Europe, the Fediverse, and the story we failed to tell

A bunch of native #openweb people spent real time, energy, and focus pushing the #EU toward the #Fediverse. This wasn’t theoretical, it wasn’t speculative, it wasn’t a #NGO whitepaper or a #VC funding pitch. It was practical outreach, grounded in working technology and lived experience, aimed at reducing Europe’s dependency on centralized corporate platforms.

One concrete moment of this work was the webinar organised between the European Commission and the ActivityPub community: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/webinar-with-the-european-commission-and-ap-community/1507

The webinars mattered, they demonstrated that EU institutions were genuinely open to #ActivityPub as a viable public infrastructure standard, not as a niche hobby project, but as a way to regain institutional and civic agency without defaulting to US-based platforms.

This is the work we needed more of, but this kind of engagement is slow, unglamorous, and politically awkward. It doesn’t fit VC startup narratives or revolutionary aesthetics. But it is the work required if Europe wants digital sovereignty without surrendering to #BigTech or reinventing the same centralized failures under an #EU flag.

So the obvious question is: what went wrong? Drift, fragmentation, and the return of the #dotcons. Instead of consolidating that momentum, the grassroots fractured, attention drifted, energy leaked away, people burned out or moved on. In the end, outreach was blocked from both sides

And then slowly, predictably, attention returned to the familiar #dotcons, because they are easy, visible, and culturally dominant. They offer the illusion of reach without the substance of agency, in the long run, this is just more #techshit to compost later.

#SocialHub itself documents much of this history. The discussions are there, the threads exist, the intent is visible. But there is little aggregation, little synthesis, and almost no narrative continuity. For anyone not already embedded, it’s hard to see what mattered, what succeeded, and what was quietly blocked or abandoned.

The missing piece is our own history – this is the core failure – we are very bad at telling our own history, this thread says it plainly: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/eu-outreach-if-we-dont-tell-our-story-am-not-sure-who-will/2950

Because we didn’t document, curate, and repeat this story, the same myths keep resurfacing:

“The EU was never interested.”

“Federation can’t work at institutional scale.”

“There were no serious alternatives.”

“Centralized platforms are the only realistic option.”

None of these are true – but they feel true when history is missing. When people don’t know that EU–Fediverse outreach already happened, when they don’t know that viable alternatives already exist, when they don’t know that these paths were actively neglected rather than disproven.

Then people fall – again and again – for the #dotcons mess, believing it’s the only possible future. This matters now, as focus shifts back to tech change, and is exactly why #OMN, #indymediaback, #makinghistory, and #OGB exist, not as competing platforms, not as replacements for everything else, but as infrastructure for memory, communication, and accountability.

Before we argue about funding models, platforms, or scale, we need to get the ordering right:

History — to remember what already worked and what failed, and why

Media — to tell the story properly, in our own words

Governance — to keep power visible, contestable, and rooted in trust rather than myth

Without these, attempts at “European digital sovereignty” will reproduce the same capture dynamics under a different logo. Telling the story is political work, if we don’t tell our story, someone else will, and it won’t be told in our interests. It will be told as inevitability, as market logic, as “there was no alternative.” That story always ends the same way: more centralization, more dependency, more enclosure – followed by another round of cleanup and composting.

We already did part of the hard work, we opened doors, we proved viability. What’s missing is not only technology – it’s memory, narrative, and continuity. Until we fix that, Europe will keep mistaking amnesia for realism, and surrender for pragmatism.

Examples of the problem we need to compost

In #openweb tech, these people are the problem not the solution https://freeourfeeds.com/whoweare

This is spoiler incompetent #techshit and likely funding mess we need to ignore https://cybernews.com/tech/europe-social-media-w/ Then compost.

Diversity is good, but this is a prat move https://www.modalfoundation.org/ the are quite a few of these.

We fucked up… and that matters because we still have agency

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: we fucked up the last 20 years of #openweb tech. Not “they” fucked it up. Not only #BigTech, not only venture capital, not only governments and surveillance states. We did, especially those of us who were closest to the tools, the protocols, the decisions – the geeks, developers, architects, and maintainers who shaped how this stuff actually worked in practice.

That matters, because it means we still have direct power over what happens next. Too often, external forces are used as an excuse. “Capital captured everything.” “Users don’t care.” “The network effects are too strong.” These stories become a form of #blocking – a way to avoid the harder work of change and challenge that is still possible inside our own communities.

The #geekproblem role in the #techmess is one of the hardest things to admit, that much of the current #techmess wasn’t imposed on us – it was designed by us. We built systems that privileged scale over care, efficiency over use, protocol purity over social process. We treated governance as a technical problem and social mess as something to be engineered away. We told ourselves that decentralisation alone would save us, while quietly centralising power in code repos, foundation boards, and informal hierarchies.

This is the #geekproblem in action: the blindness to social value, to lived use, to human mediation. The result is vast piles of #techshit – technically impressive, socially hollow systems that decay quickly because nobody actually owns them in a meaningful way.

And when these systems fail, the blame gets pushed outward. “The market did this.” “Users misused it.” “NGOs ruined it.” Sometimes those things are true – but they are never the whole story.

Then we have the # fashionistas default worship of the #deathcult which is the part people really don’t like hearing: most of us default-worship the #deathcult. #Neoliberalism doesn’t need true believers to function. It survives perfectly well on habit, convenience, careerism, and fear. We reproduce it every time we copy the UX patterns of the #dotcons, every time we design for engagement instead of meaning, every time we prioritise respectability over rupture.

At this point, polite critique is not enough. The climate is collapsing. Social trust is eroded. Institutions are hollowed out facades. We do not have the luxury of endless moderation and tone-policing.

Let’s be clear, it is well past time to hold active worshippers of the #deathcult in contempt – not as individuals to be cancelled, but as ideas and practices to be openly rejected. And more importantly, to challenge our own default compliance with those values.

Time is the one thing we don’t have. Yes, this shift will happen. Over the last few years, more people have abandon #dotcons, more will rediscover collective tools, more will rebuild local, horizontal networks.

The #OMN is precisely about that internal power: what we do together, how we organise, how we build, and crucially, what we refuse to reproduce. But here’s the problem #climatechaos does not wait for cultural maturation. Ecological breakdown, authoritarian drift, and economic precarity are accelerating now. If the #openweb is going to matter, it has to matter in this decade – not as a promise, but as lived infrastructure.

That means pushing change and challenge now, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it breaks consensus, even when it costs status. We cannot keep living inside copies of the #dotcons is one of the clearest failures of the last 10 years is this: we kept rebuilding copies of corporate platforms and calling them alternatives. The same feeds. Same metrics. Same influencer dynamics. Same UX assumptions. Just with better politics in the bio. That will never be enough.

For projects like #OMN to become real, we need to invest serious resources and energy into good #UX for #openweb projects – not slickness, not branding, but clarity, legibility, and human-scale control. Interfaces that normal people can understand. Systems that work in mess. Tools that support mediation instead of suppression. This is not about perfection. It’s about use-value over #blocking.

The next step is obvious and unavoidable, it’s not more think pieces, more foundations, more grant cycles. It’s rebuilding social-technical systems that people can actually use together, under pressure, without surrendering control. We already know this. Deep down, everyone reading this does.

The question is whether we act on it – or whether we keep hiding behind inevitability while the world burns. The #OMN is not a guarantee. It’s a refusal: to keep worshipping the #deathcult,
to keep copying the #dotcons, to keep pretending we have more time than we do.

The work is here. The tools are here. What’s missing is the will to stop fucking around.

Human tech – OMN

What are you doing today that is not pointless? Not a rhetorical question, a line in the sand. As too much contemporary “activism” is still busywork inside the #dotcons – visible, branded, career-friendly, and structurally harmless. Our old activist circles took the healthy internal tensions that once kept projects like #indymedia honest and fed them upward into a #fashernista vampire class: NGOs, foundations, panels, consultancies. For twenty years, they’ve drained grassroots energy to build CVs and gain access to “power”. That’s not radical, it’s capture.

Now, if we are serious about surviving #climatechaos and confronting the #deathcult, we have to stop doing pointless #techshit and start rebuilding outside the platforms that profit from our failure.

We need projects that doesn’t need permission, we need a #DIY crew. That means gathering like-minded people off the #dotcons, working collectively, not performatively, building small, useful things that actually publish, connect, and persist, following the #4opens: open process, open governance, open code, open data to accept mess, conflict, and compost as signs of life

The Open Media Network (#OMN) is not a brand or career ladder, not a #NGO pitch deck.
It’s unfinished work from the original #openweb – work that was paused, captured, and now needs rebooting.

So again, plainly – What are you doing today that is not pointless? If the answer is “posting”, “networking”, or “waiting for funding”, that’s a bad answer. If the answer is building with others, publishing outside capture, sharing control, doing the unglamorous work, welcome back.

#indymediaback #OMN #4opens #makeinghistory #OGB

What does anarchism want #4opens #OMN is an attempt to find an answer

Q. “We’re supposed to think of #metadata as less than #data, but it isn’t: often it is more. . .#govts that want to control their people & crush #dissent want #metadata.” #privacy #Whatsapp #BigTech

This is an interesting point, but it only makes sense if you see people as isolated individuals and the being no such thing as society. No alternative to the capitalistic free markets and no hope of changing the death spiral we are on – you might be right. BUT this is a deeply reactionary #deathcult point of view and need to be called out as such – LOUDLY.

For the last 10 years we have had a movement to banish metadata on one side and to hoard it on the other. To banish our humanity or to control our humanity. Nowhere is the celebration of humanity to be found… it’s pastime to put our feet back onto the ground and think about this for a moment. Metadata, data about data is what gives humanity its power in both an individualist sense and at a social scale.

One thing we know for sure is that ideas about privacy change, in the feudal era the village priest know everything and policed everyone, the king had sex in front of the counters to prove his line etc. The current capitalist idea of privacy which we all internalise is set to change, what it becomes we do not know.

What is the free-market? it’s a signalling device based on knowledge of metadata. For people who know little about the “free-market” is a flow of horde metadata as is “money”. In meany ways you are made up of metadata, the words that come out of your mouth are the made up names of things, likely the “things” are made up from words handed down through the ages. When you look at it all HUMAN civilization is a flow of metadata.

If we are to have meaningful social change – let’s look at anarchism as an example. How will we replace the “free-market” where will the signals come from to distribute the goods in complex society? And yes we might end up with “simple society” by killing billions of people from #climatechaos that’s true, but that’s a different subject.

Q. Metadata is the currency of surveillance capitalism. Traded as behavioural futures, and used by the military to perform situational spectroscopy upon whole nations. We can try to minimize metadata, but it’s always a tricky problem. When we generate metadata we hand cash to the likes of Google, who call it “behavioural surplus”. And to shadier organisations to use it for disruption and control. In the past there were entire academic conferences about using social media metadata to prevent “contagion” – by which they meant social movements opposing autocratic governments.

Am not in any way disagreeing with the above, I am pointing out that it is actually not the agender you think it is… raising the question of which side are you on. If nothing changes then you are right, but if nothing changes we end up with billions of people dyeing from #climatechaos and the state control/fascism that comes with this. As I outline this is a #geekproblem world view that of only thinking of tech and not social – hope I can help to balance this.

This is a #geekproblem

We HAVE TO CHANGE we can’t keep doing this same old shit. Privatizing metadata for a tiny number of geeks is not a social change project. Cant put this any simpler.

Q. This goes back over a decade to the “Freedom in the cloud” talk. What if internet users were to run their own services, and keep the logs (metadata) ? Simply moving the logs from Goog and Zuck to the users would be one of the biggest improvements to the internet. It would pull the rug out from under their business model.

That’s the plan with the #OMN and we go further (but only if the users/producers flick the switches) we have an expanding metadata commons that has two powers – one negative in that it destroys the business model of late capitalism one positive that it expands commons that gives us growing space for creativity and expression.

Summing up the choice we face:

* Capitalism wants to privatise metadata to the capitalists #dotcons and the capitalist then control the government – fascism is back into fashion.

* Chinese communism, wants the state to control the metadata so they can control capitalism, we are back to the command economy on steroids.

* Liberalism want to privatise metadata to the individual to return to a mythic free-market past.

* What does anarchism want #4opens #OMN is an attempt to answer this last one.

To recap I understand our current push for privacy from the #dotcons BUT am asking what are we to replace this with? The closing/privatizing of metadata to individuals ” is a deeply reactionary #deathcult point of view and need to be called out as such – LOUDLY!”

Ideas?

We need to talk about “metadata” and the “freemarkit”

We need to talk about #metadata and the “freemarkit” ideology.

People say “metadata isn’t real data” — but it’s more, It maps movements, moods, relationships. That’s why #governments and #dotcons want it.

If you think this doesn’t matter, that we’re just individuals in a marketplace, not a society, congrats, you’ve joined the #deathcult.

We can change course. But only if we name the poison. Loudly #OMN

Q. “We’re supposed to think of #metadataas less than #data, but it isn’t: often it is more. . .#govts that want to control their people & crush #dissent want #metadata.” #privacy #Whatsapp #BigTech

A. This is an interesting point, but it only makes sense if you see people as isolated individuals and the being no such thing as society. No alternative to the capitalistic free markets and no hope of changing the death spiral we are on – you might be right. BUT this is a deeply reactionary #deathcult point of view and need to be called out as such – LOUDLY!