A letter from the margins of the #openweb

All the #OMN projects I’ve worked on over the years, from #OGB to #indymediaback, are not directly about social change. They are about creating the possibility of social change. A subtle, but critical difference.

We don’t claim to have the answers. What we do offer are tools, networks, and processes that make it easier for people to imagine that the world can be different, and then help them to take the first step. Yet here’s the mess that keeps being pushed over us.

We are told this work is “too high up the stack,” “too fuzzy,” or “too political.” But in reality, the same topics and themes do receive funding, just safely sanitized within the logic of the #deathcult. The “shadow” gets funded, but the light source is ignored.

When we say “the world can be different,” we’re not talking about abstract theory. We mean literally:

Media that people control from the grassroots up
Governance that isn’t locked behind elite gates
A web that grows through trust not platforms
Protocols that reflect values, not just efficiency

But the funding, even in the so-called ‘alternative’ spaces, is trapped in a conservative loop. People working in these orgs are either too captured by their own #geekproblem funding logic, or too afraid to support anything that might really challenge the status quo, thus threaten the funding flows they live in.

Some of the real replies to the over 20 funding applications I have put in for the last ten years: “This kind of effort is very hard to seek grants for…” “I don’t have an obvious candidate for you to go to, either.”

What these polite deferrals mask is a structural failure of imagination. The fear of change is so strong that even funders tasked with enabling alternatives end up only supporting work that conforms to existing institutional logics and barely deviates in meaningful ways from the normal #mainstreaming paths.

So, where does that leave those of us pushing for a real #openweb reboot? We get silence or slow-walked rejections. We burn out or pivot to “safer” projects. Or worst of all, we get absorbed by the very forces we wanted to challenge. And look, maybe that’s the plan. Maybe co-option is the endgame for the #openweb: a slick, tamed version of rebellion, friendly enough for NGOs and palatable to #EU bureaucrats.

But that’s not our plan. Not the plan we’ve been composting all these years. The challenge:

Funders: If you want the future to be different, stop only funding its imitation. Step outside the safety of compliance. Trust radical imaginations.
Builders: If you’re still holding the compost shovel, don’t drop it. The real garden will grow, but only if we stop watering the plastic plants.
Everyone else, demand more. Not just better bling, but better foundations.

We don’t need more advice, we do need courage. The #openweb is not dead, but it is at risk of becoming another façade unless we build the possibility of real change into its #rebooting core.

I am still digging #makinghistory #OMN #indymediaback #OGB

#RIPENCC #NGI #NLnet

#MutualAid posts?

Why don’t people boost #MutualAid posts? This needs a thread on trust, tools, and the current limits of our #openweb. Saw this poll recently:

“For folks on here who don’t boost mutual aid requests, why is that?”
– 0% followers don’t like
– 8% I don’t like/agree
– 63% I curate what I boost
– 29% other/see comment

One comment stood out:

“Because #mutualaid is based on trust – we don’t have very good tools for this. So it's little better than charity at the moment on this #openweb reboot.”

And that hits the nail on the head: Mutual aid vs charity. The difference flows from power. Charity is hierarchical, Mutual aid, at its root, is about solidarity, reciprocity, and shared struggle.
But online, these two often blur because we lack the context and connection to see the difference.

Trust is relational, not transactional, boosting a request isn’t just about amplifying, it’s a mini trust signal. People hesitate because they’re not sure: Is this person part of my community?
Is this a real need or a scam? Will my flows see this as noise?

The current #openweb reboot lacks trust infrastructure, the #Fediverse gives us freedom, but not yet accountability. We have few native ways to: Verify reputations (without surveillance),
build relational trust over time, track the outcomes of help given, without these tools, curation becomes caution.

Without trust, mutual aid to often becomes charity with extra steps. A request without context, without connection, becomes a broadcast into the void. People scroll past, not out of malice, but because they don’t know what they’re being asked to join. It’s hard to feel mutual aid through a hashtag and transeunt fading toot.

We need tools that make trust visible, what would help?

Federated reputation trails (based on community, not scoring)
Personal endorsements or vouch systems
Verified mutual aid circles tied to real-world organizing
Transparency without compromising safety or privacy

Mutual aid thrives in networks, not platforms, most mutual aid posts are isolated asks. But mutual aid IRL is ongoing, collective, messy, relational. To make this work better, we need: Community profiles, not just individuals, project-based accounts with visible participation, local node mapping to show where people can plug in

A final thought is that the problem isn’t people being selfish, it’s that we’ve rebuilt our social media spaces with publishing tools, not relational tools. If we want mutual aid to work online, we have to stop treating it like just another kind of content. We need to compost the charity mindset and grow networked care from trust, not likes. So for now, boost with care. Build with purpose.

Tearing down the old neoliberal #deathcult consensus

People are celebrating that Trump and the new right are tearing down the neoliberal #deathcult consensus. And to be fair, they’re right, Trump’s movement is smashing the status quo. But there is an easy to see problem, it’s not being replaced with anything better. It’s just more stinking shit, only now it’s wrapped in authoritarian aesthetics and crypto-gold-rush dreams. This is the “new” mess being pushed by the different #nastyfew.

This regime change without a roadmap is the end of neoliberalism, and good riddances to that, but this change is not a “nice” step toward justice, but a corporate free-for-all masked in anti-elite smoke and mirrors. Trump project isn’t building anything. It’s the looting of the ruins.

We have already suffered through the 40 years of neoliberal breaking government to sell it off. What many still don’t understand is that neoliberalism doesn’t just passively fail, it actively sabotaged. For people who pine for this vanishing mess, let’s remind you that if you elect neoliberals, they will work tirelessly to make your government services worse. Why? Because good public services threaten private profit. This is the history of the last 40 years:

Defund and sabotage public services, transit, healthcare, education.
Add layers of bureaucracy to make them inefficient and annoying to use.
Watch public trust erode as services collapse.
Claim privatization is the only solution, and sell it off to friends and donors.

The result? A hollowed-out state, where private companies profit off pain, and public goods are rebranded as luxuries. This is what we voted for with Starmer’s labour coup in the UK. This isn’t mismanagement, it’s strategy.

Chancer, wannabe priest of the #deathcult

But Trump, and likely Farage, if we vote for him to replace Starmer, goes a step further. They’re not just running the neoliberal script, the rewriting it with a real estate mogul’s pen, driven by a dystopian vision of climate opportunism. Want proof? Look at the growing obsession on the American right with Canada and Greenland. Yes, Greenland. It’s not simply a joke, it’s a climate gold rush. As the Arctic melts, they see land, water, and new frontiers. The kids we put in charge who dream of being kings are buying into collapse like its beachfront property.

Trumpism is what happens when the neoliberal state collapses under its own mess and contradictions, and instead of building something new, it hands the keys to a cartel of extractive fantasists. They don’t deny climate change anymore. They’re planning to capitalize on it.

The is currently no plan, no future on the current path. This new right-wing movement isn’t even pretending to govern. There’s no vision beyond seizing land, eroding rights, and cutting deals. They’re not here to fix the climate. They’re here to survive it better than you, and leave you and your kids dieing in the mess.

We need to be absolutely clear about this, government services don’t have to be slow and bureaucratic. That’s a choice. A bad one. We can build public systems that are efficient, trustworthy, and just. But to do this, we need to reject the current “common sense” neoliberal decay and right-wing collapse profiteering.

These men featured here are all #fuckwits, we simply can’t let the #nastyfew define the on rushing era of collapse. A first step away from this mess is in saying out load that the hard shift to the right isn’t the antidote to neoliberalism, its final form, stripped of illusion and fully weaponized. And the answer to this isn’t hiding from the collapse, it’s composting the mess, we need a shovels #OMN

Adapting to #climatechaos in a post-1.5°C world

The climate crisis is no longer tomorrow’s problem, it’s reshaping our world now. As we pass the 1.5°C threshold, the impacts are rippling through every layer of society. One group who will increasingly highlight this is the insurance industry.

We already see the growing unease inside the insurance world as companies begin quietly pulling out of risky areas. From Florida’s hurricane-prone coast to California’s fire-ravaged interior, entire regions are being labelled uninsurable. This isn’t theory, it’s happening, and fast.

This shift marks more than a market shakeup. It signals a deep, systemic risk to our current #mainstreaming economic and social systems. Homes without insurance can’t get mortgages. No mortgages, no property value. No value, no tax base for local services. This cascade affects schools, hospitals, fire departments, our whole civic infrastructure.

One likely scenario is what insiders are calling the great abandonment. Here, insurers prioritize short-term solvency and withdraw en masse from high-risk areas. State regulators, under pressure, fail to act fast enough, and governments are left shoring up the mess.

This leads to a dangerous spiral: Massive property devaluation. Financial collapse of public insurers. Taxpayer bailouts of private-sector failures. The end of viable futures in increasingly large zones of abandonment. In short: privatized profits, socialized losses.

At best the path is triage, a slightly better path: insurers embrace adaptive survival strategies, pushing public-private partnerships and local resilience programs. This includes “ruggedized” zones where new building standards and infrastructure investments make life tenable. Still, inaction from governments on decarbonisation means triage is uneven and fragile. Many communities remain exposed and will be left behind.

The best scenario, and the hardest to reach, is where insurers become active agents of change. By pushing bold reforms, they catalyse decarbonisation, resilient infrastructure, and ecosystem restoration. In this “fantasy future”, we manage retreat with dignity. We reshape cities as climate havens. We develop insurance that doesn’t simple assess risk, but reduces it. And we align capital with survival.

How do we make this path happen? If we don’t do the needed fundamental change, then we will need to adapt. On the current #mainstreaming, this means a stronger state, to rethink not just how we build, but where and why we build.

Stronger zoning laws to prevent high-risk development.
New building codes for hurricane, fire, and flood resilience.
Water cycle restoration through urban “Sponge City” design.
Conditional rebuilds that move people to safer areas or enforce resilient construction.
Long-term planning for climate haven cities that will face new migration pressures.
Mooring rings on the second story of all low lighing buildings for us boaters to moor to.

Where we are now, elements of the mess of the great abandonment are already here. But signs of triage and breakthroughs exist too. Whether we collapse into chaos or adapt with creativity depends on the choices we make now, as community, individually, locally, and structurally.

Because in the now obverses to all 1.5°C+ world, the cost of inaction is growing to be too high for us all.

“Climate Realism”

Finding a path is messy

Let’s get this out of the way, most new tech projects are pointless. That’s not an insult, it’s a cultural symptom. People are pushing things not because they’re useful, but because they can. And when every shovel is used to dig holes in sand, we’re not building anything, we’re flailing.

From this experience, let’s build culture, not just code, because here’s the hard truth, we’re losing the reboot of the #openweb by failing to nurture it. Yes, #mainstreaming people are walking back in after the #dotcons burned their fingers, but our “welcome mat” is a mess, no clarity, no cultural grounding, no visible shovels. So it’s 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, exhausting, but better than nothing, but only in the end if we compost the shit to a healthy path.

There is an avalanche coming. A flood of scared, angry, confused people. And without grounded trust and process, we’ll get washed out by the noise. Let’s be real:

The left is built on hope and trust-based cooperation.
The right is built on fear and control.

We live in a world so muddied that it’s hard to tell the difference. That’s why we must be clear, transparent, and intentional. Without that, people can’t tell what’s real.

To the people parroting style and the mess in our community, I’ve been talking with these people for years. Some I know in person. Some in code, threads, chats, some in intention. And yeah, you could say I’ve also been “talking at” them at times, when you’re trying to talk from under a pile of #techshit, your voice gets garbled.

Can we talk usefully about these groups? If we can’t, then we’re not doing community, we’re doing individualism, which is what the #deathcult feeds on. So here’s the invitation: Start discussing structure, stop silencing style and start composting confusion. Let’s bring the shovels, the mess is real, but so is the soil we can grow from.

Reclaiming balance: News, personal, and the #openweb

On the #openweb, we need to be clear about what serves us and what distracts us. There’s a growing tendency to blur the lines between what should be public and what should remain private, and this confusion weakens our social fabric.

At the core of any healthy communication ecosystem, we need two things: news and the personal. These are not the same. They serve different social functions, reflect different truths, and nurture different parts of our communities.

News is about truth-telling. It’s rooted in shared reality and collective witnessing — what Harold Innis might call the durable structures of “truth.”

The personal is about care and context. It’s about opinion, identity, emotional honesty. It builds relational trust — what we might frame as “careness.”

We already have encrypted chat for private and group communication. That’s a separate, secure path, and while important, it’s not the same as what we need for a functioning #openweb. Obsessing over more privacy layers for things that should be either news or care-based expression is a distraction, a misdirection that can end in “perversion” rather than protection.

In open paths, the real work is in getting these paths right: Truth (news): Verifiable, public, shared. Careness (personal): Subjective, relational, shared in context. Private: Not hidden in fear, but chosen with intention, things you don’t yet feel safe sharing publicly, and that’s okay.

Then we have a different story of working in closed paths, I don’t talk about this here as it’s not native to the #openweb and a wider subject. How we express ourselves along these paths matters. If we confuse them, we break the signal-to-noise ratio that holds #openweb communities together. But if we learn to respect their distinct roles and values, we can build something meaningful, a space where truth, care, and privacy each have their place.

Let’s keep the balance. Let’s compost the noise, not the signal.

“Climate Realism”

It’s pastime more people raised their heads, the Council on Foreign Relations (#CFR), the think tank of the U.S. political establishment, just published a new statement calling for what they call “Climate Realism.”

1.5°C Is Dead – And they admit it, to their credit, CFR doesn’t sugarcoat the situation. They finally acknowledge that the international climate target of limiting warming to 1.5°C is officially dead. The new “realistic” trajectory? 3°C or higher by the end of this century, if not sooner. This isn’t just academic: 3°C means crop failures, mass displacement, geopolitical chaos, collapsing ecosystems, and runaway feedback loops. It’s climate breakdown, not “climate change.”

The #geekproblem tech fix of geoengineering is Plan A to the looming catastrophe, not degrowth, not ending fossil fuel subsidies, not climate justice or ecological transition. They want massive investment in geoengineering, particularly solar radiation management (SRM), basically spraying particles into the stratosphere to dim the sun. Yes, they’re proposing that we hack the planet to protect global capitalism. All while keeping the mess of extraction and inequality running at full speed.

They don’t say anything about system change, their “realism” is not anything to do with reducing global consumption, transitioning away from endless economic growth, or tackling the structural roots of climate collapse.

On this “common sense” #mainstreaming path we are rushing down, the is no interest in real solutions, because real solutions threaten the economic order they live in. They don’t touch on basic climate justice because justice is incompatible with on going imperial hegemony. They don’t mention degrowth because that would shake the foundations of capitalistic economics.
No mention of capitalism, it’s invisible to them, because they are capitalism, thus they are #blind to this.

This is the new fascist #mainstreaming – A doctrine of U.S. climate power, the statement frames climate breakdown as a national security issue, a geopolitical weapon to be wielded by the U.S. state. Let’s be very clear, this isn’t about saving the planet. It’s about maintaining U.S. dominance in a rapidly destabilizing world.

What they do is debunk four liberal “climate fallacies”:

Global targets are achievable – Not any more.
China and the Global South are the key battlegrounds.
Climate risks are manageable – They admit this is fantasy.
Clean energy is a win-win for the U.S. – Nope. China leads. The U.S. is lagging behind.

Instead, they push a doctrine of planning for collapse with adaptation, disaster readiness, and securing “fiscal room” for emergency responses. Investing in competitive clean tech, not for domestic transition, but to outcompete China in global markets. Leading catastrophic risk mitigation, geoengineering is their “break glass in case of emergency” option. They even float the idea of using economic and military pressure to force other nations to cut emissions.

Climate deterrence is going to be the New Cold War. #CFR now sees climate as a deterrence issue, like nuclear weapons, only with carbon. That’s their vision: a future where the U.S. uses its technological and military edge to impose climate stability through force. This is climate realism in the mess making logic of empire, don’t change course, double down on control.

We are on a path straight to hell, with eyes wide open. This should come as no surprise, ofter the last 20 years of mess building, CFR’s plan is in no way surprising. It’s the logical next step for a system that can’t imagine anything beyond growth, extraction, and domination. In their world, collapse is a management problem, not a moral one.

We should be clear, this is a death march. It’s not “realism”, it’s resignation dressed up as pragmatism. And if we follow them, we’ll arrive exactly where they’re headed, hell, but orderly. We have worshipped this #deathcult for too long.

Adapting to #climatechaos in a post-1.5°C world

The new right’s obsession with Greenland and Canada’s north isn’t some fringe fantasy, it’s real estate logic, twisted through a lens of empire and extraction. When you zoom out and frame it through the lens of #climatechaos, it’s chillingly obvious, the Arctic is melting, and they see land, not crisis.

That AlphaGeo link paints the picture, climate-driven migration, shifting growing zones, and emerging “climate havens” aren’t theoretical, they’re data-driven land grabs in progress. And the political ambition to dominate those spaces? That’s the should now be more obvious to us all.

It’s a gold rush for the apocalypse, a final frontier for the capitalist imagination. They aren’t trying to save anything; they’re re-positioning to rule what’s left. And yes, it’s a children-who-want-to-be-kings fantasy: Trump-esque thinking where climate collapse becomes opportunity, borders become walls, and “winning” means inheriting a lifeboat while others drown.

This isn’t climate denial anymore, it’s climate opportunism. That’s why adaptation can’t just be technical, it has to be political. If we don’t shape the future, they are carving it up in plain sight.

On being a prat in tech and social spaces (Yes, this might be about you 😘)

From where I’m standing, a lot of people are being absolute prats when it comes to social and technological issues. That should be obvious… but clearly, it’s not. We’ve got two basic paths here:

#Block everything you don’t like. Predictably, this just creates more prat-ish behaviour and pushes us all deeper into toxic bubbles.
Ask questions. Grow. Listen. Respond. This reduces prat-ish behaviour – over time, maybe even composts it into something useful.

Now, in the era of #stupidindividualism, which path do you think most people are taking? Yeah. That one. If you’re blocking conversations that challenge you, you’re still kneeling at the altar of the #deathcult. Look up. You’re making a mess of social technology.

“Get off your knees” comes to mind, stop worshipping the #deathcult of neoliberalism, salted with postmodernism. These ideologies have poisoned our communities by turning freedom into isolation and choice into greed. I’m all for freedom, yes, you can choose to be a prat. But I reserve the freedom to call that behaviour toxic and self-destructive. What you do with that communication is up to you, just don’t pretend that #blocking it is some kind of moral high ground.

As Thalia Campbell rightly says, sometimes the best path is just to kindly correct, share info, or talk things through face-to-face. Most of this online prat-ness wouldn’t survive a real conversation, it’s bloated on anonymity, context collapse, and dopamine-fuelled feedback loops.

Yes, what meany people do now is a mess, but mess makes good compost, compost builds soil, soil feeds the common good. And talking about “common sense” is just a way of stirring that compost.

But here’s the mess makeing: we keep repeating the same shit, and instead of composting, we leave it to fester. Capitalism, rooted in self-interested greed, claims to serve the common good. But on the fundamentalist path we have been on for 40 years, it’s clearly failing. War. Growing economic divides. Visible #climatechaos. Poisoned ecosystems and communities.

We can’t survive, or flourish, in a society based on greed. That’s just a simple #KISS message. And neoliberalism, still much of our #mainstreming “common sense”, is nothing but extreme capitalism. It’s the purest form of the #deathcult. It’s eating us alive. Please talk about this.

The #dotcons we have been building our lives in for the last 20 years are undiluted deathcult, surveillance capitalism wrapped in shiny UX. The #openweb? Often like herding cats. And scratch the surface, and yes, sometimes you find the #deathcult there too. But we can’t keep going down this path. We need to stop pushing #mainstreaming agendas that lead us back into the same poisoned mess. That path is BAD. It’s ending in ruin.

We’ve got to try, seriously try, to make things better. Not perfect. Not flashy. Just better.

And that means less prat-ing about. More compost. More care. More common good.

The #OMN is not a product — It’s a path you walk

The #OMN project is #DIY, it only works if we build it together. This isn’t a startup pitch. It’s not a platform that magically appears out of nowhere to fix everything. It’s not a product to consume, it’s a path you walk. The direction is participatory, not passive. You don’t get to sit back and clap… or boo from the sidelines. If you do, the system won’t collapse, but it sure as hell won’t grow.

Let’s be direct, there is no saviour coder, no NGO white knight, no perfectly designed protocol that will do the real work for us. If you’re waiting for a polished solution wrapped in a branded bow, you’re already on the wrong side of history.

And if our current (stupid)individualism keeps #blocking, even if we don’t build any of this now, the work still matters. There’s deep value in memory, the rough notes, the abandoned wikis, the half-built tools, the strange and beautiful conversations scattered across the #fediverse. These are the seeds and scraps that future builders can compost. If we can’t get our act together now, the next wave might. But only if we leave something living behind.

Right now, for me, that “something” is #makinghistory, the #OMN archiving project. It’s not just nostalgia or backup, it’s a living memory layer, a scaffolding of knowledge and intention that gives us a place to stand. Without memory, we circle the same old #techshit heap, repeating mistakes, retelling the same half-lost stories, falling into the same social and technical traps.

That’s not progress. That’s rot.

So we’re starting where we might get funding, bootstrapping the archive. It’s step one. It’s doable. And it matters. If we don’t remember soon, many of us, and the histories we’ve made, will be lost in the rising storm of #climatechaos and social fragmentation.

In the end, it’s simple, if we don’t build, we don’t change. If we don’t remember, we’ll never learn.
And if we don’t act, this moment becomes compost for someone else’s future.

That’s fine, but I’d rather build that future when we need it most now. Wouldn’t you?

Ah, the cockerel crows and the full moon glows, a fine moment to scratch at the compost pile.

You’re right, most are merrily skipping through walled gardens, hashtagging selfies and feeding the #dotcons. But seeds don’t need mass attention, they just do need rich compost. That’s what we need to build. Slow, damp, a bit smelly, but fertile.

The #sheeple are not my flock, they belong to the algorithmic shepherds. We’re feeding the stray goats and curious crows.

You don’t convert people by preaching. You do it by making better paths, ones they choose when the old ones crumble. We don’t sell the #openweb like snake oil — we show it, live in it, fix it when it breaks, and compost the crap. It’s #DIY, not #DRM

As for silos and skips, good compost needs oxygen, not airtight boxes. So yeah, a messy open pile — full of half-rotten ideas, posts, drama, even the occasional troll turd.

We trust in tools not gatekeepers, the #4opens are the shovels, rakes, and sieves. The people bring the scraps, and over time, it breaks down into something usable.

No army of mods, no paywalls, simple trust, process, and a lot of patience. Think rural anarchism, not startup governance.

On scaling… Ah, the eternal #techshit question, “Does it scale?” That’s the wrong frame. Nature doesn’t scale, it sprawls.

We’re not building an empire. We’re nurturing a network. Think mycelium, not megastructure.

The #OMN isn’t about numbers. It’s about resilience and agency. If it sprouts in some cracks, the monoculture breaks. And yes, nettles welcome

The #Kolektivas, the #fashernista paradoxes, the semi-anarchic infighting, it all goes in the pile. Break it down, stir it up, give it time…

And what do you get? Fluffy, fertile humus — ready for new growth. That’s the cycle. That’s the plan.

Can people engage with the #4opens process?

The #4opens is a completely obverse social restating of the #FOSS development model — but with a critical edition: The return of #openprocess, something we’ve lost over the last 10 years due to the shift from public email archives to our reliance on encrypted chat.

With this in mind, what is still #blocking the #openweb reboot? One thing I’ve learned from the last five years of this reboot is this: The #geekproblem is inadequate for the scale of change and challenge we face. Currently, the #geekproblem is HARD #blocking, obstructing both, funding, and tech direction. Think: #NLNet, #NGIZero, #SummerOfProtocols, #InvestInOpen — they say the right words, have potential, but are actually #blindly caught in a loop of the same limiting #blocking patterns.

This is why we need activism, this can be #spiky, sometimes all it takes Is a rock or a stick. Think of Greek shepherd dogs in the mountains — they come at you like wolves. But just bending down to pick up a rock or stick? They back off. No violence. Just clarity and intention. Think of the #4opens like this when facing #mainstreaming, suddenly, it starts to make sense.

Nuts and nutters, Yes — you’re right, this can sound like blinded ideology. But remember: Humans are meaning-creating creatures. One word for that is ideology — there are others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synonym

If we can compost this mess, that’s a big if, will the #OMN Work? Simple answer: Yes.
Complex answer: No. My answer to that riddle? We find the complex by implementing the simple. That’s the #KISS principle in action. Walk the simple path, we discover our way through the complex path by implementing and walking the simple one #KISS.

#Mainstreaming = #Deathcult Worship

Most mainstream agendas are pointless. Why? Because they’re built on “common sense” — Which today often just means #deathcult worship. Something to keep in mind… whenever you’re doing anything that matters. Hope this slight poetry piece helps. One thing I keep saying, please don’t be a prat, thanks.

DEV of the #OMN projects

Emissary.dev presents itself as a promising low-code platform that might potentially expedite prototyping for the #ActivityPub based #OMN projects. It’s emphasis on ease of use and integration with various #openweb social APIs which is the path we need to take for rapid development without getting bogged down in initial complexities.

Potential benefits, rapid prototyping, the low-code approach allows for quick iterations and testing of ideas, which is crucial in the early stages of project development. Open source foundation, providing the flexibility to modify and adapt the codebase as needed. This openness also means that, if necessary, a custom backend could be developed in the future without starting from scratch. The is some developer engagement, Ben the dev, appears to be actively engaged with the community, responding to issues on #GitHub and expressing a desire to support #openweb paths.

Things to consider are the monetization plans with a freemium model in the future. While this is not uncommon, it’s important to consider how this might affect the project’s long term independence and sustainability. Then there is the background of the developer, which includes work in the self-help industry. While this isn’t inherently negative, it’s worth considering how this experience might influence the platform’s direction and priorities. All this questions the codebase long-term viability for “native” #openweb use, as relying on a third-party platform always carries some risk. We do need to assess whether Emissary.dev’s development trajectory aligns with the long-term goals of the #OMN project.

Next steps are technical evaluation, a review of the codebase to assess its quality, security practices, and suitability for the project’s needs. Will reaching out to Ben for a video discussion to better understand his vision for the platform and how it might align with the #OMN project’s paths. Pilot testing, if initial assessments are positive, proceed with a small-scale pilot to test capabilities in a soft roll-out environment.

Looking for feedback on this.

We also look at Ibis Wiki

UPDATE: the code I’ve read so far at least looks well-organised, and it’s fairly clear to read through and glean intent. Looks promising.

This is what the #OGB is aiming for

The leadership model of the #Fediverse has long mirrored the “aristocracy” of many open-source projects. At the centre stands the developer “king”, a benevolent dictator model that, while functional to a point, is fundamentally limited. Now, we see a shift towards the #NGO-style of governance, and ironically, this may be an even worse model.

Let’s be honest: the day-to-day of the Fediverse is more like elephants stampeding while people throw paper planes at each other. It’s messy, chaotic, but truthfully native to what the Fediverse is. And that’s the point.

Democracy is always messy. Bureaucracy, on the other hand, is tidy—but dead. The problem is that what people wish for—neat structures, clear hierarchies, clean governance—is often exactly what kills the real vitality of alternative spaces. When you introduce money and institutional status into a grassroots organization, power politics follow. Every time. If you want to avoid this, you need some form of lived, messy democracy, rooted in shared trust and open process.

The real question is: how do we build structures that are native to the Fediverse? Ones that reflect its radical difference rather than force it back into broken moulds? I’ve watched hundreds of projects fail over the last 20 years by doing just that—reverting to what’s familiar, what seems “common sense.” But this “common sense” is the enemy of growing grassroots movements. Especially when you’re trying to build something outside the gravitational pull of the #mainstreaming machine.

The Fediverse works because it’s radically different. That difference is fragile, and we need to protect and deepen it, not dilute it with NGO logic or replicate Silicon Valley’s pyramid schemes. What we need is trust, messiness, and actual grassroots process. This is what the #OGB is aiming for. Let’s not throw that away for a seat at the wrong table.

Where this came from Open Governance Body