This is the open-source – split – FOSS moment for the Fediverse. We’ve seen this before. When “open source” was carved out of Free Software politics, it made the space more business-friendly – but at a cost, the movement never fully recovered from this. The result was a long-term weakening of the social and political grounding that made FOSS meaningful in the first place. We are in real danger of repeating this pattern in the Fediverse.

Vertical agendas – loud, well-funded, and institutionally backed – dominate conversations and displace the native horizontalism that defines the Fediverse and the #openweb. These agendas will ultimately fail, but not before they push out the grassroots energy that actually makes things work.

A Practical Intervention

One leverage point is funding – specifically, how funding is framed, distributed, and justified within the #mainstreaming process.

So the question is: how do we intervene effectively? It’s a simple classic path: mess – opening – implement.

Create an EU-Focused Consortium

Build a working consortium with three balanced pillars:

* Activism – holding the political line and pushing for real change

* #NGO layer – interfacing with bureaucracy and policy structures

* Grassroots #FOSS builders – creating and maintaining commons-based code

The goal is simple, to deliver real, native #openweb tools that create meaningful social change, not just online, but in the wider world.

Strategy

1. Discredit the Current Waste

Document and publicize the massive misallocation of public funds:

* Hundreds of millions wasted on blockchain projects

* The same pattern now repeating with AI funding

This isn’t just critique, it’s strategic pressure. It weakens the legitimacy of the current funding agenda.

2. Open a Gap

By exposing this waste, you temporarily sideline parts of the “blocking class”, those who dominate but do not deliver. This creates a window of opportunity.

3. Seed the Commons

Use that opening to:

* Channel small, strategic funding (“cents on the euro”) into multiple grassroots projects

* Fund at least three parallel codebases per call.

* Expect two to be captured or fail

* Ensure one remains viable and native

Because these projects are built on ActivityPub, even “failed” or captured projects can still interoperate within the Fediverse ecosystem and thus can maybe grow to become meaningful. Diversity is good.

Outcome

This approach nudges EU technology policy – maybe programs like Horizon Europe – toward:

* Practical, working tools, native research. Based on meany “#Nlnet” like federated working paths.

* Federated, interoperable systems

* Socially grounded infrastructure

#OMN Fit

The #OMN already has four native commons projects that align directly with this strategy:

* Governance

* Media

* Historical memory

* Digital addiction

These are not abstract ideas, they are ready-to-grow seeds for a healthier #openweb ecosystem.

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Feel free to add to this in the comments I will update the text with feedback.

UPDATE: for me the failer mode of this is the 3 groups won’t be able to stay together: Activism – holding the political line and pushing for real change. NGO layer – interfacing with bureaucracy and policy structures. Grassroots #FOSS builders – creating and maintaining commons-based code.

It’s the snip problem, people will cut off pieces of the whole for there short term survival or career building, the coalition will splinter, and then fail. I think the above strategy is good apart from this hole – how do we fill or at least mediate this?