This is a conversation that more people need to have to make change and challenge real. Every time there is a shift in technology and culture, there is a messy transition period. We are in one now, as there is real movement away from the #dotcons and back towards the #openweb. People are questioning platforms that extract value, manipulate attention, and turn communities into products. The cracks are visible everywhere. The growing frustration with places like X shows that people are starting to have some understanding of the limits of corporate-controlled spaces.
This is a good thing, but every wave of migration brings the culture of the old system with it. The #openweb is not magically protected from the habits created by the #dotcons. People bring their expectations, behaviours, and assumptions with them when they jump ship. They bring:
- platform habits
- attention-seeking culture
- status games
- individualism
- fear of conflict
- the idea that disagreement is harm
- the expectation that someone else will manage the space
This is the transition mess, the mistake is thinking the problem is simply “bad people arriving”. The deeper issue is that people are arriving from a culture built around different values. The #dotcons are designed around competition, personal branding, and algorithmic amplification. They reward outrage, performance, and visibility. They turn social relationships into measurable interactions.
The #openweb works differently, it depends on trust, contribution, shared ownership, and collective responsibility. The clash between these cultures creates friction, the question is not how do we stop the friction, it is more how do we mediate it well?
Because this is where activism matters, activism has never just been about being nice. It is about recognising problems, explaining why they matter, and pushing for change. That does not mean only being hostile. It means having both paths:
- The #fluffy path of building relationships, creating welcoming spaces, explaining, supporting, bringing people in.
- The #spiky path of challenging harmful behaviour, confronting power, refusing to let broken patterns reproduce themselves.
As I keep saying both are needed, a movement without the fluffy path burns people out, a movement without the spiky path gets absorbed and neutralised. The problem is when this timid #mainstreaming – “being nice” becomes a way to avoid necessary conflict. When “can’t we all just get along” becomes a method of protecting existing problems. When politeness becomes more important than changing the conditions causing harm. That is where mediation breaks down.
The #4opens gives us a useful test – Are we building open data, open source, open process, and open standards? Are we creating systems where people can participate, understand, challenge, and contribute? Or are we recreating the same hidden hierarchies and closed power structures from the #dotcons?
The danger is that the #openweb becomes a new home for old behaviours, the technology changes, the culture does not. This is why the transition period matters, the #openweb was never just a collection of tools. It was a different way of organising, a place where people build alternatives instead of only complaining about existing systems. A place where communities create their own infrastructure. A place where power is distributed instead of concentrated.
But that requires active cultural work, we need more people pushing the #4opens, not fewer. We need people willing to challenge, mediate, explain, organise, and build. The question is not “How do we avoid conflict?” The question is “How do we handle conflict in a way that grows stronger communities?”
Because every transition has noise, confusion, people defending old habits while claiming to build something new. The work is learning to tell the difference between signal and noise, between people struggling to adapt and people protecting the old systems. Between criticism that helps growth and blocking that protects power.
The #openweb is growing again, the challenge is making sure it grows into something different, rather than becoming another version of the same thing. That is the #OMN challenge.
