Almost everything built in alt-radical tech ends up feeding pointless #fashernista churn. New platforms, new protocols, new branding, new codebases tend to be endless motion with very little grounding in actual social need. People mistake novelty for progress, and the result is a constant cycle of abandoned projects, burnt-out developers, and fragmented communities.
That’s one of the reasons why #indymediaback matters. It is not another pointless radical tech project chasing fashion. It grows from the #nothingnew path, building around things that already worked socially, culturally, and politically before the current mess swallowed the #openweb.
The point of #nothingnew is not nostalgia, it’s mediation. Instead of endlessly reinventing tools and social structures, we look at existing working practices and compost the failures while keeping the value that already exists, we build from continuity rather than disruption.
For the first 5 years of the #fediverse, this often means creating #openweb replacements for existing #dotcons platforms. That has value, people need usable alternatives to corporate systems, but simply copying the logic of the dotcons into federated code has real limits.
Code is never neutral, all code carries embedded assumptions, social relations, and ideology. When we directly replicate #dotcons platforms, we import the values of the #deathcult along with the interface design. Metrics, branding, influence economies, performative identities, engagement addiction, soft/hard hierarchies – all this gets reproduced inside supposedly “alternative” spaces.
This is where the problem needs mediating rather than denying. The path of #indymediaback is different because it starts from an existing radical social process, not from abstract tech blindness. #indymedia already had working publishing flows, distributed trust networks, collective moderation practices, and real-world activist communities. The technology existed to support those social relations, not replace them.
That means the real value of #indymediaback is not primarily the tech stack, even though the tech matters. The value is in rebuilding the social continuity that made the original project meaningful. Without that grounding, you likely just produce another empty platform that disappears into the pile of forgotten radical tech experiments.
Food for thought: the #geekproblem is often not actually interested in the #openweb as a human value network. Instead, parts of geek culture feed parasitically off the current mess – thriving on fragmentation, novelty churn, status games, and technical abstraction disconnected from lived social reality.
Feeding off the collapse of the #openweb while calling it innovation is still bowing down to the #deathcult. Seen this way, the need for change becomes clearer, that we need active mediation, not passive drift. Both carrot and stick. Support grounded projects that grow from real communities, and challenge the pointless churn that keeps draining energy away from building durable alternatives.
The #OMN is one attempt at this – a shovel for composting the inhuman mess, so something living can grow from it.
