block to the native #openweb, and we can’t “build better” on broken foundations.
The also needs to be a cultural shift, to unblock the #geekproblem. This is not a call-out – it’s a call-in. The feedback is there, i’ve personally been working on this issue for over a decade, what we’ve seen is a cycle: Working in a small way… failing in a big way… repeating.
It’s not personal, it is structural. And we can do better, if we compost the fear of doing things differently. A practical example, we need more points that are currently deemed “off-topic.” Because what’s “on-topic” in these spaces is just branding and polite theatre. And that’s exactly how the #dotcons rose to dominance in the first place.
We are at risk of simply recreating their culture in softer tones. Let’s not do that. Let’s take a breath and reflect on what we’re actually building, it’s not a rhetorical question. This is not abstract.
Because if we keep defaulting to #neoliberal “common sense,” if we ignore the reality of climate collapse, digital authoritarianism, and infrastructure lock-in, then we’re just dancing around the edges of a very real #deathcult.
Let’s do the real work, let’s dig, plant, compost, and build trust. Let’s reclaim the tools and shape the #openweb around care, not control. Because anything less? It is just another empty panel on a sinking ship.
“All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.” — Oscar Wilde
The #openweb holds a quiet kind of power – messy, distributed, human. But I keep wondering: are people now too afraid to use that power? The sad truth is, many always were. Power isn’t something most of us are raised to understand, let alone wield collectively. For decades, we’ve been taught to outsource it, to institutions, to markets, to influencers. But the cracks are everywhere now, and there’s no more room to pretend.
What we’re facing isn’t theoretical, the hard right is not just consolidating power, they’re weaponizing it. They’ve successfully atomized progressive movements, through culture wars, #AI manipulation, and economic precarity, they’ve made sure many can’t even think collectively, let alone act.
And where is this leading? Let’s be blunt. They are on track to kill billions of people and vast swathes of nature over the next 100 years. This isn’t hyperbole. It’s baked into the political economy of climate collapse, border militarization, and resurgent fascism. #XR and other movements have been sounding the alarm for years, but the line just keeps going straight… into oblivion.
And yet… There is still hope. Hope doesn’t mean passive optimism, it means seeing that the little power we still have matters. That using it, no matter how small or local or chaotic, is the path.
When we build on the #openweb instead of feeding the #dotcons, that’s power.
When we organize locally, build mutual aid, and share resources without gatekeepers, that’s power.
When we link, when we write, when we resist the urge to block and shame and instead connect and amplify, that’s power.
None of this is perfect, it’s not about purity, it’s about action. And that action doesn’t need to scale overnight. It just needs to grow, slow, messy, rooted. Because here’s the thing the right knows and the left forgets: Power isn’t given. It’s taken, built, and – at best – shared.
So let’s stop waiting for permission, stop fearing the imperfections. The future depends on us using the power we still have – to make more.
