A reaction to the group of people who took over running the #Fediverse from us first wave crew. The problem with these people is that they are liars – not out of malice, but in a blinded, dogmatic way. They arrived in this native #openweb movement already carrying this mindset, and it’s only deepened since. That doesn’t make them personally nasty, but it does make them dangerously incompetent. Why? Because they generate serious signal-to-noise problems, misallocate resources, misplace competency, and shift focus away from what actually matters.
The problem with https://www.blog-pat.ch/moving-sideways-paths-to-growth/ isn’t that it’s wrong – it’s that it emerges from a closed loop of “truthy” ideas that feel insightful but don’t engage with #openweb material reality. That’s where the blind, dogmatic lying comes in, not malicious, but structurally embedded. It recycles a familiar narrative, classic signal-to-noise inflation, where old ideas are dressed up as insight. In #openweb terms, this is noise pretending to be signal, crowding out grounded knowledge.
This group of people abstracts away power and material constraints. “Growth” is framed as an individual mindset or path choice, when in reality sideways movement is shaped by structural limits – the very things the #OMN project is addressing: lack of upward mobility, organisational bottlenecks, precarity, stagnation, and misallocation of labour. That’s the “blind lie”: turning systemic limitation into a personal growth narrative. Not evil, but deeply misleading.
What we see is the individualist path (#stupidindividualism), centres on the individual journey – your path, your growth, your mindset – with no sense of collective structures, shared infrastructure, governance, or power relations. This is the failure mode we should be composting. Instead, the current mess drags “open” thinking back into #neoliberal self-optimisation culture. Rather than asking how we build systems that enable meaningful growth, it asks how you reinterpret your path as growth. That’s a dead end.
It also contributes to resource and focus drift. This kind of thinking has real consequences for projects like #openweb and #OMN: it encourages endless reframing instead of building, validates drift that weakens focus on the native outcomes and infrastructure we actually need. In practice, it leads to misplaced competency, misallocated effort, and degraded signal. That’s the “dangerously incompetent” part – not personal failure, but systemic impact.
The deeper issue is that these aren’t bad people. It’s that they are aligned – unthinkingly – with #deathcult thinking by individualising systemic issues and amplifying noise in already fragile spaces. They arrived with this mindset, and the environments they shape reinforce it. A grounded approach would ask harder questions: how do we build collective structures that make sideways movement meaningful? Without that, this is just narrative smoothing, smoke and mirrors.
So to sum up: the post isn’t wrong – it’s worse than that. It’s harmless-sounding, blinded ideology that recycles known ideas, strips out material context, reinforces individualist framing, and adds noise where clarity is needed. In a healthy ecosystem, this would be background chatter. In a struggling one – like the current open social web space – it becomes actively damaging.
“I headed up to Oxford to a Marmalade Festival event: The World Works on WhatsApp.”
I’m in Oxford, and I saw that event listed. My reaction was: I can’t stomach that. Still, I probably should have gone, it would have been useful to have that conversation in person.
