This matters for #FOSS because if it remains culturally trapped inside the #geekproblem, it becomes socially irrelevant at the exact historical moment it is most needed. Right now, most #FOSS energy still assumes that if you build elegant tools, argue clearly, and keep everything technically “open,” people will come. But only a tiny minority actually want to live the full-stack geek life: self-hosting, compiling, debating licenses, maintaining infra. That path selects for a personality type. It is not neutral.
The problem isn’t that this path exists, it’s that it quietly defines the culture. The tension is that the #geekproblem tends to reduce political and social questions to technical architecture. It too often treats freedom as a property of code, rather than a property of relationships. But in an era of #climatechaos, people don’t need abstract freedom in protocol design. They need mutual aid to build trust networks and local resilience. They need collective agency in open spaces to coordinate without corporate capture. These are #KISS social demands.
If #openweb remains framed as a technical alternative to Big Tech, it will only attract geeks and edge cases. If it is framed as a public infrastructure for collective survival, it suddenly matters to everyone. This shift in focus is urgent as climate disruption accelerates: Centralized platforms will prioritize profit and state alignment, infrastructure failures will become normal, feeding political polarization. Authoritarian coordination models will look “efficient.” If #FOSS cannot step outside the geek subculture, it leaves the field open to #dotcons and state/corporate hybrids to define digital coordination. That’s not a tech failure. It’s a social failure.
So, what changes this frameing? To make #openweb meaningful to the majority, we need to shift from tools to practices. Don’t only ask people to install software, ask what they are trying to do with digital tools together. Then lower cultural barriers, not just technical ones, by building code for groups, not only individuals. The mainstream internet optimizes for #stupidindividualism, the alternative needs to be balancing this mess, by optimizing for collectives.
Accept messiness, social systems are not elegant, they compost, they fork culturally before they fork technically. Centre use in crisis, not only ideology, when floods hit, when heatwaves hit, when services fail – what does the #openweb enable that corporate #dotcons platforms cannot? If the answer is “we have a nicer licence,” it won’t matter. If the answer is “your community can coordinate and survive without asking permission,” it becomes essential.
The hard truth is only a minority want to be geeks, but almost everyone wants dignity, voice, belonging and some stability in chaos. If #FOSS and #openweb can’t translate into those terms, they remain culturally marginal. This is why the issue is urgent, not because the code is broken – but because the social imagination around it is too small for the scale of the social and ecological crisis. And in the age of #climatechaos, infrastructure that doesn’t scale socially (#fluffy) will be replaced by infrastructure that scales politically (#spiky) – whether we like it or not.
The question isn’t whether #openweb works, it’s whether it can grow beyond the #geekproblem long enough to matter.
