The last five years have changed the #Fediverse. What started, grassroots, commons-based native path has become much more visible. More people have arrived, more organizations have become interested. There are more conferences, more funding conversations, more institutional involvement and more attempts to make the Fediverse part of the wider technology landscape.
Some of this is useful, but it also creates a question that is harder to avoid – what do we actually want to carry forward from the last five years? Perhaps the answer is not to defend everything that has happened, or to reject it all. Perhaps we need to compost it, were omposting means taking what has grown, including the dead material, separating out what is useful and allowing something new to grow from it.
Lets look at an example – the paywall is not just about the ticket – this becomes visible in arguments about conference tickets and paywalls. At one level, the argument is simple, events cost money, venues cost money, travel costs money, some people organizing events need to be paid. But that isn’t really the interesting part, the question that matters is what a paywall means inside a commons-based culture. For someone who comes from the #openweb, free software, grassroots media and other commons traditions, putting a price on entry feel wrong, like more than a financial barrier.
It becomes an ideological barrier as the message shift from “This is something we are building together.” towards “This is something you consume if you can afford to enter.” That distinction becomes a block, particularly when some of the people being asked to pay helped build the culture, infrastructure and ideas that made the network possible in the first place.
The question therefore isn’t whether events should cost money, it is, are we paying the costs of maintaining a commons, or are we turning participation in the commons into a product? Those are not the same thing.
Let look at this shift from commons culture to event culture – over the last five years, the #Fediverse has developed an increasingly visible event culture. Conferences, workshops, panels and gatherings can be valuable, they create relationships, spread knowledge and bring people together.
But there is a danger when the pay to enter events are pushed to the centre of the network. The commons starts to decay, funding resources and focus then starts to orbit around conferences rather than communities. Access is controled by money, professional status, travel and institutional connections.
This doesn’t happen because somebody decides to push us into a #closedweb, rather it is a common sense mainstreaming organic mess that happens gradually when a grassroots network becomes successful. Success brings institution thinking (#NGO), these institutions bring funding, funding feeds and creates professional roles. Professional roles push a feedback loop creating more top down organizations, these create events with paywalls.
This money creates barriers that eventually a culture that began with people simply building things together can start looking surprisingly similar to the systems it originally wanted to move beyond. This is not necessarily corruption (though it often is when you lift the lid), it is institutional #NGO drift.
Actively recognizing this mainstreaming mess making it is part of keeping the commons alive. We need to fund and support the what can we build together? while still actively questioning who gets recognized, funded and invited? as those questions produce very different cultures. The first is about participation and making things, the second is about access to an emerging institution.
This is one of the tensions the Fediverse now has to work through. The answer to this question is not simple, we need to not to romanticize volunteer culture either, as volunteerism has its own exclusions, it to can depend on people having spare time, money and privilege. The point is to find ways of funding the commons without turning the commons into an industry.
We have spent enough time trying to prove that the #Fediverse deserves to exist, the more interesting question for the next 5 years is – What did we actually learn? What worked? What failed? Which projects created durable infrastructure? Which relationships survived? Which forms of organizing created useful results? Which created endless meetings? Which assumptions turned out to be wrong? Which things should we stop doing?
And we need to do this without a paywall, to make this composting useful. Don’t throw away the good stuff, composting isn’t destruction, there is a lot worth keeping.
The last five years have demonstrated the practical value of open standards, federation, independent communities, people running their own infrastructure, interoperability, grassroots paths, mutual aid, trust built through practice and the ability to leave one system without losing the network. These are not just historical curiosities, they are the useful material from which the next seed can grow.
The mistake we made for the last 5 years was to think that moving forward means abandoning the culture that created the #Fediverse in the first place. And yes the is balance, equally, the mistake would be to freeze that culture in place. We maybe need to keep the principles while changing the practice. A way of looking at this is native and non-native paths
This is where the distinction between native and non-native paths becomes useful, a native Fediverse path starts from the assumptions of the commons open, federated, participatory, interoperable and community-controlled. A non-native path can still use ActivityPub or Fediverse technology while importing assumptions from another world closed access, professional gatekeeping, centralised authority, ownership, status and consumption. The technology alone doesn’t decide which path we take, #ActivityPub can carry both, an open protocol does not push an open culture.
This is one of the important lessons of the last five years, we need to pay attention to the social structures growing around the plumbing. What should the next five years look like? Perhaps we should balance pushing the #dotcons copying #Fediverse of five years ago.
We need different streams to grow the useful material and build the next layer. Not more copy’s of social-media platforms. Not more common sense conference ecosystems. Not another self selected central organization deciding what the network is. Instead open media → shared archives → trusted flows → local communities → federated governance a native path much closer to the original promise of the openweb.
Yes, the original path is good the federated network should make it easier for communities to communicate, remember, cooperate and organize without having to surrender their autonomy. This means a renewed and a clear focus on moving from social media to social infrastructure
As the biggest danger is that we keep reproducing the assumptions of the corporate social #closedweb while using open protocols. We feed open infrastructure carrying closed social practices, were the technology is federated, but it feeds culture that is still centralizing.
Some of the current mess we need to compost – The protocol is open – the event is pay-walled. The software is free – the organization is controlled by a small professional layer. The network is decentralized – the power isn’t. This is the contradiction mess we need to compost
And yes, before you start #blocking the answer isn’t purity, it is experimentation, meany native paths to build things to try different organizational models to make the processes visible so we can learn from failure to keep what works. But please lets let what doesn’t work become composts. The commons needs a metabolism, things grow, things fail, people leave, new people arrive. Yes, ideas become useful and then become obsolete, organizations shaped by these ideas appear and disappear. Practices get tested, some survive, some need to be broken down and returned to the soil.
That is what social composting means, not being afraid of the failures and contradictions of the last five years. They are part of the material we have to work with, the question is whether we can turn that experience into something more useful. The aim isn’t to reject institutions, funding or professional work. It is to #KISS keep asking who is this infrastructure for? Who can participate? Who controls it? What remains open? And the biggest question – does this strengthen the commons, or does it slowly turn the commons into another market?
For the #OMN, this is an important distinction as we don’t need another project that simply adds another social timeline to the #Fediverse. We need to explore what happens when federated technology is used for media, archives, trust and eventually governance. That means building from the things that have already proved useful while questioning the assumptions that came with the #mainstreaming of the Fediverse.
And to walk a path more native to the #openweb. #ActivityPub is built as open standards, federation and trust. We already have a working example of the path of left/open infrastructure we need. So maybe the answer is simple – don’t overcomplicate what already works, build on it.
It’s interesting to see that the #mainstreaming is moving onto subjects that many of us native to the #openweb have been talking about for the last 20 years. The problem is that when our ideas finally become fashionable, they arrive with a rush of #fashionista baggage – followed by the #geekproblem reaction of trying to solve things with another layer of #techshit.
So maybe now is the time to get the shovels out, the #OMN is one of those shovels. We need to compost the onrushing mess rather than let it become another 20-year cycle of #techcurn, fashion and reinvention.
Take the useful ideas, break down the bad habits, keep the #openweb roots. Build something that the next generation doesn’t have to spend another twenty years digging its way out of.
#OMN #Fediverse #openweb #4opens #ActivityPub #commons #KISS
