Let’s be honest, we already lost metadata privacy. The #dotcons, the surveillance state, and the data brokers see everything. This isn’t a warning about what might happen, it’s the reality we live in today’s mess. In normal peoples lives every click, every message, every connection is tracked, logged, and monetised. There is no going back to the sealed, closed-off privacy of a pre-digital era. Not legally, not technically. The dream of private digital spaces was always fragile, and today it is gone in the #mainstreaming
So what can we do? The answer is radical, counterintuitive, and deeply political: we open the metadata bag, to make the hidden flows of power visible. Every algorithm, every tracking pipeline, every corporate and state extraction point should be exposed, audited, and understood. Transparency becomes a shield against abuse because secrecy is the tool that enforces power asymmetry. We stop pretending that corporate surveillance is acceptable, or that peer-to-peer transparency is inherently dangerous. The logic flips: if everyone can see what is happening, then no one can hide exploitative behaviour behind opaque systems.
Yes, this is uncomfortable, radical transparency is not convenient, it forces us to confront how deeply control and extraction have penetrated our lives. It means admitting we’ve been stripped naked by Google, Amazon, and the NSA. But in a world where we are already exposed, radical transparency becomes the preferred path to justice.
The question is no longer “how do we hide?” – because hiding is largely impossible, but “how do we share wisely, and govern openly?” In practical terms, this means:
Open metadata protocols that let communities see what is being collected and how it is used.
Collective oversight of platforms and systems, ensuring that algorithms are auditable and accountable.
Peer-to-peer transparency, where participants in networks control their data and can trace its flow.
Commons-based governance, so that data isn’t captured by a few corporations or states, but managed in the public interest.
Outside often delusional #geekproblem ghettos, privacy as an individual, sealed-off right, is dead. But privacy as collective control over visibility is still possible. It’s not about hiding; it’s about choosing who sees, how it’s used, and under what paths.
The #OMN path treats transparency not as a threat, but as power to know, power to act, power to hold institutions accountable. By making information visible and governance participatory, we reclaim control in a world that has tried to strip it away. In short, in the age of the #dotcons, radical transparency is the new privacy. And it is not only possible, it is necessary.
A post sparked Hacker News spouting of noise and smoke. It looks like “just fork it.” phrase in #FOSS culture provokes heat. So worth a second look, for some it’s the purest expression of freedom, to others, it’s a conversation-stopper that quietly protects power. What’s striking isn’t that one side is right and the other wrong, it’s that people are too often talking about entirely different things, while using overlapping words, thus the smoke and heat in the linked discussion above.
It’s worth a little time to look at this issue. The pro-fork view is about permissionless agency. From the classic #Geekproblem perspective, “just fork it” is not an insult or a dismissal, it’s a reminder of where power actually lies. The arguments, often bad-tempered, go like this: Open source removes the need for permission, maintainers are not obligated to implement anyone else’s ideas, if you want something different, you can do the work yourself, forks are non-hostile, temporary, and often merge back.
In this view, forking is not fragmentation, it’s pressure relief, to protects maintainers from entitlement, unpaid labour demands, and endless arguments over direction. It’s also what makes #FOSS resilient: even if a maintainer disappears or a project takes a turn you dislike, the code remains usable.
For libraries, tools, and infrastructure components, this works remarkably well. Many developers maintain private forks, carry patches for clients, or experiment freely without any intention of creating a new community. No drama, no schism, no ideology “mess”, just work. From this “native” angle, criticism of “just fork it” sounds like a demand for obligation where none exists.
The counterpoint is that forks aren’t free in social systems, the critique isn’t only about forking code, everyone agrees that’s normal, healthy, and foundational. The tension is when “just fork it” is applied to social platforms, protocols, and shared infrastructure, systems where the software is only a small part of the project.
Running a fork as a new public project isn’t only technical work, it needs: attracting users, building trust, maintaining governance, handling conflict, sustaining moderation and care and thus carrying long-term responsibility. This is where the phrase starts to feel different, in these contexts, “just fork it” is heard not as empowerment, but as exit over engagement, a way to avoid dealing with governance failures, power asymmetries, or unresolved social conflicts inside an existing social project.
From a social #OMN perspective, this isn’t neutral, forking risks: splitting attention, duplicating effort, losing shared history, weakening already fragile commons. Forking may preserve freedom, but it can still destroy value. Forks vs schisms is maybe a way to look at this:
forks – technical divergence
schisms – social rupture
You can fork without a schism, but every schism requires a fork. Many arguments talk past each other on this, because one side is defending the right to fork, while the other is warning about the cost of schisms. These are related, but not identical. Power, ownership, and stewardship, are fault lines about how people understand authority.
One view holds that open source projects are a #feudalistic kingship – benevolent or not – and contributors knowingly accept this. Maintainers owe nothing, forking is the safety valve.
The opposing view sees projects as commons built from collective labour where maintainers are stewards rather than owners, carrying responsibilities that go beyond “my repo, my rules.”
Neither position is imaginary, both exist in the wild. The conflict arises when a project quietly shifts from one model to the other without naming it.
Why this matters for OMN-style projects, they are explicitly social, federated, and historical, they depend on: continuity, shared narrative, visible governance, memory. In this context, common sense “just fork it” instincts unintentionally reinforce the problems #4open paths are meant to solve: fragmentation, invisibility of power, and loss of collective learning.
That doesn’t mean maintainers owe endless emotional labour It does mean that governance and mediation matter as much as code, and can’t be solved by technical exits alone. Two truths at once, the debate becomes clearer if we hold these two truths together:
No one owes you unpaid labour, forking is a legitimate, necessary protection for maintainers.
Social infrastructure is not just software, treating forks as cost-free exits erodes shared commons over time.
When people argue past each other, it’s usually because they’re defending one truth while denying the other. This creates mess, social mess. So to compost this mess, we need to understand better where this leaves us, “Just fork it” is neither a delusion nor a universal solution, it is:
healthy in libraries and tools
essential as a last resort
dangerous as a reflex
corrosive when used to silence governance questions
The real work – the hard, unglamorous part – is knowing which situation you’re in, and being honest about the social costs of the choices you make. That’s not a technical problem, it’s a cultural one, best not to be a prat about this.
This matters because we have social problems created by tech intolerances, #blocking culture. The #dotcons industry’s ability to pull the ladder up behind itself should not be underestimated.
We’ve created digital systems so complex, fragile, and professionally gated that an entire generation is being locked out of owning and understanding their own tools. Communities and people should be able to run their own services, control their own data, and participate meaningfully in digital culture, but few can, because we made everything unnecessarily controlled and complicated.
This wasn’t an accident, it’s a part of the #eekproblem, complexity concentrates power, it creates dependency on experts, platforms, and the corporations that have been quietly erasing the possibility of autonomy. What once required curiosity and modest effort now demands specialist knowledge, constant updates, and institutional backing. The result is a widening gap between those who can build and control systems, and those who are forced to rent/beg access to them.
This is why #KISS simplicity matters, why documentation matters and most importantly why social tooling matters as much as code. And why the #openweb was always about people, not only protocols. When we ignore this, we don’t just lose users, we lose a generation’s ability to imagine, agency, and collective control in the first place.
The current #dotcons economy is not neutral, it is designed to centralise control in the interest of the #nastyfew, platform owners, server landlords, data hoarders. These are the financial intermediaries who extract value without producing social good, this is not an accident or a side effect, it is the business model.
We are told that inequality is the natural outcome of innovation, talent, and efficiency. In reality, it is engineered through enclosure. Digital infrastructure that could function as shared public goods is instead locked behind proprietary systems, paywalls, and terms of service designed to concentrate power upstream.
In contrast, a #4opens world starts from a different premise, that core infrastructure – both physical and digital – should be held in common and governed democratically under #FOSS principles. From platforms to commons, today, most people don’t control the tools they depend on. We rent access to our own communications, our social lives, our work, and even our memories. Platforms mediate these relationships, extract data, and monetise behaviour, while presenting themselves as neutral services. This rental model is currently the primary engine of inequality in digital paths.
When access is conditional, participation becomes precarious. When data is hoarded, power becomes asymmetrical. When infrastructure is privately owned, the rules are set to maximise extraction, not social value. The #4opens dismantle this logic at the root.
Open code means the tools can be inspected, modified, and shared.
Open governance means decisions are accountable and collective.
Open data means knowledge is not trapped behind corporate walls.
Open processes mean power is visible, contestable, and revisable.
Together these break the closed silos that turn users into resources and communities into markets. It’s a working path, not charity or redistribution after the fact, its focus is change and challenge of power at source. When infrastructure is open and shared, value no longer flows automatically upward. Communities build what they need, adapt to local contexts, and retain control over shaping the outcomes. The surplus created by cooperation stays where it is generated, instead of being siphoned off to distant shareholders.
This changes the nature of inequality itself. “Rich” and “poor” stop being treated as natural or permanent categories, they are revealed as outcomes of ownership models and governance choices. Change the structure, and the distribution follows? In a commons-based paths, inequality doesn’t vanish overnight, but loses its inevitability. It becomes something that can be actively reduced rather than endlessly managed. This takes us a step from dependency to autonomy.
Open infrastructure reduces dependency, when communities host their own services, control their own data, and govern their own platforms, they are no longer locked into extractive relationships. This autonomy has compounding effects: Less value leaks out of local economies, more skills and knowledge circulate horizontally, fewer people are forced into bullshit work just to survive, and most importantly, people stop working primarily to make the rich richer.
The most radical implication of the #4opens is not better tech, it’s a different story about the future. If inequality is structurally produced, then it can be structurally dismantled. Not by perfect policy, benevolent elitists, but by first changing who owns and governs the digital systems we all depend on. In that world, inequality stops being framed as a moral failing and economic necessity. It becomes a historical condition, something future generations look back on as a phase we outgrew, like feudalism or colonial monopolies.
Yes, none of this is inevitable, power will resist, enclosure always fights back. But the tools exist and knowledge exists, the choice is political. Radical reductions in inequality won’t come from better platforms or kinder billionaires. It will only come from reclaiming infrastructure as commons, governed in the open, for public good.
That is the promise – and the challenge – of a #4opens world.
One story, we have to keep telling is that we can take a different path, that in a #4opens world, exchange is no longer driven primarily by the blunt instrument of money. That doesn’t mean money vanishes overnight, or that material realities are ignored. It means money stops being treated as the only valid way to recognise value, coordinate effort, and motivate participation.
This matters, because money is a very crude tool. Capitalism trained us to believe that if something matters, it must be priced. If it has no price, it has no value. If it cannot be owned, it cannot be protected. This blinded framing works tolerably well for scarce physical goods, but it breaks down completely in the digital realm, where information can be copied, shared, and improved without depletion.
In digital spaces, scarcity is largely artificial, and when scarcity fades, the logic of money starts to wobble. This moves us from hoarding to balancing, in an open information environment, value doesn’t disappear, it becomes visible.
With open data, open governance, and transparent process, contributions can be tracked, acknowledged, and supported without enclosing them behind paywalls or ownership claims. Instead of value being hoarded, it can be balanced across a network.
Imagine a system where you give not to accumulate, but to re-balance. Where contribution builds standing, trust, and support, not private monopoly power. Where recognition is social and public, not hidden inside bank accounts. This isn’t about altruism, it’s about realism.
Most of the work that keeps societies functioning – care, maintenance, moderation, documentation, teaching, organising – has always been poorly captured by markets. Capitalism survives by extracting from these invisible labour pools while pretending they don’t exist.
The #4opens make this work visible, making value without commodification. Ending money as the primary motivator does not mean ending value. It means ending commodification as the only language for value. In open systems, value shows up as: usefulness, reuse, care, trust, resilience and continuity.
These things matter enormously, yet capitalism struggles to measure them without distorting them. When every action must be justified by profit, whole categories of necessary work are ignored or destroyed. By contrast, #4opens projects are judged by simple, grounded questions: Is the work open? Is the process open? Is governance transparent and accountable? Can others build on this without permission?
These questions don’t abolish economics, they de-center it. Breaking the spell of money as sacred. Capitalism trained us to see price as truth, markets as neutral, and accumulation as virtue. The #4opens break that spell in the digital realm first.
Why digital first? Because that’s where abundance already exists, where sharing costs almost nothing and enclosure is a political choice, not a material necessity. When we build systems that work in abundance, they give us leverage – conceptual, social, and practical – to rebalance power in the physical world as well.
This is why open media, open knowledge, and commons-based infrastructure matter so much. They are not side projects, they are training grounds for post-scarcity coordination. Not a utopia – a direction. This is not a promise of a frictionless future as power doesn’t dissolve on its own. Material needs remain real, conflict doesn’t vanish, but direction matters.
A world where money is the only motivator inevitably collapses into extraction, enclosure, and #deathcult logic. A world where contribution, openness, and shared process are recognised creates space for cooperation, resilience, and collective intelligence.
The #4opens don’t magically fix capitalism. They do give us tools to outgrow it, not by pretending scarcity doesn’t exist, but by refusing to let artificial scarcity define everything that matters. That’s the shift: from accumulation to balance, from ownership to participation, from price to value.
And once that shift is normalised in digital space, it becomes much harder to argue that money should rule everywhere else.
The ecological crisis is not a failure of technology, it’s a failure of values. We’ve been trapped in a toxic loop where growth = progress, where every solution must expand markets, increase consumption, and generate profit for the #nastyfew. This logic is killing the planet.
A #4opens world pulls up this mess at its root. Digital goods are different, they are non-rivalrous, freely replicable, and infinitely shareable. When knowledge, culture, and coordination move into open digital commons, the material basis of economic growth begins to shrink. We stop burning forests to print manuals, stop shipping plastic widgets to lock in artificial scarcity, stop wasting energy enforcing ownership where none is needed.
This isn’t abstraction, it’s leverage. By shifting value creation into open digital abundance, we reduce pressure on physical extraction. Fewer things need to be manufactured, shipped, stored, and discarded just to keep the economy “growing.” The economy stops pretending that more stuff equals better lives.
From this shift, the real ecological transformation we need becomes possible. Energy systems localise because coordination and design are shared openly. Communities can build, adapt, and maintain renewable infrastructure without licensing fees or corporate lock-in. Circular economies flourish because repair knowledge, supply chains, and governance are commons, not trade secrets. Waste becomes compost, not externality.
Most importantly, culture changes. Consumerism loses its grip when identity, creativity, and social meaning are no longer mediated by buying things from platforms. We stop confusing consumption with participation. We stop mistaking marketing for culture. Life becomes something we do together, not something we rent from #dotcons.
This is not a retreat to austerity, it’s an expansion of possibility. In a post-consumption world, human needs can be met without destroying the biosphere. Care, knowledge, coordination, and creativity grow, while extraction and throughput shrink. The planet breathes again because we’ve learned to value abundance where it exists, and restraint where it matters.
The #OMN path is not “green capitalism” with better branding, it’s a civilisational pivot: using digital abundance to escape the growth trap, and using collective governance to align human flourishing with ecological limits.
That’s not incremental reform, it survival – with dignity.
One of the most repeated mantras in #FOSS culture goes something like this: “If you don’t like it, just fork it.”On the surface, this sounds empowering. And technically, it is true. The beauty of open source is that you can take the Mastodon source code, fork it, and do whatever you want with it. Don’t like how it’s run? Do something different. Don’t like the branding? Change it. Got a better idea? Implement it.
But socially, this mantra is misleading, forking is easy, sustaining is hard. Forking code is cheap, sustaining a living project is not. What “just fork it” quietly ignores is that software is only a small part of what makes a project work. The hard parts are social: users, trust, shared norms, governance, maintenance, conflict resolution and long-term care.
When people say “just fork it,” they usually mean “remove yourself from the social problem rather than engaging with it.” That’s not empowerment – it’s fragmentation at best and prat behaver at worst.
From an #OMN point of view, sometimes this is needed, but its rare as it is mostly value destruction. Fragmentation isn’t neutrality, every fork splits attention, energy, documentation, user bases, and developer time. Most forks don’t die because the code is bad; they die because the social surface area is untrusted or unmanageable.
We end up with: dozens of half-maintained projects, duplicated effort, incompatible implementations, project communities too small to support themselves. This isn’t resilience, it’s entropy, not in a good way. And worse, most of these forks are isolated socially, even when they are technically compatible. The result is lost value, lost history, and lost trust – rinse, repeat, move on.
“Just fork it” hides power, it doesn’t challenge it. The slogan pretends to be anti-authority, but in practice it is used to protect informal power. Core teams stay untouched, governance questions are avoided, structural problems remain unresolved. The people most affected – users, moderators, small contributors – are quietly told to leave and rebuild everything from scratch.
That’s not openness, that’s abdication, it’s a prat move that we need to compost. In social terms, it’s the equivalent of saying: “If you don’t like society, go start your own civilisation.” Contribution is not about submission. There is a healthier, but, less glamorous path – start conversations that include people you disagree with, yes, this is slower than forking. It’s also how shared infrastructure survives.
What we need to talk more about is that contribution is not about obedience to maintainers. It’s about stewardship of commons. That means staying in the mess, mediating conflict, and resisting the urge to walk away every time something feels wrong. Forking skips the hardest step: collective sense-making.
Small steps beat heroic exits, the myth of the heroic fork mirrors the wider #geekproblem: the belief that technical control can replace social process. Change usually comes from boring work, partial wins, awkward compromises, long conversations, incremental shifts, not from dramatic exits. Yes, forks in #FOSS have a place, but not as a default. Forking does matter. It’s an escape hatch. A pressure valve. A last resort when projects become irredeemably captured or hostile. But when “just fork it” becomes the first response instead of the last, it stops being a freedom and becomes #geekproblem pathology.
From a social #OMN standpoint, the goal isn’t endless new projects. It’s shared infrastructure that can be argued with, adapted, and cared for over time. Open source gives us the right to fork, open culture asks us when not to. If we want something better than endless reinvention and burnout, we need to stop treating “just fork it” as wisdom – and start treating it as what it often is: a refusal to do the harder social work in #FOSS
Fascism, treats collaboration as weakness. Something you only (pretend to) do when you’re not strong enough to dominate outright. In the fascist worldview, cooperation isn’t power, it’s a temporary tactic until hierarchy and force can be re-asserted. That’s why fascists can never be trusted. Not tactically, not strategically, not “just this once.” They don’t believe in shared outcomes, public goods, or mutual care. They believe in command, obedience, and extraction.
We also touch on this in our own #geekproblm, this is why the #OMNline is drawn. Open Media, commons-based infrastructure, and collective governance only work if collaboration is real, if participation isn’t a trick, and if power actually flows horizontally. Fascist politics is structurally incompatible with this. It can mimic collaboration, but only as camouflage. The moment it has leverage, it closes processes, centralises control, and purges dissent.
We have now made such a mess of society and our ecology that getting out of this mess is going to create lots of new mess, this issue is the base of the democratic path of the #OGB project. Please don’t be a prat on this, because this is also why fascism always collapses. Systems built on domination can’t sustain themselves, they can’t maintain shared infrastructure or produce trust, care, and resilience. They can only hoard, police, and coerce, until the system eats itself.
Meanwhile, everyone else survives by doing the one thing fascism cannot: building together. Collective projects, mutual aid, shared media, and public knowledge create abundance through cooperation. They scale through trust, not fear, and grow because people see themselves in the outcome.
In the long run, fascism doesn’t lose because it’s defeated by force alone, it loses because it refuses to participate in the commons. It isolates itself, hardens, and withers, while networked, cooperative cultures keep building better lives in the open.
That’s the wager of #OMN: Not domination, but participation, not hierarchy, but shared process, not spectacle, but collective power. Fascism cannot survive in that terrain.
The networks we use shape who we are – and the networks we are given by #dotcons are designed to make us spectators. Every interaction is reduced to a metric: a like, a share, a click. We are data points to be monetised, attention to be harvested, behaviour to be predicted and sold. In these systems, connection is shallow, fleeting, and ultimately extractive.
The #4opens offer a different path. When your networks are open, knowable, and modifiable, you stop being a statistic and start being a person again. Not just a profile, not just a follower count – a participant in a living community. You can see who is contributing, who is caring, and who is struggling. You can understand the shape of your social environment and intervene meaningfully, rather than being nudged along invisible pipelines designed to maximise someone else’s profit.
Open systems give us tools to know each other better. Not superficially, through algorithmic suggestions, but genuinely: by making relationships and contributions visible, traceable, and shareable in ways that respect the participants. Collaboration becomes possible without asking for permission. Knowledge, help, and support flow where they are needed. Trust can be rebuilt across distance and time, because the infrastructure encourages transparency, accountability, and mutual care.
This isn’t only about technology, it’s about escaping the isolation of the #dotcons. Social media was sold to us as connection, but it atomised communities into consumable fragments. It told us we belonged to brands, not to people. The #4opens remind us that belonging is not transactional, and connection is not a product.
In open communities, relationships matter more than metrics. Reciprocity replaces algorithms. Long levity replaces virality. Care replaces performance. People organize not for attention, but for mutual survival, growth, and flourishing.
You can get a glimpse of the change and challenge in bodied in such projects as the #Fediverse. It can be radical: networks of care that scale, knowledge that accumulates instead of being enclosed, resilience that emerges from participation rather than extraction. Belonging becomes real again, and communities can function as spaces of power and support rather than channels for profit.
The choice is ours: continue to live as data points in someone else’s spectacle, or reclaim the digital commons as a terrain for genuine human connection. With the #4opens, the infrastructure is ready. The question is whether we will use it to rebuild what has been lost.
The #OMN is a good-faith project, so let’s begin from that assumption. I don’t value the mainstreaming direction of this podcast, but it is still a useful thinking point when considering our project outlines. It highlights the pressures and narratives that open projects eventually have to navigate when we deliberately choose a diversity of paths rather than a single, optimised one.
Yes, it is always possible to game any system, including those built on trust. That risk never disappears. The difference with trust-based projects is not that they are immune to gaming, but that they consciously refuse to optimise around it. Instead, they rely on serendipity, social norms, shared myths, and lived traditions to provide balance when people do start to “play the game.” These informal constraints matter more than formal rules, because they shape behaviour without hardening into control systems.
This is the tension space #OMN operates in: resisting the urge to over-engineer against bad faith, while nurturing cultures in which bad faith becomes costly, visible, and socially discouraged rather than mechanically policed. In this transition, we will have to rethink almost everything we take for granted.
Why do we work so much in jobs that drain us without creating real value?
Why do we compete when cooperation would make life easier, richer, and more sustainable?
Why is everything treated as a secret – data, knowledge, even culture – and why are we trained to distrust each other at every turn?
Capitalism naturalised its own ideology. It taught us that exploitation is inevitable, that scarcity is absolute, and that hierarchy is a fact of nature. Profit was framed as virtuous, generosity as naïve. Over decades, this conditioning became “common sense.” We internalised it until it became invisible, shaping our behaviour, our policies, and even our dreams.
The #4opens world undoes this conditioning. By making infrastructure, code, governance, and knowledge open and accessible, it forces us to see the assumptions capitalism presented as natural for what they really are. We begin to recognise that scarcity can be artificial, that competition is socially engineered, and that secrecy primarily serves power, not communities.
In this context, our old “common sense” becomes a prison. The rules we followed without question – work harder, own more, hoard, extract – no longer hold. Open systems teach us that cooperation, sharing, and transparency are not just ethical ideals; they are practical tools for living and thriving together.
Open thinking makes new realities possible. When knowledge, governance, and infrastructure are transparent and modifiable, we can ask new questions, and act on them collectively:
What if work were aligned with care, creativity, and social need rather than profit for the few?
What if trust replaced fear as the default in our networks?
What if data abundance, rather than scarcity, became the starting point for planning society?
Reclaiming “common sense” in this way is not abstract philosophy. It is a practical, political, and social act. It means noticing the invisible rules that keep us trapped, and then designing systems that embed fairness, resilience, and collaboration into the foundations of everyday life. The transition will not be easy. It requires questioning almost everything we were taught about “how the world works.” But it is necessary if we want to survive the current mess of exploitation, artificial scarcity, and isolation.
The #4opens give us the tools. The commons give us the space. Open thinking gives us the courage. Together, they allow us to redefine what “common sense” really means, and to build a world that is more humane, more resilient, and more just than the one we inherited.
I hope this helps us keep finding the “native” path.
We need to be explicit that spiky and fluffy are complementary, not opposing paths. They serve different functions in the same path, both are necessary for anything healthy to grow.
The problem is not disagreement between spiky and fluffy. The problem is the large number of people who actively fight against this complementarity – who insist on one mode being legitimate, and work to exclude and delegitimise the other.
This is the majority of people we end up interacting with. So until we name this clearly, we keep misdiagnosing the conflict. It isn’t about tone, strategy, or culture. It’s about a refusal to accept plurality, balance, and context – that refusal blocks progress far more effectively than any external opposition.
Spiky without fluffy becomes brittle and exclusionary.
Fluffy without spiky becomes easily captured and ineffective.
Together, they create resilience. For the #OMN and #openweb to survive, we have to stop treating this as a personality clash and start recognising it as a structural issue that needs active mediation, not denial and #blocking
A bunch of native #openweb people spent real time, energy, and focus pushing the #EU toward the #Fediverse. This wasn’t theoretical, it wasn’t speculative, it wasn’t a #NGO whitepaper or a #VC funding pitch. It was practical outreach, grounded in working technology and lived experience, aimed at reducing Europe’s dependency on centralized corporate platforms.
The webinars mattered, they demonstrated that EU institutions were genuinely open to #ActivityPub as a viable public infrastructure standard, not as a niche hobby project, but as a way to regain institutional and civic agency without defaulting to US-based platforms.
This is the work we needed more of, but this kind of engagement is slow, unglamorous, and politically awkward. It doesn’t fit VC startup narratives or revolutionary aesthetics. But it is the work required if Europe wants digital sovereignty without surrendering to #BigTech or reinventing the same centralized failures under an #EU flag.
So the obvious question is: what went wrong? Drift, fragmentation, and the return of the #dotcons. Instead of consolidating that momentum, the grassroots fractured, attention drifted, energy leaked away, people burned out or moved on. In the end, outreach was blocked from both sides
And then slowly, predictably, attention returned to the familiar #dotcons, because they are easy, visible, and culturally dominant. They offer the illusion of reach without the substance of agency, in the long run, this is just more #techshit to compost later.
#SocialHub itself documents much of this history. The discussions are there, the threads exist, the intent is visible. But there is little aggregation, little synthesis, and almost no narrative continuity. For anyone not already embedded, it’s hard to see what mattered, what succeeded, and what was quietly blocked or abandoned.
Because we didn’t document, curate, and repeat this story, the same myths keep resurfacing:
“The EU was never interested.”
“Federation can’t work at institutional scale.”
“There were no serious alternatives.”
“Centralized platforms are the only realistic option.”
None of these are true – but they feel true when history is missing. When people don’t know that EU–Fediverse outreach already happened, when they don’t know that viable alternatives already exist, when they don’t know that these paths were actively neglected rather than disproven.
Then people fall – again and again – for the #dotcons mess, believing it’s the only possible future. This matters now, as focus shifts back to tech change, and is exactly why #OMN, #indymediaback, #makinghistory, and #OGB exist, not as competing platforms, not as replacements for everything else, but as infrastructure for memory, communication, and accountability.
Before we argue about funding models, platforms, or scale, we need to get the ordering right:
History — to remember what already worked and what failed, and why
Media — to tell the story properly, in our own words
Governance — to keep power visible, contestable, and rooted in trust rather than myth
Without these, attempts at “European digital sovereignty” will reproduce the same capture dynamics under a different logo. Telling the story is political work, if we don’t tell our story, someone else will, and it won’t be told in our interests. It will be told as inevitability, as market logic, as “there was no alternative.” That story always ends the same way: more centralization, more dependency, more enclosure – followed by another round of cleanup and composting.
We already did part of the hard work, we opened doors, we proved viability. What’s missing is not only technology – it’s memory, narrative, and continuity. Until we fix that, Europe will keep mistaking amnesia for realism, and surrender for pragmatism.
Part of the shitty mess we’re in comes from the failure of #DIY culture and the rise of #stupidindividualism as the common sense path. #stupidindividualism is completely unscalable in social terms. It fragments, isolates, and exhausts. That isn’t accidental, it’s a classic divide-and-control strategy of the #deathcult. And we need to consciously step away, and away, and far away from this.
An example, over the last 20 years, I’ve answered the same questions individually, over and over. But the point of #DIY culture was never one-to-one hand-holding. You don’t need to stress personal connections just to begin. The hashtags are links – they exist to let you start the process yourself.
You can do this by #KISS following the flow, not by demanding individual explanations. Click the #hashtag links. Read the background posts. Trace the project history. Use a search engine. Learn how the process works before pulling people into one-on-one clarification. This is basic #DIY practice, grounded in the #4opens.
You need a second example, looking back, remember how many of our activist friends ran workshops on how to use #dotcons social media as a campaign tool? How to organise activism through corporate platforms? While this was happening, our own independent media was being ripped apart internally, ossified by process, and then abandoned by the same #fashionista activists.
This mess is the devil child of #postmodernism and #neoliberalism, all surface, no grounding, all individual expression, no shared responsibility. We know the names and URLs of many of the people who did this. It’s the legacy we’re dealing with. Our projects like #indymediaback exists because of this history.
If you’re serious about changing society, you have to think your way past this common sense #blocking. That means rebuilding collective pathways, shared knowledge, and common processes, not endlessly repeating the same individual conversations. The tools are here. The links are here. The work starts when we stop pretending this is a personal problem and recognise it as a social one.
To be fully human is to be empowered to live a meaningful life within society.
To be rendered sub-human is to be forced into powerlessness outside of it.
We are not isolated individuals who later “join” society. We are social creators. We make meaning together, and that meaning only exists where people have the power to act, to speak, and to shape the world around them. Remove that power, and what remains is survival, not life.
From this perspective, there is really only one political question that matters: How is power shared inside society? Every political ideology is, at its core, an answer to this question – even when it pretends to be about markets, morals, tradition, or efficiency.
Invisible power today lives in metadata. In the digital age, social power increasingly resides in metadata: who is visible, who is connected, who is amplified, who is silenced, who is predicted, who is categorised, who is excluded.
Metadata determines access to work, housing, speech, legitimacy, mobility, and safety. It shapes behaviour not by force alone, but by nudging, filtering, ranking, and erasing. Control metadata, and you control society’s nervous system.
At present, there are four broad answers to the question of who should hold this power.
Capitalism seeks to privatise metadata into the hands of corporations – the #dotcons. Platforms harvest social data, enclose it, and convert it into profit and leverage. In turn, capital uses this leverage to shape governments, laws, and public discourse.
This is why fascism is coming back into fashion. Once corporations control social coordination, the state becomes an enforcement arm rather than a democratic counterweight. Surveillance, repression, and exclusion follow naturally. This is not a failure of capitalism; it is its logical outcome.
State Communism: Metadata for the Government
Chinese-style state communism takes the opposite approach but reaches a similar destination. Metadata is centralised in the hands of the state, which uses it to discipline capital and population alike.
This is the command economy rebuilt with digital tools – total visibility, behavioural scoring, and algorithmic governance at scale. Capital is controlled, but society is tightly managed. Power flows vertically. Dissent becomes data noise to be corrected.
Liberalism: Metadata for the Individual
Liberalism proposes a third answer: metadata should belong to the individual. Each person owns their data, controls their privacy, and participates in a market of informed choice.
This vision rests on a mythic past that never existed – a free market of equals making rational decisions with perfect information. In practice, individuals cannot meaningfully manage complex data systems alone. Power does not disappear; it simply re-aggregates through contracts, platforms, and inequality.
Individualised data ownership becomes another abstraction that fails to challenge structural power.
Anarchism: Metadata for the Commons
So what does anarchism want? This is where #4opens and the Open Media Network (#OMN) enter the picture. Anarchism does not seek to privatise metadata to corporations, centralise it in the state, or atomise it to individuals. It seeks to socialise metadata into the commons, governed openly, transparently, and collectively.
Power is shared horizontally, not concentrated vertically. Metadata becomes a tool for coordination, care, and accountability – not domination. Communities can see how systems work, adapt them, and challenge them without asking permission.
This is not utopian. It is infrastructural. It is about building systems that make cooperation easier than coercion.
The real choice is not “AI vs humans,” or “state vs market.” It is about who controls the metadata that shapes our lives. Do we accept systems that render us powerless spectators? Or do we build shared infrastructures that keep us fully human – capable of meaning, agency, and collective action?
#OMN is not a finished answer. It is an attempt to walk this last path seriously, in practice, not just in theory. Because to be human is not just to exist, it is to have power together.
