Hope this helps compost some of the mess building up. It’s something we all need to do and have responsibility for.
Groups don’t usually fail because of external pressure, they fail because they turn inward and burn energy on themselves. If you want a calm, #KISS path that actually holds diversity without collapsing, we need a few simple lived – traditions and mythos – not heavy governance, not ideology battles, just grounded #KISS practice:
Keep the core action very small and clear – a shared purpose. If people can’t easily answer “what are we doing?”, drift and conflict creep in.
In twine “doing” with “talking” Most infighting comes from too much abstract discussion. Doing space – Talking space – Don’t let one swamp the other.
Protect focus like it’s fragile (because it is), the biggest risk isn’t disagreement – it’s distraction. When things start spiralling bring it back to “what are we building this week?” if it doesn’t help, park it
Default to trust, but design for friction, diversity is strength. But unbalanced diversity = chaos. So let people approach things differently, but require shared outputs – If it doesn’t produce something, it doesn’t dominate attention.
No purity tests, this is where diversity dies. People will come with different politics, paths (fluffy vs spiky) and have different priorities, that’s fine – as long as they don’t block others doing the work.
Make conflict low-energy, not zero-conflict – we won’t avoid disagreements. Trying repression = explosion later. Instead, keep arguments short, move unresolved tension into parallel paths (“try both”) and let results decide, not personalities. This is the “compost” approach we need to talk about – don’t fight the mess, process it.
Grow by doing, not convincing, you don’t need everyone to agree. You need visible, working examples. Let people see it working – that’s what grows a community of action.
What we are sketching and building is the hard middle path of not rigid control (kills growth) and not total openness (creates chaos). But a light structure that keeps things moving.
#Oxford example: Oxford boaters are sovereign, keeping the free-flowing life of the river, not bound by the old rules of the landlords.
#Fediverse example: The Fediverse is native to the #openweb path. We judge by the #4opens, and walk with power.
If we want a better web, we have to stop pretending this is just about “bad tech companies doing bad things.” Of course, they are-that’s what capitalist incentives produce. The real question is: what are we doing differently?
That means accepting some uncomfortable truths. The better path will be less convenient, at least at first. We will have to socially support things that used to look free on the #dotcons. Because the cost we didn’t want to face is simple: the #openweb was always going to be harder, someone has to:
The fantasy wasn’t that this work didn’t exist. The fantasy was that the market – advertising – would cover it without consequences.
In the current mess in tech paths, this becomes visible again. Bluesky and #ATproto keep getting lumped in with #ActivityPub under the easy label of “open protocols, yay”… but that’s just not true. Yes, they both sit in the #openweb space, but there’s a real structural problem here, and we’re seeing it play out in real time.
“Why would anyone fund an Atmosphere project if Bluesky, with $100 million in the bank, might ship a competing feature at any moment?”
That’s not an ecosystem. That’s a platform with enough gravity to crush its own edges. And people are noticing. The old pattern is back:
invite the community in
let them build the value
then absorb and replace them
Same playbook, again and again. It feels open – but the centre still holds the power. The same dynamic we saw with Twitter. The DNA is obvious.
The difference really matters. #ActivityPub was built as a commons path from the start – messy, flawed, but natively open. #ATproto is something else: a platform-first model with openness layered on top. That’s why it keeps drifting this way. It’s not a bug, it’s the design.
Too much #techshit, and everything starts to stink. Why would anyone step into the #openweb if that’s the smell? This creates a bigger problem, that it’s a mess that keeps coming back, and as usual we’ll be the ones left to compost it, underfunded, unrecorded, and unthanked.
We’ve been here before – with the #encryptionists and the #blockchain mess. Big promises, lots of noise, overlapping hype cycles. Now there’s a clear overlap with #Bluesky and #AI. The risk isn’t just that this fails. It’s that when it fails, it leaves a miasma behind, making it harder for people to trust the actually working open paths. That’s the real damage.
Neglect is not innocence, this isn’t about blaming users instead of power. Power matters. Monopolies matter. Venture capital mess matters. But still, if the #openweb mattered, why didn’t we support it?
Why do people pay for streaming, cloud, and delivery, but not support publishing tools, independent media, hosting, or open infrastructure?
Why did so many #NGO organisations that talked about openness still push people onto closed platforms the moment growth and analytics are on the table? We keep choosing short-term convenience over long-term stewardship, not just a market failure, a cultural one.
So lets look at this mess again. I’ve been trying to find a way to express my view of the people who took over outreach in the #Fediverse, and in doing so helped shape the current #openweb reboot.
DRAFT: naïve, controlling, and self-interested.
They’ve left a mess that the people they pushed aside now have to compost. It’s really useful to look at how we got here.
In the early years, outreach was organised by a genuinely diverse, native crew. It was a good time – three open conferences, and even getting the EU to adopt the standard. But that group burned out, focus splintered, self-interest crept in, driven by the need to control resources. The balance shifted, and grifters gradually outnumbered them, eventually tearing it apart. In the space left behind, a new crew stepped in – filling the vacuum with centralised power and influence. And that’s where we are today.
We don’t fix this by arguing harder. We fix it by building – and holding – open spaces that don’t follow this pattern.
It should be obvious that we need a path back to good journalism – journalism that sheds light on facts, connects the dots, and lets people trace those dots back to sources. This is what allows us to share, question, and discuss within our own trusted communities, and then spread that knowledge outward through federation, always linking back to the source.
Right now, the #mainstreaming path is broken. It’s sometimes hard for people to see this because the decline has been slow, a gradual death of journalism. Since the early days of the internet, we’ve been told the same story: “People expect news for free, so quality journalism is no longer economically viable.” There’s truth in that. Good journalism is expensive. It takes time, skill, trust, and institutional memory.
But that’s only half the story. What actually happened is this: people kept consuming familiar “news brands,” and those brands were bought, consolidated, and financialised until shareholder value replaced any sense of public value. Slowly, investigative journalists were cut and sidelined, editorial independence eroded, and content shifted toward ads, PR, and narrative management. What we now call “news” is marketing, agenda-setting, and reputation management – a distraction. Journalism, as a public good, has been hollowed out, in part through our own passive acceptance of this shift.
Today, we can see more clearly that if you do real journalism – the kind that challenges power – you have no real career path and face risks: #dotcons blocking, right-wing co-option, and at worst, isolation, exile, prison, or worse. The result is a broken landscape: corporate media that won’t tell the truth, and under-resourced independent media that carries high risk for little or no reward. In that situation, who chooses journalism as a life path?
The deeper problem is articulation and power. The world is complex, most people don’t have the time, energy, or tools to fully articulate what they see, feel, and experience. Into that gap step politicians, corporations, and #fashernista influencers. They have the resources – especially through the #dotcons – to articulate reality, but in ways that divide people, flatten complexity into conflict, and steer perception to serve power and profit. This isn’t just misinformation. It’s structured narrative control.
Why the old models won’t come back, we can’t simply “fix” legacy media. It is structurally tied to advertising, concentrated ownership, and political influence. And we can’t rely on heroic individuals either, that path is too fragile, too dangerous, and too easy to suppress. If journalism is going to survive, it won’t look like the past.
A different path: journalism as networked commons. At #OMN, we’re outlining a different approach decentralised, collective path. Think of it as a second coming of #Indymedia, but more resilient, more sustainable, and better integrated with current networks.
This is where the #openweb and the #Fediverse matter. With protocols like ActivityPub, we already have the foundations for distributed publishing, shared visibility, and cross-community discussion. But tech alone isn’t enough, the missing layer is trust and flow. To rebuild journalism, we need to focus on how information flows socially, not just how it’s published.
Metadata (tags, context, sources, warnings) travels with stories
People can trace information back through the flow
Instead of one “authoritative source,” we get many sources, with visible relationships between them, shaped through community trust and discussion. This is journalism people can actually use to follow a story back to its sources, add context and local knowledge and share and challenge it within trusted spaces.
That’s how we rebuild public understanding – not just publish articles – but from product to process. Journalism should not be a product to consume, it needs to be a process we participate in. When it’s treated as a product it’s optimised for clicks, shaped by incentives and in the end controlled by owners. When it becomes a process it becomes collective, accountable and thus resilient.
So composting the mess, we’re not starting from nothing, we have the ruins of legacy media, the lessons of projects like #Indymedia and the living infrastructure of the #Fediverse. This is compost, from it, we can grow something new – grounded in the #4opens, simple enough to understand (#KISS), and social at its core, not just technical.
The real question isn’t “How do we save journalism?” It’s: How do we rebuild the social systems that make truth-telling possible? Because without those paths, journalism doesn’t just struggle – it disappears.
YOU can’t do social change or challenge without annoying people If you think you can, you’re probably play-acting – and part of the problem – does that annoy you? If it does… maybe sit with that. 🙂 Food for thought, #4opens is a shovel for composting.
The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb. The tech – like ActivityPub – grew out of that culture. It wasn’t built by #mainstreaming interests.
Now money is flowing in, and with it comes risk of dilution of culture, capture of direction and loss of the commons. As more #mainstreaming users return to the #openweb, we need better tools and processes to handle the mess this brings.
And yes – sometimes the problem is us – when people inside our own spaces act badly, we need ways to respond, mediate, and move forward – without falling into cycles of negativity. That’s part of the work, part of #OMN.
The #Fediverse is native to #openweb thinking, it works. It will likely destroy billions of dollars of #CONTROL, and create billions in actual human value in return. But like the early #openweb, it can also be captured and pulled back into the same old control systems, this is the balance.
So the question is, are you on the side of CONTROL or TRUST?
Our obsession with control is doing real damage, it’s fed by dead-end ideology (#postmodernism), and amplified by #fashernistas pushing surface over substance. Yes – it’s messy. Yes – it’s complex, but ignoring that just makes it worse.
#stupidindividualism and the #deathcult are building an inhuman world, we can do better – but only if we’re willing to do the uncomfortable work.
In #mainstreaming and alt political cultures there’s a constant call in messy times for “strong leaders” to cut through the chaos, but this is the wrong path. What Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders actually show is something more uncomfortable and more useful that real change doesn’t come from strong individuals – it comes from movements we don’t fully control. They were signals, not saviours.
Both figures emerged on the left because something deeper was already shifting with widespread discontent, a break from #mainstreaming politics and a hunger for alternatives to 40 years of #deathcult worshipping. They didn’t create these conditions – they channelled them. “Weakness” is often misnamed, Corbyn in particular was constantly framed as weak, but what was actually happening? When people treat them as failed “leaders,” they miss the point, at best they were interfaces to movements, rather than top-down commanders. They:
Hold together fragile, diverse coalition
Refusal to impose top-down control
Emphasis on process, participation, and consensus
In a stable system, this might look slow, in a fragile system, it’s often the only thing preventing collapse. In the open vs closed battle, it’s not as simple as it looks – especially in the mess we’re in.
CLOSED → conservative / fear / control OPEN → progressive / hope / trust
We need to keep looking at the underlying path when deciding which way to push the balance.
Where the demand for “strength” usually means more control, less democracy. That path tends to deepen the mess, not fix it, as personality politics is a dead end. When media and institutions focus on personalities where movements are about issues and structures. This mismatch is fatal if your politics depends on a person you are attacked through that person – we all collapse when they falter. You never build lasting power, it is the trap both campaigns fell into, despite trying to avoid it.
Movements without structure (hard or soft) stall, is the harder truth – Horizontal energy alone isn’t enough – Electoral politics alone isn’t enough. Both Corbyn and Sanders mobilised huge grassroots energy, but institutions resisted, internal fragmentation grew – the energy wasn’t fully translated into durable paths, and they fell through the gap.
From a #OMN perspective, the takeaway is clear – Don’t look for better leaders – Don’t rely on existing institutions – Build commons-based infrastructure that movements can stand on. This means: Media we control (#indymedia paths), Governance we participate in (#OGB) and tech that reflects trust, not control (#openweb, #Fediverse)
So in messy times, don’t reach for “Strong Leaders” as this comes from fear, frustration and the desire for simple solutions, history – from left and right – shows where that road leads. In poisoned times, the work is slower, to build trust, to stay grounded in shared issues.
Corbyn and Sanders didn’t fail because they were too weak, they struggled because we don’t yet have the social, technical, and institutional commons needed to carry the kind of change they pointed toward. That’s the work, and it’s not about finding the right leader – it’s about becoming the movement that doesn’t need one.
At #NOAW event I talked a lot about the digital commons so thought it might be useful to write a post grounding this. The digital commons are not a future vision, it’s something we already have. At its simplest, the digital commons are the widely used #4opens digital resources of software, knowledge, data, and culture created collectively, governed by communities, and made available for public (re)use. This is the native path of the #openweb it’s been around for a long time, it might be hard to see but just about all of our current #dotcons mess is built on top of this layer.
There is a long history of commons in wider society. But mostly today we focus on the licences that protect reuse and sharing. None of this is abstract theory, it’s making the practical, working infrastructure that underpins much of what people still find useful online. One of the roots of the current digital commons go back to the 1980s and the emergence of the free software movement, led by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. This was not just about code, it was a social and political project:
Software should be shared
Users should have control
Improvements should remain in the commons
The creation of the GNU General Public Licence was the first step, enforcing a simple rule that if you benefit from the commons, you give back to the commons. The commons isn’t one thing, it’s an ecosystem – Some #KISS examples include:
Wikis – collectively written and maintained knowledge (#Wikipedia)
Open source software – built in public, shared freely (#FOSS)
Public code repositories like GitHub used to be (name one)
Open licensing systems like Creative Commons
Federated social tools built on ActivityPub (#Mastodon)
The Path is governance by the people who use it. What makes the digital commons different from “just free stuff” is this the people building it can shape how it works, a key distinction it’s not just access – it’s agency. The commons are non-exclusive (available to others), oriented toward use and reuse and governed by its participants, this is why it matters politically.
Today, much of the internet still runs on the digital commons, but the visible layer is dominated by #dotcons platforms. This creates a split of Commons layers → open, slow, sustainable and Platform layers → closed, extractive, growth-driven. People still rely on the commons, but interact through closed systems, this contradiction is unstable.
Policy is our current-missed opportunity, as our institutions see only the surface value. The European Union’s European Commission has pushed open source strategies as part of digital sovereignty, particularly through programmes like Horizon Europe. The idea is native – Share code – Collaborate openly – Build public infrastructure. But in practice, most of this gets lost in #NGO process, bureaucracy, and capture. The money flows, but the commons don’t grow.
The “Tragedy” of the Digital Commons. Like any commons, in the mess we live in today commons can be degraded from overuse (infrastructure strain), pollution (spam, low-quality content, noise) and information overload. The result is a corrupted signal-to-noise ratio, it is a real issue – but it’s to often used as an excuse to centralise control. This is largely solved by horizontal vs virtical scaling, if people can take this real native path.
There are social gaps. The commons reflects the culture that builds it, yes gender imbalance persists, access is uneven, and geek culture is too often exclusionary (#geekproblem). But the bigger problem we face is capture and drift. We’ve already seen it happen once: Free software → “open source” (politics stripped out). Commons → #dotcons platform capture.
Now we see this happening in the #Fediverse and #openweb reboot spaces with the last few years of vertical agendas dominating to meany outreach spaces, #NGO mediation and thus diluten is pushing native grassroots agency out, this is an old cycle repeating – the cycle that we need to compost.
OK, despite all the #mainstreaming mess, the digital commons are still the most viable path we have, we need to see this path not as hypothetical – more as it just works, but is underresourced. From a #OMN perspective, the digital commons are not only infrastructure, it’s the soil. You don’t build movements on platforms, you grow them in commons, but this growth needs care:
Protection from capture
Active governance
Social grounding, not just technical process
And most importantly the commons only survives if people act as commoners. The challenge now isn’t only to explain the digital commons, it’s to defend, rebuild, and extend it. That means funding native projects, keeping governance in the hands of participants to bridge activism, development, and real-world use as a path to push back against the continuing #mainstreaming capture.
This is not about nostalgia, it’s about #KISS recognising that we already have the tools we need, then caring enough not to only exploit them. Please try and be better than the current #mainstreaming on this, thanks.
Today there are a lot of dishonest people – it’s become the default. Finding someone who is actually truthful is rare. So with this in mind, let’s stop being polite about this, what we’re living inside online right now isn’t “social media.” It’s a managed enclosure – a system designed to extract value, shape behaviour, and concentrate power. It’s what I have been saying for the last 20 years. Call it what it is – digital #feudalism – The Lords, the Serfs, and the Server.
When everyone is pushed onto one big virtual server, you don’t get community, you get hierarchy. Platform owners become landlords. Users become tenants. Visibility becomes rent. This is not accidental, it’s the business model and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The lie of “Ease of Use”. People say these #closedweb systems are “easy.” They’re not, they hide the cost, what looks simple is just complexity moved out of sight. Advertising Is the rot, a business model moral hazard, when profit depends on attention truth becomes optional and outrage becomes profitable leading to manipulation as the new normal. You don’t get healthy communities from this, you get addiction loops and behavioural engineering. And yes, the inevitable result is screen clutter, noise, and a slow degradation of any meaningful communication, communities are managed, not grown.
So who is going to do the #DIY work? Real moderation works when it’s embedded in the community itself. Algorithmic control is anti-social, the algorithmic timeline is one of the worst ideas we’ve normalised. It drives distraction, by showing you more of what you’ve already seen, it tries to control your desires by interfering with human communication. Over time, this destroys trust, when people stop knowing if they’re being heard, they stop knowing what is real, stop trusting the space. That’s not a bug, it’s the outcome.
The celebrity illusion is how centralised platforms manufacture “importance” for brands and influencers. These only function inside controlled visibility systems, outside of that? They’re often just paper tigers. In a real network – a messy, distributed, human one – influence has to be earned, not bought or algorithmically inflated.
The commodification of human life leads to inevitable decay. Left alone, centralised platforms drift towards monopoly, manipulation and towards the amplification of the worst actors as these actors game the system best. Without constant control from above, the system degrades, with repression, it becomes what we see today, authoritarian. That’s the trap, a community you can buy your way into is not a community, it’s a marketplace.
So what’s the alternative? We don’t fix this by tweaking features. We fix it by changing the ground or tech grows from. This new growth has been seeded by the #Fediverse, It’s where the #OMN comes in, not as another platform, but as a shift back to distributed networks instead of central servers, commons-based paths instead of enclosure, social moderation instead of outsourced control, open protocols instead of locked interfaces. And yes, that means less “slick”, less uniform, more messy. But also more real, accountable and human.
A final point (That should be obvious). The problem is not that the current #dotcons systems are broken, the problem is that they are working exactly as designed. If we want something better, we don’t patch the system, we compost it to grow the #openweb back – this time with the native cultural roots intact.
Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, decentralisation, and horizontal collaboration. Through writing, workshops, and practical projects, he argues that the future of the Fediverse depends as much on culture, governance, and shared infrastructure as it does on code.
Purpose is to open conversation that many people feel but rarely articulate: the tension between grassroots culture and institutional capture. Start with your simple distinction:
Bad #mainstreaming → corporate/NGO structures reshaping the Fediverse
Then ask: “Which direction are we currently moving?”
Discussion topics – funding and governance, foundations and institutional capture, developer vs user power, infrastructure vs platforms. How to avoid repeating Web 2.0
Activity is to ask participants to map layers: Grassroots – NGO / institutional – Corporate. To discuss where power currently sits and what healthy balance might look like.
Outcome is people leave with language to understand the tensions they are experiencing in the Fediverse.
Workshop 02
Maybe a second one on why #makeinghistory is needed? Translating #OMN from “activist infrastructure” into “missing public digital infrastructure.” That language is what this event is trying to figure out. The Open Media Network (#OMN) proposes a model where grassroots publishing, community moderation, and institutional participation are balanced. Participants can discuss how institutions support shared infrastructure rather than just deploying isolated platforms.
Many institutions are experimenting with the Fediverse as an alternative to #dotcons corporate social media. However, simply running institutional servers risks reproducing the same platform dynamics in a federated form. We need workshops that explore the broader ecosystem of public-interest media infrastructure.
“What happens after institutions join the Fediverse?” The #KISS answer is they need to support the commons infrastructure that makes it socially viable. Running Mastodon is not enough, institutions need to support the wider open media ecosystem.
Talking about #openweb culture in a constructive way is tricky because most #FOSS and Fediverse conversations default to technical framing: code quality, scalability, moderation tooling, and #UX. These things matter, but they are not the foundation that determines whether a network lives or dies.
Maybe a useful way to open the conversation is to shift the starting point. Instead of saying “culture is important too”, say something stronger but practical: The success or failure of open systems is primarily a cultural question, not a technical one. The code only expresses the culture behind it.
Start with a simple historical observation. Many technically strong systems failed because the social layer was weak, while some technically rough systems succeeded because the community culture worked.
Examples from the open web – early open source projects that thrived because communities shared norms of collaboration. Grassroots networks like Indymedia worked socially even when the software was messy. Corporate platforms that succeeded not because they were technically better, but because they built powerful social gravity.
The pattern is clear, that technology enables networks, but culture sustains them. This is the missing step in most Fediverse conversations. Right now to meany discussions focus on: scaling servers, moderation tools, interface design and onboarding. These are all necessary but insufficient.
What way to often goes missing is the deeper questions – What culture are we actually trying to grow? Without answering that, the system tends to drift toward the dominant internet culture, which today is shaped by the #dotcon platform model of engagement optimisation, algorithmic attention markets, influencer dynamics and centralised power. When that culture seeps into the Fediverse, the result is a federated copy of the same problems.
So why is culture harder than code? Code can be written by a few developers, culture requires shared understanding across thousands of people. To grow this we need native governance norms, trust networks, moderation values and expectations about ownership and participation to hold to native paths for how conflict is handled. These things cannot simply be implemented in software, they must be grown socially, fail to address this is why many technically strong projects fail, they assume the social layer will somehow emerge automatically. It rarely does.
To make this constructive, it helps to clearly describe what we mean by #openweb culture. Some core values historically included public-first communication rather than platform ownership, decentralised responsibility instead of central moderation authority, commons thinking rather than product thinking to nurture horizontal participation rather than audience/influencer hierarchies, this need clear #4opens processes rather than opaque decision-making.
These values were never perfect, but they created a different social environment from today’s corporate social media. If we do not actively cultivate these values, the surrounding internet culture will slowly overwrite them. If the Fediverse continues to grow without addressing culture as it currently is, the most likely outcome is large institutional instances dominate, smaller community spaces struggle leading to more moderation being centralised. This all shifts user expectations toward platform-style experiences.
At that point, the system may still be technically federated, but the culture will have drifted back toward Web 2.0. The code will be open, but the social dynamics will not be.
So the “extra step” is simply, we must talk about culture as deliberately as we talk about software architecture. That means asking questions like: What social norms should Fediverse communities encourage? What governance models support open participation? How do we keep the ecosystem diverse rather than dominated by large actors? What responsibilities come with running infrastructure in a commons network?
These conversations are sometimes uncomfortable, because they move beyond engineering into politics, sociology, and ethics. But avoiding them does not make them disappear, it simply means the culture will be shaped by default forces instead of conscious choices.
A simple way to frame this – A phrase that often works well in discussion is – “Code builds the network, but culture decides what the network becomes.” If we want the #openweb to remain something different from the #closedweb platform internet, we need to invest as much thought into the culture as we do into the code and #UX. Otherwise, the technology may succeed technically, but the social project behind it will quietly fail.
Public Money, Public Communication, Public Infrastructure
Public institutions are funded by taxpayers. Their role is to serve the public. So it should be obvious that their communication systems are open, accessible, and accountable to everyone -without requiring people to sign up to proprietary, for-profit platforms.
Yet this is not the world we live in. Today, much of public communication is effectively outsourced to the #dotcons. If you want to follow government updates, participate in consultations, or even access timely public information, you are often expected to create an account on a closed platform – designed for profit, data extraction, and behavioural manipulation. That alone should raise serious questions.
This contradiction is especially stark in Europe as they regularly speak about digital sovereignty, data protection and public accountability. And yet, at the same time, they rely on U.S.-based corporate platforms to communicate with their own citizens. It’s a strange situation:
Public institutions, funded by European taxpayers, using foreign, proprietary infrastructure to mediate public communication.
Not only does this create dependency, it also places public discourse inside systems that are not governed by public interest.
It’s not just ironic. It’s structurally broken, we should think about prosicuting the people who have made this happen.
The access problem, useing closed platforms to access public communication creates real barriers: Not everyone wants to create or maintain dotcons social media accounts. Some people are excluded for ethical, political, or practical reasons. Algorithms decide what is seen and what is not. Public information becomes entangled with advertising and engagement metrics. This undermines a basic democratic principle that public communication should be universally accessible, without conditions.
We already have an alternative to this curupt mess, the #DIY#OpenWeb comes from europe, it offers a different path. Instead of #closedweb platform dependency, it builds on open standards, interoperable systems with multiple access points, no user lock-in. This is not a new path, it is how the web was originally created to work in the EU.
An example project that contines this native mission and supports this is the #OMN whitch creates spaces where public institutions and public communities can meet on equal terms, without one dominating the other, and without relying on closed corporate systems. If institutions instead invest in and support the wider #OMN ecosystem, they help build something fundamentally different, a public communication infrastructure that is open by default, accessible to all, resilient and distributed and aligned with democratic values.
A simple principle, if it is funded by the public, it should be accessible to the public – without restriction. No accounts required, no platform dependency and no hidden gatekeepers.
We need to organise a call to act. Public institutions need to move beyond simply using the #Fediverse. They need to help build and sustain the commons that makes open communication possible. That means, supporting open infrastructure projects, funding shared ecosystems like the #OMN and building real, not facke PR commitment to public-first communication practices.
This is not just a technical shift, it is a political and cultural choice.
A simple #KISS way forward is to shift public social communication onto the #Fediverse. This is already a significant improvement on current platform dependency. However, I want to raise a point that may sound controversial at first, but is actually quite practical: public institutions should not rely exclusively on the existing codebases.
Most current Fediverse platforms have done vital groundwork – particularly in establishing shared protocols, interoperability, and a working culture of federation. That contribution is important and should be recognised. However, many of these tools evolved shaped by the same assumptions as #dotcons and constrained by #NGO project models. As a result, they can be complex, difficult to maintain, and not always well aligned with the long-term needs of public institutions or commons-based infrastructure.
A constructive path forward would be to fund the development of a small number of new, purpose-built codebases focused on commons publishing. Not one, but three parallel implementations.
Why three? Because diversity reduces risk. In practice, not every project will succeed – this is normal and expected. Funding multiple approaches ensures resilience, encourages innovation, and avoids over-reliance on a single solution. The cost of doing this would be minimal relative to existing public digital budgets, yet the potential long-term value is significant.
Importantly, this is not about replacing the existing ecosystem. Because the Fediverse is built on shared protocols, any new tools would remain fully interoperable with current platforms. This means users of existing services can still interact seamlessly, while the overall ecosystem becomes stronger, more diverse, and better aligned with public service values.
In short: build on what exists, but don’t be constrained by it. By investing modestly in new, commons-oriented infrastructure alongside the current tools, public institutions can shape a more robust, sustainable, and genuinely public digital communication space.
Outreach to @newsmast interesting to see the #NGO view of the real alt path we need to take https://hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of-workshops-to-run-at-nodes-on-a-web-noaw-unconference/ you guys might be interested in working on the 3ed workshop outline. The 3 codebase need to be 1) mainstreaming, 2) radical #NGO and 3) native messy grassroots. You guys could be the second codebase. We do need diversity, best not to keep blindly messing up this path in the current globe mess.
Stopped going to in-person general tech conferences around 15 years ago – they’d become beyond pointless. Since then, I’ve stuck to more focused online events.
Now heading back to an in-person one. Curious what I’ll actually find.
I have a feeling it’ll be about 75% pointless, 20% narrow geek, academic and #NGO-focused (slightly useful), and maybe 5% – probably less – actually useful.
Let’s see how that shifts after the event.
UPDATE: The event was posative, people were looking for change.
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:
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
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.
Something that’s worth saying out loud: many of the people currently talking for the #Fediverse had very little to do with the generation that seeded this version. That doesn’t automatically make what they say wrong. But it does mean we should be careful about building strategy around their narratives.
A lot of the early Fediverse energy came from the older #openweb traditions of hacker and #FOSS culture, experiments in federated infrastructure and grassroots publishing networks. The long history of things like RSS feeds, blogging, and projects like #indymedia
The #Fediverse didn’t appear out of nowhere, it grew from decades of experimentation with open protocols, decentralised communication, and commons-based infrastructure. Some of the current commentators arrived after the current seeds had already been planted. That’s normal, every movement eventually attracts interpreters, professionalisers, and institutions. But it does mean there is a risk that the story gets rewritten in ways that lose the original lessons.
One of those lessons is simplicity, the systems that spread tend to follow a basic rule: #KISS – Keep It Simple: Simple protocols. Simple tools. Simple ways for people to publish and connect. When infrastructure becomes complicated – governance layers, funding structures, branding strategies, endless, #NGO mediated theoretical debates – the distance between the actual people and the invisible elitism occupying the space, talking the loudest, grows larger.
The Fediverse itself only exists because a handful of people quietly built working code and released it under #4opens licences. Communities adopted it because it worked, not because it was well marketed, not because institutions endorsed it and not because a conference panel explained its importance.
For projects growing the #openweb, the lesson is straightforward: Don’t get too distracted by who is currently speaking for the ecosystem. Look at flows, what is being built, at what people have used and at what follows the basic principles of the commons. And keep things simple. #KISS is still the best guides we have.
Stepping around the recurring #NGO voices in #openweb debates. To do this the problem we need to compost is our lack of balance, meany of the people talking for us have done the same thing for each generation of the open web and bluntly there “common sense” has always failed as it is not native to the #openweb. These people have no idea that they keep circling this mess, so please try and step around them. Because they talk loudly and consistently, newcomers often assume they represent the ecosystem, they don’t. The practical lesson is simple:
Notice them.
Learn from the patterns of past generations.
Step around them.
Our task is to grow native, functioning, living networks, not to repeat old mainstreaming debates that have consistently led nowhere. In other words: don’t argue with the noise, build around it. Keep the focus on grassroots projects, real communities, and real trust-based infrastructure.
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.
