People ask why the articles are hard to follow without background, it’s a fair point, but a distraction as these are not stand-alone hot takes, they are all a part of a long flowing story about how we got into this mess and how we might get out of it.
So, focus, please share this and the other posts if we’re going to recover focus and direction on the #openweb path. What happened over the last ten years on the Fediverse wasn’t random. It was a slow drift away from the native path that worked, and toward a confused mess of branding, #NGO careerism, platform thinking, and endless social noise.
The problem is most people now arrive in the #Fediverse with no memory of the culture that built the #openweb of trust networks, grassroots publishing, the messy but functional commons, the #4opens, the idea that media belongs in public and the understanding that social process matters more than shiny tech.
Instead, people arrive carrying the assumptions of the #dotcons – branding over community, engagement overtrust and control over openness. Leading to assumptions of private chat over public knowledge and algorithmic mediation over human responsibility. Then they push focus to rebuild the same broken structures again and again while calling it “innovation”.
That’s the real story of the last ten years, we inherited working social and technical traditions, then forgot why they worked. Now we’re drowning in signal-to-noise, fake “governance”, performative moderation, invisible power structures, startup logic and endless #fashionista churn.
The answer is probably much simpler than people want – public media, open processes, visible governance, trust networks, federation, and rebuilding commons culture from the ground up #KISS. Start reading the story flow https://hamishcampbell.com/stories/ and if you like semi hard definitions you can dip in here https://hamishcampbell.com/hashtags/ and for a bit of history of the #OMN path the Fediverse piece https://hamishcampbell.com/what-happened-over-the-last-ten-years-on-our-fediverse-path/
And yes, this matters beyond tech culture, because while people are busy polishing identities and building another pointless #techshit platform layer, the world is burning – #climatechaos, collapsing public infrastructure, rising authoritarianism and corporate enclosure of every part of public life. So yes, we need “alt sense” – alternative common sense – or we are genuinely beaten, not only in an abstract future way, but in ten years in a “rubber truncheons and floodwater” way.
Make the effort to understand the path built from alt common sense history, or we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes until there’s nothing left worth defending.
