We need to do better. In the battle of open vs closed, we failed as much as they won. We have power over OUR own failer we only have liberal wish fulfilment over THEIR control.
Key areas I am thinking and acting on:
* horizontalish “governances” process and coding to make this real.
* openmedia based on “trust” rather than power and scarcity and the coding to make this real.
Worth thinking about this old issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate as it illustrates our current problems. The clergy, the nobility, the commoners and the press
* Yes, do worship the #deathcult, so religion is still a social force and the economists are the priests and “sound money” the offering.
* The nobility is the increasing divide between the rich and the poor, they are rooted to capital and fame – rather than land and titals.
* The “commoners” are us.
UPDATE
We live in oligarchy.
“Democracy arose from the idea that those who are equal in any respect are equal absolutely. All are alike free, therefore they claim that all are free absolutely… The next is when the democrats, on the grounds that they are all equal, claim equal participation in everything.
It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.”
The “liberal fig leaf” we put in front of our opensource foundations will fall off the first time the wind blows. Yes it is easy to run down this hill, yes you can force this into place, few people will try and stop you. But before you do this, please think – Do we in the #fedivers want to live in oligarchy or are we actually building something different. We need to think about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governance
Almost all new alt-tech projects are worthless and a waste of attention. This should be obvious if you look back at the hundreds, thousands of dead projects. Yet people keep building them, i know they look shiny and sound new – but they are actually almost all dull and are copies with no linking back to the dozen of the same projects that failed from the same issues.
When truth-telling is simply penalized, it’s a clear sign we’re navigating a post-modern, obfuscating mess. Instead of addressing issues openly, society hides and punishes those who expose inconvenient views, letting problems rot and fester. It’s a reminder that transparency is essential for creating a healthier culture. When truth is composted rather than suppressed, it breaks down unhealthy systems and makes way for healthy growth and accountability.
Please look at the underlying agenda BEFORE pushing “new” ideas, please.
Conservatism/right wing is based on fear and the resulting desire for control.
Progressive/left wing is based on cooperation and trust, with the resulting desire for freedom.
Yes, this is muddled by right wing agenda to push their lies. Don’t be a #fashernista on this subject, please.
#Ideology matters, is a useful tool, to judge the shit #fashernistas spew. “It is how reactionary politics works, by appealing to sense of injustice and then, instead of focusing anger on the rightful target (capitalism etc) they create a movement to serve their own class interests, in this case far right libertarianism.”
This is a #KISS way of stepping away from the post-truth would.
Think we currently have a pile of shit for home hosting tech. Might have to break my #nothingnew pledge as the is literally nothing normal people can use/do. Plan/idea/focus?
Nothing is useable – have tried them all. Good to start from where we are we need to stop going round in circles and start to look at why we HAVE FAILED and if the is a path to failing less badly. Or better how to build something that is not fail.
The is endless circulating in our #geekproblem communities – the subject matters, but we do nothing but circal failer. Good to start from where we are.
We are here… we need social tech that works for normal people…
Update
Maybe build a #KISS set of lightweight apps that use tor as the backend communications standard and talk to the tor browser as web apps so you don’t need the app to dip in, but the apps do the work of lifting p2p hosting. Feasible?
UPDATE (from a chat room on home web hosting)
A. calling everyone’s project a pile shit and not apologising even when some of those project devs sit in this room is not ok
Q. But obviously it’s all well shitty otherwise we would not be in the stinking mess we are with everyone (well 99.99% if you nitpick) on the #dotcons if that is not a pile of shit then we kinda need to start calling a rose a rose and a pile of shit a pile of shit… we are not sniffing roses in this chat i can say this as have been here in the chat for a while and here in the alt tech world for a very long time.
Maybe “wishing” shit way is no replacement for working sewers? We need working p2p tech that normal people can use. So lets compost the shit so we can smell the roses 🙂
A. 🙄 request for moderation plz thanks bye
UPDATE (from a chat room on home web hosting)
A. i concur with *** that the language is neither helpful nor respectful towards people trying to make things. So please mind it.
Q. Fair anufe, though shit in moderation makes good compost and compost is needed for beading seedlings and seedlings grow into everything that feeds life… and https://homebrewserver.club is about grassroots DIY life… some shit in moderation is needed for this cycle 🙂
Let’s water some seeds that “normal” people can grow.
The children of Thatcher and Reagan are limited in their world views – they have been brought up and nurtured in the neo-liberal #deathcult and have limited experience in the nurturing and socialisation of anything else. Academic and book learning are a poor substitute for evolving in a non #deathcult era, so it is no surprise that they find themselves trapped in the circle of #stupidindividualism
In this #deathcult era, individualism is stupid and individualism makes you stupid. This is a degrading circle that no “self-help” or “whoo spiritualism” can help you to escape.
This manifests like dark “social magic” in many areas:
In social movement we have the take-over of #fashernistas who push “alternatives” aside in their “commonsense” self-interest, building careers and grasping at the illusionists of fame and “influence” they are slaves to #mainstreaming
In tech the #geekproblem has pushed emancipation into darkness. The #encryptionists have dominated alt-tech and the #dotcons of the #mainstreaming path, both are born of this world view and the socialisation that keeps it from sight.
The mainstream is blind in its worship “there is no alternative” for #mainstreaming agendas in this era. Our words and actions are simply spewing shit while the world burns, our ecosystems die and communities implode in manufactured (for profit) infighting #failbook
It’s actually easy to step away from this mess, the issue is: are you brave enough to fall and WILL your community catch you when you do? (both valid worries i’m afraid).
We need hand-holding and most importantly we need alt-social/tech structures in place to build and bind – all human communities are built/bound with/from these structures.
The #OMN and the #4opens are there as shovel for the shit and binding for the community – neither of these have any power but the power you use them with – the steeping and away and dreaming and digging is all down to you and your community.
Q. For social change to happen we need to empower different groups of people – just doing the usual shit is adding to the mess. The last 10 years has been completely wasted in the tech space.
A. This is a “what is to be done?” kind of question, so it’s difficult to answer. The world moves in mysterious ways, and sometimes change can come from the least likely places.
Right now I’d say the people who need empowerment are the people attending food banks, the asylum seekers, trans people, poor people in tower blocks like Grenfell, Roma/travellers and “essential workers” on the front line of the economy. In the UK at present, these people either have no voice in the mainstream or are extensively vilified by politicians.
Q. That would be a good piece of social work, but social change is a more focused than social work. Who has the power to challenge the issues that create the liberal social work problems our society create and will keep creating? First AID is a step, who do we empower to create the change, so we don’t keep creating these same issues?
A. In UK society there are a few pressure points by which power gets reproduced. Private schools. Sometimes misleadingly called “public schools” for reasons which are historical and no longer apply. The large majority of the ruling class are privately educated, and this is how they do social networking among themselves. So anything which challenges the validity or viability of private schools would send a shock wave through the establishment. If there were a successful campaign to ban private schools, or to abolish their opaque admissions criteria then this could have beneficial effects.
Abolishing private schools would bring the elite into direct contact with what life is like for the rest of the population. It would become more difficult for them to remain detached and ignorant. Issues previously deemed unimportant would suddenly become more so.
The housing circus. Access to housing ought to be a right, but in the UK housing and “getting on the ladder” is a sort of middle class religion. Politicians “flip” houses to enrich themselves, and a lot of housing “units” remain persistently empty and are traded as gambling chips on the international stock market.
Anything which decomodifies housing could bring improvements. Maybe a campaign for “the right to a home”. It would be against homelessness, but framed in the opposite way.
Maybe having a rule where any house which stands empty for a year automatically becomes public property.
Q. “Maybe a campaign” yes who do we empower to campaign – how do campaigns manifest. People make campaigns, they make them with social “traditions” built and maintained by social tools.
“For social change to happen we need to empower different groups of people – just doing the usual shit is adding to the mess. The last 10 years has been completely wasted in the tech space.”
Am getting bored with people posting theory and academic articles at me. If academic knowledge worked in the real world we would live in very different ways – thus it is easy to show that most academic ideas are useless and IMPOSING them on the real world has a VERY bad history to it. Please rethink before doing this as it’s just adding to the mess.
The problem isn’t that the #Fediverse has politics – it’s that people keep pretending it doesn’t, and then acting them out anyway in messy, unconscious ways. The Fediverse didn’t appear from nowhere, like all tech, it’s built on assumptions about power, trust, ownership, and human behaviour, and right now, those assumptions are colliding.
At its roots, the Fediverse grows out of we could call “stupid anarchism” – meaning not a deep, grounded anarchist practice, but a default instinct: no central authority, let people self-organise, trust will emerge. You can see this clearly in protocols like #ActivityPub – federation instead of central control, local autonomy over global rules. That’s the good part, the messy part is that this instinct often stops there, without the hard work of building sustainable trust, governance, or conflict mediation.
On top of this, you’ve got a layer of people trying to push toward cooperative or commons-based socialism. They’re asking real questions about shared ownership, moderation as collective care, and how to build infrastructure that isn’t captured by capital. But this layer is still thin. It exists more in intention and small experiments than in strong, lived structures.
Then pressing in from the outside – and increasingly from the inside – is #mainstreaming capitalism. Not the obvious corporate takeover (though that’s always lurking), but the softer version of growth metrics, influencer culture, branding, monetisation logic. You are seeing code-bases acting like platforms, admins acting like CEOs, and social capital turning into attention economies. It’s subtle, but it bends things.
And yes, there’s always an authoritarian shadow, not fully formed, not dominant, but present in tendencies with calls for tighter control “for safety” and central blocklists becoming de facto authority resulting in pressure for standardisation that removes local autonomy. This isn’t new. It’s just history repeating in a new technical wrapper.
If you want a clear historical parallel, look at Spanish Civil War, not because the scale is the same, but because the dynamics are familiar: anarchists, socialists, liberals, and authoritarians all operating in the same space, sometimes cooperating, often undermining each other, while larger power structures move in to shape the outcome. The tragedy there wasn’t just external force – it was internal fragmentation and failure to build shared process. That’s the uncomfortable mirror, back in the Fediverse, what do we actually have?
Background authoritarian impulses – control creeping in through safety and scaling pressures
And sitting awkwardly across all this is the Social Web Foundation and similar efforts – trying to stabilise things, but often pulling toward NGO-style mediation and #mainstreaming rather than any native grounded, messy governance. So yes, we keep making horrible mistakes, not because people are stupid, but because we refuse to name the politics we’re already enacting. We default to blinded ideology without admitting it, then fight over symptoms instead of causes.
The result is predictable endless meta arguments, fragile communities that fracture under pressure, governance that either collapses or ossifies and energy burned on internal conflict instead of building. What’s missing isn’t more blinded ideology, it’s conscious mediation between them. This is where process work matters, if the #Fediverse is going to grow into something more real, it needs to stop replaying these patterns blindly and start building with open eyes:
accept the anarchist base – but add real trust structures
grow socialist practice – not as slogans, but as working governance
resist capitalist drift – especially the subtle, “friendly” versions
keep authoritarian tendencies in check – without pretending they don’t exist
And most importantly – stop trying to “win” the ideological argument, and start building processes where these tensions can exist without tearing everything apart. That’s the shift from repeating history to learning from it, because without process, all you have is ideology colliding with itself, and ideology alone doesn’t build anything that lasts.
If we don’t get this right, the likely outcome is simple – The Fediverse becomes either a nicer version of the platforms it was meant to replace or a fragmented landscape that never scales beyond small niches. If we do get it right, it becomes something rarer, a living, federated commons that can actually hold difference without collapsing. But that only happens if we stop pretending the politics aren’t there – and start designing for them.
The#IMC project is an affinity group – so we are planing to work through consensus and diversity of strategy to move the project past where it was ripped apart by internal stresses after 10 years of running as a successfully worldwide radical grassroots media project.
Of course this can and will be updated as needed, but we have a “chicken and egg” issue that we need a working affinity group/s to reach consensus on where we go. The #indymediaback project is a way of bootstrapping this code/process in #4opens way.
To keep “diversity of strategy” in place, we are using the #OMN framework.
I don’t think our coders have ANY understanding of the damage they have done and are doing.
The state we live in is full of monsters.
In #closed the monsters can plot and destroy/divide and control because there is no way to make a judgment, you cannot have social “truth” in closed.
With #open, the monster is more obverse and much easier to trip up. As social “truth” is all around you.
Closed breeds monsters/open pushes them into the shadows.
We need to compost a lot of closed crap on the #openweb
If you look at contemporary programming – you will see in theory something that looks like anarchism and in realty something that feels like Stalinist USSR or Nazi Germany. The need for control and security is at the base of our #geekproblem culture, it is an inhumane outcome, code should always be messy as should our society.
Of course, like the above social abominations the real #geekculture hides COMPLETE insecurity and SECRET control by both the #openweb and the #dotcons it’s a mess, but not in a good way.
We never END in this social balancing, you would be an idiot or a Nazi or more often suffering from unexamined #geekproblem to think that we could or should be building towards ending the mess.
You do realize that all our data is HORRIBLY centralized and thus could vanish at any moment, come the revolution/evolution/ #climatechaos tsunamis.
Our end plan in the #OMN is that all the content is redundantly stored in the network in a #KISS way, so traditional backup is less important -when it goes wrong, and it will sometimes as we are home hosting. Just boot up a new instance and put your hashtags and user info in and all your content will be sucked back in a #lossy good enough way. This makes home hosting work well enough to scale outward to build a #openweb
“So wait, when you buy an NFT, you don’t actually BUY the art, you just buy a receipt that you bought the art? And we’re burning the planet for THAT?“
The #encryptionist project is capitalism in the #openweb where it fits badly. They keep trying https://ethereum.org/en/nft/ as if the #deathcult was common sense, which it’s not, its death, displacement for millions and the wholescale destruction of nature for the next hundred years.
These guys are EVIL, and we need to say this to them #climatchoas is the new normal, and we have to STOP the #encryptionists form feeding this mess.
