A conversation on trust and tech with #OMN projects

Remember the #fedivers is built like this, no geek in their right minds would do this, yet we use it every day

All our existing code is based on #feudalism master (admin) surf (user) this is why it is defenceless vs capitalism (#dotcons)

There have been attempts to build democratic code, early #wikis, think #indymedia

#geekproblem “common sense” shifted them back into feudalism.

We have a hard #BLOCK on democratic code, if you want to change/challenge then this blocking needs to be removed.

The #OMN is a project for this, it’s an uphill battle to bring democracy into our coding.

This is the media project (text needs a update” unite.openworlds.info/Open-MedOFFLINE

Governance for horizontals to talk to “vertical power” unite.openworlds.info/Open-MedOFFLINE

And a video for you visionon.tv/w/jqTdss1qrdk4yEZi OFFLINE

We get into the details, of the #OMN you would get Boleyn tag changes on import, so you can auto translate guardian issued tags and add your own tags with both rules and manually.

These tags would flow out of your instances and could flow back to the guardian if you trusted each other.

The idea is to turn news stories/videos into “commons” objects with rich flowing metadata… done in a #KISS way based on trust/moderated link/flows

RSS bring in the legacy objects #activitypub is the main transport protocol.

It’s the news part of the #fediverse, our first implementation of this would be #indmediaback

The idea is to decenter the server, the data is in a soup that flows… #activertypub is two-way this is need to build the horizontal network, so the soup does not ONLY flow one way.

Nobody is in charge, no slaves, no masters. Only trusted or moderated flows. It needs to be two-way, though you are right people being human meany will be one way. BUT we are not building it that way 🙂

RSS brings the legacy in, and it’s a simple display format for embeds and passive news feeds etc.

I think people find the “nobody is in charge” bit a very hard thing to understand, even though we have built meany networks/social groups on this idea, and still do.

In the realm of tech, I call this #blocking the #geekproblem and to get anywhere we need to take the “problem” outa “geek” or we are left with the mess (in a bad way)

#KISS

People BLOCKING the needed process, or simply ignore it

If you keep doing the same thing, there will be the same outcome. Different worldviews produce different processes, and sometimes entirely different outcomes. This is the core lesson people miss when they treat radical #openweb projects like just another app or fluffy #NGO pitch deck.

All the #OMN projects grow from a different worldview – that comes from the lived traditions of the commons, the early Internet, and grassroots organising. It’s a worldview that has already worked: from the early #indymedia network the global voice to the anti-globalisation movements, to the early #wikis and #blogospheres that built collaborative knowledge before #closedsocialmedia captured it, to #Fediverse platforms like Mastodon continue to prove federation can scale without #dotcons corporate control. These are working proofs that decentralised, transparent, and trust-based systems do build society. They have scaling limits – yes – but these limits are part of their strength: they push diversity, autonomy, and accountability at human scale.

The challenge now is that most people entering the tech and activist spaces have no knowledge of this lineage, or worse, have knowledge of only one half of it. Developers who understand federation but not community process end up building silos with nice APIs. Activists who understand horizontal organising but not open standards end up trapped inside Facebook groups, Google Docs, and Slack workspaces – all walled gardens that feed the #nastyfew systems they claim to oppose.

When people have no grounding in subcultures, that underpins our civil rights, free software, and creative commons, they apply their all-knowing #mainstreaming “common sense.” They block the processes that make trust possible, dismiss open governance as messy, and treat openness itself as a threat to control. The result is stagnation: yet another “platform for change” that centralises power, burns out volunteers, and silently collapses when the funding ends.

The #OMN is an answer to this trap. It’s not a single tool, but a shared soil, a technical and social framework designed to connect and compost all the half-built projects and forgotten ideas still scattered across the #openweb. By combining the social scaling limits of grassroots organising (trust, transparency, and accountability) with the technical scaling power of open protocols (ActivityPub, RSS etc.), we rebuild the conditions for a real public commons. The tools are already here, what’s missing is the cultural memory and the courage to use them.