Q. For social change to happen we need to empower different groups of people – just doing the usual shit is adding to the mess. The last 10 years has been completely wasted in the tech space.
A. This is a “what is to be done?” kind of question, so it’s difficult to answer. The world moves in mysterious ways, and sometimes change can come from the least likely places.
Right now I’d say the people who need empowerment are the people attending food banks, the asylum seekers, trans people, poor people in tower blocks like Grenfell, Roma/travellers and “essential workers” on the front line of the economy. In the UK at present, these people either have no voice in the mainstream or are extensively vilified by politicians.
Q. That would be a good piece of social work, but social change is a more focused than social work. Who has the power to challenge the issues that create the liberal social work problems our society create and will keep creating? First AID is a step, who do we empower to create the change, so we don’t keep creating these same issues?
A. In UK society there are a few pressure points by which power gets reproduced. Private schools. Sometimes misleadingly called “public schools” for reasons which are historical and no longer apply. The large majority of the ruling class are privately educated, and this is how they do social networking among themselves. So anything which challenges the validity or viability of private schools would send a shock wave through the establishment. If there were a successful campaign to ban private schools, or to abolish their opaque admissions criteria then this could have beneficial effects.
Abolishing private schools would bring the elite into direct contact with what life is like for the rest of the population. It would become more difficult for them to remain detached and ignorant. Issues previously deemed unimportant would suddenly become more so.
The housing circus. Access to housing ought to be a right, but in the UK housing and “getting on the ladder” is a sort of middle class religion. Politicians “flip” houses to enrich themselves, and a lot of housing “units” remain persistently empty and are traded as gambling chips on the international stock market.
Anything which decomodifies housing could bring improvements. Maybe a campaign for “the right to a home”. It would be against homelessness, but framed in the opposite way.
Maybe having a rule where any house which stands empty for a year automatically becomes public property.
Q. “Maybe a campaign” yes who do we empower to campaign – how do campaigns manifest. People make campaigns, they make them with social “traditions” built and maintained by social tools.
“For social change to happen we need to empower different groups of people – just doing the usual shit is adding to the mess. The last 10 years has been completely wasted in the tech space.”
Am getting bored with people posting theory and academic articles at me. If academic knowledge worked in the real world we would live in very different ways – thus it is easy to show that most academic ideas are useless and IMPOSING them on the real world has a VERY bad history to it. Please rethink before doing this as it’s just adding to the mess.
The problem isn’t that the #Fediverse has politics – it’s that people keep pretending it doesn’t, and then acting them out anyway in messy, unconscious ways. The Fediverse didn’t appear from nowhere, like all tech, it’s built on assumptions about power, trust, ownership, and human behaviour, and right now, those assumptions are colliding.
At its roots, the Fediverse grows out of we could call “stupid anarchism” – meaning not a deep, grounded anarchist practice, but a default instinct: no central authority, let people self-organise, trust will emerge. You can see this clearly in protocols like #ActivityPub – federation instead of central control, local autonomy over global rules. That’s the good part, the messy part is that this instinct often stops there, without the hard work of building sustainable trust, governance, or conflict mediation.
On top of this, you’ve got a layer of people trying to push toward cooperative or commons-based socialism. They’re asking real questions about shared ownership, moderation as collective care, and how to build infrastructure that isn’t captured by capital. But this layer is still thin. It exists more in intention and small experiments than in strong, lived structures.
Then pressing in from the outside – and increasingly from the inside – is #mainstreaming capitalism. Not the obvious corporate takeover (though that’s always lurking), but the softer version of growth metrics, influencer culture, branding, monetisation logic. You are seeing code-bases acting like platforms, admins acting like CEOs, and social capital turning into attention economies. It’s subtle, but it bends things.
And yes, there’s always an authoritarian shadow, not fully formed, not dominant, but present in tendencies with calls for tighter control “for safety” and central blocklists becoming de facto authority resulting in pressure for standardisation that removes local autonomy. This isn’t new. It’s just history repeating in a new technical wrapper.
If you want a clear historical parallel, look at Spanish Civil War, not because the scale is the same, but because the dynamics are familiar: anarchists, socialists, liberals, and authoritarians all operating in the same space, sometimes cooperating, often undermining each other, while larger power structures move in to shape the outcome. The tragedy there wasn’t just external force – it was internal fragmentation and failure to build shared process. That’s the uncomfortable mirror, back in the Fediverse, what do we actually have?
Background authoritarian impulses – control creeping in through safety and scaling pressures
And sitting awkwardly across all this is the Social Web Foundation and similar efforts – trying to stabilise things, but often pulling toward NGO-style mediation and #mainstreaming rather than any native grounded, messy governance. So yes, we keep making horrible mistakes, not because people are stupid, but because we refuse to name the politics we’re already enacting. We default to blinded ideology without admitting it, then fight over symptoms instead of causes.
The result is predictable endless meta arguments, fragile communities that fracture under pressure, governance that either collapses or ossifies and energy burned on internal conflict instead of building. What’s missing isn’t more blinded ideology, it’s conscious mediation between them. This is where process work matters, if the #Fediverse is going to grow into something more real, it needs to stop replaying these patterns blindly and start building with open eyes:
accept the anarchist base – but add real trust structures
grow socialist practice – not as slogans, but as working governance
resist capitalist drift – especially the subtle, “friendly” versions
keep authoritarian tendencies in check – without pretending they don’t exist
And most importantly – stop trying to “win” the ideological argument, and start building processes where these tensions can exist without tearing everything apart. That’s the shift from repeating history to learning from it, because without process, all you have is ideology colliding with itself, and ideology alone doesn’t build anything that lasts.
If we don’t get this right, the likely outcome is simple – The Fediverse becomes either a nicer version of the platforms it was meant to replace or a fragmented landscape that never scales beyond small niches. If we do get it right, it becomes something rarer, a living, federated commons that can actually hold difference without collapsing. But that only happens if we stop pretending the politics aren’t there – and start designing for them.
The#IMC project is an affinity group – so we are planing to work through consensus and diversity of strategy to move the project past where it was ripped apart by internal stresses after 10 years of running as a successfully worldwide radical grassroots media project.
Of course this can and will be updated as needed, but we have a “chicken and egg” issue that we need a working affinity group/s to reach consensus on where we go. The #indymediaback project is a way of bootstrapping this code/process in #4opens way.
To keep “diversity of strategy” in place, we are using the #OMN framework.
If you look at contemporary programming, I don’t think we have properly understood the social damage that our coding culture has already done, and is still doing. We have built enormous parts of modern life out of software, while pretending that software is somehow separate from society. It isn’t, code structures how we communicate, what we can see, who can participate, what gets remembered, what gets deleted, who gets heard and who gets ignored. And much of contemporary programming culture has a deeply contradictory relationship with this power.
In theory, the culture talks like anarchism: decentralisation, freedom, hacking, autonomy, permissionless innovation, open protocols. In practice, the resulting infrastructure feels closer to an authoritarian bureaucracy: rigid hierarchies, centralised control, surveillance, locked-down permissions, opaque decision-making and an almost obsessive belief that more control and more security will produce a safer society. This is part of the #geekproblem.
Closed systems hide power – in a #closed system, the monsters can operate without being easily seen. They can plot, manipulate, divide and control because the surrounding community cannot properly see what is happening. There is no shared social process for checking the claims being made or comparing them against what everyone else can see.
You cannot easily create social “truth” inside a closed system, you can have an official truth, corporate truth, an algorithmically manufactured truth. You can have whatever the people controlling the system want you to believe. But social truth is different, it emerges from people being able to see, question, compare, remember and challenge what is happening, that is one of the powerful things about #open. With genuinely open systems, the monster becomes more obvious. It becomes easier to see the relationships, the decisions, the contradictions and the consequences.
It becomes easier for other people to say – hang on, that’s not what happened – open systems don’t magically prevent abuse, they don’t make people good, but they make some forms of abuse harder to hide. Closed breeds monsters. Open pushes them out of the shadows where they can be seen.
The security paradox – this is where programming culture gets particularly strange. The demand for control and security is to often presented as neutral engineering. We are told that systems need permissions, authentication, central administration, surveillance and increasingly complex layers of security because the world is dangerous.
Of course some security is necessary, but when security becomes the organising principle of the whole system, something changes, the technology begins to reproduce the social assumptions of its creators. People become permissions, communities become accounts, relationships become access-control lists, trust becomes authentication and thus social problems become technical problems. Uncertainty becomes something that must be eliminated rather than something that society needs to learn to live with – this produces systems that are technically impressive but socially impoverished.
The fantasy of perfect control is a deeper problem here. We keep trying to build technology that removes mess, but human society is messy. People disagree, misunderstand each other, change their minds. Communities develop traditions as different groups have different needs. Sometimes things fail or somebody has a better idea, that isn’t necessarily a bug, it is social life. The #geekproblem treats this mess as something that technology should solve. The result, an endless attempt to build cleaner abstractions over increasingly complicated social realities. But the cleaner the technical abstraction becomes, the more human reality gets pushed outside the closeing system.
Then the system becomes brittle, and when it breaks, everyone is surprised. Code should be allowed to be messy – this doesn’t mean writing bad code. It means recognising that good social technology cannot be based on the fantasy of perfect control. We need systems that accommodate disagreement, forks, experiments, mistakes, local variation, negotiation and repair. In that sense, code should be a little bit messy, because society is messy. The goal isn’t to eliminate the mess, it is to create structures that help us live with it. That is different from the programming culture of trying to close every possible hole, define every possible behaviour and control every possible interaction.
#OPEN is a direction, not an endpoint – there is also a danger in treating #open as another purity project. Yes, the #openweb isn’t automatically good as open systems can contain abuse, misinformation, exclusion and power games. The #openweb itself contains plenty of contradictions. The #dotcons have their own versions of “openness”, often while retaining enormous concentrations of corporate power. So this isn’t a simple story of good open people versus bad closed people, more a balancing process.
#OPEN is a way to step away from #CLOSED – it creates space for transparency, plurality, experimentation and social accountability, gives communities more opportunities to see what is happening and to build alternatives. And that matters because we are currently living inside an enormous pile of inherited closed #techshit – closed platforms, closed data, closed algorithms, closed governance, closed infrastructures and assumptions about what technology is supposed to do. As a first step we need to compost a lot of this closed crap.
The mistake, we make to often today, is that we believe that we can build the perfect open system and finally end the struggle, we can’t, and we shouldn’t. There is no final technical architecture for society. There is no perfect governance model, no moment when we finally solve disagreement, power or human contradiction. Anyone promising that is either selling something, hiding something, or has fallen deeply into the #geekproblem.
The point is not to end the mess, it is to keep the mess visible, social and negotiable. We need technology that leaves room for people to challenge each other, organise, experiment, repair and move in different directions. That is why the #OMN work matters – to build practical #openweb infrastructure where media, metadata, moderation, governance and community relationships can remain visible, shared and contestable.
To make this happen we need #4opens starting points, #OGB experiments with governance, #MakingHistory to keep collective memory alive and #IndymediaBack to remember what grassroots media learned before the current wave of #dotcons.
You do realize that all our data is HORRIBLY centralized and thus could vanish at any moment, come the revolution/evolution/ #climatechaos tsunamis.
Our end plan in the #OMN is that all the content is redundantly stored in the network in a #KISS way, so traditional backup is less important -when it goes wrong, and it will sometimes as we are home hosting. Just boot up a new instance and put your hashtags and user info in and all your content will be sucked back in a #lossy good enough way. This makes home hosting work well enough to scale outward to build a #openweb
“So wait, when you buy an NFT, you don’t actually BUY the art, you just buy a receipt that you bought the art? And we’re burning the planet for THAT?“
The #encryptionist project is capitalism in the #openweb where it fits badly. They keep trying https://ethereum.org/en/nft/ as if the #deathcult was common sense, which it’s not, its death, displacement for millions and the wholescale destruction of nature for the next hundred years.
These guys are EVIL, and we need to say this to them #climatchoas is the new normal, and we have to STOP the #encryptionists form feeding this mess.
#indymedia was ripped apart by the war of open/closed
Build open tools without HARD coded defaults – yes you can choose where the switches are flicked on the default install, but that is as much power that the dev team should take in #4opens dev
“War, What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, say it agen…”
You can’t start a war if there is nothing to fight over.
Challenges the #fedivers faces and were next. The #twitter#bluesky thing comes from #blockchain crap – but don’t think it will end there – they will likely come up with a “new” standard that will #fashernista flash then promptly be forgotten.
Would be interesting if they tried to colonize #activertypub we would see a wholesale selling out balanced with a community fightback – think the selling out would win, but this would kill the value in the standard, so everyone would lose. If #bluesky and the #dotcons go for #activertypub and the community wins the fight for the standard in long bloody trench warfare vs the #fashernista sell outs funded by the #dotcons then you see the possibility of real social change.
That would be a battle worth of a saga and a story to tell your grandchildren siting in front of the camp fire.
“When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read…”
If you want to have a hope of having a good outcome with a CONTROL battle with the #dotcons you need to build structures that are attractive we have this with #activertypub AND they must have no hard structures that can be captured to take CONTROL, this is counterintuitive as people feel they need harder structures to stop capture. This feeling is obviously a trap and needs to be strongly mediated 🙂
A lot of people talk about censorship on the #fedivers without much understanding how this is different to censorship on the #dotcons The fedivers instances voluntary federate to other instances of the fedivers, its part of the open network that you can choose not to federate with some instances. This is not censorship as each instance has its own TOS and ethos and is happy to share information with other instances that share this world-view and not to share federation with instance that don’t, this is the point of a voluntary network.
Users who do not feel happy with the instance they are on can simply move to an instance that shares their world view. The is no “censorship” in the American sense of blocking #freespeech the reposabilerty is placed onto the user to find a place where their speech fits. If they cannot find such a place they have the freedom to set up their own place. Then instance can choose if they will federate with them or not.
It’s kinda annoying that the #rightwing#trolls and the “progressive” conspiracy crew CRY #censorship without this understanding as it take up space and focus. I mostly just end up blocking them or de-federating from their instance if they cannot understand and keep throwing shit thinking into my spaces. On the #openweb its simple don’t be a troll please.
The is a pretty sorted #ActivityPub crew, then some organizing sites/forums, the yearly conference. MOST importantly some “kings”, “princes” a bit of a tech/influencer aristocracy who currently hold much of the “power”.
Where do we go from here?
On online “governing body” to be a VOICE for the #Fediverse – all done #4opens in social code:
We have a yearly voting/consensus (online) body made up of “stakeholders”
Who are the bulk stakeholders-representatives:
One voice one instance – if you run an instance you get a vote – put the URL in as long as it’s online last year your vote counts.
The is then an equal/matching number of votes based on a “user” lottery – have to opt in by adding your account name. This is refreshed every year.
Then we have other more “affiliate” stakeholders that have to be “ratified” through the body
Codebases – could be factored by installed based on instance registered above. Over a basic threshold and the body agrees.
fedivers events – any group that regularly runs events gets a “stakeholder” vote based on them doing it last year. If the body agrees to this.
fedivers support organizations get a vote if the body agrees to this.
activitypub standards crew – get votes through all the rest and can have a vote as a founding fedivers org.
Groups and individuals could get more than one vote – which is fine.
This would give us
A representative “stakeholder” body that could accept proposals and make decisions.
How would the body work?
#techshit all ready has way to much LOOK at ME look AT me. I don’t like competitive elections as the shit float to the top
Let’s do a LOTTERY- from these “voters” that makes up the body a lottery decides 3-5 as #spokespeople then leave um to get on with it. There is a tick box to opt out of being in the “spokespeople” lottery, so you have too wont to do the extra work if you don’t want to, its opt out rather than opt in – this is important.
They have the power to speak for the body and thus the #fedivers and can make policy decisions on consensus minus one process. Or put policy directly to the body to be voted (majority vote) on by the stakeholders. (of course they would be subject to recall/impeachment if they fuckup too much, say proposal and 2/3 vote of the body)
Levels of “voice” anyone with an #activertpub account can put in a public proposal to be voted on by the stakeholders – if it jumps that hoop then it can be edited/pushed by an open group of stakeholders though a semiformal #4opens online process to jump to an agreement. Agreements are acted on by the “spokespeople” up to them to take these ideas forward? If non are interested better luck next year with your agender and new spokes people.
Q. what dose digital online Community “democracy” look like
If it does not have elephants running around throwing paper planes it’s likely the wrong structure.
NOTE: of course these alt-ideas have been tried in the offline world, and they generally DO NOT work. But this is no reason to go down the dead end of “liberal” foundation governances that also does not work. People are trying these ideas in Citizens’ assemblies so no issue not to try them online.
Lotteries take the “power” out of power politics… likely worth an experiment.
Compost and shovels are needed.
The power of the voice
User proposals are excepted by anyone who has an activertypub account- just an idea – this can become a group.
User groups – a part of the process, these come from ideas getting a level of support of the stakeholders.
User agreements come out of groups these can then be enacted by the spokes people if they are interested.
Spokes people can start groups to reach agreements and can enact agreements.
Consensus of spokes people (-1) makes agreements body wide.
What are the risks:
* need basic security and checks – to see if an instance still exists and is real. If a member account is actively posting or a pulpit – all of this can be done with flagging some of them by code some by people – flags stuff goes to the “security group”
* Groups can be captured by agenders – being open to all stakeholder members mediates this – we solve swamping by having a dynamic short non-voting time based on the number of new members in the group.
* Bad group of spokes people, it’s a lottery, it’s up to the groups to influence and as a last resort “impeach” if one goes a new one is chosen by lottery.
* The actual number of spokes people are dynamic depending on the number of stakeholders but between 3-5 is likely a good number.
UPDATE
The body is made up of stakeholder one for each instance – you wont a voice you run an instance and register it. This is clearly the voice of the #Fediverse as they are the people running it.
This is then balanced dynamically by the same number of “users” who are interested in the process, they are chosen by lottery from the registered accounts. Your choice to register or not your account as a possable stakeholder.
On registration the is a box you can untick if you do NOT do this then you are in the lottery to get “governing positions” Sortition – Wikipedia for a background on why this path.
Only people who want to be part of the governing body AND play an active role are enrolled in the lottery.
You second point “common voice” comes from the working groups, agen are made up of ONLY people who are interested in playing a role.
“serving the humans trying to communicate.” we get out of the way and let the humans work it out – we provide structer for the groups, we don’t define the groups.
SocialHub though an interesting tool has strong tech aristocracy which is not surprising as this is how almost all open source project run – the Fediverse is something different which is why we do so badly at governance. Let’s continue to use the SocialHub for #ActivityPub organizing and possibly governance though it has no tools that I have found for the governance.
Sign up for the site, then don’t untick the box for “do work” if you become a “stakeholder” every time a position opens the lottery picks a stakeholder to fill it if it is you and you would like to do the job – get to it. If you do not wont the job then resign and the lottery will pick a new person.
If you are not picked by the lottery for a job opening the is still a meany things you can do as a stakeholder in the groups. If you are not picked as a stakeholder you can still put ideas for the stakeholders to make into group decisions.
The outcome is something much more representative of the #Fediverse than we can currently think about let alone implement.
The is #nothingnew in this idea or implementation, some examples from Wikipedia
Examples
Law court juries are formed through sortition in some countries, such as the United States and United Kingdom.
Citizens’ assemblies have been used to provide input to policy makers. In 2004, a randomly selected group of citizens in British Columbia convened to propose a new electoral system. This Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform was repeated three years later in Ontario’scitizens’ assembly. However, neither assembly’s recommendations reached the required thresholds for implementation in subsequent referendums.
MASS LBP, a Canadian company inspired by the work of the Citizens’ Assemblies on Electoral Reform, has pioneered the use of Citizens’ Reference Panels for addressing a range of policy issues for public sector clients. The Reference Panels use civic lotteries, a modern form of sortition, to randomly select citizen-representatives from the general public.
Democracy In Practice, an international organization dedicated to democratic innovation, experimentation and capacity-building, has implemented sortition in schools in Bolivia, replacing student government elections with lotteries.[23]
DanishConsensus conferences give ordinary citizens a chance to make their voices heard in debates on public policy. The selection of citizens is not perfectly random, but still aims to be representative.
Private organizations can also use sortition. For example, the Samaritan Ministries health plan sometimes uses a panel of 13 randomly selected members to resolve disputes, which sometimes leads to policy changes.[24]
The Amish use sortition applied to a slate of nominees when they select their community leaders. In their process, formal members of the community each register a single private nomination, and candidates with a minimum threshold of nominations then stand for the random selection that follows.[25]
Citizens’ Initiative Review at Healthy Democracy uses a sortition based panel of citizen voters to review and comment on ballot initiative measures in the United States. The selection process utilizes random and stratified sampling techniques to create a representative 24-person panel which deliberates in order to evaluate the measure in question.[26]
The environmental group Extinction Rebellion has as one of its goals the introduction of a Citizens’ assembly that is given legislative power to make decisions about climate and ecological justice.[1]
Let’s be optimistic and say half the instances signed up that would be over 3000 instances stakeholders and thus 3000 user stakeholders for a total of 6000 and a number from affiliate groups. This number is likely too much, so we can put a limit to 100 chosen by lottery from the stakeholders instances, this is then matched by 100 from the user stakeholders for 200 stakeholders + 5-10 affiliates it’s up to the admin group to choice the right number to build a working community, if you don’t have enough good workers open the pool up if the is to much dicushern close the pool down, try different approaches.
UPDATE
Looking at this in conversation it becomes clear it is a 3 way split of stakolder groups: instances/users/builders&supporters with the last group in big groups could be the size of the others so just to higlight they would be treted in exactly the same way if they are over the number of the body then they would be chosen by lottery just like the others.
This looks like a tech/process based attempt at grassroots governance. Must say straight out, in my expirence, I have seen many process lead models like this, and they have NEVER worked.
Though it is always a good thing to try iteration. And good to contrast this to the humane/serendipity based aproch that we have been working on at the #omn
* Fluffy – asking/pressuring for change though the system
* Spiky – fucking shit up to enact change and directly and sometime ethically using “violence” to property – not to people.
* Beyond spiky the is WAR where direct harm to people happens – that’s outside the metaphor.
It’s interesting to take a few moments to look at this more. #XR talks spiky by blocking bridges and occupying spaces, but they do it for a #fluffy agender of asking for change. As we are seeing now with their co-opting into “normal” this has limits on outcomes.
Where #climatecamp invaded and shut down the direct courses of #climatechaos with some limited property damage – though there were some in the movement that pushed for more property damage, was always “non-violent” to people. Though the police did regular violence to people in return, so was a one-sided agreement. This was lived “respect for diversity” and was affective in till the internal process ossified and #mainstreaming moved it to a more #XR agender where it promptly failed.
The #animalrights crew were #spiky doing damage to property, and some were not above doing damage to people. These guys were pretty intolerant but got stuff done and seceded in many of their objectives, though at heavy personal costs.
In the UK we have not had war in our movements since the Irish “troubles” though the has been way too much state violence around the world in our name.
Q. I remember when people were spiking trees to break chainsaws. Do you think the name came from that?
A. yes, the same movement. Spiky in both ways damage to the chainsaws and with possibility of hurting the users of the chainsaws this is meditated by clearly MARKING the area as spiked so sorted “diversity of strategy” #spiky in hand with #fluffy it works.
The problem is often from the dogmatic #fluffy crew collaborating with the police to stop this direct action. Due to the possibility of hurting the people with the chainsaws, this blocking effective action. Not respecting the diversity of strategy.
UPDATE
It’s interesting to look at this more as it’s an example of the success of the “Diversity of Strategises” and also their failures. Many spiky protesters see protecting nature from commercial logging as a war, with the possible injuries to the chainsaw works as exceptable to save nature. BUT in respect for the fluffy side of “Diversity of Strategises” they generally put up the notices about the spiking to stop the workers getting injured while destroying the trees. A good balance of spiky/fluffy, the fail is the liberal protesters then betraying them to the police as often happens which is a clear non respect for “Diversity of Strategises”. Possible social/ecological change is thus BLOCKED by this failing.
