The Fediverse is fun and growing, but it seems to kinda be on autopilot at the moment

Q, The #Fediverse seams to kinda be on autopilot at the moment – I miss the days when the community was more focused….

A. I’d say it’s growing and changing. From my window, there’s a LOT happening. Many people are excited by the new stuff that’s landing, while others are afraid of how those changes may rock the boat they’re on. My solution is to build a bigger boat, because everyone needs the opportunity to be here. But that’s understandably scary for those who want a very small, exclusive community. Hopefully we can make tools that give affordances for both.

My metaphorical thinking on this is, yes, there is a lot of technical activity. New software, new protocols, bridges, funding, organisations and experiments. From that perspective, the #Fediverse is very active. But socially, it often feels like it’s on autopilot.

In the early years there was a shared sense that we were rebuilding the #openweb together. There were arguments, of course, but there was also a common direction. People were asking social questions about ownership, governance, federation and community. Those conversations created momentum beyond individual projects.

Today much of that shared vision has fragmented. Each project has its own roadmap, each server its own concerns, each funding stream its own priorities. That’s healthy to a point, but without a wider narrative the movement risks becoming a collection of software projects rather than a #openweb social movement.

I agree that we need a bigger boat. The internet needs one. But the question is what kind of boat are we building? If becoming bigger simply means attracting more users while reproducing the culture of the #dotcons, we’ve missed the point. Federation alone doesn’t create commons. We can decentralise servers while recentralising culture, governance and influence.

This is where the #OMN perspective differs from the current #mainstreaming. The challenge isn’t only scaling infrastructure – it’s scaling communities. A bigger boat still needs lots of crew who know how to sail it, repair it and decide together where it’s going. Without that, people become passengers rather than participants.

The #Fediverse already has the technical foundations. What it lacks is enough shared social infrastructure: ways to build trust, preserve collective memory, govern openly and connect local communities into something larger without creating another centre of power. That’s why I keep talking about #DIY, #MakingHistory and the #4opens. They aren’t distractions from the technology, they’re the missing social layer. The code is necessary, but code alone won’t build the commons.

Perhaps the feeling of “autopilot” comes from this imbalance. We’re very good at building new features, but much less good at building shared purpose. The result is #techchurn: lots of movement, but not always much direction.

So yes, let’s build a bigger boat, but let’s also build more harbours, more local communities, shared stories and more reasons for people to become co-builders instead of just users. Because the strength of the #openweb has never come from one magnificent ship.

It has always come from a sea full of small boats, travelling together without needing a single captain.

Update It’s interesting that there’s still so much denial about this history. To be clear, I’m not blaming the people who arrived in the #Fediverse after the shift in the first five years of its development. They only know the culture they arrived in. It’s understandable that many assume this is how the project has always been.

What needs to be better understood is that, for roughly the first five years, the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub were driven primarily as a social and political project. The technology mattered, but it was there to serve the wider goal of rebuilding #FOSS commons-based infrastructure and supporting subculture communities. The people doing the work were mostly motivated by those social and political aims, with technical and #mainstreaming perspectives forming a minority.

After that period, the balance shifted. As the network grew, technical concerns, institutional interests and #mainstreaming priorities became dominant, while the social and political vision became a minority. The conversation increasingly focused on software, scaling and features, rather than governance, commons, trust and community.

Neither perspective is wrong on its own. We need both. The problem is that the shift happened without much reflection, and today many people are simply unaware that it happened at all. There are now very few people left who have lived through both periods and can bridge the divide. Their experience matters because they remember why many of these projects were started in the first place.

The real frustration is with those few people who do know this history, who experienced the transition firsthand, yet now deny or minimise that it happened. That denial makes it much harder to have an honest conversation about where we are and where we need to go.

For everyone who arrived later, the response shouldn’t be blame – it should be curiosity. Every movement has a history, and understanding that history helps explain why today’s arguments keep repeating themselves. This isn’t unique to the #Fediverse. It’s a common pattern in grassroots projects. As movements grow, they become more institutional, more technical and more professionalised. The original political purpose fades into the background, and new participants naturally assume the current culture is the whole story.

If we want to avoid repeating that cycle, the first step is simple – Acknowledge that the shift happened. Only then can we decide, together, what kind of #Fediverse we want to build next.

Individual fears

Individual fear scales into collective outcomes, when people act mainly from fear, they tend to choose control, isolation, and short-term protection, and those choices accumulate into worse social paths. It’s useful to look at this as the balance between fear/control and trust/open in #openweb thinking.

So the question becomes – how do we reduce fear enough that people act more cooperatively? We can try some grounded ways to make this to work.

Build Real Social Support

Fear grows when people feel alone and powerless, it shrinks when people feel supported and connected. Historically, societies with strong collective structures – unions, cooperatives, community groups, local media, commons infrastructure – tend to show lower social anxiety and higher trust. What helps is strong local communities with shared institutions people actually control through mutual aid and cooperative structures. When people know others have their back, they are less likely to act defensively.

Reduce Information Panic

Traditional and #dotcons media systems amplify fear, because fear drives attention and engagement. Constant exposure to crisis narratives makes people feel the world is collapsing even when their local reality may be more stable. To counter this we need slower, contextual media, local reporting and shared storytelling in flows in media systems not driven by advertising attention metrics. This is the place where the #OMN fits: if communities control their own media infrastructure, the incentives shift away from panic amplification.

Increase Agency

Fear grows when people feel they cannot influence outcomes, when people have real participation in decisions, fear tends to drop and responsibility rises. So when people help shape the systems, they no longer see it purely as something happening to them.

Create Stable Material Conditions

A lot of fear is simply economic insecurity, worrying about housing, food, healthcare, or work, their nervous systems remain in threat mode. In that state, cooperation becomes much harder.

Encourage Contact Between Groups

Fear comes from distance and misunderstanding, interacting across social, political and cultural differences in real life, fear tends to decrease. Shared projects and cooperation help more than debate. This is why collective building projects (community media, shared infrastructure, local initiatives) can be powerful: people work together rather than just argue.

Normalize Courage Instead of Panic

Fear spreads socially, but confidence spreads socially too, when people see others acting constructively – organizing, building alternatives, cooperating – it changes what feels possible. Visible examples of working alternatives matter because they shift the emotional landscape from “Everything is collapsing.” to “We can actually build something better.”

The idea we need to balance is fear itself is not the enemy, in moderation it is a normal protective response. The problem comes when systems, like much of today’s personal and social mess exploit fear to maintain control. When that happens, fear multiplies and becomes self-reinforcing. Reducing fear at scale usually requires: stronger communities, trustworthy “native” institutions using #4opens communication to drive real participation in building visible alternatives.

In short: build systems that reward trust instead of systems that profit from fear. That is one reason projects like #openweb infrastructure of the #OMN matter. They are not just technical tools, they are about building communication spaces that encourage cooperation instead of panic.

#KISS

So how do we mediate this fear?

Why good faith is a technical requirement for #FOSS

If you’ve spent years in #FOSS, you’ve likely developed a strong allergy to vague political language. You care about licenses, reproducibility, and whether something actually runs. Good. That discipline is why free software exists at all.

But here’s the needed uncomfortable question, what if the biggest blocker to the #openweb right now isn’t technical debt – but social debt? And what if “good faith” is not a moral nicety, but a core infrastructure requirement?

The problem is when activism meets the #geekproblem. Anyone who pushes for change – especially against #mainstreaming pressures – develops a recurring relationship with bad faith. You see this when:

Corporate actors adopt the language of openness while enclosing the commons.

Institutions celebrate “community” while centralizing control.

Projects technically comply with openness while culturally gatekeeping participation.

This isn’t new, but the scale is new, in the age of #dotcons, #NGO enclosure is polished, funded, and normalized. Resistance generally fragmented, exhausted, and defensive as years of platform manipulation and extractive models have left people burnt out and cynical. In that climate, good faith is fragile, yet without it, nothing decentralized works. Good faith is infrastructure, decentralized systems cannot rely on coercion at scale. They rely on:

Trust

Transparency

Shared norms

The assumption is that participants are not actively trying to sabotage the commons, as when bad faith dominates, decentralized governance collapses into:

Endless meta arguments

Capture by the loudest actors

Drift toward hierarchy “for efficiency”

Sound familiar? This is why good faith isn’t sentimental, it’s structural. If you’ve ever tried to maintain a FOSS project while navigating trolls, corporate opportunists, and purity politics, you already know this.

To help the #4opens is a practical test, not a vibe. The #4opens framework exists precisely to operationalize good faith. It asks four simple questions of any grassroots tech project:

Is the data open?

Is the source open?

Are the processes open?

Are the standards open?

This extends beyond traditional open data initiatives (often institutional, often cosmetic). It covers the entire ecosystem of a project, not just its outputs. The value is not ideological purity, it’s resilience. When data, code, process, and standards are open:

Capture becomes harder.

Forking remains possible.

Governance can be contested transparently.

Communities can leave without losing everything.

That’s not abstract politics, it’s #KISS survival architecture. Composting the current rot we touch on here is why #OMN exists as a project. We are living in a digital environment thick with enclosure and manipulation were years of bad faith, disempowerment, and algorithmic extraction have created social decay. The instinct of many geeks is to build a cleaner stack and hope people migrate, but the problem isn’t just software, it’s trust collapse.

If the #openweb is to mean anything beyond developer autonomy, it has to support collective storytelling and coordination, not just individual expression. On this path, the #OMN is a shovel, not a cathedral, a way to compost the mess rather than pretend it isn’t there.

The #OMN (Open Media Network) is not a shiny new protocol. It’s deliberately simple: Publish, Subscribe, Moderate, Rollback, Edit. That’s it, no engagement hacks, no growth funnels and no surveillance capitalism. It’s a #DIY, trust-based, human-moderated space, messy, organic, built for communities, not only users. This matters in the era of #climatechaos and social break down, as climate instability accelerates, centralized platforms will align with state and corporate power to prioritize “order” over dissent and optimize for profitability in shrinking margins.

To balance these communities will need coordination without permission, information flows that aren’t algorithmically distorted and infrastructure they can adapt locally, that’s a social demand. If #FOSS remains culturally optimized for the small minority who enjoy living inside the #geekproblem, it will not meet that demand at all. We need to understand that the vast majority do not want to self-host, they do not want to debate licences, they do not want to live inside issue trackers. They want functioning, trustworthy spaces, if we can’t provide that, someone else will – and it won’t be #4opens.

The hard part is working with the empowered disempowered of our #fashionista class. We have a generation trained in #closed systems that reward performative critique over collective construction. On #dotcons platforms and strands of #NGO thinking, people are empowered to disempower others with common sense #blocking of call-out culture, optics over substance and branding over shared process. You get a strange anti-politics, egotistical, individualistic, allergic to long-term responsibility. A culture that critiques power while replicating it. Escaping this dynamic may be uncomfortable, it may get nasty before it stabilizes.

But here are some kinder strategies we can use:

Make contributions obvious and low-drama, clear process reduces ego battles.

Reward maintenance, not only innovation, culture follows incentives.

Default to transparency over suspicion, sunlight reduces paranoia looping.

Design for groups, not influencers, collective accounts, shared moderation, distributed ownership.

Keep it simple (#KISS), as complexity amplifies gatekeeping.

None of this eliminates conflict, but it shifts the terrain from personality warfare to shared work.

An invitation to the sceptics, you don’t need to buy the rhetoric, maybe ask instead does this increase forkability? Reduce capture risk? Does it lower dependence on extractive infrastructure to strengthen collective agency? If the answers are yes, they belong in the #FOSS conversation. The future of the #openweb will not be secured by better branding or cleverer stacks. It will be secured by projects that treat good faith as a design constraint and collective resilience as the goal.

This is not about blinded purity, it’s about durability. We can keep polishing tools for the tiny minority who enjoy living inside the #geekproblem, but, we also need to build infrastructure that ordinary communities can also use to navigate the storms ahead. The invitation stands, pick up a shovel, help compost the mess by build something that gives back more than it extracts.

#4opens #indymediaback #openweb #compostingthemess #KISS #makeinghistory #OMN

State Funding of #FOSS and Open Source: Is it a Good Idea or a Bad Idea?

Fediverse – What actually happened (no bullshit version)

A few years ago, the liberation cats of the #Fediverse stopped talking to each other. Not only from malice, mostly through burnout, distraction, and quiet withdrawal. Nature abhors a vacuum and into that vacuum stepped the #NGO crew. They in the best hierarchical sense took over, they didn’t “win” our spaces through better ideas, didn’t persuade anyone, they simply occupied every role that looked like coordination, representation, legitimacy that was funding-adjacency. That’s their native skill set, #NGO people don’t build ecosystems; they replace them with management layers, then our created history is sold as branding.

This isn’t accidental, it’s a familiar class of friendly parasites that reproduce by feeding on radical paths and left uninterrupted, they will kill as they have in the past. The painful part is that we saw this coming, and for a moment, we did interrupt it. Projects like #OGB were attempts to embed power visibility, contestability, and trust before capture could harden. But attention drifted, coordination frayed, and then – quite literally – things were blocked.

So here we are again, the mistake, is worth being blunt about, we keep trying to solve cultural and mythic problems with structural and procedural tools. That’s why everything feels exhausting, we say we’re doing “easy things,” then find ourselves writing documents, attending meetings, moderating tensions, negotiating legitimacy, and fighting over process.

That isn’t easy work, it’s managerial labour, and the unseen and unspoken problem is that the #NGO crew love managerial labour, it’s their home turf. Of course, they take over spaces defined by meetings, boards, frameworks, and legitimacy rituals. Meanwhile, the actual easy things – talking to each other, telling our own history, naming capture when it happens, building small, obvious, human-scale tools, refusing the respectability game – quietly disappear if fluffy or are actively pushed under if spiky.

Maybe it’s time, to try anew, we’re circling back to an opening, were a practical path we can focus on not trying to win positions and instead start delegitimising them. #NGO power flows from chairs that everyone else treats as “necessary” to get rid of these we need to name the chairs as optional, loudly, repeatedly: “This working group does not represent us.”, “This foundation is not the Fediverse.”, “This board speaks for itself, not the commons.” it isn’t only confrontation, it’s a calm refusal, low-energy and high impact – to #KISS restarts the conversation sideways instead of head-on.

Don’t attack NGO spaces directly, they’re designed to absorb critique, instead, encircle them with parallel spaces: messy nodes, half-finished proposals, visible disagreements. This is where #OMN-style media matters – aggregate instead of argue, tell the story of what’s happening without asking permission. Use #4opens as a litmus test, not a manifesto. It works best like this: “Cool project, let’s do a quick sanity check.” is it: Open code? Open data? Open standards? Open governance? If the answers get vague, defensive, or managerial, that’s your signal. You don’t need to argue, simply don’t invest trust or energy – capture starves quietly when it isn’t fed.

And yes, calling “mythical people” matters, it’s the missing layer. We don’t just need more frameworks; we need shared stories that make capture feel wrong. Stories of #Indymedia before NGOs. Stories of early #Fediverse moments that worked. Stories of small, trust-based wins. Stories of projects that died from NGO-isation. We should ritualise these: remembering posts, anniversary threads, public post-mortems, “how we fucked this up last time” stories. This is how cultures defend themselves without rules.

A hard but hopeful truth is that we didn’t fail because the ideas were wrong, we failed because we stopped tending the compost. Compost needs turning, air, moisture, attention – the good news is that compost is forgiving, you don’t need permission to start turning it again.

Calling mythical people – if you’re out there and this still itches, we need an affinity group with long memories, allergic to foundations, that only build and then disappear, who value trust over scale. Now would be a good time to stop ignoring each other.

Not to “fix” the #Fediverse, just to make it awkward for capture again. That alone would be a big step forward.

The greybeards and the second sell-out of the #openweb

Ecological Transformation via Digital Abundance

The ecological crisis is not primarily a failure of technology. It is a failure of values. For decades, we’ve been trapped in a toxic logic where growth equals progress, where every solution is expected to expand markets, increase consumption and generate profit for the #nastyfew. The result is a system that treats living ecosystems, human communities and even the future itself as resources to be consumed. This is the logic of the #deathcult.

The #4opens offer a way to break that cycle by starting where the leverage is greatest: information. Digital goods are fundamentally different from physical goods. They are non-rivalrous, freely replicable and infinitely shareable. Knowledge, software, culture and coordination can grow without consuming more material resources. When these become commons instead of commodities, the economic pressure for endless physical expansion begins to weaken.

This isn’t an abstract idea -it’s practical leverage. When knowledge is open, we stop burning forests to print manuals that could be freely shared. When software is commons, we stop manufacturing artificial scarcity through licensing and lock-in. When culture is shared instead of enclosed, we reduce the endless cycle of consumption driven by marketing rather than need.

By moving value creation into digital abundance, we reduce pressure on physical extraction. Fewer products need to be manufactured, shipped, packaged, stored and discarded simply to keep the economy growing. The economy no longer has to pretend that producing more stuff automatically creates better lives. This shift creates the conditions for real ecological transformation.

Energy systems can become local because designs, coordination and maintenance knowledge are openly shared. Communities build, adapt and repair renewable infrastructure without depending on proprietary technology or corporate permission. Circular economies become practical because repair manuals, supply chains and governance are treated as commons rather than trade secrets. Waste becomes a resource instead of an externality.

But the deepest change is cultural. Consumerism loses its grip when identity, creativity and social participation are no longer mediated through purchasing things from the #dotcons. We stop confusing consumption with participation. We stop mistaking marketing for culture. We rediscover that meaning comes from creating, sharing and caring together.

This is where the #OMN path becomes important. The goal is not simply to build better digital tools. It is to create social infrastructure that supports cooperation instead of competition, commons instead of enclosure and participation instead of passive consumption. The #openweb becomes the communication layer for a society organised around resilience rather than extraction.

This is not a call for austerity, it is a different understanding of abundance. Knowledge becomes more valuable the more it is shared. Culture grows richer through participation. Communities become stronger through cooperation. Care increases when it is organised collectively.

Meanwhile, material throughput – extracting, manufacturing, transporting and throwing away – can shrink without reducing human wellbeing. That is the opportunity before us. Not “green capitalism” with better branding, where consumption continues under a different label, but a genuine civilisational shift. Digital abundance allows us to escape the growth trap, while the #4opens provide the governance needed to align human flourishing with ecological limits.

That is not incremental reform, it is a practical path beyond the #deathcult. A future where the planet can recover because we’ve learned to grow what is abundant – knowledge, trust, culture and care – and restrain what is finite. Not just survival, survival with dignity.

The greybeards and the second sell-out of the #openweb

There are familiar voices resurfacing in today’s debates about the future of the web, measured, reflective, earnest, often grey-bearded., and it has funding. These are the people who were there in the Web 2.0 era. The #Flickr builders. The early platform designers, the conference speakers who once talked about “community”, “social objects”, and “public infrastructure”. Many of them now occupy foundations, NGOs, advisory boards, and policy circles.

And they are doing something dangerous, as their thinking is too trapped inside capitalism, and they are selling the #openweb reboot for a second time. Not maliciously, cynically, but from a place of deeply internalised capitalist thinking that they cannot – or will not – step outside.

The original Web 2.0 was built on a powerful lie, one many progressive people wanted to believe, that privately owned platforms could become public infrastructure. “Social” media might actually mean social in a public, civic sense, that venture capital could somehow birth commons. As one of the original designers of Flickr puts it:

“We had sort of deluded ourselves into thinking in Web 2.0 that we were building public infrastructure.”

Yes, exactly, but that delusion wasn’t accidental, it was structural – from trying to build public goods inside a system whose legal obligation is to maximise shareholder value. The moment scale arrived, the moment infrastructure emerged, the public was quietly enclosed. This wasn’t a failure of design, it was a failure of basic political economy.

The problem isn’t insight – it’s the frame – what makes the current moment frustrating isn’t their voices lack insight. On the contrary, their analysis of algorithmic control, enclosure, loss of stewardship, and extractive business models is sometimes sharp. The problem is where their thinking stops.

Again and again, the horizon of possibility remains trapped inside capitalism:

Regulation instead of abolition

Better governance instead of any collective ownership

NGOs instead of grassroots power

“Public–private partnerships” instead of commons

Even when they correctly identify that platforms have become infrastructure, the proposed solutions remain managerial, institutional, and polite. The unspoken assumption is always the same, capitalism stays, “we” sand the sharp edges. This is the limit of their narrow self-imposed view, and the danger to see is that this mirrors of the original sell-out and what makes this especially dangerous is that this thinking now takes up far more space than it deserves.

Just like in the Web 2.0 era, these voices dominate conferences, funding channels, policy conversations, and media narratives. Grassroots alternatives are marginalised as “naïve”, “unscalable”, or “too political”. This is abusive sidelining where the outcome at best is – once again, we are told to be patient. Once again, we are told to trust institutions. Once again, the radical edges are smoothed away.

Fediverse – What actually happened (no bullshit version)

This blinded cowardice mirrors the original sell-out:

Then: “Let’s build community on platforms.”

Now: “Let’s fix platforms with better policy.”

Different language, same enclosure. We see this with the #NGO trap and the illusion of stewardship, #foundations and #NGOs are presented as the solution. “Public product organisations”. “Stewardship entities”. Designed governance models that still focus on state and capital power. It’s the mess we need to see to compost – NGOs are not the commons, they are buffers.

They absorb dissent, professionalise resistance, and translate radical demands into grant-safe language. They reproduce hierarchy while speaking the language of participation. This is not an accident, it is how capitalism metabolises critique.

This is why bridges continue to collapse, I have said myself: “Let’s build bridges. We need these people on side.” Yep, we’ve tried that, the problem is that when challenged – when the underlying mess is named – the response is not dialogue, its #blocking, muting, institutional silence, invitations withdrawn and funding evaporates.

This mess keeps tells us what we need to know, bridge-building only works when both sides are willing to move. When one side controls the platforms, the conferences, and the purse strings, “bridges” become assimilation pipelines.

So yes, the path we need to take is compost, not deference, not cancellation, not personal attack. But refusing to let this thinking keep dominating the space. Compost is how dead ideas become fertile ground for new growth. It is messy, uncomfortable, and necessary.

We don’t need another generation of politely regulated enclosures. We don’t need a warmed up Web 2.0, reboot with better language and worse outcomes.

We need:

Commons, not platforms

Collective ownership, not stewardship theatre

Grassroots infrastructure, not NGO mediation

We need the #4opens, not “ethical-ish” branding. The #openweb will not be rebooted by the same people, using the same frameworks, who helped bury it the first time.

If you want to bridge, comment and engage honestly.
If you want to defend the mess, expect compost.

That’s where new growth actually comes from.

#KISS

The video flow that sparked this post

PS: I kind of like the strong metaphor of house slaves and field slaves, these people are the metaphorical house slaves.

Change is Freedom, Change is Life

We dig. We turn over the old soil, question assumptions, and get honest about what’s working, and what isn’t. We plant, build in the open, share power, and let go of fear. We grow, not by scaling up, but by spreading out: resilient, diverse and interconnected. That’s how we cultivate the commons. You don’t get transformative change by building according to the incentives of the dominant system. A post inspired by rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia as part of the Utopia Reading Group in #Oxford

“There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Most people choose the easy path: they find a nice, safe hierarchy and settle in. They obey the rules, repeat the slogans, and mistake obedience for belonging. They stop thinking for themselves, they stop changing. But change is freedom and change is life. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed captures the tension perfectly – between the anarchic, cooperative world of Anarres and the closed, hierarchical planet of Urras. It’s not only a science-fiction metaphor; it’s the current mirror of the #openweb we refuse to look into. The “open” world we imagine is already all around us, fragile, fragile seedlings buried beneath layers of control, ego, and fear.

This is the mess we need to compost, that we see every day. Talented people watching their work and lives being wasted, good minds submitting to stupid ones. Strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change.

Looking back at web history, think of how #Indymedia burned bright for a moment, then was strangled by internal control and external hostility. Think of how the second reboot – visionOntv on PeerTube – tried to keep that radical history alive, only to collapse again under neglect, lack of support, and the dominance of #dotcons platforms. Ten years of grassroots videos deleted, shadowbanned, or “de-prioritized.” That’s often what the suffocation of freedom looks like, not jackboots, but the slow deletion of memory.

Everywhere, the potential for something living and new gets buried under the weight of control. When a grassroots project loses its edge because it’s easier to fit into “funding priorities.” When energy turns to exhaustion, creativity to compliance, rebellion to report-writing. This is the logic of the #deathcult – the slow suffocation of change.

The #deathcult thrives on fear and hierarchy, the illusion that safety comes from control.
It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that the system teaches them not to. Managers, bureaucrats, “leaders” are all terrified of what real openness might unleash. This is about the banality of obedience. Le Guin warned us that the danger of obedience is not stability, it’s death. Urras, the rich capitalist world, runs on obedience. Anarres, the poor anarchist moon, survives on mutual responsibility.

You can’t get transformative change by operating according to the incentives of that system.
That’s why NGO culture and corporate-funded “innovation” projects always fail the real test, by replicating the control structures they claim to challenge. When we compost culture, the natural world understands what our institutions forget – compost happens whether you want it to or not. What’s dead breaks down, and from that decay, new life takes root.

The same is true for culture and technology. The #dotcons and #closedweb platforms, now with the new #AI wash, trap creativity and channel it into profit. They turn every act of sharing into data extraction, every connection into surveillance. They turn good minds into “content” and living movements into metrics.

We don’t need more “innovation” within this rot, we need composting. That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) is for, taking what’s broken and turning it back into living soil. A simple, federated network built on the #4opens to grow real, grassroots media again, not as a static structure, but as a breathing, evolving commons. Revolution is not destruction; it’s renewal. It’s the composting of the dead so that the living may grow. Revolution is our obligation, our hope of evolution.

Choosing life over control, to choose change is to choose life. To cling to control is to choose decay. The #OMN is one path to life, open, messy, collective. The alternative is more of what we already have: talent wasted, good minds ground down, courage strangled.

Le Guin’s lesson still stands:
“You cannot buy the revolution.
You cannot make the revolution.
You can only be the revolution.”

Let’s be that change to compost the dead systems, and make space for what’s next.

Finding the Rainbow Gathering

#4opens #openweb #OMN #nothingnew #techshit #deathcult #TheDispossessed #UtopiaReadingGroup #DIY #KISS #commons

Building bridges instead of walls

Activist tech has been stuck in “bunker mode” for 20 years. We now need to lift our heads to work on building #4opens native, commons-first systems that store, share, and protect movement knowledge in ways that don’t require a priesthood of insiders to access.

Activist tech is stuck in a defensive crouch

We need to re grow an appreciation that in an active movement, forum threads, shared docs, livestreams, and photos aren’t just chat noise, they’re collective memory. We need to better understand that when we treat them as disposable, we throw away the hard-earned lessons that future activists will desperately need. The solution is #KISS-fed, redundant, federated archiving:

All public movement data sits in the commons.

Metadata + content are mirrored across multiple federated nodes.

Backups are easy to pull, restore, and re-seed by anyone who ever has trust access.

Data is grouped via hashtags, not rigid taxonomies, so it flows where it’s needed.

This is appropriate tech: low-complexity, high-resilience, built for social utility first. But for this to grow it can’t be mediated to death by the #geekproblem – code should follow social needs, not the other way around. If we can get this kind of infrastructure running, we stop losing our history, we keep movements porous instead of paranoid, and we finally start building bridges instead of walls.

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network

Let’s look at a possable example of this: For the #DAT protocol to become relevant in #FOSS activist tech, we need to stop treating it as an isolated island and start building solid bridges to #ActivityPub. The two are not enemies – they are complementary paths. #p2p tools and protocols like DAT brings distributed, peer-to-peer file persistence; ActivityPub brings the social layer, discovery, and conversation. Together, they might create a space where activists choose their preferred path without being siloed or alienated, and without the unhealthy isolation that comes from the current #geekproblem habit of fetishising one protocol at the expense of all others.

Diversity is the basis of any healthy ecosystem – biological, social, or technological – in nature, monocultures are fragile; in tech, monocultures are authoritarian. We need to approach activist infrastructure with the same principles that make ecosystems thrive: multiple species of tools, cross-pollination between communities, and a constant flow of ideas and resources. This doesn’t mean adding complexity for complexity’s sake; it means designing with #KISS in mind, while ensuring redundancy and adaptability.

If we take this ecological view of the #openweb, then bridges are not optional extras, they are the lifelines. In our example, by linking #DAT and #ActivityPub, we create a richer habitat for movements to live in and make it harder for corporate capture to take root, to give people the freedom to move between spaces without losing connection and context. That’s how we replace the bunker mentality with real commons, not just defensive walls, but thriving, interconnected gardens.

The current mainstreaming’s greatest sin is thoughtlessness

Everyone knows we are in a mess, but most people are too distracted to do anything to change this. Most of us keep on the dysfunctional path – scrolling, clicking, consuming – because the current mess we live in is incredibly skilled at hiding most consequences.

The environmental cost is buried under greenwashing. BP rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” Shell sponsors art galleries. Apple makes claims about “carbon-neutral” devices, then glues batteries shut to prevent repair. Meanwhile, rare earth extraction, e-waste, and fast fashion destroy ecosystems from Congo to Cambodia.
The labour cost is outsourced, invisibilized, atomized. Amazon warehouse workers urinate in bottles to keep pace with surveillance timers. Foxconn installs suicide nets around dorms. Uber calls drivers “partners” while avoiding all responsibility for their lives or livelihoods.
The mental health cost is reframed as personal failure. You’re anxious and burnt out? Must be your mindset. Try a mindfulness app. Maybe eat better. Maybe “grind smarter.” Meanwhile, the structure of your life, precarious work, information overload, climate dread, is never questioned.
The social collapse is blamed on the “irresponsible poor” or “divisive politics.” Communities are gutted by austerity, housing is hoarded by speculators, but you’re told it’s your neighbour’s fault, immigrants, the unemployed, the other political tribe. The system throws fuel on every fire, then lectures you on “civility.”

Every crisis becomes your problem, not the system’s. This is because the #deathcult we unconsciously worship doesn’t just produce stuff, it produces numbness, distraction, and above all, thoughtlessness, a never-ending now, stripped of memory and consequence.

And the moment you try to pull back the curtain? There’s a brand, an #NGO ready to sell you “resistance” too. It’s a system designed to make rebellion feel like a cloned lifestyle choice.

A t-shirt with a slogan.
A rainbow flag slapped on a weapons manufacturer.
A “climate justice” conference sponsored by Shell.
A new Netflix docuseries about the thing you’ll forget by next week.

#KISS resistance requires more than outrage, we don’t just need better tech or better politics, we need:

Better attention — to what's real and what's propaganda

Slower thinking — against the churn of hot takes and algorithms

Reclaimed time — stolen back from platform metrics and work schedules

Spaces for consequence — where the impacts of our actions (or inactions) are visible, shareable, accountable

That’s why #DIY infrastructure, the commons, and openness, matter. That’s why we are rebooting the #openweb, with the #4opens, with the #OMN, with peer-to-peer tools, and with each other. And we need to do this before thoughtlessness becomes all we have left in the #mainstreaming mess.

Tech princes and the #deathcult

Capitalism is a hostage situation – not an economy

There are meany sides to the current mess, it’s worth looking at them. An example the #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t any real life, it’s a trap, which we need a way out. The wider picture in our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t have access to,
Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,
Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,
Pay to breathe because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over (inspired by). That is not a functioning economy, it’s not in any way freedom, it’s a hostage situation, where every basic human need is held behind a transactional barrier, and the meter is always running.

This #deathcult is late capitalism: an endless stack of paywalls enclosing what used to be public, shared, and free. It isn’t just about money, it’s about control, dependency, and isolation. It’s a system that need to engineer artificial scarcity, so a #nastyfew can profit while the many just try to survive.

But it wasn’t always like this, for most of human history, people lived within commons-based paths, where land was collectively stewarded, food was grown and shared within communities, tools and knowledge were passed down, not patented and governance was sometimes local and participatory.

The last 200 years of “common sense” capitalism is an enclosure of these commons, first the physical ones (land, water, food), and now the digital and social ones (communication, culture, identity). The #openweb, like the open land before it, is being digitally fenced off. Platform by platform. App by app. Cookie banner by paywall.

This enclosure now defines much of our tech infrastructure, in this #mainstreaming every scroll, click, and share is now mediated by profit-driven platforms. Even activism – once vibrant and messy – is being swallowed by slick interfaces and the same throttled feeds. Resistance is filtered, shadowbanned, deboosted, and pushed to monetize. And “our” #NGOs fighting platform power… are doing so on those same platforms.

It’s an absurdity, and worse: it’s a trap. We need alternatives, real ones. We’re not going to “ethics workshop” our way out of this. We need to rebuild the tools of everyday life – economically, digitally, socially – from the grassroots up.

Commons-based systems, let’s turn some “common sense” on it head, instead of private ownership: stewardship. Instead of scarcity: abundance through sharing. This is where projects, like The Open Media Network (#OMN) come in as a practical framework for grassroots media infrastructure:

Built on the #4opens: open data, source, standards, and governance.

Designed to decentralize publishing, and return control to local communities.

Uses both client-server and P2P bridges for accessibility and resilience.

Encourages trust-based networks over extractive platforms.

OMN is not just theory, it’s active code, messy dev, and practical tools for people to tell their own stories, host their own content, and build alternative knowledge systems outside corporate media. These technologies make community hosting the default – not the exception. They reduce reliance on fragile or compromised #dotcons infrastructure. They’re imperfect, but they’re a step out of the enclosure.

The point isn’t just tech, It’s power, capitalism doesn’t only gate resources. It enforces relationships of power. That’s why rebuilding tech without addressing governance, ownership, and access won’t get us far. The #geekproblem is real: tech that nobody can use isn’t liberation, it’s just another dead-end.

The alternative? Keep it #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), prioritize social usability over technical elegance, build bridges, not silos, return to shared ownership and open processes. Capitalism is a hostage situation, but we can walk out the door – if we build the exit together.

You’re not powerless, and this isn’t about purity or escape. It’s about building real infrastructure for real life, so when the capitalist system keeps crumbling (as it will), we’re not left scrambling. We’ll already be living differently.

#OMN #MakingHistory #4opens #openweb #p2p #indymediaback #geekproblem #commons #decentralize #cooperative #foss #degrowth #resilience

UPDATE the seed of this post was from a toot, but can’t find the original to link to due to the #UX of mastodon updating and no functioning search on my instance to find history, sorry, add in comments if you find the original. Updated

Actors, Power, and Collective Publishing: Rethinking Fediverse Architecture for Grassroots Media

We recently had an extended and thoughtful discussion on signal between collaborators working on #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory, an issue emerged: how should we structure “actors” (ActivityPub identities) in a network where the focus is collective action, not individual performance? This question isn’t only a technical issue, it’s political, and central to the success or failure of rebooting radical grassroots media within the #Fediverse.

The tension is about balancing the individual and the collective. In most current Fediverse platforms (like Mastodon or PeerTube), each user is an “actor” with their own inbox/outbox, mirroring the logic of the mainstream #socialweb where identity and expression are deeply individual. But for platforms rooted in collective publishing, such as a revived #Indymedia, this doesn’t map neatly.

“We are trying to balance individualism with collectivism. People already have all the individualism they can take, we need a structure to support the collective.”

That means maybe moving away from assuming every account needs to be a visible, subscribable actor. Working model: Per-instance actors first, a consensus is emerging around per-instance actors – e.g., the Newswire and Features flows of a local Indymedia site act as the primary publishable entities in the Fediverse. These represent the editorial collective’s curated output – not just anyone shouting into the void.

External trusted contributors (like info@hamishcampbell) would publish content from their own Fediverse accounts using hashtags like #oxfordindymedia, which the local Indymedia instance detects, vets, and republishes.

This brings three key benefits:

Curation over chaos – Stories don’t just flood in via hashtags; they’re filtered through trust relationships.
Permissioned federation – Only trusted flows (or untrusted but manually reviewed ones) are accepted. Hashtag spam is naturally blocked.
Maintaining editorial identity – Subscribing to an Indymedia instance means subscribing to its judgement, not just raw fire hose feeds.

Do we need per-user actors? Here’s where things get messy, and interesting, three models were debated:

Classic Fediverse model: Each user has their own actor. This supports full transparency and traceability of actions, but risks returning to individualist norms and opens the door to abuse or platform drift.
Invisible user accounts: Users exist internally for moderation or curation roles, but aren’t visible in the Fediverse as actors.
Controlled per-user actors: Users do have actors, but these are only used to publish activity logs, not posts. Think: “Editor X approved story Y”, useful for building transparency and trust within an open process.

Option 3 sits nicely with the principles of the #4opens, particularly open process and open governance as it provides a transparent audit trail without pushing users into the spotlight.
#UX vs backend architecture, what becomes clear is that the user experience should foreground collective flows – Features, Newswire, Tags – while any per-user mechanics operate in the background, supporting moderation, traceability, or edge-case publishing. Whether those background accounts are #AP actors or not might depend on implementation details.

“It’s not about the actors per se - it’s about what shows up in the front-end #UX, and how we build trust in the process.”

Final considerations, networks like #IndymediaBack default to collective-first publishing, with user actor functionality off unless needed. #MakingHistory, by contrast, might enable user actor publishing to support mass collaborative storytelling. Both platforms rely on whitelist federation, meaning only trusted instances and users can feed directly into the editorial stream. Abuse prevention comes not just from code, but from the politics of moderation, curation, and shared norms.

We probably need per-user actors, but used sparingly and carefully.
We definitely need per-instance actors for trusted collective outputs.
Hashtags are a start, but the flow must be curated and accountable.
UX should put collectives front and centre, with user identity in the background.
This is a political choice, not just a technical one, and that’s a good thing.

For more on how this fits into the broader reboot of radical media infrastructure, see:
Rebooting Radical Media (YouTube)
Programming: Open Media Network

Dev test work for Makinghistory application

Ignore the #AI (collective intelligence) mess, build the #OMN – this is a path

Yes, I read the post. And yes, the despair is real. The #openweb is being bulldozed by #GenerativeAI like a forest clear-cut by machines driven not by any need, but by greed, profit and power for the #nastyfew. Yes, the #deathcult of techno-capitalism is running its script to the bitter and literally dead-end. And yes, I too wonder if we’ll survive this, but as we say we have a path, and it’s not new, it’s simple, it’s human, and it’s working.

It’s called the #Fediverse and the next step we need to take is “native” applications on this path like the #OMN – the Open Media Network – and it’s built from the bones and dreams of the old web: #4opens, #KISS principles, and trust-based, #DIY infrastructure. It’s a messy, human soup of tagged data and federated flows where people and content are commons by default, not walled gardens and extractive silos.

The magic? It’s not even in the tech (though that matters). It’s in the “common sense” at the core – Anything in, anything out – mediated by trust. Lossy? Yes. Redundant? Absolutely. But that’s a feature, not a bug, it’s what makes it resilient. The blinded #geekproblem keeps trying to engineer this out, but we need to compost that #techshit into something useful, working tools for real people, growing radical networks of care and change.

To those staring into the digital abyss and seeing only Ozymandias and decay, look sideways, the #Fediverse lives, the #openweb still works, and we are building new foundations from the compost of the old. We do not need to be swept along with the gray goo of #AI, we can simply not go there, and instead stay here and focus on the work that is needed.

“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
–Percy Bysshe Shelley

And yes, I see it too, we’ve been holding back on our own power, hesitant. Maybe our despair is part of the mess we need to shake ourselves awake from. So I ask what positive path can we walk? What part of the #OMN can we all help compost, code, shape, or share?

Let’s rebuild the net with hands in the soil and eyes on the stars because the answer isn’t new, it’s what we’ve always done when things fall apart, we grow.

#KISS