Hope this helps compost some of the mess building up. It’s something we all need to do and have responsibility for.
Groups don’t usually fail because of external pressure, they fail because they turn inward and burn energy on themselves. If you want a calm, #KISS path that actually holds diversity without collapsing, we need a few simple lived – traditions and mythos – not heavy governance, not ideology battles, just grounded #KISS practice:
Keep the core action very small and clear – a shared purpose. If people can’t easily answer “what are we doing?”, drift and conflict creep in.
In twine “doing” from “talking” Most infighting comes from too much abstract discussion. Doing space – Talking space – Don’t let one swamp the other.
Protect focus like it’s fragile (because it is), the biggest risk isn’t disagreement – it’s distraction. When things start spiralling bring it back to “what are we building this week?” if it doesn’t help, park it
Default to trust, but design for friction, diversity is strength. But unbalanced diversity = chaos. So let people approach things differently, but require shared outputs – If it doesn’t produce something, it doesn’t dominate attention.
No purity tests, this is where diversity dies. People will come with different politics, paths (fluffy vs spiky) and have different priorities, that’s fine – as long as they don’t block others doing the work.
Make conflict low-energy, not zero-conflict – we won’t avoid disagreements. Trying repression = explosion later. Instead, keep arguments short, move unresolved tension into parallel paths (“try both”) and let results decide, not personalities. This is the “compost” approach we need to talk about – don’t fight the mess, process it.
Grow by doing, not convincing, you don’t need everyone to agree. You need visible, working examples. Let people see it working – that’s what grows a community of action.
What we are sketching and building is the hard middle path of not rigid control (kills growth) and not total openness (creates chaos). But a light structure that keeps things moving.
If we want a better web, we have to stop pretending this is just about “bad tech companies doing bad things.” Of course, they are-that’s what capitalist incentives produce. The real question is: what are we doing differently?
That means accepting some uncomfortable truths. The better path will be less convenient, at least at first. We will have to socially support things that used to look free on the #dotcons. Because the cost we didn’t want to face is simple: the #openweb was always going to be harder, someone has to:
The fantasy wasn’t that this work didn’t exist. The fantasy was that the market – advertising – would cover it without consequences.
In the current mess in tech paths, this becomes visible again. Bluesky and #ATproto keep getting lumped in with #ActivityPub under the easy label of “open protocols, yay”… but that’s just not true. Yes, they both sit in the #openweb space, but there’s a real structural problem here, and we’re seeing it play out in real time.
“Why would anyone fund an Atmosphere project if Bluesky, with $100 million in the bank, might ship a competing feature at any moment?”
That’s not an ecosystem. That’s a platform with enough gravity to crush its own edges. And people are noticing. The old pattern is back:
invite the community in
let them build the value
then absorb and replace them
Same playbook, again and again. It feels open – but the centre still holds the power. The same dynamic we saw with Twitter. The DNA is obvious.
The difference really matters. #ActivityPub was built as a commons path from the start – messy, flawed, but natively open. #ATproto is something else: a platform-first model with openness layered on top. That’s why it keeps drifting this way. It’s not a bug, it’s the design.
Too much #techshit, and everything starts to stink. Why would anyone step into the #openweb if that’s the smell? This creates a bigger problem, that it’s a mess that keeps coming back, and as usual we’ll be the ones left to compost it, underfunded, unrecorded, and unthanked.
We’ve been here before – with the #encryptionists and the #blockchain mess. Big promises, lots of noise, overlapping hype cycles. Now there’s a clear overlap with #Bluesky and #AI. The risk isn’t just that this fails. It’s that when it fails, it leaves a miasma behind, making it harder for people to trust the actually working open paths. That’s the real damage.
Neglect is not innocence, this isn’t about blaming users instead of power. Power matters. Monopolies matter. Venture capital mess matters. But still, if the #openweb mattered, why didn’t we support it?
Why do people pay for streaming, cloud, and delivery, but not support publishing tools, independent media, hosting, or open infrastructure?
Why did so many #NGO organisations that talked about openness still push people onto closed platforms the moment growth and analytics are on the table? We keep choosing short-term convenience over long-term stewardship, not just a market failure, a cultural one.
So lets look at this mess again. I’ve been trying to find a way to express my view of the people who took over outreach in the #Fediverse, and in doing so helped shape the current #openweb reboot.
DRAFT: naïve, controlling, and self-interested.
They’ve left a mess that the people they pushed aside now have to compost. It’s really useful to look at how we got here.
In the early years, outreach was organised by a genuinely diverse, native crew. It was a good time – three open conferences, and even getting the EU to adopt the standard. But that group burned out, focus splintered, self-interest crept in, driven by the need to control resources. The balance shifted, and grifters gradually outnumbered them, eventually tearing it apart. In the space left behind, a new crew stepped in – filling the vacuum with centralised power and influence. And that’s where we are today.
We don’t fix this by arguing harder. We fix it by building – and holding – open spaces that don’t follow this pattern.
Do you remember when tech felt like a way forward? That moment’s gone on the mainstream #closedweb path. What we’ve got now is something else entirely. Tools like Palantir and Project Maven aren’t about truth or insight. They’re excuse generators. Power does what it wants, then points to “the data” as cover. That’s the product.
And the people building this? Still cosplaying as the good guys, well-paid servants of the #nastyfew, wrapped in the fading myth of being “freedom fighters”, that’s modern tech dev. On the other side: the wreckage of #web02. Decades of promises, buried under #dotcons centralising everything that matters. Open source didn’t save us either – too abstract, too inward-looking, too lost in the #geekproblem to function in real life.
Yes, #ActivityPub cracked something open, a glimpse of a different path. But let’s not kid ourselves funding is still torched on hype cycles. Blockchain yesterday, AI today, the same ash. Meanwhile, the only things that actually work come from #DIY culture: unfunded, unglamorous, ignored.
And academia? If it worked as claimed, the world would already look different. Instead, we get theory imposed on practice, over and over, making a mess and calling it insight.
The system is built to fail, its risk-averse, paperwork-heavy and detached from reality. Perfect for proposal writers, perfect for box-ticking, useless for building. So where does that leave us? Here – build anyway – #OMN and #MakingHistory aren’t about shiny ideas, they’re about the grind, making tools people can actually use in real communities. Most open projects don’t fail because they’re wrong, they fail because they never leave the bubble, they don’t connect, don’t flow. They don’t live.
So yeah – press the #reboot button. Keep it messy, but make it real. Messy is fine, empty isn’t. Stop trying to fix funding with more control, that’s how you feed the grafters. Do this instead: – Fund real work – Distribute trust – Make everything visible
Fund the compost, not the shiny plastic by backing people already growing things, let trust flow sideways, not upwards. That’s how you starve the grafters without strangling the builders.
We have a real problem in Fediverse journalism: almost all linking flows upwards – to established sources and wannabe establishment voices, while there is a strong aversion to linking horizontally (to peers) or downwards (to smaller and emerging voices).
This behaviour isn’t native to the #openweb. It’s inherited from mainstream media culture, where authority, visibility, and trust are assumed to come from the top. In that model, linking becomes a form of validation, and people are cautious about offering that validation outside established hierarchies.
But this creates a real bottleneck by limiting discovery, reinforces existing power structures, and prevents the kind of rich, networked understanding that the Fediverse should enable. If we want a genuinely decentralised and trustworthy news/media ecosystem, we need to shift this pattern. Linking should reflect context, relevance, and trust, not just perceived status.
That means actively encouraging:
Horizontal linking between peers and communities
Downward linking to new, local, and less visible sources
Clear pathways to trace stories across the network, not just back to “authoritative” nodes
The challenge is cultural more than technical. This “linking upwards only” habit comes from fear – fear of losing credibility, of amplifying something unreliable, of stepping outside accepted narratives.
So the task isn’t to attack or block this behaviour, but to compost it – to transform it into something more useful. We do that by:
Making trust visible and contextual, rather than assumed
Supporting practices that reward good linking in all directions
Building tools that make it easy to follow and verify flows across networks
In short, we need to move from hierarchical validation to networked understanding. That’s how we make Fediverse journalism more truly native to the #openweb.
PS. I did not add any links as at this first step its judgmental and thus distracting.
It should be obvious that we need a path back to good journalism – journalism that sheds light on facts, connects the dots, and lets people trace those dots back to sources. This is what allows us to share, question, and discuss within our own trusted communities, and then spread that knowledge outward through federation, always linking back to the source.
Right now, the #mainstreaming path is broken. It’s sometimes hard for people to see this because the decline has been slow, a gradual death of journalism. Since the early days of the internet, we’ve been told the same story: “People expect news for free, so quality journalism is no longer economically viable.” There’s truth in that. Good journalism is expensive. It takes time, skill, trust, and institutional memory.
But that’s only half the story. What actually happened is this: people kept consuming familiar “news brands,” and those brands were bought, consolidated, and financialised until shareholder value replaced any sense of public value. Slowly, investigative journalists were cut and sidelined, editorial independence eroded, and content shifted toward ads, PR, and narrative management. What we now call “news” is marketing, agenda-setting, and reputation management – a distraction. Journalism, as a public good, has been hollowed out, in part through our own passive acceptance of this shift.
Today, we can see more clearly that if you do real journalism – the kind that challenges power – you have no real career path and face risks: #dotcons blocking, right-wing co-option, and at worst, isolation, exile, prison, or worse. The result is a broken landscape: corporate media that won’t tell the truth, and under-resourced independent media that carries high risk for little or no reward. In that situation, who chooses journalism as a life path?
The deeper problem is articulation and power. The world is complex, most people don’t have the time, energy, or tools to fully articulate what they see, feel, and experience. Into that gap step politicians, corporations, and #fashernista influencers. They have the resources – especially through the #dotcons – to articulate reality, but in ways that divide people, flatten complexity into conflict, and steer perception to serve power and profit. This isn’t just misinformation. It’s structured narrative control.
Why the old models won’t come back, we can’t simply “fix” legacy media. It is structurally tied to advertising, concentrated ownership, and political influence. And we can’t rely on heroic individuals either, that path is too fragile, too dangerous, and too easy to suppress. If journalism is going to survive, it won’t look like the past.
A different path: journalism as networked commons. At #OMN, we’re outlining a different approach decentralised, collective path. Think of it as a second coming of #Indymedia, but more resilient, more sustainable, and better integrated with current networks.
This is where the #openweb and the #Fediverse matter. With protocols like ActivityPub, we already have the foundations for distributed publishing, shared visibility, and cross-community discussion. But tech alone isn’t enough, the missing layer is trust and flow. To rebuild journalism, we need to focus on how information flows socially, not just how it’s published.
Metadata (tags, context, sources, warnings) travels with stories
People can trace information back through the flow
Instead of one “authoritative source,” we get many sources, with visible relationships between them, shaped through community trust and discussion. This is journalism people can actually use to follow a story back to its sources, add context and local knowledge and share and challenge it within trusted spaces.
That’s how we rebuild public understanding – not just publish articles – but from product to process. Journalism should not be a product to consume, it needs to be a process we participate in. When it’s treated as a product it’s optimised for clicks, shaped by incentives and in the end controlled by owners. When it becomes a process it becomes collective, accountable and thus resilient.
So composting the mess, we’re not starting from nothing, we have the ruins of legacy media, the lessons of projects like #Indymedia and the living infrastructure of the #Fediverse. This is compost, from it, we can grow something new – grounded in the #4opens, simple enough to understand (#KISS), and social at its core, not just technical.
The real question isn’t “How do we save journalism?” It’s: How do we rebuild the social systems that make truth-telling possible? Because without those paths, journalism doesn’t just struggle – it disappears.
In Oxford we are currently at a recurring stress in how river space is shared between boaters, landowners, and other users (such as rowers and towpath communities). The direction we take will shape not just access, but the character and sustainability of the boating community itself.
Best vs Worst Outcomes
Best outcome is a consensus synergy between boaters and landowners.
* Builds trust and cooperation
* Encourages better self-management within the boating community
* Strengthens a shared sense of stewardship over the river
Worst outcome is the spread of static, paid moorings.
* Prices out existing boaters
* Replaces a living community with “posh houseboats”
* Leads to the destruction of the current, diverse boating culture
A Practical Middle Path
Rather than conflict or heavy regulation, we propose a simple, collective approach based on shared good practice. What would this look like in practice? A lightweight, voluntary “covenant” of good boater behaviour:
* Leave at least 2 metres between moored boats to allow safe exit from the water
* Keep boats and the towpath tidy and welcoming for all users
* Respect visitor moorings – do not overstay
* Avoid leaving empty boats unattended over winter
* Share the river space, including moving boats when needed for rowing events
This Approach:
* #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): simple guidelines over complex enforcement
* Collective responsibility: community-led, not imposed from above
* Open process: visible, understandable, and adaptable
This does not legally bind boaters, but it:
* Encourages better collective behaviour
* Demonstrates responsibility to landowners and authorities (e.g. EA)
* Reduces pressure for restrictive regulation
Role of Landowners & Trusts
For balance, landowners also have a role to play:
* Provide at least two visitor moorings on their stretch of river
* Set a recommended capacity (not rigid limits) for boat numbers
* Engage in ongoing dialogue with the boating community
Open Questions for Discussion
* How do we encourage adoption of this covenant without enforcement?
* What is a fair balance between flexibility and responsibility?
* How can boaters and landowners maintain ongoing communication?
* What practical steps can we take now to move toward this “best outcome”?
This is a light-touch, community-first aimed at avoiding the worst outcome while building toward the best. If we act collectively and simply, we can preserve both access and community – without defaulting to exclusion, pricing out, or over-regulation.
Why do this – Boaters & Landowners
Framing the problem matters, we’re in a familiar pattern pressure builds → calls for regulation → community gets squeezed. This draft is about interrupting that cycle, the aim is simple:
* Give “them” something (landowners, authorities, rowers)
* Strengthen “us” as a visible, responsible community
* Untick the boxes that they use to justify intervention
* And in doing so, slow or deflect heavy-handed regulation
Not by confrontation (yet), but by being seen to act. The strategy is instead of waiting to be regulated, we act collectively to show responsibility to create a visible “good enough” standard. This gives everyone something to point to and say “Something is being done.” That alone often reduces the push for stricter control. Yes, there are multiple directions we could take:
1. Do Nothing (Status Quo)
* No shared standards
* Continued friction with landowners and other users
* High likelihood of imposed regulation
Low effort, high long-term risk
2. Top-Down Regulation
* Paid moorings
* Strict enforcement
* External control of boat numbers and behaviour
High control, loss of community, exclusion of existing boaters
* Shared responsibility between boaters and landowners
* Periodic review rather than fixed rules
Balanced, but requires trust and ongoing effort and is unlikely to have a good outcome due to shifting priorates we have no power over.
So filling the gaps (What’s missing). To make the “soft self-governance” path credible, we need better visibility – A simple public-facing statement of principles, something landowners and authorities can point to. I suggest we create a open collective (I can look into this https://opencollective.com/search?q=UK&isHost=true&country=GB )
Encouraging good behaviour through norms, quietly discouraging behaviour that causes conflict. Framing boaters as stewards, not problems by emphasising contribution to river life and culture
Some questions for feedback:
* Does this feel like enough to shift perception?
* What would make landowners actually trust this approach?
* Where does this fall down in practice?
* What’s missing that would make this work on the ground?
* Which path do people actually think is realistic?
In the #geekproblem mindset, crossing a protocol flow is a gateway were in #openweb terms, it’s a bridge. That difference is not technical – it’s social – the difference between CONTROL and TRUST. A gate is something you lock, permission, authentication, enforcement were a bridge is something you cross, connection, flow, relationship. In the physical world, we don’t put gates on bridges as a default, but in software, we keep rebuilding them, and then wondering why things fragment.
RSS is a bridge.
Closed APIs are gates.
This should be obvious, but it keeps getting lost inside coding culture.
This isn’t just a #mainstreaming problem, if this critique only applied to Big Tech (#dotcons), it would be easy, but it doesn’t. From 30 years of building in alt-tech spaces – hundreds of projects, no bosses, no corporate control – the same pattern keeps reappearing. Control creeps in, what’s striking is that this cuts across both mainstreaming “professional” engineering culture and radical, horizontal, “alternative” tech spaces. That’s why it’s an overarching #geekproblem, the shared cultural bias toward CONTROL in both code and community design.
The deeper issue is social blindness, at the root of this is something uncomfortable – A lack of joined-up social thinking – when a relatively small technical minority designs systems based on limited social experience, abstract models of human behaviour and little grounding in historical or grassroots movements.
When these systems scale globally, the result is tools fail to support humane, collective use, and undermine trust instead of building it, they reproduce the same power dynamics they claim to escape. This feeds the wider #dotcons worldview – even when the intent is “alternative”. It’s not just “the spirit of the age” it’s a worldview of a narrow culture that has become infrastructural. We’re all, to some extent, still operating inside this #deathcult logic, even when we think we’re critiquing it.
So a good first step is looking at who is funding the problem, this is where foundations and FOSS funding bodies need to look closely. A lot of funding unintentionally reinforces gate-based architectures, complexity that centralises control and abstract innovation over lived social practice. We keep funding new gates, then asking why the #openweb doesn’t grow. It #KISS that if people cannot mentally model a system, they cannot govern it, if they cannot govern it, power centralises every time.
A different path is bridges and flows. Projects like #OMN and #indymediaback take this different approach of start with flows, not platforms, building bridges, not gateways. The focus is on keeping systems simple enough to understand (#KISS) to grow trust as social and visible, not hidden in code. Using the #4opens as grounding, not branding, we understand none of this is new, that’s the value of #nothingnew. As I keep pointing out it’s how RSS worked, early Indymedia worked and large parts of the existing Fediverse still work (when not over-engineered).
On #blocking and conflict – Yes, it’s sometimes necessary, but often it’s a symptom of deeper failure of rigid, internalised worldviews, lack of shared mediation tools and systems designed for exclusion rather than negotiation. It’s easy to block, it’s much harder to build bridges, so the real question is how do we design systems that reduce pointless conflict without exhausting the people inside them? Food for thought (and compost).
We’re all carrying some of this mess, it’s fine – it’s compost. But if we don’t consciously shift from gates to bridges, we’ll keep rebuilding the same broken systems, just with nicer branding. As bridges scale trust – Gates scale control, to mediate this mess, the hard question we need to ask the #mainstreaming is which one are they funding?
The #OMN is simple flows, not platforms, it’s a way of thinking about media as flows of objects moving through a network. People shape the flow, you can find a more technical view to read after here. A human-scale, federated media infrastructure built on #FOSS practices and the #4opens:
open data
open source
open process
open standards
It doesn’t start with features, apps, or ideology, it starts with flows. Imagine the network as:
pipes and holding tanks
Content (objects) flows through them, communities decide how that flow is shaped. Nothing magical, nothing hidden. This matters because:
If people can’t picture how a system works, they can’t govern it. And when systems become opaque, power centralises.
So #OMN reduces everything to five simple functions:
1. Publish
(Add a drop to the flow)
Publishing is simply adding an object:
a story
a post
media
data
to a stream.
No automatic amplification
No built-in authority
No algorithmic boost
Publication is contribution, not domination.
2. Subscribe
(Connect the pipes)
Subscription is how flows connect:
people
groups
topics
instances
This replaces:
platform logic → “you are inside us” with
network logic → “this connects to that”
No opaque ranking, you decide which pipes you connect.
3. Moderate
(Filter and route the flow)
Moderation is not censorship. It’s sieving.
Flows can:
pass through
be filtered
be slowed or prioritised
be contextualised
Trust is:
local
visible
reversible
Different communities can apply different filters to the same flow.
This is a feature, not a bug.
4. Rollback
(Drain and reset the flow)
Rollback is how systems recover:
remove past content from your stream
undo aggregation decisions
correct mistakes
respond to abuse
Without rollback:
errors become power struggles
With rollback:
Accountability becomes procedural, not punitive.
5. Edit Metadata
(Shape meaning downstream)
Content is not rewritten – it is contextualised.
Metadata can include:
tags
summaries
trust signals
warnings
translations
relationships
This is where meaning is created.
Not by algorithms, but by people.
The Holding Tank
Underneath it all is:
a simple storage layer
a database
stored objects
moving through flows
No “AI brain” or hidden feed logic, just data shaped by social processes.
Why This Matters
Most current systems bundle everything together:
identity
publishing
distribution
moderation
monetisation
This creates centralised control, even when systems claim to be “open”.
To simplify the Open Media Network (#OMN), we focus on its core goal: creating a human-scale, community-governed media infrastructure that isn’t controlled by big corporate platforms. As we outline to understand and “simplify” the #OMN is a simple workflow:
Write: Creating the content.
Tag: Categorizing it, so others can find it.
Publish: Making it available on the web.
Federate: Sharing it across different trusted networks.
Archive: Ensuring it remains accessible over time.
The “#4opens” Framework is built on four principles designed to keep power in the hands of communities and users rather than central authorities:
Open Data: Information belongs to the community.
Open Source: The code is free to see and change.
Open Process: Decisions are made transparently.
Open Standards: Systems can “talk” to each other without gatekeepers.
Key Concepts for Simplification
Keep It Simple (KISS): The system should be so simple that anyone can mentally model how it works. If it’s too complex to understand, it’s too complex to govern.
Social over Technical: Prioritise how people use the tools over how “elegant” the code is, to mediate the #geekproblem (tech that’s too hard for normal people to use).
Composting the Past: Instead of starting from scratch or repeating old mistakes, the #OMN is about taking the “wreckage” of previous projects and turning them into “fertile soil” for new, federated networks.
Trust-Based Networking: It moves away from global algorithms and toward small, connected “nodes” of people who trust each other (or not).
You can build any application from this foundation – that’s the point of keeping the core this simple. On top of the basic #OMN #5F, we’re developing a set of seed projects:
#makinghistory – tools to keep grassroots and mainstream history alive, linked, and evolving across the #openweb
#indymediaback – a reboot of grassroots news, open publishing with modern federated infrastructure
#OGB (Open Governance Body) – lightweight, federated governance for coordinating people, decisions, and trust
#digitaldetox – a horizontal tool to step away from addictive, manipulative platform dynamics
Interoperability is default, not an afterthought, nothing is locked in, instead of building another isolated platform, we plug into the existing ecosystem, extend it to compost what doesn’t work. This is how we grow the #openweb by building better flows inside what already exists, not by replacing everything.
These aren’t separate silos, they’re expressions of the same underlying flows. The system is native to the Fediverse, built on ActivityPub. That means content flows in from existing platforms and codebases and flows out to existing networks and apps.
Compost metaphor – is memorable, not just technical. The focus on process over platform is clear and important. The move to simple steps works as onboarding and the insistence on #KISS + #nothingnew is the right first step.
#OMN is not an app, it’s a process + tools to move from isolation to commons.
YOU can’t do social change or challenge without annoying people If you think you can, you’re probably play-acting – and part of the problem – does that annoy you? If it does… maybe sit with that. 🙂 Food for thought, #4opens is a shovel for composting.
The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb. The tech – like ActivityPub – grew out of that culture. It wasn’t built by #mainstreaming interests.
Now money is flowing in, and with it comes risk of dilution of culture, capture of direction and loss of the commons. As more #mainstreaming users return to the #openweb, we need better tools and processes to handle the mess this brings.
And yes – sometimes the problem is us – when people inside our own spaces act badly, we need ways to respond, mediate, and move forward – without falling into cycles of negativity. That’s part of the work, part of #OMN.
The #Fediverse is native to #openweb thinking, it works. It will likely destroy billions of dollars of #CONTROL, and create billions in actual human value in return. But like the early #openweb, it can also be captured and pulled back into the same old control systems, this is the balance.
So the question is, are you on the side of CONTROL or TRUST?
Our obsession with control is doing real damage, it’s fed by dead-end ideology (#postmodernism), and amplified by #fashernistas pushing surface over substance. Yes – it’s messy. Yes – it’s complex, but ignoring that just makes it worse.
#stupidindividualism and the #deathcult are building an inhuman world, we can do better – but only if we’re willing to do the uncomfortable work.
In #mainstreaming and alt political cultures there’s a constant call in messy times for “strong leaders” to cut through the chaos, but this is the wrong path. What Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders actually show is something more uncomfortable and more useful that real change doesn’t come from strong individuals – it comes from movements we don’t fully control. They were signals, not saviours.
Both figures emerged on the left because something deeper was already shifting with widespread discontent, a break from #mainstreaming politics and a hunger for alternatives to 40 years of #deathcult worshipping. They didn’t create these conditions – they channelled them. “Weakness” is often misnamed, Corbyn in particular was constantly framed as weak, but what was actually happening? When people treat them as failed “leaders,” they miss the point, at best they were interfaces to movements, rather than top-down commanders. They:
Hold together fragile, diverse coalition
Refusal to impose top-down control
Emphasis on process, participation, and consensus
In a stable system, this might look slow, in a fragile system, it’s often the only thing preventing collapse. In the open vs closed battle, it’s not as simple as it looks – especially in the mess we’re in.
CLOSED → conservative / fear / control OPEN → progressive / hope / trust
We need to keep looking at the underlying path when deciding which way to push the balance.
Where the demand for “strength” usually means more control, less democracy. That path tends to deepen the mess, not fix it, as personality politics is a dead end. When media and institutions focus on personalities where movements are about issues and structures. This mismatch is fatal if your politics depends on a person you are attacked through that person – we all collapse when they falter. You never build lasting power, it is the trap both campaigns fell into, despite trying to avoid it.
Movements without structure (hard or soft) stall, is the harder truth – Horizontal energy alone isn’t enough – Electoral politics alone isn’t enough. Both Corbyn and Sanders mobilised huge grassroots energy, but institutions resisted, internal fragmentation grew – the energy wasn’t fully translated into durable paths, and they fell through the gap.
From a #OMN perspective, the takeaway is clear – Don’t look for better leaders – Don’t rely on existing institutions – Build commons-based infrastructure that movements can stand on. This means: Media we control (#indymedia paths), Governance we participate in (#OGB) and tech that reflects trust, not control (#openweb, #Fediverse)
So in messy times, don’t reach for “Strong Leaders” as this comes from fear, frustration and the desire for simple solutions, history – from left and right – shows where that road leads. In poisoned times, the work is slower, to build trust, to stay grounded in shared issues.
Corbyn and Sanders didn’t fail because they were too weak, they struggled because we don’t yet have the social, technical, and institutional commons needed to carry the kind of change they pointed toward. That’s the work, and it’s not about finding the right leader – it’s about becoming the movement that doesn’t need one.
At #NOAW event I talked a lot about the digital commons so thought it might be useful to write a post grounding this. The digital commons are not a future vision, it’s something we already have. At its simplest, the digital commons are the widely used #4opens digital resources of software, knowledge, data, and culture created collectively, governed by communities, and made available for public (re)use. This is the native path of the #openweb it’s been around for a long time, it might be hard to see but just about all of our current #dotcons mess is built on top of this layer.
There is a long history of commons in wider society. But mostly today we focus on the licences that protect reuse and sharing. None of this is abstract theory, it’s making the practical, working infrastructure that underpins much of what people still find useful online. One of the roots of the current digital commons go back to the 1980s and the emergence of the free software movement, led by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. This was not just about code, it was a social and political project:
Software should be shared
Users should have control
Improvements should remain in the commons
The creation of the GNU General Public Licence was the first step, enforcing a simple rule that if you benefit from the commons, you give back to the commons. The commons isn’t one thing, it’s an ecosystem – Some #KISS examples include:
Wikis – collectively written and maintained knowledge (#Wikipedia)
Open source software – built in public, shared freely (#FOSS)
Public code repositories like GitHub used to be (name one)
Open licensing systems like Creative Commons
Federated social tools built on ActivityPub (#Mastodon)
The Path is governance by the people who use it. What makes the digital commons different from “just free stuff” is this the people building it can shape how it works, a key distinction it’s not just access – it’s agency. The commons are non-exclusive (available to others), oriented toward use and reuse and governed by its participants, this is why it matters politically.
Today, much of the internet still runs on the digital commons, but the visible layer is dominated by #dotcons platforms. This creates a split of Commons layers → open, slow, sustainable and Platform layers → closed, extractive, growth-driven. People still rely on the commons, but interact through closed systems, this contradiction is unstable.
Policy is our current-missed opportunity, as our institutions see only the surface value. The European Union’s European Commission has pushed open source strategies as part of digital sovereignty, particularly through programmes like Horizon Europe. The idea is native – Share code – Collaborate openly – Build public infrastructure. But in practice, most of this gets lost in #NGO process, bureaucracy, and capture. The money flows, but the commons don’t grow.
The “Tragedy” of the Digital Commons. Like any commons, in the mess we live in today commons can be degraded from overuse (infrastructure strain), pollution (spam, low-quality content, noise) and information overload. The result is a corrupted signal-to-noise ratio, it is a real issue – but it’s to often used as an excuse to centralise control. This is largely solved by horizontal vs virtical scaling, if people can take this real native path.
There are social gaps. The commons reflects the culture that builds it, yes gender imbalance persists, access is uneven, and geek culture is too often exclusionary (#geekproblem). But the bigger problem we face is capture and drift. We’ve already seen it happen once: Free software → “open source” (politics stripped out). Commons → #dotcons platform capture.
Now we see this happening in the #Fediverse and #openweb reboot spaces with the last few years of vertical agendas dominating to meany outreach spaces, #NGO mediation and thus diluten is pushing native grassroots agency out, this is an old cycle repeating – the cycle that we need to compost.
OK, despite all the #mainstreaming mess, the digital commons are still the most viable path we have, we need to see this path not as hypothetical – more as it just works, but is underresourced. From a #OMN perspective, the digital commons are not only infrastructure, it’s the soil. You don’t build movements on platforms, you grow them in commons, but this growth needs care:
Protection from capture
Active governance
Social grounding, not just technical process
And most importantly the commons only survives if people act as commoners. The challenge now isn’t only to explain the digital commons, it’s to defend, rebuild, and extend it. That means funding native projects, keeping governance in the hands of participants to bridge activism, development, and real-world use as a path to push back against the continuing #mainstreaming capture.
This is not about nostalgia, it’s about #KISS recognising that we already have the tools we need, then caring enough not to only exploit them. Please try and be better than the current #mainstreaming on this, thanks.
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.
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.
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?
