The #encryptionist movement has a blind spot. Not because encryption itself is bad – it isn’t. Encryption is a tool to protect dissidents, journalists, communities under threat, and everyday privacy. In the small picture, strong encryption is often necessary.
But in the bigger picture, something more subtle is happening. Strands of crypto and decentralisation culture promote the idea of removing trust – replacing social relationships with mathematical guarantees, “trustless systems,” and automated consensus. And this is where the problem begins. Because human societies are not built on the absence of trust, they are built on trust itself.
Trust is not a bug in human systems, it is the foundation of cooperation, empathy, and shared reality. When we frame progress as eliminating trust rather than cultivating it, we weaken the social fabric that allows communities to exist. Trust is social infrastructure.
Research consistently shows that societies with higher social trust have lower corruption, crime, stronger institutions and healthier civic participation. Trust grows through openness, shared norms, and collective accountability – not through technical enforcement.
Encryption can support trust by protecting vulnerable communication. But “trustlessness” as an ideology, as often unintentionally erodes by framing humans as inherently untrustworthy, replacing social accountability with technical rules and encouraging isolation rather than relationship-building.
The paradox of crypto culture is that the rise of crypto and “trustless systems” is itself a symptom of declining institutional trust. People turn to mathematical systems because they no longer trust governments, media, or social institutions, it’s a feedback loop, thus is understandable. But if the common sense solution becomes removing trust from social systems altogether, we are accelerating the fragmentation we are trying to escape. You cannot build healthy societies purely through cryptography.
It’s worth thinking about – Open vs closed – Historically, most meaningful social change has emerged from open processes with shared debate building public knowledge commons to feed into collective organising. Many #encryptionists don’t realise they may be contributing to this dynamic, because their motivation often comes from good places: protecting freedom, resisting surveillance and empowering individuals.
The challenge is not to reject encryption, but to ask a deeper question. Are we building systems that strengthen human trust, or replace it? Are we designing for cooperation, or just adversarial verification? Are we reinforcing shared humanity, or modelling a world where nobody trusts anyone?
So yes, please have a conversation with an #encryptionist today, not to argue, but to explore whether our tools are helping rebuild trust, or unintentionally dissolving it. Because the goal isn’t a “trustless” world. The goal is a world where trust can flourish again.
Ten years ago – and honestly long before that – there were endless conversations on #failbook about how useful it was for campaigning. The dominant view back then was simple: it’s just cat memes, it’s just tooling, it isn’t political so we can use it harmlessly. Before Snowden, this wasn’t a fringe view – it was probably a 90% consensus, especially among activists, and #fashionista tech communities. I’m not pointing fingers here, as this was normal. Many of us – including friends and collaborators – believed this.
And that’s exactly why we need to remember it. If we forget, we repeat, if we scapegoat, we learn nothing and become no better than the trolls. The problem isn’t individuals – it’s collective amnesia. The is an issue of responsibility and historical memory, that when people deny their own history of responsibility, they disconnect from reality. That’s how too meany people drift into the same “post-truth” space we criticise in figures like Trump or Stammer, where inconvenient past positions are quietly erased.
The uncomfortable truth is that many of us argued that #dotcons were neutral platforms, engagement was empowerment, memes were harmless cultural glue. Meanwhile, our healthier #openweb tools were neglected and dismantled, community infrastructure withered, while the #closedweb platform economy consolidated power. Looking back isn’t about blame. It’s about understanding how we arrived at this mess.
The campaigning trap? Ironically, many tech-minded activists used to run workshops teaching people how to campaign on #dotcons – even as we recognise that these platforms structurally undermine autonomy, community governance, and sustainable organising. This didn’t only happen because people were stupid or malicious. It happened because convenience replaced infrastructure building, the #geekproblem undervalued usability and social design and short-term reach trumped long-term resilience. The result is a paradox: we built our movements inside systems that weakened them.
But spreading more shit without composting it – just makes alternative spaces smell worse and drives people away. This mess is not history, it’s now. This conversation isn’t nostalgia or score-settling. It’s about the present and future. Looking back is how we understand structural mistakes to rebuild shared memory and #KISS avoid repeating cycles of platform capture.
The compost metaphor is useful, #OMN is a spade not a weapon – a tool. A spade digs, turns soil to compost what came before. The mess we helped create – the attention traps, the algorithmic silos, the dependency on corporate platforms – isn’t something to deny or hide, it’s material to compost into something better.
The choices we made then still shape the terrain we stand on today. It’s the #fashernista problem, one of the biggest blocks to building real alternatives is this #fashernista dynamic – activism as aesthetic performance rather than infrastructure building. It looks radical, It feels good, but it rarely produces durable tools or collective power. Real alternatives require slower, less glamorous work of maintaining systems, building trust networks to support messy grassroots processes and designing for longevity rather than attention spikes.
A bridge forward? As I keep saying, this isn’t about shame or purity politics. Almost everyone followed the same path because the incentives pointed that way. The real question is that now that we know better, what do we build next?
#OMN isn’t nostalgia for a lost web – it’s an attempt to learn from past failures and construct a media infrastructure that remembers history to support collective agency and avoids repeating the mistakes that led to the current #dotcons landscape.
This message is a shovel. The question is whether we use it to dig trenches against each other – or to prepare soil where something better can grow.
Pile technology is an interesting and under-discussed organisational pattern that already shapes how many people actually work, especially in #FOSS and grassroots tech cultures.
Instead of hierarchical structures, formal taxonomies, and rigid workflows, pile-based organisation emerges from accumulation: a directory full of files, browser tabs waiting for attention, TODO lists that grow organically, issue trackers used as thinking spaces rather than strict pipelines, mailing lists and chat logs functioning as living archives
This “pile-first” approach is not laziness or lack of structure – it is adaptive cognition. Humans often work by gathering, clustering, and revisiting material over time rather than pre-defining perfect categorisation systems. Many of the most productive hackers and organisers operate this way by collect first, make meaning later with structures emerging from usage rather than planning.
Why this matters for #FOSS paths – A lot of modern tooling tries to impose rigid models with strict schemas, enforced workflows, heavy governance structures and “one correct way” UX patterns. These approaches frequently fail in grassroots environments because they assume clarity exists at the start. In reality, most innovation emerges from ambiguity, experimentation, and partial understanding.
Pile technology supports exploration without premature optimisation with low barriers to participation and iterative sense-making through organic collaboration. This aligns with successful #FOSS practices of rough consensus and running code, scratchpads and prototype repos, forks as exploratory piles, tagging emerging after content exists. In other words: piles are often the pre-structure phase of successful systems.
The shift from paper piles to digital piles? Historically, piles existed physically: cardboard boxes, stacks of notes, folders on desks, clipping archives and activist pamphlet collections. As work moves digital, the nature of piles changes with infinite accumulation becomes possible, where search can be used to replace physical memory. The risk is that digital tools force artificial structure too early, and replace human piles with opaque algorithmic sorting. Neither reflects how real communities think.
Lessons for effective organising, when we take pile technology seriously, we design systems that: allow messy accumulation without penalty, support multiple overlapping ways to revisit material, make recontextualisation easy (tagging after creation) to preserve chronological flow alongside thematic grouping. This maps directly onto many #openweb values of feeds as flowing piles, links as connective tissue and public commons growing through incremental contributions. Instead of trying to eliminate mess, we build tools that metabolise mess into meaning.
For projects like #OMN, about aiming to rebuild grassroots media and collaborative publishing by start with piles, not categories. Let trust and editorial structure emerge from participation. Treat tagging, curation, and narrative as second-order layers on top of accumulation. Avoid premature schema design that excludes contributors. In practical terms this means newswire-style flows are piles, tag streams are reorganised piles and editorial features are curated piles. This path reframes “messiness” from a problem into a core design feature.
Why this matters right now? Many contemporary platforms bot #dotcons and #FOSS optimise for control, engagement metrics, and monetisation rather than human cognition. They flatten piles into feeds designed by algorithms, removing agency from users and communities. A strong “native” #FOSS path can instead embrace human-scale chaos to feed collective sense-making and preserve autonomy over organisation. Pile technology is not anti-structure – it is pre-structure. Understanding this helps us build tools that grow organically instead of imposing brittle frameworks that collapse under real-world use.
A simple question: who – or what – has consciousness? Humans, animals, #AI, or perhaps matter itself? What is consciousness, and why is it different?
Philip Goff (Philosophy, Durham University) Consciousness is everywhere
Heather Browning (Philosophy, University of Southampton) Evidence for consciousness in non-human animals
Patrick Butlin (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) The case for AI consciousness
One recurring theme was that consciousness is not just another scientific object to measure. We already know consciousness from the inside, we are born into subjective experience. Science can describe physical processes mathematically and externally, but subjective qualities – feeling, sensation, the experience of “I am” – resist straightforward physical explanation.
This creates a gap where physical science explains structure, behaviour, and observable mechanisms, but not questions about experience, just function. #Philosophy enters here, asking not only what consciousness does, but what it is.
Some perspectives suggested a spectrum, simple systems may have simple forms of consciousness, while complex organisms have richer ones. This takes physical reality and asks what happens if consciousness is treated as a fundamental feature rather than an emergent accident.
The discussion of non-human animals focused on suffering, feeling, and ethical implications. We cannot directly access animal minds, so researchers rely on behavioural and neurological markers to infer consciousness. Despite this, there is growing consensus that animals experience subjective states, especially those capable of learning, emotional responses, and adaptive behaviour.
The ethical consequences are obvious that if animals feel, they can suffer, if they suffer, human systems must reckon with this. The discussion touched on animal cruelty and the moral responsibilities emerging from this understanding of non-human consciousness.
The most contentious section involved #AI consciousness, intelligence vs experience. One argument suggested that modern AI has reached human-level inference in certain domains, even systems trained purely on historical text. From this view, sufficiently complex information processing might be enough for consciousness.
But tensions emerged that AI systems are not embodied. Solving “geek problems” does not imply subjective experience, highlights the divide: Computationalists – see consciousness as potentially arising from information processing. Where biological or embodied perspectives, argue that lived, physical existence may be essential. The discussion felt unresolved.
Cultural observations of the event: the engineers and “geek” audience clustered at the back of the room, reflecting the broader cultural divide between technical and philosophical approaches. Much of the debate mirrored this tension, information-processing models versus lived experience and embodiment. There was also a sense that many people rarely reflect on their own use of consciousness, how we attend, choose, or engage with the world.
No clear resolution emerged – and perhaps none is coming soon. What became clear is that consciousness sits at the boundary between disciplines. Science struggles to capture subjective experience, while philosophy cannot avoid engaging with empirical discoveries.
The question of who or what has consciousness remains open, but the debate itself reveals something deeper: our theories of consciousness often reflect our cultural assumptions about intelligence, technology, and what it means to be alive.
We are feeling a cultural current many of us recognise but rarely name clearly. A feeling that something fundamental has gone wrong, not just politically or economically, but culturally. An experience that imagination has narrowed, participation has thinned, and people are increasingly pushed into the role of spectators rather than participants in shaping the world.
This didn’t appear overnight. It grew out of decades of #neoliberal restructuring that reshaped culture, technology, and social life. Collective institutions were hollowed out, public spaces became marketplaces, creativity became branding and community became “audience”. Instead of shared projects, we were offered platforms, instead of commons, we were given services, instead of any participation, metrics.
This cultural shift produced a generation who feel the weight of a system that seems unavoidable – a reality that presents itself as permanent even as it fails to meet human needs. People sense the limits, but struggle to imagine alternatives because the cultural language for collective agency has been systematically eroded.
This is the environment the #dotcons thrive in, where the #closedweb turns culture into extraction and participation becomes only more engagement metrics. Community, user base, conversation content streams are where cooperation is #blocked due to competition for visibility.
And over time, this reshapes what people think about organising itself. Grassroots action begins to look unrealistic, messy, and inefficient compared to polished controlled platform experiences. Then trust disappears, replaced by algorithmic mediation and institutional management.
Yet beneath this dominant culture, another current has always existed, the #openweb culture, rooted in collaboration, experimentation, shared stewardship, and imperfect but real participation. IP protocol stack built on mailing lists, wikis, federated systems, grassroots media, DIY infrastructures, spaces where people build together rather than consume.
This culture never fully disappeared, as it was needed by the mainstreaming, it was just pushed to the margins. The #OMN project grows from this undercurrent, not as a reaction against technology, as a continuation of the parts of internet culture that treated technology as commons rather than a commodity. It #KISS recognises that infrastructure shapes social behaviour, and that rebuilding a healthier culture requires rebuilding the spaces where people meet, publish, and organise.
The difference is social logic, from social platform ownership grows to shared protocols, from central moderation to community mediation, from passive users to active participants. It’s the change from scale-as-growth to scale-as-federation.
Importantly, this isn’t nostalgia or any path to purity politics. The culture that produces #OMN understands that systems are messy. Grassroots projects fail, fork, and struggle. But instead of seeing this as weakness, it treats messiness as the natural process of collective growth. Composting rather than perfection.
The mistake of both corporate platforms and #NGO approaches is trying to engineer clean solutions to fundamentally social problems. The #geekproblem looks for perfect systems; the grassroots path builds resilient ones through ongoing practice.
This is why affinity groups, federated networks, and the #4opens matter. They create structures where trust emerges from shared action rather than imposed authority. The culture behind #OMN is not defined by ideology alone, it is defined by lived practice of people who build together and communities that govern themselves, to remain open to change
In a world that tells us “there is no alternative,” the simple act of building functioning alternatives becomes quietly radical. And when enough small, federated efforts connect, what once felt impossible begins to look normal again. That is how cultural change happens, not through grand declarations, but through many small working examples growing from shared soil.
For sceptical #FOSS engineers, this isn’t an argument for abandoning structure, security, or technical rigour, it’s the opposite. The lesson from decades of open-source development is that trust does not mean naïveté; it means building systems where failure modes are expected and mitigated through transparency, modularity, and federation. #OMN applies these same engineering principles socially: small loosely-coupled groups instead of monoliths, open protocols instead of platform lock-in, observable processes instead of hidden governance.
If “pure trust” sounds unrealistic, think instead of reproducible builds, version control, and peer review, trust emerges from verifiable processes and shared ownership. The goal isn’t utopian social engineering; it’s creating resilient sociotechnical systems where collaboration scales horizontally because no single node becomes a point of failure or control.
A practical bridge-building approach for the #openweb / #OMN – for grassroots organisers, Fediverse communities, and sceptical #FOSS engineers.
An affinity group is not simply “a group of people who agree.” It is a functional social tool: small enough to build trust, structured enough to act, and open enough to grow.
A working path is to start with purpose, not only ideology. The biggest mistake is forming around identity or theory rather than function. Affinity groups work when they are built around shared work, not shared labels. So for #OMN, instead of saying “let’s build an affinity group for radical media,” we try something concrete like: “a small group committed to building and testing OMN publishing workflows for real users.” A clear, practical purpose lowers defensive reactions and creates common ground.
Ideal size and composition matter. Affinity groups historically work best with around 4–8 people – large enough for diversity, small enough for trust. This avoids both NGO-style bureaucracy and lone-founder burnout. Useful roles include: builder (technical), organiser (social process), storyteller or documenter, critic/tester (essential for reducing groupthink), and connector (linking to the wider network). These are roles, not hierarchy.
Trust must be built through practice. Many people distrust grassroots projects because they have seen “pure trust” models fail. So don’t rely only on ideological alignment, build procedural trust instead. Examples include small, regular deliverables (“what did we actually ship?”), rotating facilitation, transparent public logs where possible, and shared infrastructure ownership, so no single person holds control. Trust grows from repeated, visible action.
Clear boundary rules prevent both NGO capture and chaos. Without boundaries, affinity groups dissolve. Keep rules simple and aligned with #KISS: anyone can observe, participation requires contribution, decisions are made by consent or rough consensus, and there are no permanent leaders, focus more on rotating roles. Forking is allowed, following federation principles. This mirrors ActivityPub socially as well as technically.
Mediation is built into #OMN. Use soft mediation practices such as assuming good faith but verifying through actions, and asking whether behaviour supports the shared task. When conflicts cannot be resolved, allow parallel experiments rather than endless arguments. This avoids the classic problem of well-meaning people unintentionally derailing collective work.
Avoid the #NGO trap from the start. Instead of mission statements, boards, and strategic documents, focus on working notes, small experiments, and iterative prototypes. Document reality rather than intentions. NGO structures often push power upward; affinity groups keep power at the edges.
Bridge-building with #FOSS and Fediverse communities is essential for adoption. Frame #OMN affinity groups as neither anti-engineering nor anti-structure, but anti-centralised control. Messaging like “we’re applying federation principles socially, not just technically” resonates strongly with #ActivityPub builders and open-source contributors.
Growth should happen through replication, not scaling. The affinity group is not the movement – it is a seed node. New participants do not simply accumulate; instead, new affinity groups form. Groups coordinate through federation via shared protocols and culture. This approach mirrors #Indymedia nodes, the early Fediverse, and many successful activist networks.
Concrete first steps: identify 3–5 people already doing related work; define one narrow OMN goal; hold a weekly 60–90-minute working session with a public log; rotate facilitation from the beginning; and ship something small within two weeks. Momentum builds legitimacy.
Affinity groups solve three problems simultaneously: they prevent NGO-style centralisation, reduce lone-founder burnout through shared responsibility, and resist #dotcons growth-for-growth’s-sake logic. In many ways, they are the social equivalent of federation.
If we want meaningful change rather than internal noise, it helps to talk less about individual personalities and more about roles, structures, and class. Individuals come and go, but the patterns they operate within repeat. Shifting focus this way isn’t about avoiding accountability, it’s about understanding the dynamics that shape behaviour across projects and communities.
When we centre individuals, discussions drift into blame or hero narratives, which generates more temporary heat than permanent light. When we look more at structural incentives, cultural habits, and class dynamics, we start to see why the same problems reappear across different spaces – from grassroots projects to NGOs to #FOSS communities.
This is a signal-to-noise issue. A #KISS approach helps: keep analysis simple, structural, and grounded in shared experience. By reducing personalisation and increasing systemic understanding, we create more room for collaboration, learning, and mediation, which is important when building sustainable paths like the #openweb and #OMN.
What we then need to compost. It’s a normal mainstreaming augment that systems built primarily on trust will inevitably rot, decay, and collapse. That concern is understandable. Many people’s lived experience tells them that without strong control structures, things fall apart. And honestly – sometimes they do.
But the story is more complicated than that. First, there are long-term examples of trust-based or grassroots systems working, though they rarely look neat or institutional enough to be recognised as “successful” by mainstream standards. The difficulty is that these systems are best understood through participation rather than observation. They are lived processes, not static models. I document some of this history on my site, but reading alone rarely communicates the full reality, experience does.
Second, yes, grassroots projects can be damaged by well-meaning people. That isn’t paranoia; it’s everyday reality. Social dynamics, unconscious habits from institutional culture, and imported control patterns all create friction. The #OMN approach accepts this and builds mediation strategies directly into projects. These strategies are imperfect, and we often get things wrong, but acknowledging the problem openly is part of making the work sustainable.
And to the harder question: if good intentions can cause disruption, what happens when bad actors show up? The answer is that no system is immune. Control-heavy systems fail too – sometimes more dramatically because their rigidity hides problems until they become catastrophic. The goal isn’t to create a perfect system (the classic #geekproblem), but to build a more humane messy system that can adapt, respond, and recover.
All functioning social systems are messy. Trying to eliminate that mess usually creates more fragility, not less. Instead, the path forward is to embrace smaller, resilient units that federate horizontally, many small experiments linked together rather than one central structure trying to manage everything. This is where the #fediverse and projects like #OMN become interesting: we now have technologies that allow small-scale trust networks to interconnect without collapsing into centralized control.
Will people try to take control or undermine these spaces? Of course. That’s part of reality. The work is to build cultures and processes that mediate this continuously, rather than pretending it can be eliminated.
What we maybe need to convince sceptical engineers is not ideology but demonstrated failure modes and working counter-patterns. Trust-based systems are not naive if they are designed with clear threat models, transparent processes, and layered social/technical safeguards. The question is not “can grassroots projects fail?” – all systems fail – but whether they fail visibly, recover ably, and without capture.
Long-lived commons like Wikipedia moderation structures, Debian governance, early Apache development, and parts of the Fediverse show that in tech messy, trust-anchored collaboration can operate for decades when legitimacy is distributed and process is open. #OMN is not proposing blind trust; it proposes observable trust – where actions, history, and reputation are legible through open process (#4opens), allowing engineers to audit the social layer much like they audit code.
The real engineering challenge is not eliminating messiness (a classic #geekproblem trap), but designing systems where messiness becomes resilient rather than brittle. Nobody said it would be easy, but difficulty doesn’t mean impossibility. It means the work is social as much as technical.
None of this new – as Bakunin put it, “The peoples’ revolution will arrange its revolutionary organization from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.” Whether or not we use the language of revolution, the underlying insight is practical rather than ideological: durable systems grow from lived participation outward, not from abstract design imposed from above.
In #openweb and #OMN thinking, this means building structures that enable agency at the edges while allowing coordination to emerge through federation and shared practice. The goal isn’t purity or perfection, but resilient networks where trust, mediation, and collective responsibility evolve through use – messy, iterative, and grounded in real communities rather than centralized control.
We need to describe a real structural problem that shows up again and again in grassroots projects. Well-meaning people arrive claiming to help “community”, but operate through control patterns learned from institutions, #dotcons platforms and professional #NGO culture. They work very hard, believe they are doing good, and unintentionally damage horizontal processes they want to become a part of.
This isn’t primarily a personal problem – it’s a culture clash problem. And yes, mediation, especially embedded mediation, is what we’re building into #OMN to correct direction. Let’s break this down in to practical approaches that actually work in messy grassroots ecosystems. First we need to name the real tension clearly, the conflict is NOT good people vs bad people, activists vs NGOs and grassroots vs professionals. The real tension is: Control logic vs Trust logic
Control logic (learned from #dotcons / NGO structures) is about optimising for risk reduction by centralise decision-making to push standardisation. They measure success through outputs and metrics, and assume governance must prevent failure.
Trust logic (#DIY / grassroots / early #openweb) is about optimise for participation and learning by distributed responsibility and messy iteration. Success is measured by living community, where governance supports emergence rather than preventing mistakes.
Most people don’t consciously choose control, they import it because it’s what they know. So #OMN mediation starts by framing this as different operating paths, not moral failure. We build “translation layers” instead of confrontation, the worst outcome is ideological escalation, leading to #blocking
Instead, we try to create structures that translate between cultures. Examples: Write governance docs describing WHY things are messy, explicitly explain “social messiness is intentional design”. We to do this to frame openness as resilience, not lack of structure.
People from institutional backgrounds need permission to stop controlling. We can try and use process friction as onboarding. Maybe sending people through archaeology (reading posts, repos, etc). Might be actually GOOD – but only if framed constructively. Instead of “read this before asking questions” we could try “The project is built through shared learning – exploring this material helps you understand why we work this way.” Make friction educational, intentional, welcoming but firm. Not defensive.
One contradictory thing is that we need to recognise is the hardest workers are risk points, the worst ones work the hardest. Yes, because control-oriented people express care through effort, effort becomes legitimacy, legitimacy becomes informal authority. What’s the solution maybe to balance effort and decision power, decisions require some consensus and transparent process, not only labour contribution. We can also help by make invisible labour visible (care work, mediation, maintenance).
On this path, we need to introduce “soft boundaries” instead of hard blocking, as hard blocking only escalates conflict. Instead, we can focus on redirecting energy into specific roles or tasks, channel control impulses into infrastructure or documentation. Example: “That’s an interesting governance idea, can you prototype it in a parallel working group?”. This, preserves autonomy, avoids direct rejection and tests ideas in practice.
What works if you have the resources and patience is to teach #DIY culture implicitly, not by argument. Many problems come from lack of exposure to horizontal culture. Best not to lecture about #DIY, instead make participation experiential, let people see how trust works through doing. Design processes where newcomers experience collective decision-making, and failure is visible but safe.
Structural mediation patterns for #OMN are strengthened by regularly asking:
Are we slipping into control patterns?
Are we excluding through complexity?
Are we drifting too far into informal hierarchy?
Make this normal so that multiple pathways allow for experimental edges, stable core infrastructure and messy periphery. People can self-select into environments matching their comfort level.
We should always be making visible social values, not just technical #4opens. This needs to be explicit: openness to disagreement, expectation of plural narratives, composting failure, a powerful governance guidance – Compost works because decomposition is allowed, friction produces transformation, nothing is wasted, but everything changes form. Translating into policy – that conflict is expected, critique is welcomed but must produce something, few things are sacred – but everything is documented.
The deep strategic insight (important) is the goal is NOT to eliminate control-oriented people. We need them as healthy ecosystems require institutional thinkers (stability), grassroots experimenters (innovation), activists (accountability) and bridge-builders (translation). The problem occurs when one mode dominates. So mediation is about maintaining ecological balance.
Let’s look at an example of how belief systems shape political reality. Some people still deliberately conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This confusion isn’t neutral, it shapes how discussions are framed, who gets silenced, and which political paths remain possible. Let’s be clear:
Anti-Semitism is racism. It targets Jewish people as a people. It is hate, exclusion, and violence, and it must be opposed wherever it appears.
Anti-Zionism is political opposition to a state ideology and to actions carried out in its name, particularly when that ideology manifests as ethnic nationalism, apartheid, and genocide. Criticising state power and political structures is not racism; it is part of political accountability.
Much of the current framing is not about honest thinking, it is about strategy. By collapsing these two terms together, critics of state violence can be delegitimised without engaging with what they are actually saying. Debate is shifted away from material realities and toward defensive arguments about identity.
We need to refuse this mess-making. Instead of getting trapped in endless semantic battles, shift the focus toward power and consequences of who holds power? Who is being harmed? What structures enable that harm? Then, how do we build paths toward justice that do not reproduce oppression?
Moments of political rupture – scandals, revelations, shifting alliances – expose how #mainstreaming narratives are constructed and maintained. When these moments occur, people become more open to questioning “common sense.” That creates opportunities for real social change and challenge.
The goal is not to win rhetorical battles inside broken frames, but to move discussion toward ethical clarity and collective responsibility. Focus on actions, structures, and outcomes, not weaponised labels designed to shut conversation down.
This dynamic reflects a broader pattern. People often live inside belief systems that function like religions, even when they present themselves as purely rational. These systems shape what appears normal, possible, or inevitable, and define which questions are allowed.
Modern economics is one of the most powerful of these belief systems. Despite presenting itself as objective and scientific, much contemporary economic thinking has only a tenuous connection to physical reality – ecosystems, material limits, social relationships, and lived community experience. Instead, it operates through abstract models centred on growth, competition, and individual optimisation. These abstractions become controlling myths of markets become invisible gods, “efficiency” becomes moral virtue and growth becomes salvation.
Humans have always created symbolic systems to understand complexity. The problem emerges when these systems detach from the material world. When that happens, distorted decision-making becomes inevitable. Ethnic cleansing, #climatechaos, ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, and recurring conflict are not anomalies, they are predictable outcomes of a worldview that treats nature and community as externalities.
One of the deepest misunderstandings reinforced by liberal ideology is the belief that society is simply the sum of independent individuals. In reality, the individual – their freedom, reason, and identity – emerges from social relationships. Strong individuals are produced by healthy collective structures, not opposed to them.
This insight sits at the heart of anarchist and commons-based traditions, and it was central to the original spirit of the #openweb. This is why the open web – and #OMN – matter, they represent a break from economic fundamentalism because they treat infrastructure as commons rather than commodities by prioritises interoperability, shared stewardship, and collective agency over enclosure and extraction.
By strong contrast, the #mainstreaming#closedweb (#dotcons platforms) reflects economic dogma of enclosure instead of openness, surveillance instead of trust and platform ownership instead of shared governance leading to individual extraction instead of collective flourishing.
The tragedy is that many “alternatives” risk reproducing the same patterns because they inherit the same assumptions. This is why #OMN matters, it isn’t simply another technical project, it is a shifting of the underlying social logic from product thinking to ecosystem thinking, from institutional control to community process (#4opens), from scale as success to resilience as success, to move from abstract models to lived social reality
If modern economics functions as a religion disconnected from nature, then grassroots digital commons are a form of re-grounding. They reconnect technology with human needs, ecological awareness, and collective agency.
We need to be composting the myths. Across both examples – geopolitical narratives and economic ideology – the task is similar: compost the myths. Recognise which assumptions no longer serve us so that new forms can grow. That means questioning inherited narratives, rejecting reactionary nationalism, and building alternatives rooted in shared stewardship and open process.
The #openweb, at its best, is not nostalgia or utopian fantasy. It is a recognition that healthy systems grow from real communities and collective care. And perhaps the most radical step is simply this: step outside our inherited belief systems long enough to remember that we built the web together – and we can rebuild it differently.
It’s interesting to think about the idea of good and bad faith when dealing with people in change and challenge interactions. If you spend time in life doing activism, this will be an ongoing, unpleasant reacuringing relationship. When pushing aside, pushing back #mainstreaming there will be a lot of bad faith coming at you, your good faith is the best and likely only defence.
Open Media Network (OMN): Portable Digital Commons for a Federated Europe
Summary
The Open Media Network (#OMN) is a real grassroots initiative to build sustainable, human-centred digital infrastructure aligned with the principles of the #openweb and the #4opens. To providing easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and freedom at their core – OMN focuses on creating living social ecosystems alongside technical infrastructure.
At a time when the European Union is investing in alternatives to dominant platform monopolies (#dotcons), The OMN addresses a critical gap: ensuring that open infrastructure remains socially grounded, decentralised in governance, and accessible to grassroots communities, not only institutional actors.
This project proposes to develop practical tools, governance models, and community infrastructure to support a resilient federated ecosystem built on open standards such as #ActivityPub.
Problem Statement
The digital public sphere is currently dominated by large corporate platforms that centralise power, restrict portability, and commodify user participation.
The EU’s growing investment in digital sovereignty and open infrastructure presents a historic opportunity. However, there is a structural risk of replacing Californian platform capitalism with European platform capitalism; building technical infrastructure without sustainable social ecosystems; funding professionalised, institutional actors while excluding needed grassroots innovation.
Healthy digital ecosystems require tension and balance between institutional stability and grassroots experimentation. Without this, “commons infrastructure” risks becoming technocratic infrastructure lacking community participation – leading to failure, abandonment, and wasted investment.
Project Vision
The Open Media Network aims to develop a federated, portable digital ecosystem where: individuals and communities retain control over their data and identity; services are interoperable and portable across providers; governance is participatory and transparent; grassroots actors can build and sustain independent infrastructure.
The goal is not only technological decentralisation but social decentralisation, ensuring that federation is lived practice rather than technical abstraction.
Objectives
Portable Hosted Services. Develop and deploy easy-to-use hosted services based on open standards that prioritise: service portability between providers; user-controlled data ownership; interoperability via ActivityPub and related protocols.
Grassroots Governance Models. Design and test governance frameworks rooted in #4opens principles, with open data where appropriate; open process and decision-making; open standards and open participation. These models will be documented as reusable frameworks for wider adoption.
Experimental Commons Infrastructure. Create an experimental environment where: grassroots communities can launch federated services; low-resource groups can participate without heavy technical barriers; experimentation is encouraged alongside stability.
Historical Memory and Knowledge Transfer. One of the recurring failures of digital movements is loss of institutional memory. OMN integrates documentation and archiving into the infrastructure itself, ensuring lessons learned are preserved and accessible.
Key Activities
Develop and maintain ActivityPub-compatible hosted services.
Build onboarding pathways for non-technical users and grassroots organisations.
Establish pilot communities using OMN infrastructure (e.g. activist media, local networks, cooperative publishing).
Produce documentation and toolkits for governance and sustainability.
Engage with EU initiatives (e.g., NGI Commons) to bridge grassroots and institutional approaches.
Innovation
Unlike many decentralisation projects that focus primarily on technical architecture, OMN emphasises social infrastructure as core technology; governance experimentation alongside code; low-barrier participation for grassroots actors. This creates a resilient ecosystem where innovation emerges from diverse communities rather than centralised development teams.
Expected Impact
Increased adoption of federated technologies across grassroots communities to reduced dependency on proprietary platforms. Strengthened European digital commons aligned with democratic values by development of replicable governance models for decentralised ecosystems. Long-term sustainability through community ownership rather than platform lock-in.
Alignment with EU Priorities
This project supports digital sovereignty and European autonomy, open standards and interoperability, sustainable digital commons, privacy and data portability and innovation through diversity and experimentation.
Sustainability Strategy
OMN operates on a low-cost, distributed model, prioritising: community stewardship; cooperative hosting paths; modular infrastructure that can be replicated and adapted. Rather than scaling toward centralisation, sustainability emerges through federation and shared maintenance.
Consortium and Community
OMN builds upon decades of grassroots media and openweb experience, including work on Indymedia and federated social networks. The project actively collaborates with FOSS communities, federated platform developers, grassroots media networks and independent infrastructure providers.
Funding Request
We seek funding to support: development and seed infrastructure hosting, coordination and community facilitation, documentation and knowledge sharing leading to governance experimentation and research.
Closing Statement
Europe has a unique opportunity to build digital commons that avoid the failures of platform capitalism. The Open Media Network provides a grassroots pathway that complements institutional initiatives, ensuring that the future European internet remains participatory, portable, and human-centred.
The #openweb reminds us that meaningful autonomy comes from shared infrastructure, collective governance, and mutual trust. Projects like #OMN are built on this understanding: individuals do not create networks alone; networks create the conditions that allow individuals to flourish. Real freedom grows from commons-based collaboration, not from isolated platforms or competitive silos.
A Practical Infrastructure Layer for Portable, Human-Centred Digital Commons
Summary
The Open Media Network (OMN) is a pragmatic effort to improve the usability, portability, and resilience of federated digital infrastructure through incremental engineering grounded in existing open standards.
Rather than introducing new protocols or replacing existing ecosystems, OMN focuses on integrating known working components – ActivityPub, open hosting practices, and activist community traditions – into deployable, reusable infrastructure patterns.
The goal is straightforward we build a practical layer that allows grassroots communities and small organisations to deploy federated services that are portable, interoperable, and socially sustainable.
This project addresses a persistent gap between technically sound decentralised systems and real-world adoption by non-specialist users.
Problem Statement
The technical foundations of decentralised social infrastructure already exist. Protocols such as ActivityPub demonstrate interoperability and federation at scale. However, adoption barriers remain that existing solutions optimise for developers rather than communities. And institutional funding risks producing technically impressive systems that fail socially due to missing grassroots participation.
This results in a paradox, an ecosystem has functional protocols but lacks usable grassroots infrastructure patterns. The OMN addresses this gap, it’s not a new platform or protocol, more an integration and implementation project that focuses on packaging existing federated technologies into existing cultures. Creating reproducible deployment models for small-scale operators, that natively scale by federating. Supporting data flows and thus service migration between providers. And embedding governance into operational practice rather than treating governance as a theoretical layer.
The core engineering philosophy is to use existing tools.
The #openweb reminds us that meaningful autonomy comes from shared infrastructure, collective governance, and mutual trust. Projects like #OMN are built on this understanding: individuals do not create networks alone; networks create the conditions that allow individuals to flourish. Real freedom grows from commons-based collaboration, not from isolated platforms or competitive silos.
What can grassroots #openweb people actually do when the EU is building alternatives to #dotcons, but with very real risks of recreating European versions of the same problems? This is a historic moment, for the first time in decades public funding is flowing toward digital commons and infrastructure sovereignty is being taken seriously. Federated technologies like #ActivityPub are gaining traction, largely due to years of grassroots work which is leading to initiatives such as @NGICommons attempting to support open infrastructure.
But alongside this opportunity comes an obvious risk, that they replace Californian platform capitalism with European platform capitalism. The danger: is European #dotcons. Institutional “common sense” – especially when combined with bureaucracy and the #NGO class – tends to reproduce familiar patterns of projects prioritise compliance and institutions over communities. Tech governance becomes professionalised and detached from users and seed communities. Yes, open standards exist, but power centralises anyway as funding rewards scale, stability, and safety rather than needed native grassroots paths.
The result is predictable, European #dotcons. The structural problem is institutions optimise for safety when #EU funding systems are designed around risk avoidance, measurable outcomes to build controlled delivery structures. This leads to only professional actors and institutional partnerships. Grassroots projects – messy, political, horizontal – rarely fit comfortably into this narrow thinking.
So even when the intention is to “build commons,” the outcome becomes safe-looking infrastructure that lacks living social ecosystems. The commons turn into infrastructure without community, and frequently fail, leaving funding poured down the drain and more #techshit to compost.
Why grassroots counter-currents matter is that healthy technology ecosystems need tension between institutional builders for stability, grassroots radicals for innovation and activists for accountability. This balancing leads to communities and real-world grounding.
Without this tension, governance ossifies and technology becomes abstracted from users. Political imagination shrinks and becomes #blocked. Grassroots projects like #OMN represent the compost layer, the messy soil where new forms grow. Institutions rarely generate this energy themselves.
Where initiatives like #NGICommons sit is that some people inside these initiatives genuinely want openness. Much like early Google’s “don’t be evil” phase, there is still a window of possibility. This means influence is still possible and direction is not fully locked in. Individuals inside may be allies, even if institutional structures trend toward mainstreaming. The danger is not simply bad intentions, it is the structural gravity toward institutionalisation.
We need practical strategies (not just critique) to move grassroots actors to shift direction, critique alone is not enough. Practical engagement matters to frame grassroots work as ecosystem infrastructure. Don’t argue only from ideology, speak in terms institutions understand: that tech ecosystems need experimental edges as monocultures fail. We need to argue that diversity increases resilience.
Policy language travels further, when we push for small “wild funding” streams. Instead of demanding institutional transformation, push for small structural openings:
microgrants
low-bureaucracy funding
experimental tracks
funding for governance experiments, not just technical deliverables.
Small budgets can create disproportionate impact.
Promote ActivityPub + social governance together as many EU projects adopt federation technically while retaining centralised governance culturally. We need to communicate that federation without social decentralisation is fake decentralisation. This is where #OMN has strong positioning.
Build parallel legitimacy, not only opposition, as institutions might respond to working prototypes with visible communities that demonstrated outcomes. Critique alone rarely shifts funding flows. Working alternatives do.
We need to find sympathetic insiders, every institutional structure contains pragmatists, a few idealists and sometimes meany reformers. So bridge-building matters. Not everyone inside #NGICommons or EU initiatives is an opponent, some are actively trying to resist corporate capture from within.
The EU currently has three possible futures:
European #dotcons – platform capitalism with EU branding
Technocratic infrastructure without social life (#techshit to compost)
Living digital commons grounded in grassroots communities.
The third path requires messy activism with strong social processes (#4opens) and historical memory rooted in #openweb culture. Without pressure from the grassroots edge, institutions drift toward the first outcome by default.
The deeper insight is that grassroots movements do not need to “win” against mainstreaming. They need to remain the compost layer that keeps the ecosystem alive. That means critique combined with collaboration where possible, strong and grounded independent experimentation and most importantly refusal of capture.
Across Europe, large-scale “mainstreaming” tech projects are increasingly shaping the future of the digital commons. From infrastructure initiatives to sovereign cloud strategies and federated social technologies, the EU tech stack is becoming more organised, more funded, and more institutionalised.
On the surface, this looks like progress. But history suggests that without active counter-currents, #mainstreaming inevitably drifts toward bureaucracy, risk-aversion, and quiet capture by institutional and corporate interests. The problem is almost all current European tech funding is poured down the drain of soft painless corruption.
This is why a small but intentional flow of funding toward grassroots, activist, and counter-cultural projects within #FOSS is not a luxury, it is essential infrastructure.
Innovation rarely if ever starts in the mainstream
Most genuinely transformative ideas in #FOSS and free software and #openweb did not originate from institutional programmes. They came from messy edges of volunteer collectives, activist media projects feed by autonomous spaces building #FOSS social infrastructure.
These environments allow experimentation without needing immediate legitimacy or scalability. They tolerate failure and contradiction, conditions that mainstream programmes often cannot. Without supporting these edge spaces, mainstream funding feeds an echo chamber that only produces incremental improvements, if any, to existing paradigms. Counter-currents are not only opposition; they are the ecosystem that generates future pathways.
Activism keeps governance honest
Institutional projects naturally optimise for stability, compliance, and reputation. This creates blind spots where needed difficult political questions get softened and avoided, governance becomes less participatory over time leading to decisions shift toward funders and professional stakeholders. Activist communities provide necessary friction by asking uncomfortable questions about power concentration and co-option by #NGO and corporate actors.
This friction is often misinterpreted as negativity or disruption. In reality, it acts as a corrective force that keeps projects aligned with the original European values, and the values of the #openweb and #FOSS. Without activist pressure, mainstreaming tends toward the same #closedweb patterns it now claims to be resisting.
Diversity of approach is a resilience strategy
A healthy ecosystem requires multiple approaches operating simultaneously, with institutional scaling projects in balance with community-led infrastructure. When funding flows only toward “safe” and easily measurable projects, the ecosystem loses adaptive capacity. Counter-currents provide alternative models and paths that become critical when dominant approaches fail. This is something repeatedly demonstrated in the history of internet development. Funding these spaces is therefore not charity; it is long-term risk management.
The current gap: refusal to fund counter-currents
Some current alternative funding bodies – including initiatives like #NLnet – have done valuable work supporting open technology. However, when funding structures avoid explicitly supporting activist or counter-cultural paths, a structural imbalance emerges. By prioritising technical outputs without investing in the social and political ecosystems that sustain them, funding breaks down, reinforcing the same dynamics that previously enabled enclosure and platform capture. Technical neutrality is not neutral. It implicitly favours existing power structures.
A truly balanced funding flow would intentionally support more grassroots organising capacity to build activist infrastructure projects with working governance experimentation like the #OGB to open spaces to shape community memory and historical continuity. Without this, mainstream funding cannot claim to represent the full health of the #FOSS ecosystem.
Why this matters now
The European tech stack is at a turning point. As public funding grows, so does the risk of institutionalising the very problems open technology originally emerged to resist. Activism is not only an external threat to mainstream projects, it is also a feedback system.
Supporting counter-currents prevents stagnation and helps to surface blind spots early by keeping alignment with public values. It’s needed to keep the tech ecosystem genuinely open rather than merely #NGO branded as such. The simple principle is if mainstream funding only supports what already looks safe and legitimate, it stops being an engine of innovation and becomes a mechanism of consolidation.
To keep the #openweb alive, we need funding flows that intentionally include the messy edges – the activists, the grassroots builders, and the experiments that don’t yet fit neat categories.
Not because they are comfortable, because they are necessary.
And to tell the truth we need a better balance of useful verses funding poured down the drain #NLnet#EU#NGI#NGIzero and likely more, please post in the comments.
