Why It’s Difficult to Build the #OMN – and What We Can Do About It

One of the biggest barriers to building projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) is not technical – it is structural – how resources are distributed in our society. Under capitalism, the driving force behind what gets built and what counts as “innovation” is profit. Investment flows toward projects that promise financial returns. Venture capital, grants, and corporate funding all operate under this logic: if a project can generate profit, scale, or market dominance, it is considered worthy of investment. If it cannot do those things, it does not get funded.

This creates a deep distortion in what kinds of technology and social infrastructure actually get built. Projects that could save lives, strengthen communities, or benefit wider society struggle to find any resources simply because they do not generate profit. We can see this clearly in the digital world. Billions flow into speculative technologies, advertising systems, surveillance platforms, and financial schemes. Meanwhile, the basic tools people need for public communication, community coordination, and independent media remain fragile and under-resourced.

The result is the landscape we now call the #dotcons: platforms that monetize our attention, harvest our data, and shape public conversation for the benefit of a handful of corporations and shareholders.

A different motivation? The native Fediverse and projects like the #OMN are built from a completely different starting point. Not designed to extract profit or built encloser. And not driven by the logic of venture capital. Instead, at best they grow from a humanist motivation: the desire to build social meaning and meet simple human needs. The goal is to improve the quality of life in general by supporting open publishing, shared media infrastructure, and grassroots communication. These are the kinds of tools we need to help communities tell their own stories, organise collectively, and respond to crises.

In this sense, the #OMN sits firmly in the tradition of the #openweb and projects like #indymedia. The technology exists, the cultural knowledge exists, what is missing is not possibility, but resources. Because the #OMN does not promise financial returns, it sits outside the normal funding pipelines. Venture capital has no interest, corporate sponsors want control, institutional funding comes with strings attached that reshape projects into something “safer” and less disruptive.

Over the past decades we have also seen how #NGO funding models neutralize grassroots initiatives, the original goals become softened, the governance shifts upward, and projects become professionalized to the point where they lose the communities they were meant to serve. So the challenge becomes very simple, but very real how do we resource projects that are built for social value rather than profit? This is the core difficulty in building the #OMN.

It is not that people disagree with the idea, in fact, many people recognise the need for open, public-first media infrastructure. The difficulty lies in finding ways to support that work outside the normal profit-driven economy.

Growing from seeds – the good news is that the #OMN does not need to start big. Many of the most important pieces of the #openweb have always grown from small seeds: communities, volunteer effort, shared infrastructure, and trust networks. The #Fediverse itself is proof that distributed systems can grow organically when people care enough to build and maintain them.

The aim is not to replace the existing system overnight. It is to grow an alternative ecosystem alongside it, rooted in openness, collaboration, and public benefit. This means building slowly, sharing knowledge, and keeping the processes transparent and simple. The #4opens principles remain a useful guide: open data, open source, open standards, and open process.

What you can do – if the #OMN is going to exist – it will exist because people decide it should. There are a few practical ways to help make that happen:

Support the project financially. Even small recurring contributions make a difference when building shared infrastructure https://opencollective.com/open-media-network
Contribute skills and development. Developers, designers, writers, organisers, and testers are all needed to grow the network.
Use and experiment with the tools. Real projects and real communities are what give infrastructure meaning.
Share the ideas. Talk about the need for public-first media systems and the problems with the current #dotcons landscape.
Help build the culture. Technology alone is not enough. The #OMN depends on the social culture of the #openweb: cooperation, trust, and collective responsibility.

This is a #KISS path to building the world we need. The current system directs enormous resources toward technologies that extract value rather than create it. That is not inevitable, it is simply how our economic structures currently allocate attention and funding.

The #OMN represents a small but practical step to build something different, not a platform empire, or another startup. Just a shared piece of public media infrastructure, grown from the grassroots, and built to serve the people who use it. If that sounds like a world worth building, you can help make it real: https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

It’s not easy, and it’s not as simple as clicking “sign up” and walking into a ready-made community

A bit of #OMN history and where the current paths come from

For a long time the focus has been on solving two linked problems – both of which are actually #nothingnew. The first is grassroots publishing and organising. The second is network coordination between communities. Neither of these problems started with the internet, and they certainly didn’t start with Silicon Valley.

Projects like #Indymedia and community organising networks solved these problems culturally long before modern platforms existed. They worked through shared practice, trust networks, affinity groups, and rough consensus. Importantly, they worked in non-federated ways – loose collaboration across independent nodes. This model likely stretches back a century or more in activist and cooperative cultures.

What the last five years of #ActivityPub rollout has given us is something new to add to that history: technical federation. So we now have two complementary paths that both grow naturally from the #openweb:

Grassroots #DIY culture – social federation built on trust, practice and community.

Technical federation – protocols like ActivityPub enabling networks of independent servers to interoperate.

Both are native to the open web. From the #OMN perspective this leads to practical projects:

#indymediaback – rebuilding grassroots publishing and organising infrastructure based on the lessons of the original Indymedia movement, but updated with openweb tools.

#OGB – a parallel path emerging through EU outreach and institutional engagement.

The key point is that these paths do not depend on the dominant platform ecosystem, the #dotcons. In fact, if we step back historically, we can see a fork in the road that happened twenty years ago. Instead of building open infrastructure, most movements ended up relying on corporate platforms. It was easier, faster, and seemed practical at the time. But that path turned out to be a trap.

The current tech landscape – platforms, algorithms, venture capital ecosystems, and the ideology surrounding them – is largely #techshit. Not because technology itself is bad, but because the dominant model is built to extract value and control attention rather than support communities. The solution isn’t simply to reject technology, it’s to compost it. Take what works, discard what doesn’t, and grow something healthier from the remains. That’s the thinking behind #OMN projects.

The projects start from a social understanding: technology alone doesn’t create networks. Culture, trust, and shared practice do. The tools should support those relationships, not capture or replace them. So the historical loop closes. Grassroots culture + open protocols – #DIY practice + federation. If we had taken that path twenty years ago, the web might look very different today.

The task now is simple, go back to that fork and take the other path.

#OMN #OpenWeb #ActivityPub #DIY #Fediverse #Indymedia

A note on the current voices speaking for the #Fediverse

We can use a lot of the mess of the last 20 years to learn from, the composting metaphor.

Disciplined curiosity beats IQ, Oxford

There is a persistent myth pushed in our culture that intelligence – high IQ, academic credentials, elitist education – leads naturally to clear thinking. My organic experience suggests the opposite, what matters is disciplined, skeptical, freethinking curiosity. Without that, intelligence simply becomes a tool for defending whatever assumptions people already hold.

This is one of the reasons many academic environments produce people who are, bluntly, credulous. Not because they lack intelligence, but because the institutional structures around them reward conformity and reputation management far more than genuine curiosity.

Over the last two years I’ve been spending time in and around the university culture in Oxford, participating in discussions, events, and academic life. The experience has been instructive, if in the end frustrating. You would expect a place associated with University of Oxford to be a centre of open intellectual challenge. In practice, it feels like something else: a system that filters, polishes, and reproduces existing assumptions.

This is not universal, some of the hard scientific disciplines still cultivate a form of disciplined skepticism, experiments fail, evidence contradicts theory, so you are expected to question results. The process encourages a narrow but very real culture of doubt, but outside those narrow areas, skepticism to often fades.

Instead, you find intellectual fashion cycles building reputational alliances that push institutional caution based on #blinded ideological signalling. The result can be a strange mix of high intelligence and low #blocking curiosity. People who are good at working inside established frameworks, but much less comfortable questioning the foundations of privilege those frameworks rest on.

This matters for the #openweb and projects like #OMN. I got nowhere here as many of the institutions that might have supported open digital infrastructure – universities, NGOs, research centres – have shifted toward the same #deathcult #mainstreaming #blocking that dominates the wider tech world. Funding cycles shape research priorities, institutional partnerships shape acceptable ideas and career incentives shape what can safely be questioned.

So even where intelligence and resources exist, the culture of disciplined curiosity that drives the needed real innovation is thin if it exists at all. The irony is that the early internet grew out of exactly the same institutions, but with opposite culture. The original World Wide Web ecosystem, the hacker and #FOSS communities, and early grassroots media projects like #indymedia were built by people who combined technical curiosity with deep skepticism about centralised control.

They didn’t wait for institutional approval, they experimented, built #DIY tools that broke things and rebuilt them. That spirit is what projects like #OMN are trying to revive. The goal is not to outcompete corporate #dotcons platforms or impress #NGO academic institutions. The goal is simpler: to build open media infrastructure that communities can use based on small nodes, trust networks and open metadata flows. Simple tools that allow people to publish, share, and connect.

This is a working #KISS approach to rebuilding grassroots media. If the last twenty years of the web have taught us anything, it’s that intelligence alone doesn’t produce healthy systems. You can have brilliant engineers building platforms that clearly undermine democratic communication, it’s the mess that shapes the current #dotcons world.

What makes the difference is curiosity combined with skepticism, the willingness to question the structures that shape our digital lives. Without that, even the smartest institutions drift into the same patterns of credulity and conformity, which is why rebuilding the #openweb is not just a technical project, it’s a cultural one.

For some reflections from the last couple of years around Oxford life and technology culture, see: https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/oxford/

#Oxford #academic #elitist

Why does it feel like so many people have become intolerant prats? A blunt observation: it increasingly feels like many people today are intolerant prats. And worse, this behaviour has started to feel normal. You see it everywhere. Online discussions collapse quickly into hostility. Small disagreements become unthinking moral #blocking were people retreat into camps where any challenge is treated as an attack.

This isn’t just a social media problem, though the #dotcons have certainly amplified it, it’s a deeper cultural shift. For decades the dominant systems shaping our culture have encouraged competition, individualism, and personal branding. The result is what I often call #stupidindividualism – a worldview where the individual ego becomes the centre of everything. In that environment, disagreement stops being part of learning and becomes a threat to identity, so people react defensively, aggressively or dismissively. What used to be debate becomes performance.

The platform problem is when the #dotcons platforms are designed to amplify this behaviour where algorithms reward outrage, tribal loyalty and moral signalling to push conflict to drive engagement. They do not reward patience, nuance, or curiosity, in other words, they are structurally optimised to turn ordinary people into worse versions of themselves. Over time this becomes cultural habit, people start to assume that hostility is normal conversation.

Another factor is the slow collapse of collective spaces. When communities interact face-to-face, or in smaller trust networks, people have to deal with each other as human beings. Relationships create friction but also accountability. In large anonymous digital environments, those social checks weaken. People become avatars and opinions rather than neighbours, this makes it much easier, “natural” to treat each other badly.

Why this matters for the #openweb. If we are trying to rebuild grassroots media and communication infrastructure, we need to recognise that these cultural habits have already spread into many communities, including the tech and activist spaces that should be alternatives. This is one reason projects fragment so easily as small disagreements spiral, people assume bad faith and thus trust collapses.

You end up with endless internal conflict instead of collective building. This isn’t just a personality problem, it’s the legacy of systems that reward attention and conflict rather than cooperation.

A different path can be grown in projects like #OMN which is partly about rebuilding infrastructure, but they are also about rebuilding culture. The idea is simple: smaller networks, trust-based publishing, open metadata flows and simple tools people can run themselves. A #KISS approach to communication infrastructure.

But technology alone doesn’t solve the deeper issue, what actually makes communities work is something much older and simpler: tolerance and curiosity. The ability to disagree without instantly turning disagreement into war. The ability to assume that the other person might have something worth hearing. Without those habits, no infrastructure – open or closed – will function well for long.

Composting the mess – the current online culture is a mess. A lot of the behaviour we see today is the product of twenty years of #dotcons platform design. But mess is also compost, it shows us clearly what doesn’t work. The next generation of the #openweb has an opportunity to build systems that encourage something better: slower conversation, local trust networks, collective responsibility, shared media infrastructure. Less shouting, more listening.

It won’t magically make people perfect. Some people will still be intolerant prats. But at least we won’t be running the entire communication system of society on platforms designed to encourage it.

#KISS

This Oxford mess is a shadow of a larger mess. We were told the story of Prometheus: fire stolen from the gods and given to humans – our first real piece of technology. The myth asks a simple question: what do we do with power once we have it?

In democratic society why do we put up gig work and side hustles, endless surveillance platforms pushing algorithmic attention traps, housing crises and climate collapse all pushed by a handful of billionaires controlling huge parts of the economy. Why do we put up with What with the mess of technocratic oligarchy – a system where technological infrastructure concentrates power instead of distributing it?

The #mainstreaming mythology of the tech founder helped this happen. The “visionary genius” narrative around people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk turned corporate executives into cultural heroes. This mess is simply #KISS oligarchy with better marketing.

Even ancient thinkers warned about this. Plato and Aristotle described how societies cycle through forms of power, and how rule by the wealthy tends to serve the wealthy above everyone else. The irony is that many of today’s tech elitists think of themselves as the new aristocracy – the “smartest people in the room” guiding humanity forward.

Yet the future they’ve built is #techshit platform #feudalism with people monitored constantly, economic life mediated by a few #dotcons platforms. Infrastructure owned by private empires and democratic institutions bought out then sidelined.

The tragedy isn’t that technology failed, it is more that we let our technological imagination be captured by oligarchs. Prometheus gave humanity fire so we could build civilization together, not so a tiny #nastyfew tech CEOs can privatise the flame and sell back the light.

The real question isn’t whether technology will shape the future, it’s who controls it.

#OMN #OpenWeb #TechPower #Oligarchy #Future #Compost

EU tech strategy, composting the mess

As #climatechaos accelerates, European politics will not stay where it is now. History suggests that periods of instability push politics to the right, because right-wing politics tends to be driven by fear and control. If that trajectory holds, then the digital infrastructure we build today needs to be resilient in a more hostile political environment tomorrow. This matters for the EU’s current technology strategy.

Most policy thinking still focuses on industrial competitiveness – AI funding, semiconductor independence, cloud sovereignty, cybersecurity frameworks. These are important, but they mostly reinforce state and corporate power structures. What is missing is investment in grassroots civic infrastructure.

If democratic societies are going to survive the pressures of climate disruption, economic instability, and political polarisation, they will need independent communication systems that communities themselves can run and trust. This is where projects like #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback, and #makeinghistory fit.

The starting point: is yes, we are all inside #neoliberal systems. For forty years Europe has been shaped by neoliberal infrastructure – platforms, markets, and institutions designed around extraction and competition. In the hashtag story language this is the #deathcult we have worshipped. None of us are outside this mess, the realistic mission is not purity but gradual exit.

That means: building small affinity groups, creating tools that allow communities to organise themselves to develop infrastructure that scales socially, not just technically. The #openweb is a core path for this. The #4opens – open data, open source, open process, open standards – provide a practical way to judge whether infrastructure actually supports commons-based development we need.

Why this matters politically? The dominant platforms – the #dotcons – centralised the web’s communication power. Grassroots movements traded their own infrastructure for convenience. In doing so, they gave away their media power. The problem we need to balance is if you have no power, talking directly to power is usually pointless. Grassroots power grows from the soil, from collective organisation.

What we need are projects like the #OMN which are not more platforms, rather it is an attempt to build simple trust-based media infrastructure, the design principle is #KISS – Keep It Simple. At its core, building and boot-up media nodes run by communities, systems for publishing and sourcing content with flows of rich metadata linking media together. Technically this becomes a very simple semantic layer: media objects linked through open metadata streams.

Think of it as a network of media “cauldrons” and flows, growing from local publishing outward. The important point is that the infrastructure is open and decentralised. Communities decide how to use it. Initial examples include: #makeinghistory and #indymediaback, the architecture is intentionally general. Once you have open pipes and flows, many other uses become possible. Protocols like #RSS and #ActivityPub are starting points for this type of infrastructure.

The path looks like this: Create a focus (hashtags, projects, shared language). Grow community networks around that focus. Use those networks to regain collective power. Then speak to power with power, this matters as we have mess to compost.

The control myth in tech policy? A lot of current EU tech thinking is built around control frameworks: cybersecurity regimes, digital identity systems, privacy enforcement and regulatory compliance layers. These are needed protections, but they also reflect a deeper ideological assumption: that the internet must be controlled to be safe. In practice, many of these approaches close possibilities for social paths we need.

Two concepts in particular have been used in ways that reinforce centralisation: security and privacy. Both are important. But when implemented through centralised systems, they become tools that close infrastructure rather than open it. Security without social trust becomes just another form of control.

So trust versus control. One of the biggest ideological shifts needed in tech infrastructure is moving from control-based systems to trust-based systems. In tech culture we to often fetishise control: permissions, identity verification, cryptographic enforcement and algorithmic moderation. But the internet originally grew through something very different: open trust networks.

The early World Wide Web forced enormous social change because it was built around open protocols and shared infrastructure. The #dotcons later captured that infrastructure and turned it into centralised platforms. Rebuilding the #openweb means reopening those pathways.

Digital infrastructure is a mode of production we need this deeper economic perspective, Karl Marx famously argued that the mode of production shapes social consciousness. The digital era represents a new mode of production, built on information flows, network effects, and data infrastructures. If those infrastructures are controlled by a handful of #dotcons corporations, they shape society accordingly. If they are open, distributed, and collectively governed, they create very different possibilities.

What this means for EU policy is we need better balance in EU funding, legislation and thinking. An effective EU digital strategy should not only fund: AI research, blockchain experiments and industrial platforms. It should balance support for public digital common’s infrastructure, funding projects that: follow the #4opens, strengthen the #openweb to enable local community media networks and reduce dependence on corporate platforms. These paths will not look like Silicon Valley platforms. They will look messier, smaller, and more local. But they are also more resilient.

King Canute and the digital tide. There is an old story about King Cnut, who supposedly ordered the tide to stop to demonstrate that even kings could not control nature. The digital tide is similar. No amount of regulation or platform power can permanently control networked communication. The question is not whether the tide moves, the question is who builds the boats.

Projects like #OMN are attempts to start building them, and yes – the tools required are simple.

Shovels and compost come to mind.

The #dotcons assume you want to be a techbro

One of the quiet assumptions built into almost every #dotcons platform is that the user secretly wants to become a #techbro. Not literally, of course, but culturally.

You are expected to optimise yourself by building your “personal brand” to track your metrics. Engage with algorithmic growth loops by understand platforms, feeds, APIs, monetisation tools, creator dashboards. You’re supposed to treat communication as a kind of performance engineering problem.

Most people never asked for this, they just wanted to talk to friends, share ideas, organise communities to publish things that matter. Instead, they got trapped inside systems designed around growth hacking and behavioural manipulation.

This is one of the reasons people are quietly, sometimes timidly, stepping away from the #dotcons, not always loudly, not always politically, but gradually. People feel something is wrong.

But when they look toward the #openweb, the path isn’t always easy either. Too often the tools we build assume something similar – just with a different flavour of geek culture. The user is expected to understand servers, protocols, instances, keys, forks, configuration files, federation quirks. In other words, the user is still expected to become a tech person.

This is the #geekproblem showing up again, if the #openweb is going to be a real alternative, we need to take this seriously. The vast majority of people do not want to be #techbros, sysadmins, protocol engineers or crypto specialists. They want tools that work socially, tools that support community rather than demanding narrow blind identity.

This doesn’t mean hiding the technology. The power of the #openweb comes from openness, the #4opens of open data, open source, open process and open standards. But openness should not mean unfriendly #UX.

The challenge for #FOSS and #openweb projects is to build tools with human-first design: Interfaces that feel welcoming rather than intimidating, workflows that reflect how communities actually organise with systems that support trust and relationships, not optimisation and metrics. We need onboarding that doesn’t require a technical worldview

In short: non-techbro #UX. This doesn’t mean dumbing things down, it means remembering what the web was originally good at, simple tools that let people publish, connect, and collaborate without needing permission or expertise.

Right now there is a real opportunity as people step away from the #dotcons, slowly, unevenly, sometimes reluctantly, but the shift is happening. If the #openweb meets them with only complicated tools and insider culture, they’ll drift back to the platforms they know. If we meet them with simple, social, welcoming infrastructure, the shift becomes something much bigger.

So the question for #FOSS developers is simple: Are we building tools for techbros? Or tools for people? If we want the #openweb to grow, the answer matters.

OMN: Broken Institutions, and the Need to Rebuild the Commons

For progressive and radical people, one of the central political questions of our time is simple to ask but hard to answer – Why is it so difficult to rebuild the institutions that were destroyed in our #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s? And more importantly why does the impossibility of rebuilding them make it so hard to change the needed balance of power in society? These question matters for working on the future of the society and most importantly the grassroots part of this: #openweb, grassroots media, and projects like #OMN.

The hollowing out of institutions, in the 20th century, politics used to be deeply institutional. People didn’t just express opinions, they joined organisations. If you marched in a protest, we usually marched as a member of something: a trade union, a political party, a civil rights organisation or community association. These organisations formed the infrastructure of democracy, connecting everyday anger and hope to real power.

But beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, much of this infrastructure was deliberately dismantled. Union power was broken, mass political parties were hollowed out, and community organisations lost resources and influence. The result is the political landscape we inherit, a society with political anger but without any working political structures.

Today we live in what #fashionistas and academics call #hyperpolitics or what I call #stupidindividualism in the hashtag story. Yes, some people are more politically engaged than they were in the 1990s or early 2000s: More fluffy protests, #dotcons online political discussion. But this engagement is almost all unstructured in the old sense.

Millions may join a protest or share a political message in the #dotcons, yet very little, if any lasting organisation emerges from this. This surface engagement creates a strange paradox of huge drifting mobilisations leading to very little structural change. We can have the largest protests in history – yet the underlying power structures remain completely untouched.

Closed #dotcons social media lowered the cost of expression, but algorithmically shaped it into smoke and mirrors. Let’s take a moment to lift the lid on this #tecsit mess. The role of media in this is complex, on the positive side, #closedweb platforms drastically reduced the cost of political expression.

Forty years ago, if you wanted to express a political opinion publicly you needed a newspaper, radio station, a public meeting or to stand in a square shouting. Now you can reach thousands of people instantly. But there is a downside that #dotcons smoke and mirror online engagement replaces the slow work of institution-building. Posting, sharing, and reacting can feel like participation, but it has very little role in building the durable structures needed for any long-term change.

So why do the current hard right succeed without institutions? There is an uncomfortable asymmetry between left and right. The right can carry out its agenda without building mass organisations, because it relys on: existing elitist power structures, wealthy donors, state institutions and traditional corporate media.

The left cannot rely on these, historically the left needed mass organisations because its power came from collective action – workers, communities, movements. Without those structures, left politics becomes, mess, fragmented and reactive. This is why protest waves can be enormous but still fail to shift any real policy.

The #undeadleft problem is where vertical left respond to this crisis with nostalgia, there imagination stops at rebuilding the mass political parties and institutions of the 20th century. But this is to often like trying to animate a corpse, even if you could recreate it, the environment has changed so much that it wouldn’t survive.

At the same time, the opposite response – abandoning institutions entirely to relying purely on digital networks – also fails. Purely online movements often dissolve as quickly as they form. We need a #DIY hybrid path based on federated #4opens institutions like the tools we are building and rebooting with the #OMN projects.

Not rigid old institutions, not purely online networks, But something that seeds the in between. The goal is not to create another platform, it is to expand #federated #p2p infrastructure for collective media and collective politics. The original #openweb worked because it supported networks of communities, independent publishers and grassroots movements. The corporate #dotcons replaced this with extractive platforms designed for profit and control.

KISS rebuilding the commons means rebuilding the social infrastructure of media, not just tools, but institutions and practices that persist to allow collective voices to organise and persist.

The simple truth, if we want real political change, we cannot rely on viral posts, temporary movements or algorithmic attention. We need structures that last, connect people, that can turn energy into horizontal power. That work is slow, messy, and unfashionable, but like digging compost for a garden, it’s the only way anything grows.

A path to start to compost this #techshit is growing horizontal tools from the Fediverse for real change (#OMN).

If the problem of our time is political energy without institutions, then the opportunity is clear:
build new institutions native to the #openweb. Not simply recreate the rigid organisations of the 20th century, and not fall into the hollow performative politics of the #dotcons. Instead, we grow native horizontal digital tools to help people organise, coordinate, and act collectively. This is where the Fediverse and projects like #OMN matter.

The #Fediverse already proves that distributed infrastructure works. But right now it is mostly used for conversation. If we want meaningful change and challenge, we need to extend it into practical coordination and collective action. by build tools for organising, not just talking

Current social media tools are built for attention and engagement, not organisation. What we need to add to the mix is simple #4opens tools that help people form groups, coordinate action, share resources, document activity and most importantly maintain continuity over time (#makinghistory). The Fediverse already has #fashionista and #geekproblem pieces of this:

Mastodon / Pleroma → conversation

Mobilizon → events and gatherings

PeerTube → video publishing

PixelFed → visual storytelling

Lemmy / Kbin → community forums

These existing pieces can become seeds to be woven together into workflows for collective action. On this path we need to remember the goal is not more platforms, it’s practical ecosystems. For this to work a first step is rebuilding commons-based media. A core idea behind #OMN is returning to something like the #Indymedia publishing model, but rebuilt using modern federated tools. Instead of a single website, imagine distributed publishing nodes where local groups post reports, media is shared across networks, discussions happen across servers and archives remain accessible and most importantly meaningful.

This builds collective memory, something the algorithmic feeds of the #dotcons constantly destroy. Movements need memory to learn.

#makinghistory is the same code-base as this grassroots media project

One reason mass organisations collapsed is that participation became too heavy, people don’t want to “join a church” politically any more. So tools should allow different levels of engagement: casual participation, occasional contribution, active organising with core stewardship. The Fediverse naturally supports this because it allows loose affiliation rather than rigid membership. You don’t need permission from a central authority to participate.

Focus on infrastructure, not branding. A common #NGO trap in activist tech is building new branded platforms that compete with existing networks. That approach usually fails. The better path is infrastructure building based on protocols instead of platforms for #4opens interoperability instead of silos, tools that connect existing communities. This was the original power of the #openweb, protocols scale. Platforms capture.

Keep the tech simple (#KISS), as the biggest barrier to grassroots technology is complexity. Many promising projects fail because they become too technical for real communities to use. So the rule should always be KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Tools should be installable easily, understandable by non-geeks and maintainable by small communities to grow resilience without large funding. If only developers can run the system, it will never become a movement infrastructure.

Compost the failures (#techshit). Another key idea is recognising that the tech world constantly churns useful waste. Old tools, failed platforms, abandoned code, all of this is #techshit that can be composted instead of chasing fashionable new tech, we reuse working ideas, simplify existing tools to combine proven approaches. The #openweb already solved many of these problems decades ago. Sometimes progress means going back to what worked.

Build trust networks, as the most important layer isn’t technical – it’s social. Horizontal networks only function when there is trust and shared culture. The Fediverse works because communities can federate with trusted peers, block hostile actors, build local norms. This allows networks to remain open but resilient. The challenge is nurturing communities of practice around the tools.

Grow slowly and organically, movements that scale too quickly often collapse. The better model is ecological growth with small nodes → connected networks → resilient ecosystems. Just like compost turning into soil. The goal is not explosive growth, its sustainable infrastructure for collective action.

The real challenge is the biggest obstacle isn’t technology, it’s the #geekproblem – the gap between technical culture and social reality. Too many tech projects assume that better tools automatically produce social change, but tools only matter when they are embedded in real communities and struggles. The work of projects like #OMN is bridging that gap.

Shovels, not silver bullets, we don’t need magic platforms, we need shovels, tools that help people dig, build, connect, and organise together on the native #openweb. If we can do that, the Fediverse becomes more than an alternative social network, it becomes infrastructure for democratic power.

What projects like #OMN can learn from history

What projects like #OMN can learn from history

The lesson from the Leonid Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union is simple but brutal that stability is not strength. From the outside the system looked powerful – armies, rockets, space stations. But internally it had stopped being able to correct itself, criticism became dangerous, information was distorted, and the leadership focused on maintaining control rather than fixing problems. The result was a long, slow decay that only became obvious once collapse was already underway.

For projects like #OMN and the wider #openweb, there are some clear lessons. A system must be able to criticise itself, when criticism is blocked, systems rot quietly. In political systems this shows up as propaganda and falsified reports, in tech projects it shows up as closed decision-making, defensive leadership with performative openness, leading to communities where criticism gets socially punished.

The #4opens matter because they institutionalise self-correction: open code → people can inspect, open data → people can verify, open process → people can challenge decisions and open standards → people can fork and build alternatives. Forking is the equivalent of democratic opposition, without it, stagnation creeps in.

What we can learn is simple don’t trade dynamism for comfort. What we learn from history, a big part of the Brezhnev problem was that the leadership chose predictability over adaptation. The same thing happens in tech ecosystems when projects shift from experimentation to → brand protection, messy community → managed messaging leading to failing grassroots growth → to institutional control. You end up with stagnation.

For something like #OMN, the messy grassroots stage is not a weakness, it is the source of vitality, it’s about having a space were we can compost the institutions that tend to prioritise survival over purpose.

This is a universal pattern, over time, organisations start to exist to maintain themselves, not to achieve their original mission. You can see this in NGOs that avoid challenging power because they depend on funding, tech foundations that prioritise corporate partnerships and projects that optimise for grants rather than any usefulness. The danger for #openweb projects is #mainstreaming without accountability. When institutions become the goal, the commons become secondary.

Back to history, we find that information rot is deadly, the Soviet system increasingly relied on false reporting maintaining the illusion of success. Tech ecosystems have their own version with inflated user numbers exaggerating adoption claims, marketing replacing real development leading to blocking #NGO conferences replacing working infrastructure. Healthy ecosystems need ground truth, it’s another reason the #4opens matter, they make it harder to fake progress.

Real strength is distributed, the Soviet model concentrated authority at the top. That made correction impossible. The #openweb path is at best the opposite with distributed infrastructure, federated governance leading to multiple independent actors feeding the ability to fork and diverge. Resilience comes from diversity and redundancy, not central authority.

Collapse often looks stable until suddenly it isn’t, the lesson from the Brezhnev period is that decline can look like stability for a long time. You see signs only if you look closely at empty shelves, falsified reports, ageing leadership squatting rigid institutions.

In the current #dotcons web ecosystem the equivalents might be shrinking trust in platforms, centralised control of communication, developer burnout, communities drifting away from corporate spaces. The surface can still look powerful while the foundations are weakening.

The practical lesson for #OMN is that we need to keep focus as anti-Brezhnev systems. That means building structures that encourage criticism, experimentation, decentralisation, transparency and community power over institutional control. The goal is not stability, its living systems that can correct themselves. Because once a system loses that ability, the future is already written – it just takes a while before everyone else notices.

A note to #FOSS funders

I’ve been working at the heart of this space for more than 30 years, funded and unfunded. In that time I’ve seen hundreds of alternative tech projects start with energy and good intentions. Most of them wither on the vine, a very small number flower.

After watching this cycle repeat for decades, one thing has become clear: the projects that survive and grow almost always follow a simple pattern. I call this the #4opens. Other people describe similar ideas as open source development, open governance, or commons-based development. The label doesn’t matter – the practice does.

If you want to know which projects will flower and which will wither, look at the ground, not the words. The #4opens ask four very simple questions:

Open data – can people access and reuse the information?

Open source – can people read, modify, and share the code?

Open process – can people see and participate in how decisions are made?

Open standards – can different systems interoperate and grow a wider ecosystem?

Projects that are open in all four of these ways tend to build living ecosystems. Projects that are only partially open tend to stall or collapse. The two repeating problems, over the years two patterns constantly undermine good projects.

#geekproblem – A teenage mix of arrogance and ignorance that is surprisingly universal in tech culture. Developers assume technical elegance (and complexity) will automatically solve social problems. They underestimate governance, community, and messy human reality.

#dotcons – The opposite pressure: corporate platforms pushing business models that prioritise extraction and growth over human need. They happily wrap themselves in the language of “open” while building fundamentally closed systems.

Both pressures distort funding decisions. Both lead to projects that sound open but aren’t. Money is a dangerous subject, yes, funding matters, but money inside infrastructure projects to often distorts them quickly. For #openweb work, a useful rule of thumb is: Keep the core simple. Focus funding on maintaining the #4opens infrastructure. Let many different organisations, businesses, and NGOs build external services and applications on top.

This keeps the core commons stable while allowing diversity and experimentation around it. It’s the #KISS principle applied to digital commons. When funding pushes too many external agendas into the core, projects become heavy, political, and fragile.

Some uncomfortable truths, over the last decade we’ve been told several stories about security and scale that simply don’t hold up. There is no security in CLOSED systems, security emerges from open scrutiny and shared responsibility:

There is no security in radical individualism, security emerges from community.

There is no security in “trustless” systems, real resilience grows from social trust.

These ideas have been obscured by hype cycles and by the influence of #dotcons and their shadow allies, the #encryptionists who push purely technical “trustless” thinking. Both camps wrap themselves in the language of openness, but their systems remain structurally closed. Words are wind, look at the ground: #4opens.

The unspoken scaling problem, there is also an unspoken #geekproblem around how we think about scaling. When many developers talk about #p2p, they imagine data-to-data scaling, systems optimised to move information as efficiently as possible. From that perspective, human friction looks like a problem.

But if you see #p2p as human-to-human, the picture changes. Human scaling limits – smaller communities, slower processes, local trust networks – are not bugs, they are virtues, creating resilience and accountability. The data-first model is the one favoured by the #dotcons.
The human-first model is the one the #openweb actually needs. Funders should be aware of which philosophy a project is building around.

A simple test If you want a quick filter when looking at proposals, ask:

Does this project genuinely follow the #4opens?

Does it build community and governance, not just code?

Is it resilient without permanent central funding?

Does it strengthen the commons, rather than a future platform?

Projects that pass these tests are the ones most likely to flower, everything else tends to wither. Food for thought.

#EU #NLnet #NGI #funding

Make some FOSS compost

Make some FOSS compost

Twenty years ago the #openweb conversation was simple: build in the open, share the code, grow commons. It wasn’t perfect, but the direction was clear. Now? We talk about “neutral infrastructure” while most energy flows into platforms, APIs, app stores and AI silos owned by the #dotcons. Even many of our own projects quietly depend on their hosting, their identity layers, their distribution channels. We’ve normalised bowing down to closed systems, and we call it pragmatism.

But tech was never neutral, to build open systems is not just a technical preference, it’s a social and ecological choice. It’s a choice for collective flourishing: Open code, open standards, open governance – these are living systems, they circulate knowledge, let communities adapt and compost failure into growth.

Closed systems hoard, they lock knowledge behind terms of service, they centralise power by optimising for extraction. And like any monoculture built on extraction, they eventually rot from within. So here’s the uncomfortable question for us as #FOSS maintainers – Are we feeding the #deathcult every time we design for platform lock-in, accept surveillance funding, or optimise for venture adoption over community resilience, we edge closer to it.

The wider culture is drowning in #stupidindividualism. People are burned out by churn, distracted, cynical. But underneath that noise, the desire for connection, justice and sustainability is still there, the soil. The problem isn’t that people don’t want open, it’s that we’ve stopped seeding it in ways that feel alive.

“Open is life. Closed is death.” If that’s too dramatic, look at the ecosystems: federated systems that self-host and fork survive. Closed platforms collapse when the funding cycle shifts or the CEO sneezes. So what do we need to do?

Build for communities, not exit strategies.
Make governance as open as the code.
Refuse the false neutrality that hides power.
Design for interdependence, not dominance.
Compost the mess, learn from failed projects instead of pretending they never happened.

We don’t need purity politics, we need living systems. If open is life, and closed is death –
what are we growing with our commits?

Make some compost.

#4opens

Why good faith is a technical requirement for #FOSS

Public Money, Private Hype: From Blockchain to AI – and the #FOSS Path Less Taken

In tech funding, over the last decade, the #EU poured hundreds of millions of euros into the #blockchain mess. The promise has proven to be illusion, we built no working transformation: trustless systems, frictionless governance or new economic layers for Europe. The reality? By any honest social metric, 99.9% of that public funding was poured straight down the drain.

Now we are lining up to do the same with AI. Another wave of hundreds of millions, based on another cycle of hype, feeding frenzy for consultants, startups, and policy conferences. And if we are realistic, 99% of this funding will follow the same path: absorbed into closed, corporate-driven ecosystems with minimal public return, poured down the drain.

In between these two hype cycles, we invested comparatively little in the #openweb and #FOSS. And yet that is where we actually saw meaningful results. Even if we are conservative and say 70% of public funding for #openweb and Free and Open Source Software was wasted, that still leaves 30% that worked. Thirty percent that built tools people use. Thirty percent that created infrastructure that continues to function. Thirty percent that delivered measurable social good.

Compared to less than 0.001% meaningful return from blockchain projects (and that’s being generous), and perhaps 1% from AI funding (also generous), this is an extraordinary success rate. So why aren’t we talking more about this?

The Pattern: Funding the Closed, Ignoring the Commons

The problem is not technology, it’s political economy. Public money is repeatedly funnelled into closed ecosystems. #Blockchain projects were built around proprietary platforms, based on financialisation. They all failed to deliver public infrastructure, most were simply vehicles for extraction.

#AI is following the same pattern. Instead of building public infrastructure rooted in openness, transparency, and shared governance, we are too often simply subsidising closed models and corporate consolidation. The result will be the same: dependency, vendor lock-in, and very little democratic control.

Meanwhile, the #4opens and #FOSS quietly power the world.

Servers run on open-source operating systems.
The web runs on open protocols.
Community platforms run on federated code.
Critical infrastructure depends on open libraries.

And yet funding for these projects remains very marginal, precarious, and treated, if at all, as an afterthought.

Why This Matters

This is not only about waste, it is about direction. We are living in an era of climate breakdown, democratic fragility, and accelerating inequality. Public investment needs to strengthen commons-based infrastructure, not deepen dependency on mess of speculative and corporate-controlled #dotcons. When we fund the #fashionista hype cycles we increase centralisation, reduce public oversight and lock ourselves into closed ecosystems, which hollow out our needed local capacity.

When we fund #openweb and #FOSS we build shared infrastructure, increase resilience, enable local innovation to create tools that can be forked, adapted, and reused. Even a poor 30% success rate in commons-based funding creates compounding social value. Code written once can be reused globally. Infrastructure built openly becomes a foundation others can extend. Knowledge stays in the public sphere.

Closed projects don’t compound in the same way. They expire, pivot, get acquired, and then disappear behind paywalls.

The Incentive Problem

So why does this mess keep happening? Because hype is easier to support than maintenance. The current #mainstreaming is to blind, Blockchain and AI come with glossy narratives of disruption and geopolitical competition. They promise growth, dominance, strategic autonomy. They flatter policymakers with the illusion of being at the frontier.

The #openweb and #FOSS, by contrast, are mundane. They are about maintenance, collaboration, and long-term stewardship. They don’t produce any unicorn valuations, the smoke and mirrors that feed splashy policy headlines. But they work, and in public policy, “working” should be the gold standard.

What We Need to Talk About

We need to keep asking direct #spiky questions about what percentage of publicly funded tech projects remain usable five years later? How many are open, forkable, and independently maintainable? Who owns the infrastructure we are building with public money? And does this investment strengthen the commons or subsidise enclosure? If we measured blockchain funding by long-term public utility, it would be exposed as a massive misallocation at best and fraud at worst. If we measure AI funding the same way in five years, we may reach the same conclusion. We #KISS need structural change:

Default to #4opens – Public funding #KISS should require open licenses, open standards, and transparent governance.
Fund Maintenance – Not just #fashionista projects, but long-term stewardship of critical open infrastructure.
Measure Social Value – Not hype, not valuation, not patents, but actual public use and resilience.
Grassroots tech as seedlings – to be open to real change and challenge in tech.
Support Commons Governance – Fund communities, not more startups.

Why We Need to Act

If we do not challenge the current messy #techshit cycle, we keep pushing ourselves into a future defined by the #dotcons, closed platforms with extractive models. To say this is not anti-technology, it is pro-public infrastructure. The choice is simple, do we keep pouring public money into, closed ecosystems with near-zero public return or invest systematically in the messy, imperfect, but functioning #openweb commons.

The data – even by generous estimates – is clear. Thirty percent real return beats 0.001% every time. We need to stop funding hype, we need to fund what works, and we need to say this loudly, before the next billion euros disappears down the same drain.

Why good faith is a technical requirement for #FOSS

If you’ve spent years in #FOSS, you’ve likely developed a strong allergy to vague political language. You care about licenses, reproducibility, governance models, and whether something actually runs. Good. That discipline is why free software exists at all.

But here’s the uncomfortable question, what if the biggest blocker to the #openweb right now isn’t technical debt – but social debt? And what if “good faith” is not a moral nicety, but a core infrastructure requirement?

The problem is when activism meets the #geekproblem. Anyone who pushes for change – especially against #mainstreaming pressures – develops a recurring relationship with bad faith. You see this when:

Corporate actors adopt the language of openness while enclosing the commons.

Institutions celebrate “community” while centralizing control.

Projects technically comply with openness while culturally gatekeeping participation.

This isn’t new, but the scale is new, in the age of #dotcons, #NGO enclosure is polished, funded, and normalized. Resistance generally fragmented, exhausted, and defensive as years of platform manipulation and extractive models have left people burnt out and cynical. In that climate, good faith is fragile, yet without it, nothing decentralized works. Good faith is infrastructure, decentralized systems cannot rely on coercion at scale. They rely on:

Trust

Transparency

Shared norms

The assumption is that participants are not actively trying to sabotage the commons, as when bad faith dominates, decentralized governance collapses into:

Endless meta arguments

Capture by the loudest actors

Drift toward hierarchy “for efficiency”

Sound familiar? This is why good faith isn’t sentimental, it’s structural. If you’ve ever tried to maintain a FOSS project while navigating trolls, corporate opportunists, and purity politics, you already know this.

To help the #4opens is a practical test, not a vibe. The #4opens framework exists precisely to operationalize good faith. It asks four simple questions of any grassroots tech project:

Is the data open?

Is the source open?

Are the processes open?

Are the standards open?

This extends beyond traditional open data initiatives (often institutional, often cosmetic). It covers the entire ecosystem of a project, not just its outputs. The value is not ideological purity, it’s resilience. When data, code, process, and standards are open:

Capture becomes harder.

Forking remains possible.

Governance can be contested transparently.

Communities can leave without losing everything.

That’s not abstract politics, it’s survival architecture. Composting the current rot is why #OMN exists as a project. We are living in a digital environment thick with enclosure and manipulation. Years of bad faith, disempowerment, and algorithmic extraction have created social decay. The instinct of many geeks is to build a cleaner stack and hope people migrate. But the problem isn’t just software, it’s trust collapse.

If the #openweb is to mean anything beyond developer autonomy, it has to support collective storytelling and coordination, not just individual expression. #OMN is a shovel, not a cathedral. It’s a way to compost the mess rather than pretend it isn’t there.

The #OMN (Open Media Network) is not a shiny new protocol. It’s deliberately simple: Publish, Subscribe, Moderate, Rollback, Edit. That’s it, no engagement hacks, no growth funnels and no surveillance capitalism. It’s a #DIY, trust-based, human-moderated space. Messy, organic, built for communities, not only users.

This matters in the era of #climatechaos and social break down. As climate instability accelerates, centralized platforms will align with state and corporate power to prioritize “order” over dissent and optimize for profitability in shrinking margins.

To balance these communities will need coordination without permission, information flows that aren’t algorithmically distorted and infrastructure they can adapt locally, that’s a social demand. If #FOSS remains culturally optimized for the small minority who enjoy living inside the #geekproblem, it will not meet that demand at all.

We need to understand that the vast majority do not want to self-host, they do not want to debate licences, they do not want to live inside issue trackers. They want functioning, trustworthy spaces, if we can’t provide that, someone else will – and it won’t be #4opens.

The hard part is working with the empowered disempowered of our #fashionista class. We have a generation trained in #closed systems that reward performative critique over collective construction. On #dotcons platforms and strands of #NGO thinking, people are empowered to disempower others with common sense #blocking of call-out culture, optics over substance and branding over shared process. You get a strange anti-politics, egotistical, individualistic, allergic to long-term responsibility. A culture that critiques power while replicating it. Escaping this dynamic may be uncomfortable, it may get nasty before it stabilizes.

But here are some kinder strategies we can use:

Make contributions obvious and low-drama, clear process reduces ego battles.

Reward maintenance, not only innovation, culture follows incentives.

Default to transparency over suspicion, sunlight reduces paranoia looping.

Design for groups, not influencers, collective accounts, shared moderation, distributed ownership.

Keep it simple (#KISS), as complexity amplifies gatekeeping.

None of this eliminates conflict, but it shifts the terrain from personality warfare to shared work.

An invitation to the sceptics, you don’t need to buy the rhetoric, maybe ask instead does this increase forkability? Reduce capture risk? Does it lower dependence on extractive infrastructure to strengthen collective agency? If the answers are yes, they belong in the #FOSS conversation. The future of the #openweb will not be secured by better branding or cleverer stacks. It will be secured by projects that treat good faith as a design constraint and collective resilience as the goal.

This is not about purity, it’s about durability. We can keep polishing tools for the tiny minority who enjoy living inside the #geekproblem, but, we need to build infrastructure that ordinary communities can also use to navigate the storms ahead. The invitation stands, pick up a shovel, help compost the mess by build something that gives back more than it extracts.

#4opens #indymediaback #openweb #compostingthemess #KISS #makeinghistory #OMN

State Funding of #FOSS and Open Source: Is it a Good Idea or a Bad Idea?

#FOSS needs to take a social lead

This matters for #FOSS because as if it remains culturally trapped inside the #geekproblem, it becomes socially irrelevant at the exact historical moment it is most needed. Right now, most #FOSS energy still assumes that if you build complex tools, argue narrowly, and keep everything technically “open,” people will come. But only a tiny minority actually want to live the full-stack geek life: self-hosting, compiling, debating licenses, maintaining infra. That path selects for a personality type. It is not neutral.

The problem isn’t that this path exists, it’s that it quietly tries to define culture. The tension is that the #geekproblem tends to reduce political and social questions to technical architecture. It too often treats freedom as a property of code, rather than a property of relationships. But in an era of #climatechaos, people don’t need abstract freedom in protocol design. They need mutual aid to build trust networks and local resilience. They need collective agency in open spaces to coordinate without corporate capture. These are #KISS social demands.

If #openweb remains framed as a technical alternative to Big Tech, it will only attract geeks and edge cases. If it is framed as a public infrastructure for collective survival, it suddenly matters to everyone. This shift in focus is urgent as climate disruption accelerates: Centralized platforms will prioritize profit and state alignment, infrastructure failures will become normal, feeding political polarization. Authoritarian coordination models will look “efficient.” If #FOSS cannot step outside the geek subculture, it leaves the field open to #dotcons and state/corporate hybrids to define digital coordination. That’s not a tech failure. It’s a social failure.

So, what changes this frameing? To make #openweb meaningful to the majority, we need to shift from tools to practices. Don’t only ask people to install software, ask what they are trying to do with digital tools together. Then lower cultural barriers, not just technical ones, by building code for groups, not only individuals. The mainstream internet optimizes for #stupidindividualism, the alternative needs to be balancing this mess, by optimizing for collectives.

Accept messiness, social systems are not elegant, they compost, they fork culturally before they fork technically. Centre use in crisis, not only ideology, when floods hit, when heatwaves hit, when services fail – what does the #openweb enable that corporate #dotcons platforms cannot? If the answer is “we have a nicer licence,” it won’t matter. If the answer is “your community can coordinate and survive without asking permission,” it becomes essential.

The hard truth is only a minority want to be geeks, but almost everyone wants dignity, voice, belonging and some stability in chaos. If #FOSS and #openweb can’t translate into those terms, they remain culturally marginal. This is why the issue is urgent, not because the code is broken – but because the social imagination around it is too small for the scale of the social and ecological crisis. And in the age of #climatechaos, infrastructure that doesn’t scale socially (#fluffy) will be replaced by infrastructure that scales politically (#spiky) – whether we like it or not.

The question isn’t whether #openweb works, it’s whether it can grow beyond the #geekproblem long enough to matter.

Commons and the metaphor of “grow a backbone”