#spiky is the confrontational, direct, and uncompromising path within radical movements. It is the willingness to push back against power, name uncomfortable truths, and refuse to water down political edges to make ideas more acceptable to mainstream audiences.
In the #OMN hashtag story, #spiky represents the necessary tension between accessibility and integrity. Movements to often face pressure to become smoother, friendlier and less challenging in order to attract wider support. But when every difficult idea is softened, every conflict avoided, and every criticism turned into polite language, movements lose the ability to describe the problems they are pushing to change by challenging them.
The purpose of being #spiky is not to be hostile for its own sake. It is not about performing anger, creating drama or attacking individuals. The useful form of #spiky is a social function that cuts through denial, challenges comfortable assumptions and keeps political conversations connected to reality.
Every transformative movement needs people willing to say: this system is not working; this compromise is damaging; this “common sense” is a story that protects existing power structures. Without this #KISS path, radical ideas are to often absorbed, diluted and repackaged into harmless versions that leave the underlying structures untouched.
But there are real dangers if #spiky becomes disconnected from the wider ecology of a movement. Pure confrontation without trust, care or organisation burns energy and push people away, anger alone does not build alternatives. The challenge is connecting the sharp edge of critique with the patient work of creating commons, relationships and working infrastructure. This is why #spiky needs to work alongside #fluffy as any healthy movement needs people who question, people who create, and people who sustain. The sharp edge identifies problems; the collective process creates solutions.
#spiky is the refusal to pretend everything is fine, a reminder that movements lose their purpose when they become more concerned with appearing acceptable than with changing reality.
#stupidindividualism is the manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective survival. It is not simply “people being selfish” – it is a social behaviour shaped and reinforced by decades of politics and economics teaching people to see themselves as isolated consumers, competitors and brands.
Forty years of #neoliberalism normalised the idea that individual choice is the highest form of freedom. The language sounds empowering: be independent, maximise your opportunities, look after yourself, compete and succeed. But underneath this is a deeper mess that has shifted our cultural – the erosion of the idea that we are connected, that we have responsibilities to each other, and that communities are something we actively build and maintain.
The result is a strange contradiction, that people are encouraged to believe they are exercising freedom while making choices that reduce their own collective freedom. Choosing convenience over resilience, competition over cooperation, private solutions over public infrastructure, endless consumption over ecological survival. The individual becomes trapped inside blinded paths that reward behaviour harmful to everyone, including themselves.
#stupidindividualism appears when people defend a personal advantage that damages the commons they depend on. It is the person fighting against community organisation because “no one should tell me what to do”, while benefiting from the roads, healthcare, knowledge, ecosystems and social networks created through collective effort. It is the belief that independence means having no obligations, rather than having the power to participate meaningfully with others.
This is not an argument against individuality, as its #kiss obvious that real individuality depends on a healthy commons. Creativity, freedom and personal expression flourish when people have trust, shared resources and supportive communities. The problem is the manufactured isolation that turns people against each other and hides the collective systems that make any individual lives possible.
The challenge for movements like #OMN and the wider #openweb is rebuilding the social habits that #stupidindividualism has weakened: cooperation, trust, sharing, moderation, collective memory and responsibility. We need to move from a culture of isolated consumers competing for scraps towards communities that can create, maintain and defend the commons together. Freedom is not the ability to ignore everyone else. Freedom is the ability to work with others to shape the world we share.
#techchurn is the #blocking cycle of adopting new platforms, tools and technologies – not because they solve real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. Every year there’s a new framework, protocol, social platform, programming language or AI tool that promises to change everything. Communities rush to migrate, developers rebuild the same ideas, and institutions rewrite strategies. Meanwhile, the basic fundamental social problems remain untouched.
The churn becomes the work that burns what remains of our commons, as the cost of this mess isn’t technical, it’s social. As every migration leaves people behind, communities fracture across platforms, documentation becomes obsolete, skills have to be relearned, leading to the disappearance of institutional memory. Relationships weaken as peoples energy and focus is consumed by rebuilding instead of improving. The result is a perpetual state of “starting again.” – it should be easy to understand as the illusion of innovation
The tech industry depends on the story that newer is always better, this isn’t simply marketing, it’s the economic engine of the industry. Venture capital needs growth, platforms need lock-in, consultants need transformation projects, and companies need reasons to upgrade. The easiest way to sell something new is to convince people that what already works is obsolete – the old becomes unfashionable long before it stops being useful.
The #geekproblem feeds this cycle, as technologists focus on technical elegance while treating social continuity as someone else’s responsibility. The result is software that may be cleaner, faster or more modern, but communities that are weaker, smaller and less resilient. Technology is replaced, trust is not.
What doesn’t change – Despite decades of innovation, the same underlying power structures remain remarkably stable. The dominant platforms still centralise attention – Advertising still shapes communication – Algorithms still determine visibility – Corporate ownership still captures value created by communities. The interfaces change, logos change, programming languages change but the power relationships barely move. This is why #techchurn feels productive while producing very little social change.
Communities don’t become stronger by constantly relocating, the #openweb needs the same attitude to build slowly, maintain carefully, document openly. Value continuity over novelty as the future isn’t another platform, it’s resilient communities using technology they understand, control and can pass on. That’s the opposite of #techchurn and how we build commons.
The current mess in media isn’t that journalism has become biased, its always been, the problem is that the “progressive” #mainstreaming institutions trying to solve the crisis are still inside the assumptions that created it. Take the current liberal darling project Ground News, their promise is attractive: escape your filter bubble, compare left and right, become a more informed citizen. But notice the framing, the solution to broken media is… another layer of liberal media infrastructure.
This is a classic liberal response, instead of questioning the structure, it tries to manage the symptoms. The wrong question is “How do we balance left and right?” where it’s better to ask “Who owns the infrastructure? Who controls trust? Who decides what is visible?” These are very different questions. Political bias matters, but ownership, funding, moderation and publishing infrastructure matter far more. They shape what can be said long before anyone labels an article “left” or “right”.
Modern liberal media believes enough transparency, enough fact-checking and enough algorithmic tuning can repair journalism. But every new layer simply becomes another institution requiring trust.
Who rates the raters?
Who moderates the moderators?
Who audits the algorithms?
The answer is usually another professional organisation, another foundation, another for profit corporation, or another “independent” expert group. This creates an endless chain of powerless power rather than building any genuine public trust, it’s the false centre. One #KISS thing we need to understand is that political “centrism” is not a neutral place, it is constructed. On a surface layer – when publications owned by billionaires are labelled “centre”, while grassroots or socialist publications are labelled “left”, the scale itself quietly normalises existing power. This isn’t necessarily a conspiracy, it is simply what happens when institutions built inside capitalism reproduce capitalist assumptions.
The #OpenMediaNetwork starts somewhere else – instead of trying to create perfect neutrality, it creates open process. The #4opens don’t solve bias or decide truth to determine who is correct, they simply make the process visible. This doesn’t eliminate conflict, instead it makes conflict transparent. People can inspect decisions, challenge moderation, fork communities, preserve history and build alternative trust networks. The goal isn’t perfect objectivity, it is accountable process, that in the end trust comes from communities
Liberal media imagines trust that comes from old (and by now well captured) institutions – where the #OMN argues that trust emerges from communities that can see how decisions are made, that trust is built through transparent moderation, open metadata, public discussion, versioned history actively used for federation instead of monopoly. This native path is closer to how the early #openweb worked, and how projects like #Indymedia succeeded before platforms enclosed this public conversation flow.
Ones you take this #KISS path the problem isn’t simply media bias it’s about ownership of traditional media itself. As long as publishing, discovery, moderation and archives remain controlled by institutions whose survival depends on existing power structures, every attempt to “fix” journalism will reproduce those same structures. This is the root problem when liberal media keeps trying to repair liberal media.
The #OMN starts somewhere different – building commons instead of platforms, process instead of authority and trust instead of branding. Yes, that won’t magically solve media bias, but what it can do is balance the current mess by creating open space where communities can solve these problems together. That is a much stronger foundation than asking another algorithm to tell us which billionaire newspaper is slightly more “centre” than another.
History shows that societies can normalize destructive ideas until they become “common sense.” The tragedy of the Irish Famine illustrates how blinded dogmatic thinking becomes more powerful than human need. Food existed, yet the prevailing political economy treated markets, property rights, and profit as more important than preventing mass suffering. The disaster was not simply natural; it was shaped by human choices and by the values those choices expressed.
Today we face a different crisis, but one driven by the same logic. The #deathcult metaphor tells us that the right to extract, pollute, and profit need to be better balanced with the right of communities to defend the ecosystems they depend on. This isn’t currently in any real balance. Over the last forty years we’ve shifted the political centre so far toward markets and private accumulation that environmental destruction is treated as normal, while protecting the commons is portrayed as extreme.
If we continue to use our current “common sense” to “balance” destruction against survival, destruction wins. Climate breakdown isn’t negotiated with, ecosystems don’t compromise, physics doesn’t vote. The task is therefore not to seek a mythical middle ground, but to move the social balance back towards the real commons, cooperation, stewardship, and long-term thinking. Only by changing what society sees as “common sense” do we have any realistic hope of avoiding deeper ecological and social collapse.
This is where the #OMN comes in, the #OMN is not simply another technology project. It is an attempt to shift power away from the #dotcons and away from the #geekproblem that has dominated so much of the #openweb. Instead of platforms extracting value from people, or technical elitists deciding what everyone else needs, the path is to place power back in the hands of the people who actually create culture, knowledge, and media.
The #4opens provide the practical framework: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. Together they create the conditions for shared ownership, transparency, and trust rather than enclosure and extraction.
The #OGB complements this by providing grassroots governance. Rather than relying on central authorities or corporate gatekeepers, it explores ways communities can make decisions together while remaining federated and autonomous.
None of this guarantees good outcomes, technology never does. What these projects do is create the possibility for healthier social relationships. They build commons infrastructure instead of proprietary platforms, they distribute power instead of concentrating it, they make cooperation easier than enclosure. As the future is not determined by technology alone, it is determined by the values embedded in the systems we build and the communities that choose to use them.
That’s why the real struggle isn’t simply over software, t’s over the values that software embodies. #KISS reminds us to keep these solutions simple enough for ordinary people to understand, use, and shape themselves. Without that, the commons will once again be enclosed by experts, corporations, or bureaucracies, and we will repeat catastrophes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) in todays rush towards #climatechaos.
The choice is ours. The tools matter because they shape the possibilities. What we build with them remains a collective responsibility.
We spend a lot of time talking about crises as if they’re sudden events, they rarely are, crises are the outcome of decades of accumulated social, political, economic and technological choices. The challenge isn’t simply understanding why societies enter periods of instability, it’s understanding how they find their way back out again.
History suggests something important – entering crisis is often easier than leaving it – it’s a downhill path. For long periods, societies can appear stable. Institutions function, people get on with their lives, and conflict remains manageable, yet beneath the surface something changes.
Power concentrates.
Wealth accumulates upward.
Institutions begin serving themselves rather than the commons
Public trust erodes.
By the time these trends become obvious, society has already gathered momentum, think of it like a huge ball rolling down a steep valley, once it begins rolling, it becomes incredibly difficult to stop. This is where much of today’s #climatechaos, democratic decline and digital enclosure fit. They are symptoms of long-running structural shifts rather than isolated failures.
To understand this recurring mess, it’s useful to think about this is as a wealth pump. Healthy societies circulate resources, were unhealthy societies increasingly extract resources from ordinary people while concentrating wealth and decision-making power into ever smaller circles. Eventually this creates reinforcing problems – the growing insecurity for everyone else, competition between increasingly numerous elitists leads to weakening of public institutions, eventually the system becomes unstable. This describes much of the last forty years of #neoliberalism just as well as many earlier historical periods.
In #OMN language, this is one way of describing the growth of the #deathcult. Technology follows politics, so the same process appears online. The early #openweb distributed power, the #dotcons recentralised it. Open participation became algorithmic engagement, communities became audiences, citizens became products. This wasn’t a simple a technical change, it’s the same mess of concentration of power occurring throughout the wider society. Technology amplified existing political and economic trends, crisis created the possibility.
The encouraging part of history is that outcomes are not predetermined, although the path into crisis is narrow, the path out is surprisingly open. Once institutions begin failing, many futures become possible. Some societies descend into violence, some replace one ruling group with another while changing very little. A few manage genuine reform, the difference comes from organised social movements that are able not merely to seize attention, but to rebuild institutions capable of creating trust again. This matters as moments of instability are also moments when relatively small interventions can have disproportionately large effects.
This is where #OMN fits, the Open Media Network is not a project to seize power. It is a project to rebuild commons infrastructure. Instead of reinforcing extraction, it strengthens trust. Instead of creating new gatekeepers, it distributes responsibility. Instead of proprietary platforms, it builds open processes. Instead of replacing one monopoly with another, it supports federation and shared ownership.
This is why the #4opens matter, not as ideological slogans, they’re much more useful as practical safeguards against rebuilding the same systems that created today’s crisis. Trying to engineer perfect systems produces new failures, complex societies never become tidy, so the useful goal is not perfection. Rather to create institutions capable of learning, adapting and redistributing power before crises become catastrophic. This is why #OMN emphasises mediation over control, commons over ownership, participation over spectatorship to push trust over extraction.
Building the next commons matters – if we accept that we’re living through a period of structural instability, then waiting for institutions to solve it is unlikely to succeed, the work we need belongs to communities.
Building archives.
Building media.
Building governance.
Building trust.
We can play a part in this by building technologies that reinforce this path rather than undermine it as history suggests that societies emerge from crises when they reverse the flows of concentrated power to begin rebuilding the commons, that’s the path #OMN is on.
All startups are expressions of the #deathcult, every #VC is, in effect, a bishop preaching endless growth, extraction and enclosure. This isn’t innovation. It’s a business model accelerating social breakdown, deepening inequality, and feeding the #climatechaos that will displace billions and cost millions of lives over the coming century. If you’re serious about activism, stop feeding the machine. Put your energy into building the #openweb commons instead.
The whole value system behind startups and #VC is the problem, not the solution. The #KISS truth is simple: endless growth, extraction and enclosure cannot solve the crises they create. They are accelerating today’s breakdown and shaping tomorrow’s catastrophes. We don’t need more investment in the #deathcult. We need investment in the digital commons, the #openweb, and the #4opens.
The crisis of the #openweb isn’t just coming from the #dotcons. It’s also coming from us. Our #mainstreaming#fashionistas are dangerously consumptive, forever chasing the next platform, the next funding round, the next shiny self abstraction. Meanwhile, our alternative #fashionistas mirror exactly the same behaviour, endlessly reinventing tools that never escape their own echo chambers.
Both paths produce the same result: more #TechShit, more #TechChurn, less social value. We don’t need another clever framework, another protocol that nobody uses, or another startup pretending to be commons. What we do need is to change and challenge the social norms that reward novelty over usefulness to make the #4opens fashionable.
Reward open data instead of data hoarding.
Reward open process instead of closed decision-making.
Reward open standards instead of lock-in.
Reward open source instead of proprietary dependency.
And yes, this isn’t about technology, it’s about culture. As Oscar Wilde observed in The Critic as Artist:
“We live in the age of the over-worked, and under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
In the current churning mess, that feels even more true today. We are producing more code, more platforms, more content and more noise than ever before, while creating less shared understanding and fewer if any useful durable institutions, structures or networks.
The answer isn’t to work harder. It’s to work differently. The #OMN is a path to do that by stopping repeating the same mistakes by compost the failures of the last forty years, and rebuild the #openweb on social foundations that people can actually live with. If we can’t make this shift, we’ll simply keep rebuilding the same broken systems with newer code.
The #WSocialmess is about more than one failed platform, it exposes a deeper problem with the EU’s approach to digital sovereignty. If Europe is serious about sovereignty, it needs to stop confusing European ownership with digital freedom. A platform hosted in Europe built as a proprietary, venture-capital project recreates the same #dotcons model under a European flag. Changing the server location doesn’t change the underlying power relationships.
This matters because the European Commission has spent years promoting open standards, interoperability, user choice and open source through its own policy. Yet when it came to practice, it publicly embraced a platform moving in the opposite direction: closed development, identity verification, restricted participation and a business model built around enclosure rather than the commons.
This contradiction should not simply be criticised on social media. It needs to be challenged within the EU’s own institutions. The issue isn’t whether #WSocialsucceeds or fails. The issue is whether public institutions are reinforcing closed corporate platforms while claiming to champion openness. That contradiction deserves formal scrutiny and, where appropriate, legal challenge.
The broader problem is cultural as much as legal. Too much European digital policy remains trapped in #mainstreaming thinking:
Replace American monopolies with European monopolies.
Replace Silicon Valley venture capital with European venture capital.
Replace one gatekeeper with another.
That isn’t digital sovereignty.
Real sovereignty (what every that means) comes from building digital commons that nobody owns and everybody can use. That’s why the #4opens matter: open data, open source, open standards and open process. These aren’t ideological preferences; they’re practical safeguards against the next generation of vendor lock-in.
The #Fediverse already demonstrates the path we need to be on. It’s messy, imperfect and decentralised, and those are strengths, not weaknesses. The challenge is to improve these commons rather than abandon it for the latest corporate platform wrapped in European branding.
Europe needs courage to defend the digital commons it already has. And perhaps the hardest truth is, successful European alternatives are unlikely to come from institutionsalone. They will come from communities, public-interest developers, grassroots organisations and #FOSS projects building native #openweb infrastructure from the ground up, institutions should be supporting that commons.
When they don’t (and they won’t) then a three-pronged prodding attack to help balance this mess they make.
The #Fediverse is an accidental reboot of the #openweb, it wasn’t designed from the top down, it emerged because thousands of people built alternatives to the #dotcons. That’s its greatest strength, it’s also why it’s so messy.
Herding cats – the #Fediverse has no central authority, every project, server, and community has its own priorities, culture, and governance. It’s often like herding cats. This can be frustrating, but it’s also what makes the network resilient. There is no single point of failure, no CEO to sell it, and no corporation that can simply shut it down. The challenge this leave us with is not eliminating the mess, but learning how to live with it productively.
The invisible problem that keeps blocking this path is in part the limits of “common sense”, what the #geekproblem refuses to see is that the difficulty isn’t primarily technical. For over forty years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what people experience as “common sense.” Competition replaces cooperation. Individualism replaces commons. Endless critique replaces collective construction. People absorb these assumptions without realising it, then push them over real alt paths.
When alternative ways of organising are introduced, many people instinctively react with hostility or retreat. Push too hard, and they disappear back into familiar habits, like snails retreating into their shells. This isn’t usually bad faith, it’s learned behaviour.
We have a project to mediate this mess, native governance without hierarchy. This is where the Open Governance Body (#OGB) comes in. The goal isn’t to control the #Fediverse or impose bureaucracy, the goal is to create lightweight, transparent ways for communities to coordinate, resolve conflict, share responsibility, and make decisions together.
Governance should emerge from the grassroots, not be imposed from above. That’s why #OGB builds on the principles of the #4opens:
Open Data
Open Source
Open Standards
Open Process
The last of these – Open Process – is the missing piece. Technical openness alone isn’t enough. Communities also need visible, participatory ways of building trust. What matters is creating processes that turn #mainstreaming failures into shared learning instead of endless conflict.
The future of the #openweb won’t be built by perfect software, it’s built by imperfect people who learn how to cooperate despite their differences. That’s the real work of #OMN and #OGB: not replacing the mess, but giving it enough structure to grow into a healthy commons.
The internet didn’t become broken overnight, it drifted from being a network of communities into a marketplace dominated by platforms whose purpose is extracting value. This is the logic of #dotcons most of us invested our lives and community into. How did we get into this mess? The problem isn’t only bad companies, it’s that our digital lives depend entirely on proprietary #dotcons paths and software, commercial interests end up controlling our reality.
This is why #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) matters. The “free” in #FOSS is about freedom, the freedom to use, study, modify and share the tools that shape our lives. Those freedoms create something much more important than software, they create #4opens social power. Open code means community accountability.
Instead of trusting #closedweb corporations, we can build “native” trust through transparency. That changes how communities work as closed platforms create consumers, open projects create participants. The community doesn’t just use the infrastructure, it becomes in part responsible for maintaining it. We can exit to a more #DIY path, were anyone can inspect, improve, challenge and adapt to disparate community needs.
This isn’t always the fastest path as open collaboration is often messy. Consensus takes time, criticism can be uncomfortable. But these are social strengths, not weaknesses. Diverse communities find problems earlier, reduce hidden bias and create paths and systems that are more resilient because they are shared.
The #OMN approach builds on this real world path and body of ideas. That technology can strengthen communities rather than replacing them, code can support human trust rather than algorithms deciding everything. Infrastructure should belong to the commons rather than becoming another private enclosure.
Today’s #closedweb social media platforms are digital landlords. Yes you may build a following, create value and invest years of work, but you’re still a tenant. The rules can change overnight, your reach can disappear, your community can be fragmented at the click of a button.
The #openweb offers another path were we have control of identity and content to connect through open protocols instead of closed silos. We need this more than ever to building communities that can survive the failure – or hostility – of any single platform.
We can’t keep repeating the same mess, this composting matters even more in the age of #AI. If the software, models and infrastructure are closed, then a handful of companies determine how knowledge is created, filtered and shared. If they are open, communities can inspect them, improve them and govern them together.
The future isn’t simply open source software, it’s open source society. That means investing back into the commons we depend on. Maintaining infrastructure, supporting contributors, building institutions that outlast individuals. Planting trees whose shade we may never sit under.
That’s what #OMN is about. Not simply writing better code, but helping build a better social fabric for the #openweb. Because freedom isn’t something technology gives us, it’s something communities build together.
The current common sense of #neoliberal worldview replaces trust with greed as the social motivator. The problem is that every successful society is built on trust. When you undermine trust, you build a #deathcult. Climate breakdown, inequality, social isolation and failing public institutions are not accidents – they’re the predictable outcomes.
When people recognise the problem, ask them what the solution is. Most will instinctively reach for the same neoliberal “common sense” that created the crisis. That’s the moment to gently point out that those ideas are part of the #deathcult, not a way out.
The alternative starts with rebuilding trust, commons and community, #FOSS needs to become a core to this.
Facts matter, technology matters, governance matters. But people rarely change because they read theory, a specification or a list of features. People change because of stories, this is why storytelling is central to the #OMN path. A story gives people somewhere to stand, it connects ideas to lived experience.
Instead of explaining the #4opens as an abstract framework, tell the story of a community escaping a #dotcons platform by building trust on the #openweb. Instead of arguing about governance, tell the story of how a group solved a conflict through #OpenProcess. Instead of listing technical features, tell the story of someone who regained control of their community tech after years of platform lock-in.
Stories carry values, the last forty years of #mainstreaming have been held together by stories about competition, consumption and individual success. These stories have normalised the #deathcult, making extraction and enclosure feel like “common sense.” We now need better stories about cooperation instead of competition, commons balancing ownership, about trust instead of surveillance. Stories about building rather than consuming.
The #Fediverse itself is a story, an accidental reboot of the #openweb that proves another internet is possible. It isn’t perfect, but it demonstrates that people can build social infrastructure without billionaires directing the conversation.
The challenge is that the academics or the #geekproblem tell stories only to other, academics or geeks, technical and academic paths are important, but they don’t inspire people to act, so we need stories that people can understand:
A neighbourhood rebuilding local media.
Boaters organising to defend the waterways as a commons.
Volunteers composting #techchurn into useful tools.
Ordinary people discovering that they can build infrastructure together.
These stories become shared memory, shared memory becomes culture, culture shapes “common sense.” and changing common sense is how lasting social change happens. So don’t just build software or academic theory, tell stories that help people imagine themselves as part of a healthier #openweb.
People often ask which messaging platform they should use. Matrix? XMPP? Signal? Something else? The honest answer is there is no perfect option.
At the #OMN we’ve tried running #XMPP servers for years. From a #4opens prospective it’s probably the strongest foundation. Socially, though, it’s still trapped by the #geekproblem, despite years of outreach, we never found any implementation simple enough for normal communities to adopt at scale.
#Matrix is in meany ways worst, but for different resigns. Its governance and development have drifted towards an #opencore and #NGO model that doesn’t sit comfortably with grassroots #openweb values.
#Signal is the best of the bad options. It’s centralised and reproduces many of the patterns of the #dotcons. But people will actually install it and, sometimes, keep using it. That’s worth something.
The point is that these aren’t just technical choices, they’re social ones. Too much of the conversation gets trapped in feature comparisons, cryptography debates and protocol wars, while the real challenge is helping ordinary people communicate, organise and build trust together. That’s why #KISS matters.
Simple tools people actually use are often more valuable than technically perfect tools that remain confined to narrow inward looking communities.
The same lesson applies across the #Fediverse. We have seeded good technology, but we’re allowing the #fashionistas and chattering classes to dominate the conversation while practical grassroots organising gets pushed to the margins.
This is a recurring pattern, and one we need to compost. The future of the #openweb won’t be decided by having the cleverest protocol. It will be decided by whether we build communities around tools that ordinary people can understand, trust and participate in.
Technology matters, but social process matters more. That’s the path we’re trying to grow with #OMN and the #4opens.
#OMN is not trying to replace servers with #P2P, that’s never been the idea. The interesting architecture is hybrid, where each layer does what it is good at – #P2P isn’t the answer. It’s a tool. Browser-based P2P has hard limits, a browser isn’t a database, phones aren’t reliable servers, people go offline, storage is limited, connections are intermittent. If you build a system assuming every device is always available, it simply won’t work. The path we need is that #OMN isn’t trying to replace servers, it’s trying to change what servers do.
Servers are good at availability, are online all the time, easy to reach. They’re ideal for caching, indexing, discovery, search and temporary message retention. They’re also cheap enough that communities can run them. Trying to eliminate them is mostly ideology rather than engineering.
#P2P shines at resilience and autonomy, your phone is your primary editing environment, it stores your drafts, your identity and trust relationships. It can synchronise directly with nearby peers or trusted nodes whenever they’re available. That doesn’t mean every post has to live only on your phone forever.
Think “edge first”, not “server free” the #OMN architecture is closer to Git than to BitTorrent, many copies, many caches, many paths. No single point of failure, servers cache because they’re convenient. Peers synchronise because they produce the data, archives preserve because history matters, these are different jobs.
#ActivityPub already points this way, the Fediverse demonstrates the pattern when instances cache remote posts, users move between servers and archives exist independently. Nothing says there has to be exactly one canonical copy.
OMN simply pushes this idea a little further – Storage is a social problem as much as a technical one. The biggest mistake engineers make is assuming technology alone solves trust, it doesn’t, communities preserve history, archives preserve movements. Servers preserve availability, but people preserve the meaning. The goal isn’t to eliminate hosting, the goal is to avoid dependence on any single host, this is where the #4opens become architecture rather than philosophy.
Open Data means your data can move.
Open Standards mean different storage methods interoperate.
Open Source means anyone can build another client or server.
Open Process means communities decide how long things are retained, what is archived, and who they trust.
The path isn’t pure #P2P or pure client-server, it’s a federation of caches, archives, peers and communities, each doing what they’re best at. That’s a much more resilient model than pretending one technology can solve every problem.
The #OMN insight, that distinguishes the path from most “P2P” discussions is the primary object isn’t the file or the message – it’s the trust network. Content can be cached almost anywhere, but trust (identity, moderation, reputation, governance) is what needs to remain under community control. That shift – from moving data to maintaining trust – is where #OMN differs from most previous #P2P projects.
