In #mainstreaming and alt political cultures there’s a constant call in messy times for “strong leaders” to cut through the chaos, but this is the wrong path. What Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders actually show is something more uncomfortable and more useful that real change doesn’t come from strong individuals – it comes from movements we don’t fully control. They were signals, not saviours.
Both figures emerged on the left because something deeper was already shifting with widespread discontent, a break from #mainstreaming politics and a hunger for alternatives to 40 years of #deathcult worshipping. They didn’t create these conditions – they channelled them. “Weakness” is often misnamed, Corbyn in particular was constantly framed as weak, but what was actually happening? When people treat them as failed “leaders,” they miss the point, at best they were interfaces to movements, rather than top-down commanders. They:
Hold together fragile, diverse coalition
Refusal to impose top-down control
Emphasis on process, participation, and consensus
In a stable system, this might look slow, in a fragile system, it’s often the only thing preventing collapse. In the open vs closed battle, it’s not as simple as it looks – especially in the mess we’re in.
CLOSED → conservative / fear / control OPEN → progressive / hope / trust
We need to keep looking at the underlying path when deciding which way to push the balance.
Were the demand for “strength” usually means more control, less democracy. That path tends to deepen the mess, not fix it, as personality politics is a dead end. When media and institutions focus on personalities where movements are about issues and structures. This mismatch is fatal if your politics depends on a person you are attacked through that person, and we all collapse when they falter. You never build lasting power, it is the trap both campaigns fell into, despite trying to avoid it.
Movements without structure (hard or soft) stall, is the harder truth – Horizontal energy alone isn’t enough – Electoral politics alone isn’t enough. Both Corbyn and Sanders mobilised huge grassroots energy, but institutions resisted, internal fragmentation grew – the energy wasn’t fully translated into durable paths, and they fell through the gap.
From a #OMN perspective, the takeaway is clear – Don’t look for better leaders – Don’t rely on existing institutions – Build commons-based infrastructure that movements can stand on. This means: Media we control (#indymedia paths), Governance we participate in (#OGB) and tech that reflects trust, not control (#openweb, #Fediverse)
So in messy times, don’t reach for “Strong Leaders” as this comes from fear, frustration and the desire for simple solutions, history – from left and right – shows where that road leads. In poisoned times, the work is slower, to build trust, to stay grounded in shared issues.
Corbyn and Sanders didn’t fail because they were too weak, they struggled because we don’t yet have the social, technical, and institutional commons needed to carry the kind of change they pointed toward. That’s the work, and it’s not about finding the right leader – it’s about becoming the movement that doesn’t need one.
At #NOAW event I talked a lot about the digital commons so thought it might be useful to write a post grounding this. The digital commons are not a future vision, it’s something we already have. At its simplest, the digital commons are the widely used #4opens digital resources of software, knowledge, data, and culture created collectively, governed by communities, and made available for public (re)use. This is the native path of the #openweb it’s been around for a long time, it might be hard to see but just about all of our current #dotcons mess is built on top of this layer.
There is a long history of commons in wider society. But mostly today we focus on the licences that protect reuse and sharing. None of this is abstract theory, it’s making the practical, working infrastructure that underpins much of what people still find useful online. One of the roots of the current digital commons go back to the 1980s and the emergence of the free software movement, led by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. This was not just about code, it was a social and political project:
Software should be shared
Users should have control
Improvements should remain in the commons
The creation of the GNU General Public Licence was the first step, enforcing a simple rule that if you benefit from the commons, you give back to the commons. The commons isn’t one thing, it’s an ecosystem – Some #KISS examples include:
Wikis – collectively written and maintained knowledge (#Wikipedia)
Open source software – built in public, shared freely (#FOSS)
Public code repositories like GitHub used to be (name one)
Open licensing systems like Creative Commons
Federated social tools built on ActivityPub (#Mastodon)
The Path is governance by the people who use it. What makes the digital commons different from “just free stuff” is this the people building it can shape how it works, a key distinction it’s not just access – it’s agency. The commons are non-exclusive (available to others), oriented toward use and reuse and governed by its participants, this is why it matters politically.
Today, much of the internet still runs on the digital commons, but the visible layer is dominated by #dotcons platforms. This creates a split of Commons layers → open, slow, sustainable and Platform layers → closed, extractive, growth-driven. People still rely on the commons, but interact through closed systems, this contradiction is unstable.
Policy is our current-missed opportunity, as our institutions see only the surface value. The European Union’s European Commission has pushed open source strategies as part of digital sovereignty, particularly through programmes like Horizon Europe. The idea is native – Share code – Collaborate openly – Build public infrastructure. But in practice, most of this gets lost in #NGO process, bureaucracy, and capture. The money flows, but the commons don’t grow.
The “Tragedy” of the Digital Commons. Like any commons, in the mess we live in today commons can be degraded from overuse (infrastructure strain), pollution (spam, low-quality content, noise) and information overload. The result is a corrupted signal-to-noise ratio, it is a real issue – but it’s to often used as an excuse to centralise control. This is largely solved by horizontal vs virtical scaling, if people can take this real native path.
There are social gaps. The commons reflects the culture that builds it, yes gender imbalance persists, access is uneven, and geek culture is too often exclusionary (#geekproblem). But the bigger problem we face is capture and drift. We’ve already seen it happen once: Free software → “open source” (politics stripped out). Commons → #dotcons platform capture.
Now we see this happening in the #Fediverse and #openweb reboot spaces with the last few years of vertical agendas dominating to meany outreach spaces, #NGO mediation and thus diluten is pushing native grassroots agency out, this is an old cycle repeating – the cycle that we need to compost.
OK, despite all the #mainstreaming mess, the digital commons are still the most viable path we have, we need to see this path not as hypothetical – more as it just works, but is underresourced. From a #OMN perspective, the digital commons are not only infrastructure, it’s the soil. You don’t build movements on platforms, you grow them in commons, but this growth needs care:
Protection from capture
Active governance
Social grounding, not just technical process
And most importantly the commons only survives if people act as commoners. The challenge now isn’t only to explain the digital commons, it’s to defend, rebuild, and extend it. That means funding native projects, keeping governance in the hands of participants to bridge activism, development, and real-world use as a path to push back against the continuing #mainstreaming capture.
This is not about nostalgia, it’s about #KISS recognising that we already have the tools we need, then caring enough not to only exploit them. Please try and be better than the current #mainstreaming on this, thanks.
This is the open-source – split – FOSS moment for the Fediverse. We’ve seen this before. When “open source” was carved out of Free Software politics, it made the space more business-friendly – but at a cost, the movement never fully recovered from this. The result was a long-term weakening of the social and political grounding that made FOSS meaningful in the first place. We are in real danger of repeating this pattern in the Fediverse.
Vertical agendas – loud, well-funded, and institutionally backed – dominate conversations and displace the native horizontalism that defines the Fediverse and the #openweb. These agendas will ultimately fail, but not before they push out the grassroots energy that actually makes things work.
A Practical Intervention
One leverage point is funding – specifically, how funding is framed, distributed, and justified within the #mainstreaming process.
So the question is: how do we intervene effectively? It’s a simple classic path: mess – opening – implement.
Create an EU-Focused Consortium
Build a working consortium with three balanced pillars:
* Activism – holding the political line and pushing for real change
* #NGO layer – interfacing with bureaucracy and policy structures
* Grassroots #FOSS builders – creating and maintaining commons-based code
The goal is simple, to deliver real, native #openweb tools that create meaningful social change, not just online, but in the wider world.
Strategy
1. Discredit the Current Waste
Document and publicize the massive misallocation of public funds:
* Hundreds of millions wasted on blockchain projects
* The same pattern now repeating with AI funding
This isn’t just critique, it’s strategic pressure. It weakens the legitimacy of the current funding agenda.
2. Open a Gap
By exposing this waste, you temporarily sideline parts of the “blocking class”, those who dominate but do not deliver. This creates a window of opportunity.
3. Seed the Commons
Use that opening to:
* Channel small, strategic funding (“cents on the euro”) into multiple grassroots projects
* Fund at least three parallel codebases per call.
* Expect two to be captured or fail
* Ensure one remains viable and native
Because these projects are built on ActivityPub, even “failed” or captured projects can still interoperate within the Fediverse ecosystem and thus can maybe grow to become meaningful. Diversity is good.
Outcome
This approach nudges EU technology policy – maybe programs like Horizon Europe – toward:
* Practical, working tools, native research. Based on meany “#Nlnet” like federated working paths.
The #OMN already has four native commons projects that align directly with this strategy:
* Governance
* Media
* Historical memory
* Digital addiction
These are not abstract ideas, they are ready-to-grow seeds for a healthier #openweb ecosystem.
Feel free to add to this in the comments I will update the text with feedback.
UPDATE: for me the failer mode of this is the 3 groups won’t be able to stay together: Activism – holding the political line and pushing for real change. NGO layer – interfacing with bureaucracy and policy structures. Grassroots #FOSS builders – creating and maintaining commons-based code.
It’s the snip problem, people will cut off pieces of the whole for there short term survival or career building, the coalition will splinter, and then fail. I think the above strategy is good apart from this hole – how do we fill or at least mediate this?
Today there are a lot of dishonest people – it’s become the default. Finding someone who is actually truthful is rare. So with this in mind, let’s stop being polite about this, what we’re living inside online right now isn’t “social media.” It’s a managed enclosure – a system designed to extract value, shape behaviour, and concentrate power. It’s what I have been saying for the last 20 years. Call it what it is – digital #feudalism – The Lords, the Serfs, and the Server.
When everyone is pushed onto one big virtual server, you don’t get community, you get hierarchy. Platform owners become landlords. Users become tenants. Visibility becomes rent. This is not accidental, it’s the business model and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The lie of “Ease of Use”. People say these #closedweb systems are “easy.” They’re not, they hide the cost, what looks simple is just complexity moved out of sight. Advertising Is the rot, a business model moral hazard, when profit depends on attention truth becomes optional and outrage becomes profitable leading to manipulation as the new normal. You don’t get healthy communities from this, you get addiction loops and behavioural engineering. And yes, the inevitable result is screen clutter, noise, and a slow degradation of any meaningful communication, communities are managed, not grown.
So who is going to do the #DIY work? Real moderation works when it’s embedded in the community itself. Algorithmic control is anti-social, the algorithmic timeline is one of the worst ideas we’ve normalised. It drives distraction, by showing you more of what you’ve already seen, it tries to control your desires by interfering with human communication. Over time, this destroys trust, when people stop knowing if they’re being heard, they stop knowing what is real, stop trusting the space. That’s not a bug, it’s the outcome.
The celebrity illusion is how centralised platforms manufacture “importance” for brands and influencers. These only function inside controlled visibility systems, outside of that? They’re often just paper tigers. In a real network – a messy, distributed, human one – influence has to be earned, not bought or algorithmically inflated.
The commodification of human life leads to inevitable decay. Left alone, centralised platforms drift towards monopoly, manipulation and towards the amplification of the worst actors as these actors game the system best. Without constant control from above, the system degrades, with repression, it becomes what we see today, authoritarian. That’s the trap, a community you can buy your way into is not a community, it’s a marketplace.
So what’s the alternative? We don’t fix this by tweaking features. We fix it by changing the ground or tech grows from. This new growth has been seeded by the #Fediverse, It’s where the #OMN comes in, not as another platform, but as a shift back to distributed networks instead of central servers, commons-based paths instead of enclosure, social moderation instead of outsourced control, open protocols instead of locked interfaces. And yes, that means less “slick”, less uniform, more messy. But also more real, accountable and human.
A final point (That should be obvious). The problem is not that the current #dotcons systems are broken, the problem is that they are working exactly as designed. If we want something better, we don’t patch the system, we compost it to grow the #openweb back – this time with the native cultural roots intact.
We need to have a clearer, more grounded conversation about “security” and what it actually means in the context of the #openweb. There is a long history of thinking in #FOSS spaces that security is something we can solve purely technically: better encryption, better protocols, better architectures. But in everyday life and practice, people need to work from a much simpler starting point – We do not trust client–server security. We only meaningfully trust what can be verified through the #4opens. And even with #p2p, we keep our trust closed limited.
Why? Because the underlying systems people actually use are insecure by design: old phones, opaque operating systems, proprietary blobs built and controlled by #dotcons. You can build the most secure system in the world, but if the people you are communicating with are using compromised devices, then your security collapses to their level.
That’s the bit people who fixate on closed don’t like to face. So a #KISS approach helps cut through the illusion – At normal use, there is very little real security. At paranoid levels, security breaks down socially, because you still need to interact with people operating at the normal level. That doesn’t mean security doesn’t matter. It means we need to stop pretending it technically works in isolation from social reality.
Why closed paths, spaces and projects fail socially, is a harder point. Closed systems are often justified in the name of security, privacy, or control, but socially, they create a very different dynamic in that they remove visibility. And without visibility, you cannot form shared judgment, without shared judgment, you cannot have social truth. In closed environments, bad actors – call them “monsters” if you like – can manipulate, divide, coordinate in the dark to avoid accountability, because there is no wider context to test what is happening.
In open systems, the same actors exist, but they are much easier to see, challenge, and trip up, because conversations are visible, processes are transparent and history is accessible. Closed breeds monsters, open pushes them out of the light and into the shadows. This is why, for the #openweb, “closed” should be deliberately limited and clearly bounded, not expanded as a default.
There is a very real social problem on this with #Encryptionism, as a social project as it is where meany parts of the #FOSS world go wrong. There is a strong tendency – what we call the #encryptionists – to treat encryption as a kind of universal solution, were in reality, this to often becomes: a focus on abstract technical purity, a dismissal of messy social reality to retreat into systems that don’t scale socially. And too often, aligns – ironically – with the same #deathcult logic it claims to resist: control, fear, and abstraction over lived practice. Encryption is a tool, not a culture.
This brings up the #Geekproblem – put simply – The people building the tools often cannot see the social problems those tools create. Even when those problems are pointed out repeatedly, over years, with real-world examples, the response is often negative and #blocking – to retreat into technical framing, to rephrase the issue in jargon, to build another “better” tool that misses the point.
A useful way to explain this to the #FOSS crew is yes, jargon can be messy, but this is not just about language. The deeper issue is cultural blindness, lets look at a concrete example that might help in bridging: #Indymedia was a ten-year working global experiment in open publishing and #4opens practice. And, yes, it ran into exactly these tensions, in the UK, the project fractured along three lines:
#Encryptionists – blocking aggregation due to abstract security concerns
#Fashernistas – pushing shiny but incompatible “better” solutions
#Openweb practitioners – arguing for simple, interoperable approaches (like #RSS)
Instead of adopting existing standards like RSS, parts of the project built new, incompatible formats, “better” on paper, but useless in practice. The result? Fragmentation, internal conflict, loss of interoperability, eventual collapse. All three sides lost. This pattern should feel familiar, you can still see it today in parts of the Fediverse.
The practical path forward, starts with taking this history seriously, then a few things become clear, that closed should be minimal and purposeful, not the default. Open processes (#4opens) are the only scalable form of trust, interoperability beats cleverness, social reality matters more than technical purity. And most importantly we need to design for the world as it is, not the world we only wish existed.
One Foot In, One Foot Out. Right now, most people are still inside the #dotcons. So the path forward isn’t purity, it’s transition. The approach we are taking with #OMN, it is simple, install and configure usable #openweb tools, make them accessible, let people use them alongside existing platforms to support a gradual #walkaway culture. One foot in. One foot out. If enough people take that step, the balance shifts.
But to take this step we need to compost the closed, we don’t need to destroy everything that exists, we need to compost it. Take what works, turn over what doesn’t, to grow something better from the remains. That means being honest about the limits of security, about the dangers of closed systems and about the cultural blind spots in #FOSS. If we can do that, we have a chance to build an #openweb that actually works.
If we can’t, we will keep repeating the same failures – just with better code.
A recent essay on deadSimpleTech makes a point the #openweb community should hear: the biggest problem in technology is not only the tools, it’s also the culture behind them. For years the tech world has operated under a form of narrow “tech empiricism”: the belief that if something produces results quickly, then it must be working well. In this mindset, success is measured by novelty, speed of production, and the ability to create something new. The heroes of this culture are disruptors and iconoclasts who ship fast and build shiny things that capture #fashionista attention.
But this basic #geekproblem ignores a simple #KISS truth: technology only has meaning inside the culture that builds and maintains it. And this is where the real problem begins. In the dominant tech worldview, the culture rewards novelty, disruption, rapid production, and personal prestige. Inside this environment of #deathcult worship, producing new code becomes a way to gain status among peers. Shipping quickly matters more than maintaining systems or improving what already exists.
But there is another culture that exists alongside this, the culture of engineering and maintenance. In fields like civil engineering or infrastructure design, the heroes are not disruptors. They are the people who quietly maintain systems, improve reliability, and prevent failures. The emphasis is on responsibility, long-term stability, and care for systems people depend on. This difference in culture matters enormously. Because what counts as something working “well” depends entirely on what the culture values.
From the perspective of blinded tech culture, a tool that generates lots of new code and features appears incredibly successful. But from the perspective of infrastructure and engineering culture, that same tool may look deeply flawed – even dangerous. Real systems require debugging, maintenance, testing, and institutional memory. Most importantly, they require people who accept responsibility when things fail.
In mature systems, the first prototype is only the beginning. The real work comes later: years of maintenance, improvement, and adaptation. Yet this long-term work is largely invisible in tech culture and funding systems, which celebrate the person who creates something new but rarely honour the people who keep it running. This cultural blindness leads to fragile systems and recurring cycles of hype and #techshit to compost.
The same problem is in the #OpenWeb. Unfortunately, this problem is not limited to Silicon Valley, it also appears inside the #openweb, #NGO, and #FOSS ecosystems. Many conversations focus almost entirely on: code, protocols, scaling, features and UX. All of these are important, but without balance they are not enough to sustain a functioning ecosystem.
Without the native social culture that originally shaped the open web, open technology slowly drifts toward the dominant norms of the wider #dotcons tech industry of status competition, short-term innovation cycles, neglect of maintenance and eventual capture by institutions or corporations. This is one reason so many promising #openweb projects stagnate or collapse.
The technology works, but the social infrastructure fails. It’s in part why the #OMN exists as a project. This is the gap we need to address, not primarily as technical project. Most of the protocols and software already exist. What is missing is the social infrastructure that allows them to function as a public commons. Instead of focusing only on building new non-native platforms, the #OMN focuses on growing the wider ecosystem around what all ready works.
This means recognising that the real value of a network comes from the people who maintain it, moderate it and build communities around it – not just from the code itself.
From tech “empiricism” to social infrastructure, if we want the #openweb reboot to succeed, we need to move beyond the narrow mindset that treats technology as purely technical. The lesson from history is simple, code builds systems, culture makes them work. Without a healthy culture, even the best open technologies will eventually fail or be captured by more powerful institutions.
A deeper mess is “The End of Theory”, tech empiricism problem is really the #geekproblem amplified by ideas like this, the claim that massive data sets make traditional scientific thinking unnecessary. This idea, popularised by Chris Anderson, suggests that with enough data we no longer need theories, models, or human understanding. But this is a dangerously narrow view as large data models are epistemologically weaker than scientific theories. They can recognise patterns, but they do not understand them.
This becomes even more problematic in the age of opaque and unexplainable #AI systems. Deep learning models can be efficient at pattern recognition, but they lack human comprehension and produce opaque but believable outputs. At the same time, the increasing “datafication” of society means that communication and public life on the #dotcons platforms are moderated by these same algorithms. These systems prioritise engagement and behavioural prediction over needed values like: accuracy, truth, democratic deliberation. The result is a social environment driven by metrics rather than meaning.
It is past time to compost the mess as it is becoming easier and easier to see. But seeing the problem is only the first step. The next step is to compost it – to take the failures of the current system and use them as nutrients for something better. The future of the #openweb will not be decided by better code alone. It will be decided by whether we build the social infrastructure to support it. That is the work the #OMN is trying to grow.
Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, decentralisation, and horizontal collaboration. Through writing, workshops, and practical projects, he argues that the future of the Fediverse depends as much on culture, governance, and shared infrastructure as it does on code.
Purpose is to open conversation that many people feel but rarely articulate: the tension between grassroots culture and institutional capture. Start with your simple distinction:
Bad #mainstreaming → corporate/NGO structures reshaping the Fediverse
Then ask: “Which direction are we currently moving?”
Discussion topics – funding and governance, foundations and institutional capture, developer vs user power, infrastructure vs platforms. How to avoid repeating Web 2.0
Activity is to ask participants to map layers: Grassroots – NGO / institutional – Corporate. To discuss where power currently sits and what healthy balance might look like.
Outcome is people leave with language to understand the tensions they are experiencing in the Fediverse.
Workshop 02
Maybe a second one on why #makeinghistory is needed? Translating #OMN from “activist infrastructure” into “missing public digital infrastructure.” That language is what this event is trying to figure out. The Open Media Network (#OMN) proposes a model where grassroots publishing, community moderation, and institutional participation are balanced. Participants can discuss how institutions support shared infrastructure rather than just deploying isolated platforms.
Many institutions are experimenting with the Fediverse as an alternative to #dotcons corporate social media. However, simply running institutional servers risks reproducing the same platform dynamics in a federated form. We need workshops that explore the broader ecosystem of public-interest media infrastructure.
“What happens after institutions join the Fediverse?” The #KISS answer is they need to support the commons infrastructure that makes it socially viable. Running Mastodon is not enough, institutions need to support the wider open media ecosystem.
Talking about #openweb culture in a constructive way is tricky because most #FOSS and Fediverse conversations default to technical framing: code quality, scalability, moderation tooling, and #UX. These things matter, but they are not the foundation that determines whether a network lives or dies.
Maybe a useful way to open the conversation is to shift the starting point. Instead of saying “culture is important too”, say something stronger but practical: The success or failure of open systems is primarily a cultural question, not a technical one. The code only expresses the culture behind it.
Start with a simple historical observation. Many technically strong systems failed because the social layer was weak, while some technically rough systems succeeded because the community culture worked.
Examples from the open web – early open source projects that thrived because communities shared norms of collaboration. Grassroots networks like Indymedia worked socially even when the software was messy. Corporate platforms that succeeded not because they were technically better, but because they built powerful social gravity.
The pattern is clear, that technology enables networks, but culture sustains them. This is the missing step in most Fediverse conversations. Right now to meany discussions focus on: scaling servers, moderation tools, interface design and onboarding. These are all necessary but insufficient.
What way to often goes missing is the deeper questions – What culture are we actually trying to grow? Without answering that, the system tends to drift toward the dominant internet culture, which today is shaped by the #dotcon platform model of engagement optimisation, algorithmic attention markets, influencer dynamics and centralised power. When that culture seeps into the Fediverse, the result is a federated copy of the same problems.
So why is culture harder than code? Code can be written by a few developers, culture requires shared understanding across thousands of people. To grow this we need native governance norms, trust networks, moderation values and expectations about ownership and participation to hold to native paths for how conflict is handled. These things cannot simply be implemented in software, they must be grown socially, fail to address this is why many technically strong projects fail, they assume the social layer will somehow emerge automatically. It rarely does.
To make this constructive, it helps to clearly describe what we mean by #openweb culture. Some core values historically included public-first communication rather than platform ownership, decentralised responsibility instead of central moderation authority, commons thinking rather than product thinking to nurture horizontal participation rather than audience/influencer hierarchies, this need clear #4opens processes rather than opaque decision-making.
These values were never perfect, but they created a different social environment from today’s corporate social media. If we do not actively cultivate these values, the surrounding internet culture will slowly overwrite them. If the Fediverse continues to grow without addressing culture as it currently is, the most likely outcome is large institutional instances dominate, smaller community spaces struggle leading to more moderation being centralised. This all shifts user expectations toward platform-style experiences.
At that point, the system may still be technically federated, but the culture will have drifted back toward Web 2.0. The code will be open, but the social dynamics will not be.
So the “extra step” is simply, we must talk about culture as deliberately as we talk about software architecture. That means asking questions like: What social norms should Fediverse communities encourage? What governance models support open participation? How do we keep the ecosystem diverse rather than dominated by large actors? What responsibilities come with running infrastructure in a commons network?
These conversations are sometimes uncomfortable, because they move beyond engineering into politics, sociology, and ethics. But avoiding them does not make them disappear, it simply means the culture will be shaped by default forces instead of conscious choices.
A simple way to frame this – A phrase that often works well in discussion is – “Code builds the network, but culture decides what the network becomes.” If we want the #openweb to remain something different from the #closedweb platform internet, we need to invest as much thought into the culture as we do into the code and #UX. Otherwise, the technology may succeed technically, but the social project behind it will quietly fail.
Public Money, Public Communication, Public Infrastructure
Public institutions are funded by taxpayers. Their role is to serve the public. So it should be obvious that their communication systems are open, accessible, and accountable to everyone -without requiring people to sign up to proprietary, for-profit platforms.
Yet this is not the world we live in. Today, much of public communication is effectively outsourced to the #dotcons. If you want to follow government updates, participate in consultations, or even access timely public information, you are often expected to create an account on a closed platform – designed for profit, data extraction, and behavioural manipulation. That alone should raise serious questions.
This contradiction is especially stark in Europe as they regularly speak about digital sovereignty, data protection and public accountability. And yet, at the same time, they rely on U.S.-based corporate platforms to communicate with their own citizens. It’s a strange situation:
Public institutions, funded by European taxpayers, using foreign, proprietary infrastructure to mediate public communication.
Not only does this create dependency, it also places public discourse inside systems that are not governed by public interest.
It’s not just ironic. It’s structurally broken, we should think about prosicuting the people who have made this happen.
The access problem, useing closed platforms to access public communication creates real barriers: Not everyone wants to create or maintain dotcons social media accounts. Some people are excluded for ethical, political, or practical reasons. Algorithms decide what is seen and what is not. Public information becomes entangled with advertising and engagement metrics. This undermines a basic democratic principle that public communication should be universally accessible, without conditions.
We already have an alternative to this curupt mess, the #DIY#OpenWeb comes from europe, it offers a different path. Instead of #closedweb platform dependency, it builds on open standards, interoperable systems with multiple access points, no user lock-in. This is not a new path, it is how the web was originally created to work in the EU.
An example project that contines this native mission and supports this is the #OMN whitch creates spaces where public institutions and public communities can meet on equal terms, without one dominating the other, and without relying on closed corporate systems. If institutions instead invest in and support the wider #OMN ecosystem, they help build something fundamentally different, a public communication infrastructure that is open by default, accessible to all, resilient and distributed and aligned with democratic values.
A simple principle, if it is funded by the public, it should be accessible to the public – without restriction. No accounts required, no platform dependency and no hidden gatekeepers.
We need to organise a call to act. Public institutions need to move beyond simply using the #Fediverse. They need to help build and sustain the commons that makes open communication possible. That means, supporting open infrastructure projects, funding shared ecosystems like the #OMN and building real, not facke PR commitment to public-first communication practices.
This is not just a technical shift, it is a political and cultural choice.
A simple #KISS way forward is to shift public social communication onto the #Fediverse. This is already a significant improvement on current platform dependency. However, I want to raise a point that may sound controversial at first, but is actually quite practical: public institutions should not rely exclusively on the existing codebases.
Most current Fediverse platforms have done vital groundwork – particularly in establishing shared protocols, interoperability, and a working culture of federation. That contribution is important and should be recognised. However, many of these tools evolved shaped by the same assumptions as #dotcons and constrained by #NGO project models. As a result, they can be complex, difficult to maintain, and not always well aligned with the long-term needs of public institutions or commons-based infrastructure.
A constructive path forward would be to fund the development of a small number of new, purpose-built codebases focused on commons publishing. Not one, but three parallel implementations.
Why three? Because diversity reduces risk. In practice, not every project will succeed – this is normal and expected. Funding multiple approaches ensures resilience, encourages innovation, and avoids over-reliance on a single solution. The cost of doing this would be minimal relative to existing public digital budgets, yet the potential long-term value is significant.
Importantly, this is not about replacing the existing ecosystem. Because the Fediverse is built on shared protocols, any new tools would remain fully interoperable with current platforms. This means users of existing services can still interact seamlessly, while the overall ecosystem becomes stronger, more diverse, and better aligned with public service values.
In short: build on what exists, but don’t be constrained by it. By investing modestly in new, commons-oriented infrastructure alongside the current tools, public institutions can shape a more robust, sustainable, and genuinely public digital communication space.
Outreach to @newsmast interesting to see the #NGO view of the real alt path we need to take https://hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of-workshops-to-run-at-nodes-on-a-web-noaw-unconference/ you guys might be interested in working on the 3ed workshop outline. The 3 codebase need to be 1) mainstreaming, 2) radical #NGO and 3) native messy grassroots. You guys could be the second codebase. We do need diversity, best not to keep blindly messing up this path in the current globe mess.
Stopped going to in-person general tech conferences around 15 years ago – they’d become beyond pointless. Since then, I’ve stuck to more focused online events.
Now heading back to an in-person one. Curious what I’ll actually find.
I have a feeling it’ll be about 75% pointless, 20% narrow geek, academic and #NGO-focused (slightly useful), and maybe 5% – probably less – actually useful.
Let’s see how that shifts after the event.
UPDATE: The event was posative, people were looking for change.
Individual fear scales into collective outcomes, when people act mainly from fear, they tend to choose control, isolation, and short-term protection, and those choices accumulate into worse social paths. It’s useful to frame this as the dynamic between fear/control and trust/open in #openweb thinking.
So the practical question becomes – how do we reduce fear enough that people act more cooperatively? We can try some grounded ways to make this to work.
Build Real Social Support
Fear grows when people feel alone and powerless, it shrinks when people feel supported and connected. Historically, societies with strong collective structures – unions, cooperatives, community groups, local media, commons infrastructure – tend to show lower social anxiety and higher trust. What helps is strong local communities with shared institutions people actually control through mutual aid and cooperative structures. When people know others have their back, they are less likely to act defensively.
Reduce Information Panic
Traditional and #dotcons media systems amplify fear, because fear drives attention and engagement. Constant exposure to crisis narratives makes people feel the world is collapsing even when their local reality may be more stable. To counter this we need slower, contextual media, local reporting and shared storytelling in flows in media systems not driven by advertising attention metrics. This is the place where the #OMN fits: if communities control their own media infrastructure, the incentives shift away from panic amplification.
Increase Agency
Fear grows when people feel they cannot influence outcomes, when people have real participation in decisions, fear tends to drop and responsibility rises. So when people help shape the systems, they no longer see it purely as something happening to them.
Create Stable Material Conditions
A lot of fear is simply economic insecurity, worrying about housing, food, healthcare, or work, their nervous systems remain in threat mode. In that state, cooperation becomes much harder.
Encourage Contact Between Groups
Fear comes from distance and misunderstanding, interacting across social, political and cultural differences in real life, fear tends to decrease. Shared projects and cooperation help more than debate. This is why collective building projects (community media, shared infrastructure, local initiatives) can be powerful: people work together rather than just argue.
Normalize Courage Instead of Panic
Fear spreads socially, but confidence spreads socially too, when people see others acting constructively – organizing, building alternatives, cooperating – it changes what feels possible. Visible examples of working alternatives matter because they shift the emotional landscape from “Everything is collapsing.” to “We can actually build something better.”
The idea we need to balance is fear itself is not the enemy, in moderation it is a normal protective response. The problem comes when systems, like much of today’s personal and social mess exploit fear to maintain control. When that happens, fear multiplies and becomes self-reinforcing. Reducing fear at scale usually requires: stronger communities, trustworthy “native” institutions using #4opens communication to drive real participation in building visible alternatives.
In short: build systems that reward trust instead of systems that profit from fear. That is one reason projects like #openweb infrastructure of the #OMN matter. They are not just technical tools, they are about building communication spaces that encourage cooperation instead of panic.
There is a point that often gets misunderstood in conversations about the future of the #openweb and #FOSS that #mainstreaming itself is not inherently good or bad. What matters is who is influencing whom. We can think of it in two very different directions.
Good #mainstreaming is when the values of the #openweb move outward into the wider world: Transparency, decentralization, cooperation, shared infrastructure and community governance. In this case, mainstream society learns from the cultures that grew around free software and open networks. But there is another direction.
Bad #mainstreaming happens when the mainstream flows inward and reshapes the open ecosystem in its own image. The values that arrive tend to look like this: corporate control, surveillance capitalism, hierarchical governance, branding over substance leading to growth and extraction over community. In this case, the #openweb is not influencing the mainstream, the mainstream is absorbing and reshaping the openweb. And historically, that absorption rarely ends well.
This second bad option of co-option Is the default, in the current context, mainstreaming tends to dilute radical alternatives into market-friendly compromises. This is not accidental, the system many of us are working inside – what I often call the #deathcult of neoliberalism – does not absorb things in good faith, it absorbs them in order to neutralize them.
We have seen this pattern repeatedly when open communities become venture-backed platforms, cooperative tools become monetized services, grassroots networks become brands. What begins as a commons to often ends as a product. For people building or funding #FOSS infrastructure, this pattern should be familiar.
Because of this messy dynamic, we need active mediation when interacting with mainstream institutions. Not blanket rejection, but not naïve acceptance either. The question is always contextual: Is the mainstream being influenced by open values or are open communities being reshaped to fit mainstream power structures? Right now, the balance is heavily tilted toward the latter, which means the priority is not endless integration. The priority is protecting and strengthening the roots of the #openweb.
Thinking about this kinda mess making helps to highlight the problem of the #NGO Path, where the NGO layer becomes problematic. The people involved are sometimes well-meaning, many think they are genuinely trying to help. But the institutional incentives they operate under reshape projects in subtle but powerful ways.
Our #FOSS funding structures push toward professionalization, opaque centralized governance, brand management, risk avoidance that is compatibility with existing power structures. Over time, this acts like a kind of social poison inside grassroots ecosystems. That might sound harsh, but it is simply a reality of social dynamics and institutional gravity. People working within those systems carry those assumptions with them, often without realizing it.
For the health of the ecosystem, we need to mediate our intake of that poison. This is not about demonizing individuals, it is about recognizing structural effects. There is no contradiction in saying both things at once: They may be good people – Their institutional logic still damages grassroots culture. So a useful rule of thumb is simple is don’t drink too deeply from the #mainstreaming.
Visibility Matters – Another issue for #FOSS projects is much more practical – Grassroots infrastructure often stays invisible. If people don’t know a project exists, they cannot adopt it. And when that happens, the public will naturally drift toward the next “ethical” platform marketed by the very companies reproducing the #dotcons model. The difference is that those companies have huge PR budgets. If open projects do not communicate what they are building and why it matters, the narrative will be written elsewhere and it will not favour the commons.
The real value of the #OpenWeb at its simplest, the #openweb path does something very straightforward in that it empowers horizontal, DIY culture and dis-empowers vertical, closed systems. That shift alone has enormous value.
It changes who gets to publish.
It changes who controls infrastructure.
It changes who participates in shaping the network.
Yet one of the strangest things in the current moment is how many people actively reject or ignore this possibility. Part of that blindness comes from habit, part from career incentives, part from the cultural gravity of the mainstream. But the result is the same: the tools that could strengthen public digital space are sidelined in favour of systems designed primarily for profit.
So what can maintainers and funders do? If you maintain or fund #FOSS infrastructure, there are a few practical steps that can help strengthen the ecosystem:
Fund the commons, not just products. Support infrastructure that serves communities, even if it does not generate revenue.
Protect open governance. Funding models should strengthen community decision-making rather than centralizing power.
Support grassroots visibility. Help projects communicate what they are building and why it matters.
Resist quite capture. Watch for subtle shifts where open projects become shaped by market logic or branding priorities.
Invest in horizontal ecosystems. The long-term health of the web depends on many small interconnected projects, not a few dominant platforms.
The choice in front of us is the future of the #openweb will not be decided by technology alone. It will be decided by culture, governance, and resource flows. If the current trend continues, open infrastructure will increasingly be absorbed into corporate platforms, #NGO programs, and venture ecosystems.
But there is another path, slower one, messier, more grassroots one. One that keeps the web as a commons rather than a marketplace. Whether that path survives depends heavily on the choices made by #FOSS maintainers and the people who fund the work.
One of the biggest barriers to building projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) is not technical – it is structural – how resources are distributed in our society. Under capitalism, the driving force behind what gets built and what counts as “innovation” is profit. Investment flows toward projects that promise financial returns. Venture capital, grants, and corporate funding all operate under this logic: if a project can generate profit, scale, or market dominance, it is considered worthy of investment. If it cannot do those things, it does not get funded.
This creates a deep distortion in what kinds of technology and social infrastructure actually get built. Projects that could save lives, strengthen communities, or benefit wider society struggle to find any resources simply because they do not generate profit. We can see this clearly in the digital world. Billions flow into speculative technologies, advertising systems, surveillance platforms, and financial schemes. Meanwhile, the basic tools people need for public communication, community coordination, and independent media remain fragile and under-resourced.
The result is the landscape we now call the #dotcons: platforms that monetize our attention, harvest our data, and shape public conversation for the benefit of a handful of corporations and shareholders.
A different motivation? The native Fediverse and projects like the #OMN are built from a completely different starting point. Not designed to extract profit or built encloser. And not driven by the logic of venture capital. Instead, at best they grow from a humanist motivation: the desire to build social meaning and meet simple human needs. The goal is to improve the quality of life in general by supporting open publishing, shared media infrastructure, and grassroots communication. These are the kinds of tools we need to help communities tell their own stories, organise collectively, and respond to crises.
In this sense, the #OMN sits firmly in the tradition of the #openweb and projects like #indymedia. The technology exists, the cultural knowledge exists, what is missing is not possibility, but resources. Because the #OMN does not promise financial returns, it sits outside the normal funding pipelines. Venture capital has no interest, corporate sponsors want control, institutional funding comes with strings attached that reshape projects into something “safer” and less disruptive.
Over the past decades we have also seen how #NGO funding models neutralize grassroots initiatives, the original goals become softened, the governance shifts upward, and projects become professionalized to the point where they lose the communities they were meant to serve. So the challenge becomes very simple, but very real how do we resource projects that are built for social value rather than profit? This is the core difficulty in building the #OMN.
It is not that people disagree with the idea, in fact, many people recognise the need for open, public-first media infrastructure. The difficulty lies in finding ways to support that work outside the normal profit-driven economy.
Growing from seeds – the good news is that the #OMN does not need to start big. Many of the most important pieces of the #openweb have always grown from small seeds: communities, volunteer effort, shared infrastructure, and trust networks. The #Fediverse itself is proof that distributed systems can grow organically when people care enough to build and maintain them.
The aim is not to replace the existing system overnight. It is to grow an alternative ecosystem alongside it, rooted in openness, collaboration, and public benefit. This means building slowly, sharing knowledge, and keeping the processes transparent and simple. The #4opens principles remain a useful guide: open data, open source, open standards, and open process.
What you can do – if the #OMN is going to exist – it will exist because people decide it should. There are a few practical ways to help make that happen:
Contribute skills and development. Developers, designers, writers, organisers, and testers are all needed to grow the network.
Use and experiment with the tools. Real projects and real communities are what give infrastructure meaning.
Share the ideas. Talk about the need for public-first media systems and the problems with the current #dotcons landscape.
Help build the culture. Technology alone is not enough. The #OMN depends on the social culture of the #openweb: cooperation, trust, and collective responsibility.
This is a #KISS path to building the world we need. The current system directs enormous resources toward technologies that extract value rather than create it. That is not inevitable, it is simply how our economic structures currently allocate attention and funding.
The #OMN represents a small but practical step to build something different, not a platform empire, or another startup. Just a shared piece of public media infrastructure, grown from the grassroots, and built to serve the people who use it. If that sounds like a world worth building, you can help make it real: https://opencollective.com/open-media-network
For a long time the focus has been on solving two linked problems – both of which are actually #nothingnew. The first is grassroots publishing and organising. The second is network coordination between communities. Neither of these problems started with the internet, and they certainly didn’t start with Silicon Valley.
Projects like #Indymedia and community organising networks solved these problems culturally long before modern platforms existed. They worked through shared practice, trust networks, affinity groups, and rough consensus. Importantly, they worked in non-federated ways – loose collaboration across independent nodes. This model likely stretches back a century or more in activist and cooperative cultures.
What the last five years of #ActivityPub rollout has given us is something new to add to that history: technical federation. So we now have two complementary paths that both grow naturally from the #openweb:
Grassroots #DIY culture – social federation built on trust, practice and community.
Technical federation – protocols like ActivityPub enabling networks of independent servers to interoperate.
Both are native to the open web. From the #OMN perspective this leads to practical projects:
#indymediaback – rebuilding grassroots publishing and organising infrastructure based on the lessons of the original Indymedia movement, but updated with openweb tools.
#OGB – a parallel path emerging through EU outreach and institutional engagement.
The key point is that these paths do not depend on the dominant platform ecosystem, the #dotcons. In fact, if we step back historically, we can see a fork in the road that happened twenty years ago. Instead of building open infrastructure, most movements ended up relying on corporate platforms. It was easier, faster, and seemed practical at the time. But that path turned out to be a trap.
The current tech landscape – platforms, algorithms, venture capital ecosystems, and the ideology surrounding them – is largely #techshit. Not because technology itself is bad, but because the dominant model is built to extract value and control attention rather than support communities. The solution isn’t simply to reject technology, it’s to compost it. Take what works, discard what doesn’t, and grow something healthier from the remains. That’s the thinking behind #OMN projects.
The projects start from a social understanding: technology alone doesn’t create networks. Culture, trust, and shared practice do. The tools should support those relationships, not capture or replace them. So the historical loop closes. Grassroots culture + open protocols – #DIY practice + federation. If we had taken that path twenty years ago, the web might look very different today.
The task now is simple, go back to that fork and take the other path.
Something that’s worth saying out loud: many of the people currently talking for the #Fediverse had very little to do with the generation that seeded this version. That doesn’t automatically make what they say wrong. But it does mean we should be careful about building strategy around their narratives.
A lot of the early Fediverse energy came from the older #openweb traditions of hacker and #FOSS culture, experiments in federated infrastructure and grassroots publishing networks. The long history of things like RSS feeds, blogging, and projects like #indymedia
The #Fediverse didn’t appear out of nowhere, it grew from decades of experimentation with open protocols, decentralised communication, and commons-based infrastructure. Some of the current commentators arrived after the current seeds had already been planted. That’s normal, every movement eventually attracts interpreters, professionalisers, and institutions. But it does mean there is a risk that the story gets rewritten in ways that lose the original lessons.
One of those lessons is simplicity, the systems that spread tend to follow a basic rule: #KISS – Keep It Simple: Simple protocols. Simple tools. Simple ways for people to publish and connect. When infrastructure becomes complicated – governance layers, funding structures, branding strategies, endless, #NGO mediated theoretical debates – the distance between the actual people and the invisible elitism occupying the space, talking the loudest, grows larger.
The Fediverse itself only exists because a handful of people quietly built working code and released it under #4opens licences. Communities adopted it because it worked, not because it was well marketed, not because institutions endorsed it and not because a conference panel explained its importance.
For projects growing the #openweb, the lesson is straightforward: Don’t get too distracted by who is currently speaking for the ecosystem. Look at flows, what is being built, at what people have used and at what follows the basic principles of the commons. And keep things simple. #KISS is still the best guides we have.
Stepping around the recurring #NGO voices in #openweb debates. To do this the problem we need to compost is our lack of balance, meany of the people talking for us have done the same thing for each generation of the open web and bluntly there “common sense” has always failed as it is not native to the #openweb. These people have no idea that they keep circling this mess, so please try and step around them. Because they talk loudly and consistently, newcomers often assume they represent the ecosystem, they don’t. The practical lesson is simple:
Notice them.
Learn from the patterns of past generations.
Step around them.
Our task is to grow native, functioning, living networks, not to repeat old mainstreaming debates that have consistently led nowhere. In other words: don’t argue with the noise, build around it. Keep the focus on grassroots projects, real communities, and real trust-based infrastructure.
