Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
The indieweb is strongly individualism, where the Fediverse is more community based, though says it’s individualism to get #mainstreaming outreach (white lie).
So it depends on your (mostly unspoken) view on politics. In this they use overlapping tech but for different use, they are both #openweb native.
#fashernista and the media are always a problem that is hard to do anything about. They shift the focus from the grassroots to themselves and tell #mainstreaming stories because this is what the media wants to hear.
The undercurrents that is the story drafts back into the flow and nothing is understood, no change or challenge happens.
We are sold for some ones fragile egos moment of feeling important.
This is crap behaviour.
Remember the #fedivers is built like this, no geek in their right minds would do this, yet we use it every day
All our existing code is based on #feudalism master (admin) surf (user) this is why it is defenceless vs capitalism (#dotcons)
There have been attempts to build democratic code, early #wikis, think #indymedia
#geekproblem “common sense” shifted them back into feudalism.
We have a hard #BLOCK on democratic code, if you want to change/challenge then this blocking needs to be removed.
The #OMN is a project for this, it’s an uphill battle to bring democracy into our coding.
This is the media project (text needs a update” https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/Open-Media-Network/wiki OFFLINE
Governance for horizontals to talk to “vertical power” https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/wiki/01.-Online-Governance OFFLINE
And a video for you https://visionon.tv/w/jqTdss1qrdk4yEZi OFFLINE
We get into the details, of the #OMN you would get Boleyn tag changes on import, so you can auto translate guardian issued tags and add your own tags with both rules and manually.
These tags would flow out of your instances and could flow back to the guardian if you trusted each other.
The idea is to turn news stories/videos into “commons” objects with rich flowing metadata… done in a #KISS way based on trust/moderated link/flows
RSS bring in the legacy objects #activitypub is the main transport protocol.
It’s the news part of the #fediverse, our first implementation of this would be #indmediaback
The idea is to decenter the server, the data is in a soup that flows… #activertypub is two-way this is need to build the horizontal network, so the soup does not ONLY flow one way.
Nobody is in charge, no slaves, no masters. Only trusted or moderated flows. It needs to be two-way, though you are right people being human meany will be one way. BUT we are not building it that way 🙂
RSS brings the legacy in, and it’s a simple display format for embeds and passive news feeds etc.
I think people find the “nobody is in charge” bit a very hard thing to understand, even though we have built meany networks/social groups on this idea, and still do.
In the realm of tech, I call this #blocking the #geekproblem and to get anywhere we need to take the “problem” outa “geek” or we are left with the mess (in a bad way)
Thinking of stepping away from the #dotcons to the #openweb a conversation with an activist signing up on a big general instance – they kinda all do this.
A. You might be better off on an activism focused instance, https://activism.openworlds.info, but you will be fine on the one anyone, as they all talk to each other. The instance you join is your “home community” so good to join one that matches your interests and mission.
Q. Thank you so much – I am entirely lost here as just arrived and the whole ‘find your server’ bit flumoxxed me! Excuse what’s likely a silly question – but ‘where is my main profile?’ ie: where whatever bit of Mastodon I’m on… I would
be the same me?
A. you have joined a big general instance’s https://mastodon.online/ it’s a fine place to be. You can have more than one account on different instances, I have 3 mastodon accounts on 3 different instances, run 2 of these as a part of the #OMN
Ps. hashtags are your friend, use them in posts and click on them to find interesting people
Q. so if I boost a post on one account – I would need to also boost on other ‘me’ accounts in other arenas/spaces? Thanks so much for your help x
A. you can do that, but you don’t need to. All the instances are kinda one big space. The import bit is that each instance has a community and focus, so it helps yourself and the #openweb if you put our self into a subject instance.
For example, if someone complains about your posts it’s the mods and admins of the instance you join get to decide if it stays up or your account gets closed… so best to have a relationship with the instance admin and mods… This is much easer on a smaller, friendly focused instance than a bigger, more inpersional general one.
The “better” #closedweb (ISP intranets) was “surprisingly” destroyed by the “inferer” #openweb, which then exploded in use to spread everywhere. The #mainstreaming thinking then tried and failed to recapture this #4opens project for ten years as it takes up global space, and was a real challenge change, that the “common sense” said should not exist. This working alternative was finally sold out by our own #fahernistas, who bribed with money and statues members of the “unthinking” #geekproblem to build the #dotcons that rapidly took over the #openweb space.
Our wider activist #fashernistas created “liberal stories” about how embracing the #dotcons was a good path. The wider #fahernistas flocked to these #closedweb spaces to grasp at the real early power they provided, after society had finished this shift, the bate and switch took this power away, and we were left with “servalence capitalism” and no social power, as was obvuse at the time it was a con.
Our #fashernistats then pissed tech change/challenge agenst the wall for ten years. While the #openweb user facing technology withered, ignored and irrelevant to #mainstreaming. A few years ago we had an “accidental” #openweb reboot with #activitypub and soon after pushing of the next generation of #closedweb projects with #web03 leaving us in the current messy times.
Yes now the #dotcons are roting, but the #openweb is only a small change challenge due to our #fahernistas and #geekproblem actively #BLOCKING the change challenge inherent to the project.
Where are we now and what can we learn from this? Liberalism in tech are often active prats, co-opting, bait and switch and taking the easy #NGO funded path when the choice comes. They are #friendlyenemies, even when they deny this with all their “common sense”. Ideas to mediate this, please?
Do you except that “new” is often #deathcult (neo-liberalism) and #postmodernism because this is “common sense” what is your plan/idea to get around these problems?
I have had 20 years of “new” and am very underwhelmed, actually it’s almost all #blocking or adding to the #techshit to be composed. This is obviously a problem that needs to be mediated, what is your plan/process to have a better outcome?
Remember that the only thing that has worked in the last 10 years has been copying #dotcons with #activertypub every themselves has failed, what can we learn from this?
This is an important question that the #OMN project mediates.
Q. We need to be honest about this
A. I joined here only recently to experiment with the Fediverse, and that’s my first impression too. The two hottest kinds of topic I found were meta discussions such as “Twitter users will come here now”, and “the system is fucking with us using vaccines”.
Q. we build at Alt but will people come, some will. Moving away from the #dotcons it’s a tiny step we need to do more, MUCH more #OMN
A. people use the mainstream media because there they can find the information they want, their friends, and have a pleasant experience with highly usable tools. Only a very small group of people would use a privacy-oriented social media with complexities such as a federated network just because “fuck the system”. Even a nerd with the obsession for cybersecurity and privacy like me has an hard time finding interesting stuff here. And, believe me, I’m trying.
Q. this is an excellent question to ansear.
There are two points:
Firstly, we had exalent outreach alt media around for 20 years, #indymediaback is an example project that we need coders to help reboot.
Secondly, to think that we/you have any chance of grassroots progressive social change challenge without working alt media is a fatal fantasy. We can clearly see this in the mess of the last ten years.
We have the codeing tools #activitypub, and we have the historical social models that we know used to work, but had scaling issues.
The #OMN plan is simple, bring the new working technical scaling to the old working social models/process #4opens
As you say the fedivers made up of copies of #dotcons is too small a step.. We have to take the next step if we have any seruse ideas about change/challenge of the current #mainstreaming #deathcult
We have to change, challenge our social ideas and social process in what is left of the #openweb
This is less fundermentalist than it sounds as open-source (free softer) development already works mostly #4opens so the change being pushed by the #OMN is #nothingnew
This should be easy, but #BLOCKING has obviously to be overcome, dig, plant, grow. Compost the #techshit, repeat. One good first step is to be honest about our own funding.
A. being “alternative” is not a strong selling point because you define yourself relatively to something else instead of having your own identity. This dooms you to be always in the shadow of “the mainstream” as a sort of second choice.
Q. Being alternative USED to have a strong identity as did #openweb and yes you are right they DO NOT have this any more, this is a problem we should change challenge not except as “common sense”.
Think before replying as this conversation is more about agreeing then division, focus is good.
Q. Doing the same thing in the same context and expecting different results is one of the clinical definitions of insanity. 😀
A. That is EXACTLY the #mainstreaming problem the #hashtages are about, well said. If it’s not different, it’s not working #nothingnew
WE have solved this problem in the past but have not had a way to scale these solutions, now we have a technological way of scaling but have lost the “working activist culture” to social use with the technological scaling.
This is the story and the path, let’s get biblical.
Q. One difficulty that I personally have with your communication methods is your use of hashtags that convey meaning to the people that already know and use them, but are opaque to someone who doesn’t know what they mean.
You end up being only able to communicate with people within your own filter bubble. What are the ranges of different patterns of communication that you have tried? Which ones worked more effectively with which audiences?
A. As we talked about before, the #hashtags are a collective social story, but what is obvious is that if there is no collective there is no story… So if you want the story, build the collective to tell the story.
Bit of a chicken-and-egg issue, ay.
It’s #4opens non #mainstreaming change challenge… If nothing changes there is no challenge, thus it’s completely up to “us” not “me” I am doing my “modernist” story, as you say if we all do different story’s the is no outcome. Someone at some point has to add to the story, retell it, shape it and use it for change challenge. I repeat, I have done my bit, been at the front line of this social story for 40 years and am now sailing off on my lifeboat.
What are “we” doing with this story, that has passed through “my” hands, Anyone can pick up the power of the story or let it fall as sand as we currently do. Remember you would have to be completely #stupidindividualism to only see this as “my” story, it’s obviously not, don’t be a prat please.
We need to start from a simple but often-missed point – different starting assumptions lead to different processes – and those lead to very different outcomes. This is the lesson that gets lost when radical #openweb projects are treated like just another app, or reduced to a polished #NGO common sense path.
The #OMN doesn’t come from that place. It grows out of a different worldview, rooted in the lived traditions of the commons, the early internet, and grassroots organising. This isn’t abstract theory; it’s a body of practice that has already worked in many different forms.
We’ve seen it before in the early #indymedia network giving global voice to decentralised movements in the #wikis and early blogospheres building shared knowledge in public and more recently, the #Fediverse (for example Mastodon) showing that federated systems can scale without (yet) falling under corporate control.
These are not utopian ideas, they are working proofs that transparent, decentralised, trust-based systems can function and sustain real communities. Yes, they have limits. But those limits are not simply weaknesses, they are part of what keeps them healthy. They enforce diversity, autonomy, and accountability at a human scale, rather than collapsing everything into a single, extractive system like the #dotcons.
Where things go wrong, the current problem is a loss of context. Many people entering tech and activism today don’t have access to this lineage, or only see half of it. Developers who understand federation but not community process often build technically elegant systems that don’t sustain real social use. You end up with silos that work, but don’t live. Activists who understand horizontal organising but not open standards end up relying on closed tools – Facebook groups, Google Docs, Slack – rebuilding their movements inside systems that ultimately undermine them.
In both cases, something essential is missing. Without a grounding in the subcultures that shaped civil rights movements, free software, and the commons, people default to what feels like “common sense” – but is really just #mainstreaming logic.
That tends to look like discomfort with open governance (“too messy”), preference for control and clarity over participation and suspicion of openness when it challenges institutional norms. The result is familiar: well-intentioned projects that centralise, burn out, and quietly disappear when funding cycles end.
The #OMN is an attempt to break that cycle, it’s not a single platform or product, it’s better understood as shared infrastructure – both social and technical – that helps reconnect what has been fragmented. Think of it as soil, not a finished structure. The aim is to reconnect grassroots practice with open technical standards, compost the backlog of half-built projects and abandoned ideas and create conditions where new work can actually take root and grow.
On the technical side, the building blocks already exist – protocols like ActivityPub and RSS. On the social side, we have long-standing practices of trust, transparency, and collective governance. What’s missing isn’t only the tools, it’s cultural memory, continuity of practice and the confidence to build differently.
If we’re serious about the #openweb, the shift is less about innovation and more about orientation from products → to processes, from platforms → to ecosystems, from control → to trust and from presentation → to practice.
This isn’t about rejecting institutions or funding outright. It’s about recognising that if everything is filtered through those to often blinded lenses, we lose the qualities that make the #openweb viable in the first place.
The challenge – and the opportunity – is to reconnect the layers of narrative with practice, funding with real needs and technology with lived community. Because without that, we don’t get growth, we just get better storytelling about stagnation.
The are few if any working humane alternatives to the current #deathcult worship, thus for meany stepping away from this mess is simply not an option. The #OMN is about proof of concepts to build off what we know works combined with the new technology of federation (activitypub) to scale these small scale to wider social projects. The #OGB #indymediaback #4opens are stepping stones to a different, sustainable world.
#BLOCKING this is stupid and irresponsible.
Keep your thinking #KISS
Interesting to think about why people put so much energy into #BLOCKING
All #OMN projects are based on grassroots organisation that we know works, the innovation is in using “technological federation” to scale these working social projects using #activitypub that the fedivers is based on, which we know works.
Mainstreaming people who spend energy #blocking the fedivers are the same people who would come into a protest camp and reject and try and force change on the working process.
#encryptionists is about the feeling of total control that encryption gives the #geekproblem this is key because all good progressive society are based on trust, which is about giving up this desire.
The problem in “geek” is the problem of socialization… a known geek issue 🙂 in itself is fine, am not judging. BUT this is embedded in code that shapes society, it becomes a “problem”.
Good to think a bit more on this one. With power comes responsibility.
The is a minority role for “encryption” the #encryptionst hashtag is for the group of people who push this minority use over to many things.
Social change/challenge to rebuild society based on “trust” is a social issue and social solution. The #geekproblem is seeing technical solutions and PUSHING this over the obviously hard social path. This is not only pointless, it’s damage.
Can you think of a way of explaining this to people who’s “common sense” add to this mess?
#mainstreaming is obviously a #deathcult we do need to keep saying this. There are well document alt’s that I push with every use of the hashtags #OGB #OMN #4opens etc. The problem we way too often face is people wanking liberal “common sense” in the era of the #deathcult so need to make this point forcefully.For our liberals (of every type) this comes across as toxic positively if they can see the positive side at all. When they don’t I call this #BLOCKING and often get blocked for doing so.
Compost and shit comes to mind, shit is good compost, so this is NOT actually a negative statement, it’s part of the story, in radical grassroots direct action you need to go through trying meany people to build a affinity group that makes a difference. http://hamishcampbell.com/2022/09/19/
People who PUSH “solutions” while they are obviously bowed down eyes on the ground to the #deathcult are pushing problems, not solutions. This is not an obvious statement to our “liberals” thus they way to often PUSH “solutions” over real working alternatives. #BLOCKING and adding to the social mess and #techshit we need to compost.
No matter how “nice” they are as individuals, their, perhaps well intended, work is a problem adding to the mess. I should not need to talk about this, but lets as few people I know understand these obverse points:
* Liberals talk about individuals, they talk about personal actions and personal responsibility. This is how you tell you are talking to a liberal.
* socialists, anarchists and leftists talk about social groups, community actions, social change and challenge. This is how you tell you are talking to a radical progressive.
So try judging people you are talking about to get a better idea who is #BLOCKING and who has the possibility of doing anything useful.