What should be closed? And what should never be?

A conversation about ideology, sociology, and the #openweb. Let’s start with a basic liberal framework: “Most social interactions should happen in the open. Some personal interactions should remain private.” Seems reasonable, right? That’s the position many of us think we agree on. Yet when we look at how our technology, and by extension, our society, is being built, that balance is totally out of whack. Today, more and more of life is CLOSED:

Closed apps.

Closed data.

Closed social groups.

Closed algorithms.

Closed hardware.

Closed governance.

And on the flip side, the things that should be protected, our intimate conversations, our location, our health data, are often wide open to surveillance capitalism and state control. What the current “common sense” dogma gets wrong? What is missing is the idea that mainstream tech culture, privacy absolutists, and many crypto/anarchist types:

Almost all good social power comes from OPEN.
Most social evils take root in CLOSED spaces.

When people organize together in the open, they create commons, accountability, and momentum. They make movements. When decisions are made behind closed doors, they breed conspiracy, hierarchy, abuse, and alienation.

It’s not just about what is open or closed, it’s about who controls the boundary, and what happens on each side. If we close everything… If we follow the logic of total lockdown, of defaulting to encryption, of mistrust-by-design… then what we’re left with is only the closed. This leads to a brutal truth, the powers that dominate in closed systems are rarely the good ones.
Secrecy benefits the powerful far more than the powerless. Always has.

So when we let the #openweb collapse and treat it as naive, we’re not protecting ourselves. We’re giving up the last space where power might be accountable, where ideas might circulate freely, where we might build something together.

Examples: When openness was lost. Let’s talk about a real-world case of #Diaspora vs. #RSS. 15 years ago, Diaspora emerged with crypto-anarchist hype as the alternative to Facebook. It was secure, decentralized, and… mostly closed. It emphasized encryption and privacy, but lacked network effects, openness, and simple flows of information.

In the same era, we already had #RSS, a beautifully open, decentralized protocol. It powered blogs, podcasts, news aggregators, without permission or centralized control. But the “Young #fashionistas ” of the scene shouted down RSS as old, irrelevant, and too “open.” They wanted to start fresh, with new protocols, new silos, new power. They abandoned the working #openweb to build “secure” ghost towns.

Fast-forward a decade, and now we’re rebuilding in the Fediverse with RSS+ as #ActivityPub. The same functionality. The same ideals, just more code and more complexity. That 10-year gap is the damage caused by the #geekproblem, the failure to build with the past, and for real people.

So what is the #geekproblem? At root, it’s a worldview issue. A failure to think about human beings in real social contexts. Geeks (broadly speaking) assume:

People are adversaries or threats (thus: encrypt everything),
Centralization is evil, but decentralization is always pure (thus: build silos of one),
Social complexity can be reduced to elegant protocols (thus: design first, use later).
But technology isn’t neutral. It reflects ideologies. And if we don’t name those ideologies, they drive the project blindly.

A place to start is to map your ideology, want to understand how you think about openness vs. closedness? Start by reflecting on where you sit ideologically, not in labels, but in instincts. A quick sketch:

Conservatism: Assumes order, tradition, and authority are necessary. Values stability, hierarchy, and often privacy.

Liberalism: Believes in open society, individual freedom, transparency, and market-based solutions.

Anarchism: Rejects imposed authority, promotes mutual aid, horizontal structures, and often radical openness.

None of these are “right,” but understanding where you lean helps clarify why you walk, build or support certain tools. If you’re building tools for the #openweb, these questions matter:

Do you default to closed and secure, or open and messy?

Who do you trust with knowledge—individuals or communities?

Do you believe good things come from control, or emergence?

These are sociological questions, not just technical ones, maybe start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies. Where do we go from here? Let’s bring this back to the openweb and the projects we’re trying to build, like:

#OMN (Open Media Network)

#MakingHistory

#indymediaback

#Fediverse

#P2P tools (DAT, Nostr, SSB, etc.)

All of these projects struggle with the tension between openness and privacy, between usability and purity, between federation and anarchy. But if we start with clear values, and an honest reflection on the world we want to create, we can avoid the worst traps. Let’s say it plainly:

Not everything should be open. But if we close everything, we lose what’s worth protecting.

Let’s talk: What do you think should be closed? What must be kept open at all costs? What’s your ideological instinct, and how does it shape your view of the #openweb?

Capitalism is a hostage situation -Not an economy

Our current #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t life, it’s a trap, we need a way out. In our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t own,
Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,
Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,
Pay to breathe, because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over (inspired by). That’s not a functioning economy, it’s not freedom, it’s a hostage situation, where every basic human need is held behind a transactional barrier, and the meter is always running.

This #deathcult is late capitalism: an endless stack of paywalls enclosing what used to be public, shared, and free. It isn’t just about money, it’s about control, dependency, and isolation. It’s a system that engineers artificial scarcity, so a #nastyfew can profit while the many just try to survive.

But it wasn’t always like this, for most of human history, people lived within commons-based paths, where land was collectively stewarded, food was grown and shared within communities, tools and knowledge were passed down, not patented and governance was often local and participatory.

The last 200 years of “common sense” capitalism is an enclosure of these commons, first the physical ones (land, water, food), and now the digital and social ones (communication, culture, identity). The #openweb, like the open land before it, is being fenced off. Platform by platform. App by app. Cookie banner by paywall.

This enclosure now defines much of our tech infrastructure, every scroll, click, and share is now mediated by profit-driven platforms. Even activism – once vibrant and messy – is being swallowed by slick interfaces and the same throttled feeds. Resistance is filtered, shadowbanned, deboosted, and pushed to monetize. And “our” #NGOs fighting platform power… are doing so on those same platforms.

It’s an absurdity, and worse: it’s a trap. We need alternatives, real ones. We’re not going to “ethics workshop” our way out of this. We need to rebuild the tools of everyday life – economically, digitally, socially – from the grassroots up.

Commons-based systems, let’s turn some “common sense” on it head, instead of private ownership: stewardship. Instead of scarcity: abundance through sharing. This is where projects, like The Open Media Network (#OMN) come in as a practical framework for grassroots media infrastructure:

Built on the #4opens: open data, source, standards, and governance.

Designed to decentralize publishing, and return control to local communities.

Uses both client-server and P2P bridges for accessibility and resilience.

Encourages trust-based networks over extractive platforms.

OMN is not just theory, it’s active code, messy dev, and practical tools for people to tell their own stories, host their own content, and build alternative knowledge systems outside corporate media. These technologies make community hosting the default – not the exception. They reduce reliance on fragile or compromised #dotcons infrastructure. They’re imperfect, but they’re a step out of the enclosure.

The point isn’t just tech, It’s power, capitalism doesn’t just gate resources. It enforces relationships of power. That’s why rebuilding tech without addressing governance, ownership, and access won’t get us far. The #geekproblem is real: tech that nobody can use isn’t liberation, it’s just another dead-end.

The alternative? Keep it #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), prioritize social usability over technical elegance, build bridges, not silos, return to shared ownership and open processes. Capitalism is a hostage situation, but we can walk out the door – if we build the exit together.

You’re not powerless, and this isn’t about purity or escape. It’s about building real infrastructure for real life, so when the capitalist system keeps crumbling (as it will), we’re not left scrambling. We’ll already be living differently.

#OMN #MakingHistory #4opens #openweb #p2p #indymediaback #geekproblem #commons #decentralize #cooperative #foss #degrowth #resilience

UPDATE the seed of this post was from a toot, but can’t find the original to link to due to the #UX of mastodon updating and no functioning search on my instance to find history, sorry, add in comments if you find the original. Updated

Real world tackling the #geekproblem

With rebooting the #openweb we run headfirst into the #geekproblem, a recurring pattern where: Technically brilliant people build powerful tools …but those tools remain socially unusable …or solve only geek problems, not the needs of actual communities. It’s not malice, often it’s idealism, but it creates a dead-end culture of endless prototypes, abandoned standards, and empty tech demos. Meanwhile, the real-world crisis deepens.

The work we need is bridges building, let’s try this ere “P2P news app” built on #dat Hypercore/Hyperswarm is exciting. Yes, it’s similar to Nostr in structure: distributed relays, client-side aggregation, unstoppable flow. But as with Nostr tech isn’t enough. We are social creatures. A usable system needs:

Clear use cases rooted in human relationships – not just tech possibilities.
User-facing front-ends that invite participation, not gate it.
Interoperability with existing protocols (ActivityPub, ATProto, etc.) to avoid siloing.
Bridges between architectures – e.g. client-server ↔ P2P – so that real-world adoption is gradual and survivable.

The good news, the wider #OMN project is already a sane path forward, with a #KISS hybrid path. The plan is in bridging #P2P and client-server as a way out of this. Something like:

A lightweight server bridge that serves data to client-server users (ActivityPub, fediverse, legacy web),

While simultaneously feeding a P2P mesh, with each peer storing and distributing redundant objects,

So that over time, client-server becomes the bootstrapping layer, and #P2P becomes the long-term archive + resistance layer.

“Data is just object flows – how the user gets the object is irrelevant technically.”

This is the kind of thinking that gets us out of the traps, by moving from protocols to people. This isn’t just about code, it’s about culture. The #geekproblem won’t be solved by more architecture diagrams, it needs movements that embrace imperfection and prioritizes social use, visible, working front-ends people can contribute to and understand, documentation and tooling that builds capacity in others, not silos around the brilliant few.

What next? For the devs:

Can the p2p-news-app codebase be modularized to plug into #OMN projects as a data backend, even in a basic way?

Can we bridge shared data objects across protocols (e.g. post metadata flows from P2P → ActivityPub), even if janky at first?

Can we prototype a simple but cross protocol usable frontend, the examples is the work on #makeinghistory and #indymediaback, that lets non-geeks see and touch the network they’re part of?

Yes, for the movement, keep things messy but moving. Avoid dead ends by always asking:

"How does this empower non-technical users to organize, document, and publish together?"

Keep the tech grounded in the social fabric, the activists, journalists, organisers, and rebels this is all meant to serve. If you’re reading this and thinking, “I can help,” please step forward. There’s space in wider tech/social #OMN and #MakingHistory for everyone, coders, writers, designers, testers and storytellers.

Let’s build bridges, not silos, let’s build tools people can use, not just tools geeks can admire, let’s do this together.

Where’s the Resistance to Algorithmic Monopolies?

The big question need to be highlighted: where will pressure for meaningful regulation of #dotcons algorithmic monopolies actually come from?

Right now, it’s hard to see. Lawmakers generally have a poor grasp of the real problems, decades behind on both the tech and its corrosive social consequences. Most legislation we get is either pre-packaged by lobbyists from the #nastyfew controlled platforms causing the harm, or superficial and narrow, #fashionista focus on headline optics like “online harms” or “child safety,” instead of addressing the deeper crisis of algorithmic control, attention addiction, and social fragmentation for control.

Even worse, and this needs to be said loudly, the civil society institutions that should be resisting this mess are captured. Charities, #NGOs, media orgs, #geekproblem digital rights groups. Whether for funding, publicity, or simple convenience, they’ve tied their missions to the very tools they should be questioning. Rather than building alternatives or even naming the deeper problems, they instead focus on “using platforms better” or “more ethically”, which only serves to legitimise the #techshit they should be dismantling for composted.

This is classic #mainstreaming. It’s how radical energy gets drained, redirected, and eventually used to feed the system it once opposed. Meanwhile, into the vacuum of real critique and action steps, conspiracy-driven nonsense and cynical populism to feed the cycle.

This is why grassroots and native #openweb spaces like the #Fediverse matter, not just as “alternatives” but as active resistance. They are places where we can build different logics, embed different values, and avoid replicating the same centralising, manipulative dynamics.

It’s also why we have to defend these spaces, especially when they’re messy or imperfect. Because if we don’t build and protect something better, we’ll be left with a fight where even the so-called opposition is simply more of the same problem.

Composting the EU Tech Mess: From #NLnet to #Eurostack

The new right weaponizing culture: The right goes post-liberal

Let’s have a look at an example of the new mess we’re facing: JD Vance – author, venture capitalist, convert Catholic, and now Vice President. He’s not a Reaganite libertarian, nor a traditional conservative. Instead, Vance represents something more dangerous: a dogmatic ideology, born in the boardrooms of tech billionaires and the seminaries of Catholicism, forged on in the #dotcons, and now pushing American politics into very dark territory.

This isn’t politics as usual. It’s not even populism any more. While there’s grifting (of course) and plenty of weirdness to laugh at, Vance and his fellow travellers are deadly serious. They are actively wielding state power – not to protect liberal values, but to bury them. They’ve declared the Enlightenment dead. The compromise that held Western democracies together for centuries? Thrown out. In its place, they want to sack the referee and replace him with a priest, a general, and a patriarch. All under the rallying cry of “Culture in Crisis.”

Vance’s origin myth is the breakdown of the American family, as told through Hillbilly Elegy – addiction, poverty, and social collapse in the white working class. That story pushed him through the Thiel-funded ranks of the #techbro elitists. But he didn’t stop at diagnosis, the next step is to legislate culture, to grasp state power and use it to impose the narrow vision of the #nastyfew onto everyone else.

This isn’t nostalgia and posturing any more. This is a fully operational political project, rooted in religion, nationalism, and family. It’s about dismantling the old #mainstreaming and replacing it with a fortress ideology. Neutrality in courts and bureaucracy? Gone. Education? To be weaponised. History? To be rewritten. Opponents? To be punished. This is a hard right revolution, bulldozing the old order as a prerequisite for building the new. “The System Is the Enemy.” Libertarian economics are dismissed as rootless; personal liberty as decadent. Academia, journalism, and law are painted as captured by postmodern “wokeism”, a hegemonic structure that must be ripped out like a tumour.

This isn’t rhetorical. It’s actionable. Seize the Ford Foundation’s assets. Fire the civil service. Override the courts. Vance quotes Andrew Jackson: “The Chief Justice has made his ruling; now let him enforce it.” This is a revolution, not of the people, but for the #nastyfew. At its heart is a revival of ethno-nationalism. Where American identity once leaned on shared civic values, not shared blood, they now champion a mythic “homeland” of “legacy Americans” and cemetery plots. A culture you must inherit to belong. Don’t have children? You’re a “childless cat lady”, a punchline and a pariah. Public servant without offspring? Then you have “no commitment to the future.” It’s an ideological border wall: to belong, you must believe in the right God, live in a traditional family, and descend from the right people. Everyone else? Suspect, and/or disposable.

This isn’t simple reactionary, it’s counter-Enlightenment. The appeal is clear: it speaks to the spiritual hollowness of late capitalism – to the loneliness, the nihilism, the disconnection. And liberal technocracy, the ruling ideology of the last 40 years, has failed utterly to address this. The #deathcult of managerial neoliberalism left a void. Now the New Right wants to fill it, with hierarchy, obedience, and repression.

But it should be obvious that this right-wing “solution” is catastrophic. Meaning cannot be mandated by the #nastyfew. Culture cannot be enforced by fiat. Pluralism is not a flaw, it’s the messy reality of modern life. Pretending you can erase difference and enforce unity is delusional. Movements that try always end in repression, exclusion, and worse. What begins as a culture war ends as a culture purge.

A liberal view of this hard right push

So what can we do? This is where the #OMN – the Open Media Network – matters more than ever. Not to magnify the mess, but to mediate it. The #OMN is a native, grassroots alternative to both the hollow liberal centre and the authoritarian push of the right. It doesn’t build through imposition. It builds through federation, dialogue, and trust. Our path is transparent, accountable, and open-source – not sacred, secret, and top-down. Where the hard right sees liberalism’s emptiness and tries to fill it with obedience and dogma, we recognise the same void, and fill it with commons, care, and co-creation.

Please, don’t worship either the old or the new #deathcult. The #MAGA movement preaches high-control authoritarian ideology with high priests in expensive suits. This is why #openweb projects like #OMN matter more than ever. Because if we don’t build our own rooted, federated commons, our own peer-to-peer culture of meaning, then yes, the future will be built by people like JD Vance and the rotting Trump dynasty. And it won’t be a future you can simply opt out of. So stop dithering. Don’t be a prat about it. The time to build the alternative is now.

https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

Two paths, one bridge: Seceding under capitalism vs. seceding toward change

In our media and tech projects, we’re walking two very different paths – often without any or partly realising the tension between them. On one side, we’re seceding under capitalism. That means navigating funding applications, #NGO partnerships, grant cycles, and institutional compromises. It’s where projects get trimmed down to what’s legible to funders. It’s survival, maybe even minor success, inside the system.

On the other side, we’re seceding toward the change we want and need. Building alternatives with radical trust, open governance, mutual aid, and grounded peer-to-peer systems. It’s messy, difficult. But it’s actually outside the system, what we used to call prefigurative politics, what we now build as #openweb infrastructure, federated networks, and horizontal institutions.

These two paths are not the same. And if we pretend they are, we lose. What we need is a #4opens bridge between them:

Open data to keep control in the commons.

Open source to prevent black boxes of power.

Open process so anyone can inspect and challenge decisions.

Open standards to build actual interoperability - not walled gardens in disguise.

But here’s the problem we are currently blind to – that bridge doesn’t stay up on its own. It has to be maintained through deliberate political will, through active resistance to co-option, through remembering why we started building in the first place.

The mainstream will always try to absorb the open, turn it into a sandbox, a product, a brand. That’s the nature of #mainstreaming and #NGO logic. We’ve seen it again and again – #FOSS, #indymedia, #activism – all turned into funding pipelines and branding opportunities if not defended.

So our task is not just technical, it’s political infrastructure work to hold the bridge. Guard the open paths, so that we can compost what’s broken. And always build forward.

Composting the EU Tech Mess: From #NLnet to #Eurostack

There’s an old rot in the heart of European tech policy – and it’s not just from the corporate lobbies. It’s also sprouting from the well-funded, #NGO-flavoured corners of what should have been grassroots. A contradiction that tells us everything we need to know about how broken the current #EU #mainstreaming crew and paths are.

Take #Eurostack for example, on paper, it looks decent: a collaborative push toward European digital sovereignty, resilience, and open-source infrastructure. The slogan is right, some of the tech might be right. But the people who will be driving it? And the people that will flood onboard to push it thought, that’s where it falls apart.

The same revolving-door #NGO actors, the same consultant-heavy think-tankers. The same polite funding circles that treat power as something to be managed, not challenged. These are not builders, these are managers of decline, politely sanding the edges off radical tech to make it presentable to policymakers, while completely ignoring the communities that could actually make it work.

And then we have #NLnet, which still has some grassroots soul left, but let’s be honest, the #geekproblem rears its head. Some of the funded projects are brilliant in technical terms but exist in complete social isolation. Beautiful protocol paths that no one will use. Decentralized stacks with zero real social onboarding. Tools solving problems that are themselves geek-invented, not in any sense real-world urgent.

So what do we get? Corporate-captured “open” projects that simply entrench the status quo, with a shine of progressive #PR (hello #Mozilla). Funded grassroots tech that is overengineered, fragile, and oblivious to social or political context it’s built for. Endless talk of “digital commons” by people who’ve never participated in one.

The result? More #techno-solutionist dead ends, more paper victories, more funding poured down the drain, to feed the empty abstracted versions of real solutions. And worse, a complete blind spot for why the #openweb is in crisis: it’s not a lack of good tech, it’s a lack of courageous, messy, trust-based social organising.

Too many of the actors at the table are blinded by the #deathcult of neoliberal governance. They don’t want alternatives – they want reforms that keep their seats at the table warm. This isn’t conspiracy talk. It’s about structural failure: the very people tasked with change have made comfort and compliance their operating system. That’s why the best thing we can do with this EU mess is compost it.

Let’s be clear: We’re not burning bridges with #NLnet or even #Eurostack. We’re building parallel paths with stronger roots, clearer intentions, and radical memory. We’re rebooting native projects like #indymediaback and the #OpenMediaNetwork not because the EU can’t help, but because it won’t, unless it’s dragged there by working alternatives. Until then, the #mainstreaming “solutions” paths will remain #PR for a status quo that’s rotting and failing with decay. Pastime for you to help to compost the lot, and grow better from the mulch.

https://unite.openworlds.info

Where’s the Resistance to Algorithmic Monopolies?

Composting the confusion: A critical response to the misreading of the #Openweb

“It’s fascinating to see how the #OpenWeb ideology was formed in the late aughts... Open Web evangelists criticizing early Facebook for being too private is an incredible heap of irony.”
— [Someone missing the point entirely]

Let’s be clear: this is a historical and political mess, and one worth composting. The original #openweb vision, was wide, from the original European social vs the American libertarian, the person quoted is talking his view from inside the #blinded USA path rather than the original #WWW #mainstreaming of the more social European path.

The idea on both paths was never about exposing personal data, that’s a strawman born of today’s #dotcons-common-sense, where everything gets flattened into privacy = good, openness = bad. A deeply ahistorical take, infected by the post-Snowden wave of #encryptionism that conflates liberation with hiding, and assumes the only threat is surveillance by “them,” never enclosure by “us.”

The actual #4opens path—Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Process – is still a radical project rooted in trust, transparency, and collective power. It is about creating shared public spaces and protocols to collaborate, self-organize, and break the silos both big, built by emerging tech monopolies and small built by our #encryptionists dogmas. This original path draws from traditions of anarchist publishing, community radio, and autonomous tech. And yes, it explicitly distinguished between publishing and privacy.

Early Facebook wasn’t “too private.” It was already a walled garden – a corporate trap disguised as a community. The real critique from #openweb folks was that it centralized control, commodified interaction, and locked users in. That’s why people built alternatives like #Indymedia, #RSS networks, (sudo)federated blogging, and early #P2P social tools.

To say the openweb led to surveillance capitalism is like blaming bicycles for car crashes. What happened wasn’t openness going too far, it was openness being abandoned, subsumed, and bastardized by closed platforms under the guise of “convenience” and “safety.” And now, some are trying to rewrite that history to serve the logic of today’s bloated encryption silos and #NGO-funded moderation regimes. This is not just wrong, it’s dangerous. Because without remembering what native open tech looked like, we’ll keep mistaking the problem for the solution.

So yes, this quote, and the worldview it represents, is a mess. But we don’t throw it in the fire, we compost it, break it down, extract the nutrients, and grow something better from the rot. The #openweb was never about exposing people, it was about building shared power. Don’t confuse that with the platforms that sold us out, and don’t mistake critique for irony when it’s actually prophecy.

Rise and Fall of Grassroots #OpenWeb

The #fashionistas are coming https://yewtu.be/embed/u_Lxkt50xOg? It’s time to become more real before this inflow swamps our “native” reboot, if we let them they will consume it and shit it out as more mess. To mediate this shit storm, it’s time to act, please, feel free to repost these web posts, thanks.

To understand where the #Fediverse and the #OpenSocialWeb are heading, and how not to lose our way, we need to reflect on where we’ve come from. The history of grassroots #openweb activism offers both inspiration and hard lessons.

Foundations are built by real people, social movements start local, they begin with people on the margins – those directly affected by injustice – taking action with the tools they have. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, tech projects like #Indymedia were the blueprint: decentralized, radically open, and run by volunteers who trusted each other and worked horizontally. It worked, for a while.

Today, projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), #indymediaback, and #makeinghistory try to learn from that past. They aim to reboot media infrastructure and historical memory, powered by the #4opens: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. We need to remember that this kind of work doesn’t scale by magic, it grows from grounded trust and native infrastructure, not from #VC injections or #NGO grants.

The trap of #NGO thinking is one of the biggest reasons grassroots projects fail, co-optation. When grassroots groups chase funding, they start shifting agendas to fit the funder’s priorities. Slowly, the mission gets neutralized. Culture changes, risk-taking of change and challenge vanishes, the projects to often become empty shells wearing yesterday’s slogans.

This has happened time and again, from later #Indymedia nodes to #EU-funded tech projects that are now more about kickbox reports than what any “user” wonts or the needed basic radical change. We can’t afford to go down this path again in the current #openweb reboot, the Fediverse.

We need Spiky/Fluffy balance, mutual aid that’s not just charity, but infrastructure. That’s where the #Fediverse shines: not just as an alternative platform, but as a parallel public space for organizing, sharing, and then resisting. It has to support both spiky (radical, disruptive) and fluffy (care-focused, relational) approaches.

On these paths, memory matters, projects like #makeinghistory remind us: if we don’t remember our wins and losses, we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes. Documenting not just content but working practice, how decisions were made, what trust looked like, what failed and why – is crucial. History is not just a mirror; it’s compost.

No monoculture, today, #Mastodon is becoming the monoculture of the Fediverse. It’s not evil. But it is dominating to the point of distortion. It’s following NGO-friendly paths and watering down the radical possibilities the #openweb offers. That’s a problem. We need more balance, more useful codebases, more governance experiments. This space is meant to be a garden, not a plantation.

Security isn’t paranoia, it’s culture, security on the #openweb isn’t about creating another bureaucratic nightmare of permissions and logins. It’s about cultural practices, trust, openness, moderation by consent, and keeping things simple. Most of all, it’s about not building what you don’t need, complexity is the enemy of security.

Final thought, to build real alternatives, we need to stop chasing virality and start building resilience. Less hype, more humility. Less “engagement,” more entanglement. And always, a ruthless focus on not becoming the thing we were trying to replace. Let’s not feed the mess. Let’s compost it and grow something better.

The problem of too big, Mastodon

I would start to say, with care, that #Mastodon is now heading in the wrong direction. Not because it’s inherently bad, or malicious, or “captured” in some conspiratorial sense. But because it’s become too dominant, tipping the scales far away from the diversity and messiness that a healthy #Fediverse needs.

This isn’t about blame, it’s about balance. To keep the #openweb alive and meaningful, we need to nurture other codebases, other, paths, cultures, and radically different governance paths alongside Mastodon’s dormant trajectory. Let’s acknowledge where Mastodon succeeded: It has been a gateway into the Fediverse, by mimicking Twitter, it provided a familiar experience that let mainstream users, journalists, #NGOs, and even some governments dip their toes into decentralization. It helped break the suffocating monopoly of Twitter/X. This was useful, necessary even. We needed a bridge.

But now? That bridge is being pushed/mistaken for the destination. And worse, it’s reinforcing the patterns we were trying to escape. Instead of blossoming into a diverse ecosystem and experimental tools, the #Fediverse is shaped by Mastodon’s design limitations and its pushing institutional gravity. That’s the problem, it’s not just a project any more, it’s becoming a bottleneck.

With #NGO-centric thinking shaping many of the newer Fediverse-adjacent events (like #NGI forums or EU funding discussions) which are now populated by the same #NGO/#dotcons crowd and comfortable liberal institutions that avoid risk, fear grassroots control, and domesticate the web for funding reports.

So, Mastodon isn’t “bad” and it played its part well. But its institutional path is now out of alignment with the nature of the Fediverse: the #4opens, radical transparency, permissionless innovation, and native grassroots culture. This is a poisoned balance, not because Mastodon is wrong, but because its gravitational pull is now preventing new paths from taking root.

What’s the alternative? Push for federation that supports collectives, not just individuals. Rebuild spaces for group publishing (like #Indymediaback) and shared authorship, not just influencer-following. Keep pushing the #4opens: Open data, open standards, open governance, open code – not just a logo and a code of conduct. Remember that a monoculture is always a point of vulnerability. Diversity isn’t optional, it’s the core strength of the #openweb.

So yes, Mastodon is a problem on balance, even as it was a solution before. But still, we don’t need to burn the bridge – but we do need to compost the monoculture and grow a thicker forest around it. Because decentralization means divergence, not convergence to one project’s roadmap #KISS

Trying to Remember: A Personal Reflection on Activist Histories and Memory Holes

The Mess We Make (Again… and again)

Ten years ago, I remember being told, often condescendingly, with smug certainty, that hosting in the cloud was the future. That what I was working on, #DIY grassroots self and community hosted tech was the dinosaur, a dead end, old obsolete thinking, out of touch. Despite spending years pointing out the obvious flaws in this pushing, for this I got only that my “native” path was irrelevant, for Luddites, they said. Legacy thinking, dead tech walking.

Well, here we are, a decade later. And guess what the cloud: It was expensive, less performant, less secure, and a gateway to increasingly exploitative pricing models. This isn’t hindsight bias, the warning signs were always there. But many #fahernista and #geekproblem people get caught up in the glossy surface and tech hype mess, repeating the same mistake we’ve made across generations of #geekproblem tech, believing scale and #PR buzzwords were synonymous with progress.

Let’s now be clear on what actually happened.

We handed over infrastructure to a handful of giant platforms that lock us in and bleed us dry.
We lost resilience, sovereignty, and basic control over our own data.
We normalized rent-seeking as a business model.
We pushed decentralization off a cliff and called it “abstraction.”

Meanwhile, local compute got cheaper, storage exploded in affordability, bandwidth costs continued to fall, #dotcons threats increased. And guess what? Running things locally started making sense again, just like it always does when the #PR smoke clears and mess composts.

The lesson, which we need to now bring to #crypto and #AI, just because something is fashionable doesn’t make it in any way real or sustainable. That tech #PR hype cycles aren’t innovation, they’re marketing. And when you stop looking at the core trends (cost, control, resilience) and just ride the buzz, you’ll end up where we are now, mess, bloated budgets, shrinking trust, and a growing #techshit pile to clean up.

We need to re-learn the value of #KISS grounded thinking, to remember that local, #4opens, transparent, and interoperable #openweb systems aren’t retro, they’re essential. This isn’t about nostalgia for the old paths, It’s about having power over our basic infrastructure again. The cloud, at the time and in looking over our shoulders, was smoke and mirrors, a detour, it’s now past time to get back on the real progressive #Fediverse path.

History has a lot to say on the peasant revolt vs. liberal half-measures

Can bureaucracies join the #Fediverse? Yes – with WordPress + ActivityPub

Let’s stop pretending every institution has to “go social” by building new habits, communities, and platforms from scratch. We already have a solid, simple tool that can bridge them from the #dotcons into the #Fediverse: WordPress + the ActivityPub plugin.

Institutions want control – That’s OK. Bureaucratic institutions, local councils, unions, media orgs, #NGOs, aren’t designed for fast, messy social interaction. They won’t control over moderation, messaging, and timelines. That’s how they work, the good news is that they don’t have to surrender that control to leave the exploitative corporate platforms.

There is a path to step sideways into the #openweb by using tools they already trust, #WordPress, plugging into the #Fediverse with a few small adjustments. Here is how this works:

Use WordPress as a public publishing hub, it already supports articles, media, comments, and user permissions. It’s familiar to thousands of comms and IT staff.
Install the ActivityPub plugin. This lets every post become a Fediverse-native object. Readers on Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica etc. can follow and share the content.
Keep moderation tight. Comments from the Fediverse can be held for review by default. Content inflows are closed, moderated, or opened based on trust levels.
Build distribution without chasing followers. The content flows outward. Others can quote, reply, remix – but the source stays under local control.

The alternative? Indie News, if not WordPress, the more adventures could host a dedicated Fediverse news instance (like a rebooted #IndymediaBack) or even set up a microblogging server using software like WriteFreely or Plume. These would support long-form or short-form posts, stay focused on the institution’s goals, avoid chasing engagement metrics from #dotcons. And again, comments and responses could be moderated or disabled, depending on needs. No spam tsunami. No culture wars. Just distribution and visibility – on native #openweb terms.

Why this matters, many public institutions want to move away from Facebook and Twitter, but feel locked in. They know those platforms are toxic, yet all the people are there. But what if we stopped treating the #Fediverse like a chaotic free-for-all and started showing how it can also work for structured, “responsible” publishing? WordPress already has millions of users. The ActivityPub plugin is mature, maintained, and already working. All it takes is will, and a little guidance.

Benefits at a glance:

Maintain editorial control
Publish to a growing #openweb ecosystem
Avoid vendor lock-in and algorithmic censorship
Build real, direct relationships with communities
Help decentralize digital infrastructure for the public good

If an institution can run a blog, it can join the Fediverse. If it can post on Facebook, it can do better. Let’s stop waiting for perfect platforms and start using the tools we already have, WordPress is an underrated bridge from the bureaucratic world into a better, fairer, and more resilient #openweb path.

Why Doesn’t Every City Have a Fediverse Server?