There is a strong reluctance to link horizontally – to peers and neighbouring communities – or downwards, to smaller, newer and emerging voices. This isn’t really a problem with the #openweb itself, it is something we have inherited from mainstream media culture. Mainstream media assumes authority, visibility and trust come from the top, linking is a form of endorsement. You link to the big newspaper, the recognized expert or the established organization because doing so is safe, were inking to small and unfamiliar source feels risky.
For our grassroots openweb paths this creates a bottleneck, limiting native discovery and reinforces existing power structures. This stops us building the richer, more connected understanding that a federated web should make possible. If we want a genuinely decentralized and trustworthy news and media ecosystem, we need to change this habit. Links should follow context, relevance and trust, not status, this means actively encouraging:
- Horizontal linking between peers, projects and communities.
- Downward linking to new, local and less visible sources.
- Networked linking that lets people follow a story across different sources rather than always leading back to an “authoritative” node.
The challenge to making this happen is more cultural than technical. The habit of “linking upwards” comes from fear: fear of losing credibility, amplifying something unreliable, or stepping outside an accepted narrative. So to compost this mess, the path isn’t simply to attack this behaviour or build another system that blocks it, we need to compost it. Make trust visible and contextual rather than something automatically granted to prestigious sources. Encourage good linking in every direction by building tools that make it easy to follow, compare and socially verify how information moves through the network.
This is one of the important cultural shifts the #OMN is supporting, the move from hierarchical validation to networked understanding. 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
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.
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