Tag: nothingnew

Treating everything as personal conflict is a dead end

Let’s focus on being honest, the most exhausting and destructive habit in activist and alternative tech spaces is the blinded reflex to turn disagreement into personal conflict. Someone challenges an idea, and it becomes an attack, names a pattern of behaviour, and suddenly it’s a vendetta. Someone points at structural problems and gets accused of targeting individuals. This is #stupidindividualism in its purest form, and it’s #nothingnew.

It’s not only about difficult personalities or bad intent, it’s the result of forty years of #neoliberal conditioning. The #deathcult of “common sense” market logic has trained us to see everything as personal, personal responsibility, personal success, personal failure, personal conflict. The frameworks for understanding structural problems have been stripped away, so when structural problems are talked about, people fall back on the only tool they’ve been given – finding someone to blame.

The result is nasty and predictable, good projects collapse into personality clashes, needed critiques get dismissed as personal attacks. The real issues will be the systemic mess that needs composting, never get addressed, because everyone is too busy dealing with the drama. This is #deathcult doing what it’s designed to do – keep us fighting each other instead of the system.

So why do we struggle to see this mess, it’s mostly invisible to the people caught inside it as people feel like they’re responding reasonably to real problems, and sometimes they are. But the frame – “this person is the problem” – is almost always wrong as this mess runs like background software, it shapes perception before conscious thought kicks in. A structural critique goes in, a personal accusation comes out – not because people are stupid, but because that’s how they’ve been trained to interpret things.

This is why telling people to “be less defensive” or “think structurally” rarely works. Were asking people to change behaviour without changing the environment that produces it. Culture follows structure, if we want different behaviour, we need different processes, practices, and spaces.

How we actually compost this? It isn’t about perfection, it’s about having better tools – some practical shovels (like the #OMN) to use to name the pattern, not the person, when things start getting personal, we simply shift the frame. “This feels like it’s turning into a personal conflict, but the issue is actually how we’re making decisions” works better than “you’re being defensive.” One opens space, the other closes it.

  • Build processes before you need them, don’t wait for conflict to figure out how to handle it. Groups that survive disagreement usually have simple, visible processes in place: how decisions happen, how issues get raised, who mediates. This is what #4opens and #OGB are for – use them early.
  • Separate decision-making from chat as most drama lives in chat spaces – WhatsApp, Discord, comment threads are optimised for reaction, not reflection. If decisions happen there, we’ll get reactive, personalised outcomes. Move important decisions into slower, more visible, documented spaces.
  • Make structural problems visible as vagueness fuels personalisation – Clear statements like “our funding model creates dependency” or “new people can’t influence decisions” give people something real to work on. Without that clarity, frustration gets directed at individuals.
  • Actively grow a different culture, its slow, but it works. Model structural thinking by rewarding people who name patterns rather than blame individuals. Create spaces where “this process isn’t working” is normal. Over time, this shifts what feels like common sense.
  • Let people step back without drama, not everyone can work in structurally-aware, non-hierarchical spaces right now, that’s OK. If leaving a project becomes a crisis, everything becomes personal. Lower the stakes, reduce the pressure, and personalisation drops.
  • Compost failure publicly, when things go wrong, talk about what failed, not who failed.
    The #openweb keeps reinventing broken wheels because we don’t compost our mistakes. Honest, structural post-mortems build shared learning.

The deeper work is that none of this is quick. The #deathcult didn’t embed itself over decades by accident, and it won’t disappear because of a few good arguments. People don’t think their way out of (stupid)individualism, they experience their way out.

What works is repetition of building spaces that function differently, showing that collective approaches work and sticking with it long enough for that experience to become normal. That’s the path of #OMN not only focusing on fixing people, not that only the right language solves everything. The path is #KISS, building open, trust-based, structurally honest systems – and composting the failures along the way – we slowly shift what “common sense” looks like.

The work is slow, practical, and unglamorous, the shovel is structure, the compost is honesty. The soil is what grows when we stop treating every problem as someone’s fault. Pick up the shovel, there’s a lot to get through.

#OMN #4opens #KISS #nothingnew

The Fluffy/Spiky Debate and the Trolls in Between

The fluffy/spiky tension is one of the oldest and least resolved arguments in activist and grassroots organising spaces. It’s real, it’s necessary, and it’s been exploited. Let’s name the grounding first.

The Fluffy Position

Fluffy politics is about inclusion, emotional safety, consensus, and non-confrontation. At its best it builds welcoming spaces, holds diverse people together, and prevents the macho posturing that drives people away from radical movements. Fluffy people are doing the invisible emotional labour that keeps groups functioning. Without them, most grassroots projects collapse into ego wars.

At its worst, fluffy becomes conflict avoidance dressed as principle. Real problems don’t get named,difficult people don’t get challenged. The group becomes a feelings-management exercise rather than an organising force. Nothing spiky – meaning nothing that actually confronts power – ever gets done, because confrontation itself has been pathologised.

The Spiky Position

Spiky politics embraces confrontation, directness, and a willingness to name uncomfortable truths regardless of who gets upset. At its best it cuts through bullshit, holds people accountable, and actually frightens the powerful rather than merely inconveniencing them. Spiky people often do the work nobody else wants to do – the hard conversation, the direct action, the refusal to pretend things are fine when they aren’t.

At its worst, spiky becomes machismo with a political justification. Aggression gets mistaken for radicalism, burning things down feels more satisfying than building. People who raise concerns about tone or process get dismissed as weak, co-opted, or bourgeois. The movement shrinks to whoever can tolerate the bad atmosphere.

The Debate

The genuine fluffy/spiky debate is worth having. Movements need both tendencies and the tension between them is productive when it’s honest. Fluffy without spiky produces nice shallow groups that change nothing. Spiky without fluffy produces effective alienators who also change little, just more dramatically. The balance is hard and context-dependent – what works on a picket line is different from what works in a community meeting, which is different again from what works online.

The problem is this debate rarely gets had with any honestly, because of a third character type who poisons the the change and challange path.

The Passive-Spiky Fluffy Troll

This is the one that needs naming clearly. This character tends to presents as fluffy. They speak the language of care, inclusion, and safety. They invoke consensus, call for kindness, and position themselves on the moral high ground of the group. But their actual behaviour is spiky in the most destructive possible way – not the honest confrontational spiky that names real problems, but a passive, weaponised spiky that:

  • Distracts – derails productive conversations with tone policing, and hurt feelings at strategic moments
  • Decides – makes unilateral calls while performing consultation, using the language of consensus to smuggle through their own blinded preferences
  • Destroys – systematically undermines people and projects they find threatening, always with plausible deniability, always from behind the shield of their own stated good intentions

They are, in effect, trolls. Not the obvious aggressive troll who can be identified and dealt with, but something more insidious – the troll wearing a fluffy third-bear costume, all warmth on the surface, all disruption underneath.

The Character Types

The Tone Policer – Never engages with substance, always has a concern about how something was said. Uses the language of trauma and safety to shut down challenges to their comfort or control. Allies with whoever seems most aggrieved at any given moment.

The Consensus Hijacker – Performs collective process while actually steering outcomes. Calls meetings, sets agendas, summarises discussions in ways that happen to always reflect their own narrow position. If challenged, expresses deep hurt that their commitment to the group is being questioned.

The Concern Troll – Agrees with the goal in principle, always. Just has concerns. So many concerns. The timing isn’t right, the framing is off, this might alienate people, have we really thought this through. Concern is infinite and self-replenishing, ensuring nothing ever moves forward.

The Moral Credentialist – Collects grievances and allyships like armour. Their identity and stated commitments make them immune to criticism. Any challenge to their behaviour becomes an attack on the community they represent. This is the most effective variant because it recruits others to their defence automatically.

The Exhaustion Engine – Doesn’t block directly, just makes everything take so long, require so much emotional management, and generate so much process overhead that the capable people eventually leave. Wins by attrition.

What To Do

Treat them as trolls. Not with hostility – that plays into their framing – but with the same basic approach you’d use for any bad-faith actor in a shared space:

  • Don’t feed the performance. Engaging earnestly with endless concern-raising rewards the behaviour.
  • Name the pattern, not the person. “This keeps happening and it’s blocking us” is more useful than “you are doing this deliberately.”
  • Keep moving. Don’t let process objections halt action indefinitely. Document, note the objection, proceed.
  • Protect the genuinely fluffy people. Real fluffy organisers are valuable and they’re often the first casualties of passive-spiky trolling, because they’re the most susceptible to guilt and the most invested in harmony.

The fluffy/spiky debate is needed, but the passive-spiky fluffy troll makes sure it never happens properly. Naming them is the first step to composting the mess they make.

Turning stress, conflict, and exhaustion into commons culture instead of mutual destruction

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies – not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn

The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective well-being – a behaviour normalised by forty years of #neoliberalism, where people work against their own community and ecological survival while believing they are exercising “freedom”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=stupidindividualism

In the #OMN hashtag story, #spiky is the confrontational, direct, and uncompromising tendency within radical movements – the willingness to push back against power, name uncomfortable truths, and refuse to sand down political edges for mainstream comfort.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=spiky

#RSS is the unglamorous but democratic backbone of the #openweb – a simple, open standard that allows content to flow without the gatekeeping, algorithmic manipulation, and the data hoarding of the #dotcons.

#reboot is the necessary reset of the #openweb – stepping away from the dead ends of #techshit and #dotcons to rebuild human-centred, trust infrastructure using tools like #activitypub and the #fediverse, guided by the #4opens.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=reboot

#postmodernism is the cultural current that dissolved shared truth into competing narratives, undermines the foundations needed for collective action – leaving people fragmented, cynical, and unable to build solidarity.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=postmodern

In the #OMN hashtag story, #Oxford is a grounded example of real-world contradiction – where elitist power (#mainstreaming, #NGO, #deathcult) coexists with genuine grassroots community, making it a test bed for grassroots #openweb organising and the #4opens path.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Oxford

In the #OMN hashtag story, #PGA (Peoples’ Global Action) represents horizontal, grassroots, anti-capitalist organising – a prefiguration of the #openweb, built on direct action and solidarity rather than #NGO bureaucracy or #mainstreaming compromise.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=PGA

In the #OMN path, #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer – real human relationships and trust as the foundation that decentralised tech should serve, not replace.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=p2p

In the #OMN view, #opensource is not just a licence – it’s a political commitment to transparency, shared ownership, and community control over code, data, and process.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opensource

The #openweb is internet infrastructure built on open standards, open-source code, and community control – where users share power – as opposed to the #dotcons, with the #closedweb which enclose and monetise the commons.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openweb

#openprocess means decisions and governance happen visibly and participatorily – not behind closed doors, so people can see, challenge, and shape outcomes.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openprocess

#opendata means data that is freely accessible and shareable – controlled by communities rather than locked inside corporate silos.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opendata

In the #OMN path, #open means building on the #4opens – open code, data, standards, and process as a foundation for technology that serves people, not profit.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=open

#OMN (Open Media Network) is a grassroots project to build human-centred, trust-based digital infrastructure on the #openweb, grounded in the #4opens and focused on community control over technology.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN

The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is a framework for transparent, inclusive decision-making – replacing hidden power structures with accountable, federated, messy collective governance.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OGB

In the #OMN story, #nothingnew reminds us that cycles of co-option and failure have all happened before – and ignoring this history is how we repeat mistakes.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=nothingnew

In the #OMN story, #NGO refers to professionalised activism that defuses radical politics – replacing grassroots power with managed, funder-friendly “dissent”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=NGO

In the #OMN path, #neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of markets over people – normalising greed and eroding solidarity into the logic of the #deathcult.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=neoliberalism

#makinghistory is the practice of communities reclaiming storytelling – building open, living archives rather than leaving history to those in power.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=makeinghistory

In #OMN usage, #mainstreaming is how radical ideas get absorbed and neutralised – keeping the language while stripping out real challenge.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=mainstreaming

In the #OMN path, #KISS (“Keep It Simple, Stupid”) is a political stance against the #geekproblem – rejecting unnecessary complexity as a form of control.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=KISS

#indymediaback is a call to rebuild grassroots, community-controlled media as an alternative to both #dotcons and hollow #NGO media structures.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=indymediaback

In the #OMN path, a hashtag is not just a label – it’s a node in a shared political vocabulary, building a map of meaning and direction.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=hashtag

#grassroots means bottom-up organising rooted in real communities – accountable to collective need, not institutions.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=grassroots

The #geekproblem is the tendency to replace human trust with technical control – embedding narrow values into systems that shape everyone’s lives.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=geekproblem

In #OMN, #FOSS is a political commitment to collective ownership of technology – not just a licensing model.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=FOSS

In #OMN language, #fluffy describes feel-good politics that avoid conflict – prioritising comfort over any real change.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fluffy

#feudalism describes the emerging digital structure where platform owners extract value like lords from dependent users.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=feudalism

#fascism is what happens when the #deathcult drops its mask – authoritarian control to defend failing systems.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fascism

On the #OMN path, the #fediverse is practical #openweb infrastructure – decentralised, federated, and not owned by corporations.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fediverse

#encryptionist describes the tendency to prioritise technical security over social trust – a core expression of the #geekproblem.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Encryptionist

#dotcons are corporate platforms built on data extraction and control, presenting themselves as neutral while enclosing the commons.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

In the #OMN story, #DIY means reclaiming the ability to build and organise outside institutional control – grounding politics in practice.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

The #deathcult is the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism – sacrificing social and ecological survival for short-term fear drivern greed.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

In the #OMN story, #compost means breaking down failure and mess into fuel for new growth.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

In #OMN, #closedweb is controlled, extractive digital infrastructure where users have no power.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

#climatechaos describes the accelerating breakdown driven by the #deathcult, beyond manageable “climate change.”
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

#classwar is the ongoing conflict between the #nastyfew and the communities they exploit – often hidden by #mainstreaming narratives.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

#capitalism is the dominant system turning everything – relationships, nature, culture – into “profit”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

In #OMN, #block is the reflex to shut down challenge – preventing the messy work needed for real change.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

#blinded is being unable or unwilling to see beyond #mainstreaming and #dotcons logic.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

#fashernista describes performative activism that prioritises appearance over substance.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

#dotcons are the corporate platforms – Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube and their kin – whose business model is built on harvesting user data, manufacturing engagement, and converting human attention and community into profit, while presenting themselves as neutral public spaces.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

In the #OMN hashtag story, #DIY means reclaiming the practical capacity to build, organise, and maintain tools and communities outside of corporate and state control – not as a lifestyle choice, but as a political act of grounding radical change in real skills, real trust, and real human relationships rather than outsourcing power to institutions that don’t serve you.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

The #deathcult is the #OMN metaphor for the self-destructive logic of forty years of #neoliberalism – an ideology so committed to short-term profit, individualism, and economic growth that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations that human life depends on.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

In the #OMN hashtag story, #compost means taking the failures, mistakes, and accumulated mess of past movements and tech projects – rather than discarding or ignoring them – and breaking them down into something that can feed new growth, treating dysfunction and #blocking dead ends as raw material for building better rather than as waste to be hidden.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

In #OMN language, #closedweb refers to the controlled digital infrastructure – platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter – built on proprietary code, extractive business models, and centralised power, where people have no meaningful control over their data, their communities, or the rules that govern them.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

The #deathcult of #neoliberalism has driven us past the point where “climate change” – with its implication of manageable, orderly shifts – remains any honest description of what we face now. What we actually have is #climatechaos: cascading, systemic breakdown of the ecosystems, weather patterns, and social structures that human civilisation depends on, accelerating faster than institutions built on forty years of market logic are capable of, or willing to, address.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

#classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism – the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes – and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit. A conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

#capitalism is the current common sense – the water we swim in – the economic system that systematically converts collective goods, human relationships, and the natural world into private profit, enforcing this logic through every institution and platform we touch, while presenting itself as the only possible reality.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

In the #OMN hashtag story, #block refers to the reflexive, unconscious tendency of individuals and communities to shut down unfamiliar and challenging ideas, people, and processes – a defensive gesture rooted in #stupidindividualism and #postmodernism that prevents the trust-building and messy collective work needed for real #openweb organising.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

#blinded refers to being so captured by #mainstreaming tech orthodoxy and ideological “common sense” – particularly #neoliberalism and #dotcons culture – that you no longer see, or refuse to see, the harms those systems cause or any alternative paths that exist outside them.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

#fashernista describes a person in progressive or radical spaces who prioritises the appearance and aesthetic of activism – the right look, language, and social positioning – over the unglamorous, difficult work of actually building lasting structural change.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

If you want, the next step is to cluster these into a clean “chapter flow” (roots → mess → behaviours → solutions) so this stops being just a glossary and becomes a narrative tool.

These are the foundation tags – the ones everything else grows out of – the overall project: grassroots, trust-based, human-centred media infrastructure

#openweb – the political/technical terrain we’re trying to reclam

#4opens – the non-negotiable baseline (open code, data, standards, process)\openprocess – visible, participatory decision-making as default

#grassroots – bottom-up power, not institutional mediation

This cluster is about legitimacy, if it’s not grounded in these, it drifts into #NGO capture or #dotcons logic quickly. This is the “native soil” everything else either grows from or gets rejected by.

The Problem Space (what we’re composting), these tags describe the mess we’re in – the stuff we don’t ignore, but break down.

#deathcult (neoliberalism as destructive common sense)

#neoliberalism – 40 years of market logic shaping behaviour

#dotcons – corporate capture of digital space

#closedweb – controlled, extractive infrastructure

#mainstreaming – dilution and co-option of radical ideas

#NGO – managed dissent and professionalised politics

#classwar – underlying structural conflict

This is the compost heap, you don’t fix this directly, you don’t “win” against it head-on. You break it down, reuse what’s useful, and grow alternatives around and through it.

The #geekproblem Layer (tech distortions) is where things go wrong in implementation.

#geekproblem – replacing social trust with technical control

#techchurn – endless pointless rebuilding

#encryptionists – over-prioritising technical purity over social reality

#KISS – counterbalance: keep things simple and usable.

This cluster is why good ideas fail, not because the ideas are wrong, but because the tools and culture get shaped by people who don’t understand social process. This is where most #openweb projects die.

Cultural/Behavioural Patterns (how people act). The human layer – messy, unavoidable, and central.

#stupidindividualism – learned self-interest over collective good

#postmodernism – fragmentation of shared meaning

#fluffy – avoidance of conflict, feel-good paralysis

#spiky – necessary confrontation and edge

#block – reflex rejection of challenge

#blinded – inability to see outside dominant narratives

#fashernista – prioritising appearance over substance

This is the real battlefield, not tech, not policy – behaviour. If you don’t mediate this layer, everything collapses back into dysfunction, no matter how good your structure is.

The Alternative Infrastructure (what we build), are the actual tools and practices that make change possible.

#fediverse – decentralised network as a base layer

#activitypub – the protocol glue

#RSS – simple, open distribution backbone

#p2p – people-to-people first, tech second

#FOSS / #opensource – shared ownership of tools

#opendata – accessible, non-extractive information

These only work if rooted in the first cluster, otherwise they get captured and turned into another layer of the #closedweb.

Governance & Process (how we hold it together). Where most projects fail – or succeed.

#OGB – structured, open governance

#openprocess – again, because it’s that important

#DIY – practical ownership and responsibility

Without this, informal power takes over. You end up with hidden hierarchies, gatekeeping, and eventual burnout. With it, you get messy but functional collective control.

Practice & Direction (how we move).

#reboot – reset and rebuild from working patterns

#indymediaback – learning from past grassroots media

#makinghistory – documenting and owning our narratives

#nothingnew – grounding in historical cycles

This cluster stops you repeating mistakes, without it, every new wave thinks it’s inventing something new and walks straight into the same traps.

Grounding Example Layer

#Oxford – real-world test bed of contradictions

#PGA – historical example of horizontal organising

Without grounding, this all drifts into theory, these are example tags anchoring it in lived practice, where things break, and where they can actually work.

The Meta Layer (how to use this)

#compost – break down failure into growth

This is the key to the whole thing – Don’t try to “fix” the mess. Don’t try to “win” cleanly, you compost:

bad behaviour → learning

failed projects → patterns

conflict → structure

Final point (this matters) is the mistake people make is trying to tidy this into a neat theory, reduce it to messaging, turn it into a fixed ideology. That kills it, this clustering is not about control – it’s about navigation.

The mess stays messy, but now people can walk through it without getting lost.If you don’t cluster this stuff, it turns into a wall of noise. The mess is useful.

The #dotcons, #mainstreaming, and Build to Walk Away

Three years ago I was trying to explain something simple in language liberals might actually hear. They talk about “platform capitalism.” Fine. But I’ve been calling it the #dotcons for 20 years – because that’s what it is – a con.

The last 30 years of tech hasn’t just drifted into this mess. It’s been shaped, step by step, enclosure by enclosure, into systems designed to extract value from us. What we now call the internet is, in large part, a machine built to manipulate, capture, and profit.

The old #openweb got fenced in, and most people, especially polite liberal society, went along with it. So we need to talk about the return and the problem. Now we have a shift of the #mainstreaming is flowing back toward the #openweb, that should be a good thing. But there is a problem: people don’t leave the #dotcons behind when they move, they bring the culture with them.

What we’re seeing is a flood of the same patterns – extractive behaviour, ego performance, status games. Not from one “side,” but from everywhere. The habits built inside the #dotcons don’t magically disappear just because the platform changes.

So the real issue isn’t technical, it’s cultural. If we don’t actively mediate this influx, we won’t rebuild the #openweb – we’ll just recreate the same broken systems in slightly different code.

So why do I talk so much about compost, and mess not being the problem. Mess is necessary, but only if it composts – if it breaks down into something fertile. Right now, we’re mostly just piling it higher.

This is where projects like #indymediaback and #OGB matter. They’re not perfect, but they are native to the #openweb path: grounded in trust, process, and the #4opens rather than control, branding, and capture.

The question isn’t whether #mainstreaming is good or bad. The question is: how do we hold the cultural line so that what grows is something genuinely different? Because if we don’t, the #dotcons don’t need to defeat us. We’ll blindly rebuild them ourselves.

So why do I argue we can’t just leave the #dotcons? This is where people get it wrong, every time the #dotcons tighten control – censoring, tweaking algorithms, shifting rules – the reaction is the same: leave, build the #openweb.

Yes, build the #openweb, but the idea that we should stop organizing inside the #dotcons right now? That’s a trap, because billions of people are still there. The conversations, the communities, the movements, they haven’t magically migrated. Walking away doesn’t free those people, it abandons them, leaving the space to be shaped entirely by the #deathcult and the forces already in control.

This is #nothingnew. The #dotcons are #closedweb infrastructure. They serve power because they were built to serve power. Expecting anything else is misunderstanding the system. The real question has never been: are these platforms good? It’s: what do we do, given that this is where people are?

The #geekproblem and the exodus fantasy, is a persistent fantasy – a classic #geekproblem – that if we just build better tools, people will come. They won’t, not on their own. A clean exodus to the #fediverse or any #openweb space doesn’t happen because we post about it. Movement-building has never worked like that, people move through relationships, trust, and shared struggle – not technical superiority.

So if you abandon the spaces where people already are, you cut those pathways. The #OMN approach has always been simple to use the #dotcons as a bridge, not a home, seed organizing where people already are while focusing energy on building the #openweb in parallel to clearly keep your foundations in the #4opens.

This isn’t about purity, it’s about effectiveness, don’t fall into #stupidindividualism, the idea that personal withdrawal is more important than collective reach. This is about infrastructure and grounding, if the #dotcons can switch you off at any moment, they cannot be your foundation.

That’s why we need:

  • indymediaback as publishing roots
  • activitypub and the #fediverse as distributed infrastructure
  • OMN as a bridge between cultures and spaces

This is the practical expression of the #4opens: not just open code, but open process and open trust. Don’t build your house on someone else’s land, but don’t stop talking to the people still living there either. Stay in the fight, when the #dotcons clamp down, it’s not a surprise, it’s a signal of what they are, and what they’ve always been.

The answer isn’t to run away, it’s to root ourselves somewhere that can’t be shut down, while continuing to show up where the people are.

Build the #openweb, stay in the fight, keep it simple #KISS

Gates vs Bridges: the obscure politics of the #geekproblem

In the #geekproblem mindset, crossing a protocol flow is a gateway were in #openweb terms, it’s a bridge. That difference is not technical – it’s social – the difference between CONTROL and TRUST. A gate is something you lock, permission, authentication, enforcement were a bridge is something you cross, connection, flow, relationship. In the physical world, we don’t put gates on bridges as a default, but in software, we keep rebuilding them, and then wondering why things fragment.

  • RSS is a bridge.
  • Closed APIs are gates.

This should be obvious, but it keeps getting lost inside coding culture.

This isn’t just a #mainstreaming problem, if this critique only applied to Big Tech (#dotcons), it would be easy, but it doesn’t. From 30 years of building in alt-tech spaces – hundreds of projects, no bosses, no corporate control – the same pattern keeps reappearing. Control creeps in, what’s striking is that this cuts across both mainstreaming “professional” engineering culture and radical, horizontal, “alternative” tech spaces. That’s why it’s an overarching #geekproblem, the shared cultural bias toward CONTROL in both code and community design.

The deeper issue is social blindness, at the root of this is something uncomfortable – A lack of joined-up social thinking – when a relatively small technical minority designs systems based on limited social experience, abstract models of human behaviour and little grounding in historical or grassroots movements.

When these systems scale globally, the result is tools fail to support humane, collective use, and undermine trust instead of building it, they reproduce the same power dynamics they claim to escape. This feeds the wider #dotcons worldview – even when the intent is “alternative”. It’s not just “the spirit of the age” it’s a worldview of a narrow culture that has become infrastructural. We’re all, to some extent, still operating inside this #deathcult logic, even when we think we’re critiquing it.

So a good first step is looking at who is funding the problem, this is where foundations and FOSS funding bodies need to look closely. A lot of funding unintentionally reinforces gate-based architectures, complexity that centralises control and abstract innovation over lived social practice. We keep funding new gates, then asking why the #openweb doesn’t grow. It #KISS that if people cannot mentally model a system, they cannot govern it, if they cannot govern it, power centralises every time.

A different path is bridges and flows. Projects like #OMN and #indymediaback take this different approach of start with flows, not platforms, building bridges, not gateways. The focus is on keeping systems simple enough to understand (#KISS) to grow trust as social and visible, not hidden in code. Using the #4opens as grounding, not branding, we understand none of this is new, that’s the value of #nothingnew. As I keep pointing out it’s how RSS worked, early Indymedia worked and large parts of the existing Fediverse still work (when not over-engineered).

On #blocking and conflict – Yes, it’s sometimes necessary, but often it’s a symptom of deeper failure of rigid, internalised worldviews, lack of shared mediation tools and systems designed for exclusion rather than negotiation. It’s easy to block, it’s much harder to build bridges, so the real question is how do we design systems that reduce pointless conflict without exhausting the people inside them? Food for thought (and compost).

We’re all carrying some of this mess, it’s fine – it’s compost. But if we don’t consciously shift from gates to bridges, we’ll keep rebuilding the same broken systems, just with nicer branding. As bridges scale trust – Gates scale control, to mediate this mess, the hard question we need to ask the #mainstreaming is which one are they funding?

#openweb #4opens #OMN

Let’s try and simplify the #OMN

The #OMN Framework: The Five Functions (#5F)

The #OMN is simple flows, not platforms, it’s a way of thinking about media as flows of objects moving through a network. People shape the flow, you can find a more technical view to read after here. A human-scale, federated media infrastructure built on #FOSS practices and the #4opens:

  • open data
  • open source
  • open process
  • open standards

It doesn’t start with features, apps, or ideology, it starts with flows. Imagine the network as:

pipes and holding tanks

Content (objects) flows through them, communities decide how that flow is shaped. Nothing magical, nothing hidden. This matters because:

If people can’t picture how a system works, they can’t govern it.
And when systems become opaque, power centralises.

So #OMN reduces everything to five simple functions:

1. Publish

(Add a drop to the flow)

Publishing is simply adding an object:

  • a story
  • a post
  • media
  • data

to a stream.

  • No automatic amplification
  • No built-in authority
  • No algorithmic boost

Publication is contribution, not domination.

2. Subscribe

(Connect the pipes)

Subscription is how flows connect:

  • people
  • groups
  • topics
  • instances

This replaces:

  • platform logic → “you are inside us”
    with
  • network logic → “this connects to that”

No opaque ranking, you decide which pipes you connect.

3. Moderate

(Filter and route the flow)

Moderation is not censorship. It’s sieving.

Flows can:

  • pass through
  • be filtered
  • be slowed or prioritised
  • be contextualised

Trust is:

  • local
  • visible
  • reversible

Different communities can apply different filters to the same flow.

This is a feature, not a bug.

4. Rollback

(Drain and reset the flow)

Rollback is how systems recover:

  • remove past content from your stream
  • undo aggregation decisions
  • correct mistakes
  • respond to abuse

Without rollback:

  • errors become power struggles

With rollback:

Accountability becomes procedural, not punitive.

5. Edit Metadata

(Shape meaning downstream)

Content is not rewritten – it is contextualised.

Metadata can include:

  • tags
  • summaries
  • trust signals
  • warnings
  • translations
  • relationships

This is where meaning is created.

Not by algorithms, but by people.

The Holding Tank

Underneath it all is:

a simple storage layer

  • a database
  • stored objects
  • moving through flows

No “AI brain” or hidden feed logic, just data shaped by social processes.

Why This Matters

Most current systems bundle everything together:

  • identity
  • publishing
  • distribution
  • moderation
  • monetisation

This creates centralised control, even when systems claim to be “open”.

OMN does the opposite:

It separates the core functions.

This makes the system:

  • understandable
  • auditable
  • forkable
  • governable

#NothingNew by Design

This model isn’t new, it mirrors systems we already understand:

  • plumbing
  • electrical grids
  • packet-switched networks
  • version control

That’s intentional.

Systems people understand are systems people can govern.

From Platforms to Commons

The #5F is the smallest possible set of actions needed to run a media network:

  • Publish
  • Subscribe
  • Moderate
  • Rollback
  • Edit

Everything else:

  • feeds
  • timelines
  • notifications
  • UI/UX

…is just interface, nice to have but not essential.

The Point Is – The OMN is not about building a better platform.

It’s about building:

infrastructure for a democratic digital commons

Simple flows.
Social mediation.
Human control.

Not control systems, but trust systems.

In One Line

#OMN is plumbing for the #openweb. #KISS

To simplify the Open Media Network (#OMN), we focus on its core goal: creating a human-scale, community-governed media infrastructure that isn’t controlled by big corporate platforms. As we outline to understand and “simplify” the #OMN is a simple workflow:

  • Write: Creating the content.
  • Tag: Categorizing it, so others can find it.
  • Publish: Making it available on the web.
  • Federate: Sharing it across different trusted networks.
  • Archive: Ensuring it remains accessible over time.

The “#4opens” Framework is built on four principles designed to keep power in the hands of communities and users rather than central authorities:

  • Open Data: Information belongs to the community.
  • Open Source: The code is free to see and change.
  • Open Process: Decisions are made transparently.
  • Open Standards: Systems can “talk” to each other without gatekeepers.

Key Concepts for Simplification

  • Keep It Simple (KISS): The system should be so simple that anyone can mentally model how it works. If it’s too complex to understand, it’s too complex to govern.
  • Social over Technical: Prioritise how people use the tools over how “elegant” the code is, to mediate the #geekproblem (tech that’s too hard for normal people to use).
  • Composting the Past: Instead of starting from scratch or repeating old mistakes, the #OMN is about taking the “wreckage” of previous projects and turning them into “fertile soil” for new, federated networks.
  • Trust-Based Networking: It moves away from global algorithms and toward small, connected “nodes” of people who trust each other (or not).

You can build any application from this foundation – that’s the point of keeping the core this simple. On top of the basic #OMN #5F, we’re developing a set of seed projects:

  • #makinghistory – tools to keep grassroots and mainstream history alive, linked, and evolving across the #openweb
  • #indymediaback – a reboot of grassroots news, open publishing with modern federated infrastructure
  • #OGB (Open Governance Body) – lightweight, federated governance for coordinating people, decisions, and trust
  • #digitaldetox – a horizontal tool to step away from addictive, manipulative platform dynamics

Interoperability is default, not an afterthought, nothing is locked in, instead of building another isolated platform, we plug into the existing ecosystem, extend it to compost what doesn’t work. This is how we grow the #openweb by building better flows inside what already exists, not by replacing everything.

These aren’t separate silos, they’re expressions of the same underlying flows. The system is native to the Fediverse, built on ActivityPub. That means content flows in from existing platforms and codebases and flows out to existing networks and apps.

Compost metaphor – is memorable, not just technical. The focus on process over platform is clear and important. The move to simple steps works as onboarding and the insistence on #KISS + #nothingnew is the right first step.

#OMN is not an app, it’s a process + tools to move from isolation to commons.

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.

A Minimal, Governable Infrastructure for Trust-Based Media Flows

Human Tech: The Open Media Network (#OMN) is a proposal for human-scale, federated media infrastructure built on standard #FOSS practices and the #4opens: open data, open source, open process, open standards.

It does not attempt to invent a new platform. It defines a minimal, interoperable framework for how content flows through networks, in ways that remain understandable, auditable, and governable by the communities that use them.

The core premise is simple, if people cannot mentally model how a system works, they cannot meaningfully govern it. When infrastructure becomes opaque, power centralises.

OMN reduces networked publishing to five irreducible functions. Everything else – feeds, timelines, notifications, dashboards – is interface.

The OMN Framework: The Five Functions (#5F)

Rather than starting from features or products, OMN starts from flows. Think of a network as pipes and holding tanks. Objects move through them, communities decide how. The entire stack reduces to #5F:

1. Link / Subscribe to a Flow

Connection is explicit and user-controlled. A node can link to or subscribe to any flow – local or remote. Flows can be personal, collective, moderated, experimental, or archival. This replaces platform enclosure (“you are inside us”) with composable federation (“this connects to that”).

No built-in opaque ranking algorithms, no engagement manipulation, just declared connections between flows.

2. Trust / Moderate a Flow

Moderation is treated as routing and filtering – not binary censorship. Flows can:

  • Pass through untouched
  • Be diverted into holding tanks
  • Be filtered through community-defined sieves
  • Be contextualised rather than removed

Trust is local and explicit, different communities can apply different filters to the same upstream source. This preserves plurality while avoiding centralised control.

3. Rollback

Rollback enables recovery without destructive central authority. Communities can:

  • Rewind aggregation decisions
  • Remove objects from local flow
  • Correct moderation mistakes
  • Recover from abuse or spam

Without rollback, errors escalate into governance crises. With rollback, accountability becomes procedural rather than punitive.

4. Edit Metadata

Objects are not rewritten, they are contextualised, metadata can be appended to content:

  • Tags
  • Trust signals
  • Warnings
  • Summaries
  • Translations
  • Relevance markers

Meaning emerges through socially applied metadata, not engagement-optimised algorithms. This is the backbone of decentralised news curation.

5. Publish Content

Publishing is simply adding an object into a flow. Publication does not imply amplification. Authority is emergent through trust relationships. At the base of all five functions is a simple storage layer, a database holding objects in motion. No proprietary feed logic, its people and community. No built-in opaque AI ranking layer or dependency on surveillance economics.

Why This Matters for Public Digital Infrastructure

Most contemporary social media systems are vertically integrated, identity, distribution, ranking, moderation, monetisation and storage are all coupled inside corporate governance structures. This produces structural centralisation, even when protocols are nominally federated.

#OMN is about functional decoupling by isolating the core five functions, infrastructure becomes auditable, replaceable, forkable, composable and grassroots governable. Complexity is where capture happens, minimalism is a #KISS governance strategy.

Nothing New – By Design

OMN intentionally builds on patterns that already work: Packet-switched networks, electrical grids, plumbing systems, version control systems and federated FOSS collaboration models. This is the #nothingnew principle: sustainable infrastructure mirrors systems humans already understand. When technology reflects intuitive physical systems, governance becomes possible at human scale.

Built on #4opens and Standard FOSS Process

The OMN stack adheres to:

  • Open data
  • Open source
  • Open process
  • Open standards

It is not a product, it is a reference architecture and implementation framework. Others are encouraged to build clients, moderation layers, UX experiments, archival tools, research layers, and community governance models in the flow. The value lies not in novelty, but in interoperability and trust-layer experimentation.

Design Principles Relevant to #NLnet Priorities

OMN aligns with public-interest infrastructure goals:

1. Decentralisation Without Fragmentation

Federated flows with local moderation and shared protocols.

2. Trust Mediation as a First-Class Function

Trust is explicit, inspectable, and socially determined, not hidden inside ranking systems.

3. Lossy by Design

Perfect synchronisation is not required. Redundancy increases resilience.

4. Forkability

Each node can evolve independently without breaking interoperability.

5. Infrastructure Over Platform

OMN is a toolkit for building ecosystems, not a single destination site.

From Indymedia to a Federated Commons

The first seed projects are makinghistory and rebooting early grassroots media networks like Indymedia demonstrated the power of open publishing anyone could contribute, communities moderated collectively and infrastructure was mission-aligned. But back in the day, those systems lacked tech scalable trust layering and sustainable federation paths.

OMN is an attempt to reboot that tradition using contemporary FOSS practice and federated architecture. Not as nostalgia, but as public digital infrastructure.

What Funding Enables

Support from funders such as NLnet would allow:

  • Formal specification of the #5F architecture
  • Reference FOSS implementation
  • Interoperability tooling with existing federated systems
  • Trust-metadata experimentation frameworks
  • Governance model documentation
  • Security auditing and resilience testing
  • Documentation aimed at non-technical community operators

The aim is to lower the barrier to running community-governed media nodes while preserving composability with the broader federated web.

In Summary

The Open Media Network is federated, trust-based, open by design with minimal core architecture built for governance, not engagement capture. It is infrastructure for communities to create their own flows, their own networks, their own moderation models. It is not about optimising users, it is about enabling public agency. Not control, trust.

OMN is not a platform, it is plumbing for democratic digital commons #KISS

Most people sense that something is off

Meany people see the world degrading, enclosure accelerating. They see climate, politics, media all bending toward extraction. And even when they can see the trajectory, they feel powerless, so they cope by optimise their careers. They scroll. They argue. They consume. They retreat into irony. From birth, we’re trained into one core assumption: There Is No Alternative (#TINA).

Not because it’s true, but because every dominant institution reinforces it:

  • Schools train compliance.
  • Media normalises enclosure.
  • Platforms reward performance over substance.
  • Workplaces absorb our creative energy into extractive systems.

The message is subtle but constant:

  • “You can’t change anything.”
  • “Radicals just break things.”
  • “Be reasonable. Fit in.”

For builders, this message hits differently, because we know alternatives are possible, we’ve already built them. This is the #FOSS Paradox, as free and open source software proves collaboration without enclosure works, commons-based production works, open standards work and distributed governance can work. Yet somehow, the infrastructure we helped build keeps being enclosed.

The #openweb became the #dotcons, protocols became platforms and communities became markets. Not because we failed technically, but because we underestimated scale, incentives, and capture. And too often, we built tools without building parallel social power. The real trap isn’t rebellion – It’s drift – The #mainstreaming system doesn’t survive by crushing everyone loudly. It survives by absorbing alternatives, funding safe versions of dissent, steering energy into manageable channels and exhausting people with maintenance and precarity

Gatekeeping doesn’t always look like repression, more it looks like grants, partnerships, “best practices,” and institutional legitimacy. The result is that talented builders end up reinforcing the systems they once set out to replace. Not out of malice more from survival.

This Is where #OMN and #4opens come In, it isn’t only ranting about what’s broken, it’s about rebuilding missing layers:

  • Trust
  • Shared infrastructure
  • Media flows outside algorithmic capture
  • Governance rooted in actual participants

The #4opens are not branding, they are structural safeguards:

  • Open data
  • Open source
  • Open standards
  • Open process

Without all four, enclosure can creep back in, slowly, politely and inevitably.

This Is not about individual heroics, the myth of the lone hacker is part of the problem. What we need for the new “common sense” is that #stupidindividualism is a dead end. Few people escape extractive systems alone, no one builds durable alternatives alone. Collective infrastructure helps build counterweight to centralised power.

That’s what the #Fediverse gestures toward, what the #openweb once promised, and what needs strengthening now. A first step is to stop pretending we’re powerless. If you’re in #FOSS, you already have:

  • skills
  • networks
  • literacy in decentralised systems
  • experience with commons governance

What’s missing isn’t capability, it’s coordination and shared direction. The first step isn’t dramatic, it’s simple, reject the #NGO path to:

  • Find your people.
  • Support projects aligned with the #4opens.
  • Build flows, not just features.
  • Connect tools to real communities.
  • Refuse quite capture.

Do something – anything – that strengthens commons infrastructure instead of platform enclosure. The biggest lie Is that there’s no choice, when we keep repeating “this is just how things are,” eventually it becomes self-fulfilling. But history says otherwise, every dominant system looks permanent, until it isn’t.

The real outsiders aren’t the loudest rebels, they’re the ones who quietly stop reinforcing broken systems and start building viable alternatives. That’s what this moment asks of the #FOSS community is not #blocking outrage, not purity and not only collapse fantasies.

So, please stop waiting for permission, build systems that align with human autonomy and biophysical reality by strengthening commons before they’re erased. Because alternatives don’t appear, they’re built, and if we don’t build them, enclosure wins by default.

#KISS #openweb #4opens #nothingnew #geekproblem

Scale changes everything

The uncomfortable path

The individual, their freedom, and their capacity for reason are products of social relationships, not independent origins. Society is not built from isolated individuals; individuals arise from shared culture, history, and collective life. As society grows richer and more humane, individuals gain the conditions needed for deeper development and freedom emerges from this shared foundation.

What’s really at stake is power. The shift has to be away from private ownership and toward the commons – not just in licensing, but in governance, culture, and decision-making. The whole #OMN project is grounded in this understanding. It’s about building shared infrastructure that people can actually use, shape, and grow trust.

One of the great ironies of many “alternative” spaces is that people believe they’re resisting power, yet by locking everything down – secret decisions, closed processes, gatekeeping – they end up recreating the systems they claim to oppose. The result is stasis, nothing moves or grows, everything fragments.

Paranoia is one of the biggest blocking forces in alt-tech and radical spaces. It breeds mistrust, isolation, and internal sabotage, making collective action almost impossible. Some caution is necessary, we’re not naïve, but when paranoia becomes the default posture, it hardens into control. At that point, it stops being defensive and starts being corrupting.

The #4opens is a direct antidote to this. Transparency punctures paranoia. When decisions, processes, and networks are open, there’s less space for suspicion to fester. Trust isn’t built through secrecy or technical cleverness; it’s built through visible, accountable practice over time. Open process beats “good intentions” every time.

This is also why letting technical people make final product decisions is a mistake, overemphasizing technology then underplaying the social problems we’re actually trying to solve. We end up designing better mousetraps without ever asking whether we’re even trying to catch mice. Tech becomes the point, rather than a tool.

This is where the #fashernista problem kicks in, being seen to hold the correct stance replaces doing the work. But staying “right” while nothing changes is another form of failure. If we want alternatives that function, we have to move past paranoia, reopen flows, and accept that trust is something you build, not something you secure with walls.

The uncomfortable truth is that it’s easy to be “right” in theory. It’s much harder to take part in the compromises that building anything real requires. Most people prefer the comfort of ideological purity over the messiness of collective practice, especially when dealing with complex social truths. That’s the trap.

#OMN is often critiqued as if it were a finished system, a moral framework, or an alternative economy. It is none of those things. We need to be clear about scope, sequence, and intent if discussion is going to move forward instead of circling the same ground.

#OMN is a commons-first, tool-building project. It exists to create shared infrastructure, processes, and cultural practices that can grow non-extractive media and communication. It prioritizes shared ownership, open process (#4opens), and reducing capture in order to build the needed public-first infrastructure. It’s about creating conditions, not declaring outcomes.

It’s an early-phase project, an affinity-building space to create tools and governance to reconnect fragmented activist and media histories. It is not claiming to already provide economic survivability, stable long-term livelihoods, or a full replacement for existing systems. Confusing the step with the destination is the root of most disagreement.

It’s grounded in lived historical practice. #OMN grows out of more than 30 years of real projects – Indymedia, grassroots media, squatting and DIY cultures, trust-based networks – and a clear view of where #NGO-driven paths have failed. This history matters. The path is not speculative theory, it’s an attempt to compost what worked, acknowledge what failed, and try again with better tools.

That’s based on a simple historical reality, society does not pay people to challenge itself. Early change is driven by passion, not wages, and support structures emerge after commons exist, not before. This isn’t a moral claim, it’s an observation drawn from experience. #OMN is also a space where tone is a process tool. Friction is used to slow things down, open space for challenge, and form affinity where none yet exists. This is messy by design, not a finished social contract.

We don’t set out to solve how everyone is paid, how risk is evenly distributed, or how long-term security is guaranteed. These are unsolved problems, not denied ones. #OMN exists because these tools do not yet exist, so expecting it to already provide them misunderstands its scope and phase. Participation is voluntary, alignment is practical, not moral. Funding may be used tactically, but OMN is not structured around chasing it.

This is not a safe, smooth, or finished space. The path is unfinished, uneven, and sometimes uncomfortable. If a project has to be safe, stable, and fully funded before it can exist, it will never challenge anything.

The core misunderstanding is that the #OMN is judged for failing to deliver something it has never claimed to already be. What we are doing is building the tools that make survivability possible later, without reproducing the failures that keep repeating. That work is slow, messy, and incomplete – because it has to be.

The shared path is a practical response to repeated historical failure. It is not a promise, a moral demand, or a finished alternative. If you judge a seed by whether it is already a tree, you will never grow anything.

Why groups matter, in our “common sense” we like to pretend society is made up of strong, independent individuals who freely choose everything about their lives. That story is comforting, but it’s also mostly false, humans are group creatures first. People don’t start as individuals. We are born into families, cultures, languages, histories. Our values, assumptions, and sense of what’s “normal” are learned socially long before we ever get a chance to reflect on them. Groups aren’t an add-on to human life – they’re the foundation.

Individual identity is hard work, as modern culture tells us we must be ourselves, define our own path, build a unique identity. But doing that alone is exhausting, being an “individual” means constant self-definition, self-presentation, self-justification. You’re never finished as you’re always proving who you are, to employers, platforms, institutions, and peers.

That permanent uncertainty is what people mean when they talk about burnout, anxiety, and imposter syndrome. Groups reduce that pressure, as belonging to a group shares the load, with values, purpose, norms, responsibility. You don’t have to invent everything from scratch, you’re part of something that existed before you and will continue after you. This isn’t about conformity, it’s about being human, support and continuity.

The current #deathcult myth of pure individual freedom, where individuals are fully free and self-made #KISS serves power. When people are isolated, all problems look personal instead of structural, failure feels like a moral flaw and collective solutions disappear. You can’t organise if everyone thinks and acts as if they’re alone.

Healthy groups vs. toxic groups, yep, groups aren’t automatically good. Some are rigid, exclusionary and authoritarian. Healthy groups are porous and open to change, allow disagreement, are based on trust, not fear and exist to serve their members, not control them. The solution to bad groups isn’t no groups – it’s better ones.

Why this matters for media and the web? The #openweb wasn’t built by isolated individuals chasing personal brands. It grew out of horizontal’ish communities, shared tools, and mutual aid. What broke it, was pushing of individual status, platforms replacing communities then metrics replacing relationships. Projects like #OMN are about rebuilding group-based publishing, shared infrastructure, and collective voice, not amplifying lone influencers.

In short, (stupid) Individualism puts people in a permanent liminal state – alone, unstable, competing. Groups give people grounding, belonging, continuity, and the ability to act together. If we want social change, resilient media, and a future beyond the current mess, we on balance don’t need better individuals, we need better groups.

#stupidindividualism

I proposed a long time ago that #openweb is a less tribal, more expansive framing than #fediverse socially and technically. It’s also #nothingnew, which is honestly a breath of fresh air. We can (and should) use both terms, but if we want meaningful change and challenge to the #mainstreaming mess, we need to foreground the more generic one.

Predictably, this gets pushback from two directions: the non-political #FOSS crowd, and the mainstreaming crew. And yes, when you bring #NGO behaviour into the #fediverse, there’s going to be friction. Try being #openweb-native on this, please.

People are going to keep doing self- and socially-destructive things. That’s a human problem, not a branding one. But the language we choose does shape how we respond to it.

One of the reasons we use a #4opens process is to balance the reality that people often arrive with strong opinions before understanding the history, context, or existing work. The process isn’t there to exclude anyone, it’s there to slow things down just enough so people can orient themselves before trying to reshape what already exists.

At the moment this only works partially, because some people still interpret being asked to explore existing materials as dismissal. For example “You have sent me on a ride through Mastodon posts and two repos while not providing direct answers.”

What may feel like dismissal is actually part of a #DIY open process. The intention is to encourage people to engage with the work already done so conversations can move forward from shared context rather than restarting the same debates repeatedly.

Similarly: “Why assume blog archaeology is the right approach instead of presenting everything in a more processed way?” In grassroots projects, documentation is often messy, organic, and evolving rather than packaged into clean summaries. Exploring this material isn’t busywork, it’s a way to understand the social and historical layers that shape the project. Without that grounding, discussions can unintentionally repeat old loops to propose changes that have already been explored.

And when people say: “Most people don’t have time or energy for this.” That’s a real constraint, but it also highlights the core challenge. Open, collective projects rely on participants investing some effort to understand shared context. Without that, the burden shifts onto existing contributors to repeatedly re-explain the basics, which keeps stalling progress.

The aim here is not gatekeeping or dismissal. It’s #KISS: keep the process simple, open, and grounded in shared effort. If something needs improving – documentation, summaries, onboarding – the most constructive path in a #DIY culture is to step in and help build that improvement together.

An example of the mess from #deathcult centrism

Don’t worry too much, the corporate world has solutions, we look here at #ESG which stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. Its advocates say that if companies disclose enough data about their environmental and social behaviour, “good” corporate conduct will be rewarded by investors with higher share prices.

Let’s really look at #ESG, for what they are, #greenwash, a system of delay, distraction, and capture – on this #deatcult path this it is not a mistake, it is a function. The green halo on the same old shit, #mainstreaming sustainability has always been a corporate scam. Much less “green transition” more global polycrisis. Climate breakdown, ecological collapse, rising inequality – all accelerating.

The market, once again, is meant to save us. So what happened next was predictable. A sewage flow of private ESG frameworks spread across the corporate world. None issued by public bodies. None democratically accountable. All vague, inconsistent, and easily gamed. Companies can score highly on ESG while: Exploiting workers, running unsafe workplaces, destroying ecosystems and locking in fossil fuel dependency

How? It’s the normal mainstream economics, counting the wrong things. Employee cycling schemes, wellbeing surveys, diversity, trivial “green” initiatives. Meanwhile, any real structural harm is ignored. Companies can claim to be “100% renewable” by buying Renewable Energy Certificates (#REC) – while still running entirely on fossil-fuel electricity. This #greenwash is not broken – It’s working, but the grassroots question is for whom? It is not environmentalism, to see it clearly, it’s risk management for capital.

One fluffy/spiky path to fixing this is composting the consultancies who market themselves as climate saviours while simultaneously advising coal, oil, and gas firms on “upstream optimisation” – which is consultant-speak for extract more, faster.

There is a lot to compost, our “progressive” institutions are captured, The UN climate summits (#COPs) are crawling with these consultants. At COP28, the talks were presided over by the head of a state oil company. McKinsey, a big consultancy company, “advised” the process – while simultaneously serving the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers. This isn’t failure, it’s corruption, regulatory capture in public view.

Then we have the “investment”, magical thinking for grown adults. Carbon offsets are sold as a way to “neutralise” emissions. When in practice few if any reduce emissions, what they do is allow corporations to continue polluting while outsourcing guilt. And yes – the same eco parasites, consultancies, helped design the metrics that made this scam possible.

All the mess is a delay infrastructure that does not exist to solve climate change. It exists to slow real regulation, displace political action, convert existential crisis into financial products and keep power exactly where it is. This is why projects like #ESG are voluntary, private, fragmented, and endlessly technical. Complexity is not a bug – it’s the shield.

So back to the subject of this site – what #OMN calls signal – is grassroots journalism that does not only ask: “How can companies do better?” But focus on: Who benefits? Who decides? Who profits from delay? Who pays the price, and what power structures remain untouched?

And the answer to this is not complex, it’s the mess we live in. Which can be #KISS solved by breaking the power of the institutions that caused it. The example we talk about here #ESG is capitalism blessing itself in public. A ritual, a distraction, The priesthood of consultants chanting metrics while the planet burns.

To put this simply, if “sustainability” is filtered through profit first, it is not sustainability, it’s more lies we are being asked to kneel before, more #deathcult we all need to stop worshipping. So get up, pick up a shovel, there’s a lot of composting to do.

#OMN #deathcult #ESG #greenwashing #signal2noise #nothingnew

Progressive Mainstreaming

Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult – it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters.

But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people off their knees to challenge the altar to stop the sacrifice. It rearranges the seating in the temple, feeding the deeper problem, obedience. Progressive mainstreaming accepts the frame, accepts the metrics, accepts the economy of extraction and then argues about distribution. It negotiates better terms with a machine that is killing us. That is not transformation, it’s managed decline.

The project of real change and challenge – the work the #OMN exists for – starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with people standing up and walking away. Walking out of the temple of the #deathcult we all live in, not in purity, utopia or comfort. But into mess, cooperation, unfinished tools, shared risk, and actual agency. This isn’t about better policies inside the system. It’s about building outside it, under it, alongside it – until the system hollowed itself out and no longer matters.

It’s about people picking up shovels, composting the wreckage, and growing something that can actually sustain life. This is simplicity #KISS #OMN

We have already seen the failures: lived through #Indymedia, the #NGO turn, the #dotcons capture, the #Fediverse repeating old mistakes. When we talk about #OMN, we’re trying to stop people from re-learning the same lessons by losing again. Silence would be complicity.

The #OMN is where critique becomes agency. It’s not about “promoting a project”, if we don’t talk about this without something like #OMN, critique collapses into doom, aesthetics, or personal exits. #OMN is a way to, act collectively, without lying about power, money, or governance.

Forgetting is how capture happens, the moment people stop naming alternatives, the space fills with managerial language, funding logic, and fear-based control. We talk about #OMN to keep the space open enough for something human to grow.

The #OMN is a path that resists #stupidindividualism, where most contemporary “solutions” reinforce isolation, personal brands, and individual safety strategies. #OMN starts from the assumption that survival and meaning are collective. We need to keep talking about this because almost nobody else does.

It’s unfinished – and that matters. It’s not about defending a polished system, instead, it’s about holding open a process. Talking about #OMN is how we invite others into the compost rather than presenting them with a finished product to consume.

We talk about #OMN because it’s a native way of saying: “We don’t have to repeat this. We can build differently, together, if we remember what already worked.”*

It’s not evangelism, it’s stewardship.

A few of us have been working on real, positive, horizontal social and technological solutions for over twenty years. Not hypotheticals, not vibes, things that actually work.

We know they work locally, we know they work socially. And after more than a decade building on the #fediverse, we know they can work in tech, at scale without going vertical, corporate, or authoritarian.

This isn’t speculative any more. Our creative task now – the #nothingnew work – is simply to combine what already works: Horizontal social practice, federated #openweb tech, trust-based governance. We already have a slate of projects waiting to be built: #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback and #makinghistory. What’s missing is not ideas, it is people willing to show up and implement.

And here’s the hard truth: every time we try to talk about radical or progressive language, power, or structure, people retreat into #blocking and ignoring. The same unresolved tensions get replayed endlessly, nothing is mediated, nothing is grounded. Bad will accumulates, the social commons rots.

This rot isn’t accidental – it’s structural – To work our way out of this mess, we need both #fluff and #spiky. We need broad categories to think clearly, the #mainstreaming #fashernista rejection of this isn’t sophistication – it’s submission. It’s a soft, polite form of #deathcult worship.

You don’t dismantle a #deathcult by being nicer to it, you dismantle it by stopping your participation and building something better.

So this is the question, not rhetorical, not theoretical: Are you going to help make this happen? Are you going to pick up a shovel? Or are you going to stay on your knees, arguing about tone while the ground burns?

Digital Detox Is Urgently Needed

Fighting #fashionistas with fashion. We have an app outline for that: iPhone or android.

Not as a lifestyle tweak, not as wellness branding, not as another individual “better habits” story. These proposed apps and the wider projects have nothing to do with self-optimisation, productivity hacks, or personal purity. Framing it that way is already defeat – that’s #stupidindividualism doing the work of the #dotcons for them.

What we’re facing in our digital mess isn’t only a failure of self-control, it’s a structural capture problem. The #dotcons platforms are designed to extract attention, shape behaviour, and enclose social space. You don’t fix that by telling isolated individuals to be stronger or more disciplined. You fix it by changing the infrastructure people live in.

That’s why this has to be collective infrastructure. Shared norms, shared limits, shared tools. Social agreements embedded in tech and process, not moral pressure dumped onto individuals. The goal is to change default behaviour at the group level, so resistance isn’t exhausting and opting out doesn’t mean disappearing.

The native #OMN path is about rebuilding the commons: tools that assume trust, reciprocity, transparency, and accountability from the start. Defaults that slow extraction, not accelerate it. Processes that make manipulation visible and contestable. Mediation instead of opaque algorithms. Human-scale flows instead of infinite feeds.

We do need to keep highlighting, this isn’t self-control, it’s collective self-defence. Anything on the normal path is to often dressing up surrender as “wellness” and calls it choice, it is just more head down, worshipping the #deathcult.

The core idea for this app is #nothingnew: The buddy method. You don’t fight addiction alone, don’t detox alone, you don’t escape algorithmic capture alone, you do it with another human.

App 1: Digital Detox Buddy

A simple app that sits on top of existing child lock / screen time APIs. No dark magic, spyware, behavioural profiling. Instead, simple:Just process, consent, and friction.

Defaults matter. Default allowance: 4 hours per day on #dotcons, when time runs out: You get a 10-minute grace extension button. Extending beyond this requires talking to your buddy

To permanently end limits: You must unbuddy (an explicit social action). This creates pause, reflection, conversation – the opposite of dopamine scroll loops.

Time reduction is gradual, a soft landing, not punishment. Start at 4 hours/day, reduce by 1 hour per week/month. People can stabilise or reverse with buddy agreement. This is about retraining habits, not moral purity.

What Is counted (and what Is not)? Metered: Phone screen time (total). Time spent on #dotcons platforms. Unmetered: Web browsing, #FOSS apps, Reading tools, Local-first utilities, Creative tools.

The framing is explicit: The problem is not only “screen time”. The problem is extractive platforms.

Privacy + accountability balance, Aggregated stats are public (community-level visibility, cultural pressure). Exact stats are buddy-only (trust-based accountability)

Public stats answer: Average phone use, average #dotcons use, detox participation trends

This is #DemocracyOfReach applied to behaviour change – cultural signal without surveillance.

Architecture: First version: client–server is OK, preferably designed for #p2p later

Buddy relationship is explicit, revocable, symmetric, no central behavioural scoring, no advertising, no data resale, this is infrastructure, not a product.

App 2: Consumerism Detox Buddy

Same logic. Different addiction.

Consumerism Is also a platform problem, endless consumption isn’t “choice”. It’s nudging, targeting, and engineered impulse. This second app mirrors the first but focuses on shopping behaviour. How it works, uses geolocation, identifies time spent in: shopping centres, large retail chains, branded consumption spaces,

Same buddy rules: time limits, soft extensions, explicit social negotiation. Local markets, repair, reuse, libraries, commons spaces are excluded or positively weighted.

This is people to people anti-#deathcult economics grown in apps.

This is why it belongs on the #OMN path, and why it is not about personal optimisation, quantified-self nonsense, wellness capitalism, #NGO nudging, or behavioural surveillance.

A clear path about collective governance of attention. With explicit social process, open defaults, visible culture change. Tools that support people talking to each other, not being silently managed.

The apps don’t “fix” people, they change the environment people live in. This is striving to mediate what matters now: digital addiction and consumerism aren’t side effects. They are core pillars of the #deathcult. If we can’t or won’t build ways to step out together, all we get is isolated “self-help” to oftern just another name for addiction.

These apps are p2p, gentle, federated, human-scale refusal, not banning, shaming or preaching. Its #KISS “Let’s do less of this – together.” If we can build social media apps, we can build #dotcons exit apps. This is a #OMN-native path.

Before you ask, the second stage, step, is to socialise the first step, offline.