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.

Why #FOSS matters socially

The internet didn’t become broken overnight, it drifted from being a network of communities into a marketplace dominated by platforms whose purpose is extracting value. This is the logic of #dotcons most of us invested our lives and community into. How did we get into this mess? The problem isn’t only bad companies, it’s that our digital lives depend entirely on proprietary #dotcons paths and software, commercial interests end up controlling our reality.

This is why #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) matters. The “free” in #FOSS is about freedom, the freedom to use, study, modify and share the tools that shape our lives. Those freedoms create something much more important than software, they create #4opens social power. Open code means community accountability.

Instead of trusting #closedweb corporations, we can build “native” trust through transparency. That changes how communities work as closed platforms create consumers, open projects create participants. The community doesn’t just use the infrastructure, it becomes in part responsible for maintaining it. We can exit to a more #DIY path, were anyone can inspect, improve, challenge and adapt to disparate community needs.

This isn’t always the fastest path as open collaboration is often messy. Consensus takes time, criticism can be uncomfortable. But these are social strengths, not weaknesses. Diverse communities find problems earlier, reduce hidden bias and create paths and systems that are more resilient because they are shared.

An example of how #FOSS works

The #OMN approach builds on this real world path and body of ideas. That technology can strengthen communities rather than replacing them, code can support human trust rather than algorithms deciding everything. Infrastructure should belong to the commons rather than becoming another private enclosure.

Today’s #closedweb social media platforms are digital landlords. Yes you may build a following, create value and invest years of work, but you’re still a tenant. The rules can change overnight, your reach can disappear, your community can be fragmented at the click of a button.

The #openweb offers another path were we have control of identity and content to connect through open protocols instead of closed silos. We need this more than ever to building communities that can survive the failure – or hostility – of any single platform.

We can’t keep repeating the same mess, this composting matters even more in the age of #AI. If the software, models and infrastructure are closed, then a handful of companies determine how knowledge is created, filtered and shared. If they are open, communities can inspect them, improve them and govern them together.

The future isn’t simply open source software, it’s open source society. That means investing back into the commons we depend on. Maintaining infrastructure, supporting contributors, building institutions that outlast individuals. Planting trees whose shade we may never sit under.

That’s what #OMN is about. Not simply writing better code, but helping build a better social fabric for the #openweb. Because freedom isn’t something technology gives us, it’s something communities build together.

A #mainstreaming video looking at this.

The current common sense of #neoliberal worldview replaces trust with greed as the social motivator. The problem is that every successful society is built on trust. When you undermine trust, you build a #deathcult. Climate breakdown, inequality, social isolation and failing public institutions are not accidents – they’re the predictable outcomes.

When people recognise the problem, ask them what the solution is. Most will instinctively reach for the same neoliberal “common sense” that created the crisis. That’s the moment to gently point out that those ideas are part of the #deathcult, not a way out.

The alternative starts with rebuilding trust, commons and community, #FOSS needs to become a core to this.

Why Stories Matter on the #OMN

Facts matter, technology matters, governance matters. But people rarely change because they read theory, a specification or a list of features. People change because of stories, this is why storytelling is central to the #OMN path. A story gives people somewhere to stand, it connects ideas to lived experience.

Instead of explaining the #4opens as an abstract framework, tell the story of a community escaping a #dotcons platform by building trust on the #openweb. Instead of arguing about governance, tell the story of how a group solved a conflict through #OpenProcess. Instead of listing technical features, tell the story of someone who regained control of their community tech after years of platform lock-in.

Stories carry values, the last forty years of #mainstreaming have been held together by stories about competition, consumption and individual success. These stories have normalised the #deathcult, making extraction and enclosure feel like “common sense.” We now need better stories about cooperation instead of competition, commons balancing ownership, about trust instead of surveillance. Stories about building rather than consuming.

The #Fediverse itself is a story, an accidental reboot of the #openweb that proves another internet is possible. It isn’t perfect, but it demonstrates that people can build social infrastructure without billionaires directing the conversation.

The challenge is that the academics or the #geekproblem tell stories only to other, academics or geeks, technical and academic paths are important, but they don’t inspire people to act, so we need stories that people can understand:

A neighbourhood rebuilding local media.
Boaters organising to defend the waterways as a commons.
Communities escaping the #dotcons.
Volunteers composting #techchurn into useful tools.
Ordinary people discovering that they can build infrastructure together.

These stories become shared memory, shared memory becomes culture, culture shapes “common sense.” and changing common sense is how lasting social change happens. So don’t just build software or academic theory, tell stories that help people imagine themselves as part of a healthier #openweb.

#OMN #FOSS #openweb #4opens #ActivityPub #Fediverse #commons #DIY #makinghistory

Why we use the #deathcult hashtag

People sometimes ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult. It isn’t just a provocative label, it is to name the dominant political and economic logic that has shaped the last forty years. By #deathcult, I mean the era of #neoliberalism: a system that treats endless economic growth, privatisation and competition as unquestionable “common sense,” even when the consequences are ecological collapse, growing inequality and social breakdown.

I call it a cult because, like any successful ideology, it becomes difficult to see from the inside. Its assumptions become so normal that alternatives appear impossible. Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, “There Is No Alternative,” sums this up perfectly. The “death” part has become harder to ignore, due to movements like #XR (Extinction Rebellion), the reality of #climatechaos has entered mainstream discussion. We can now see that continuing on our current path means ecological collapse, mass displacement and the deaths of millions – and displacement of billions – of people over the coming century.

Of course, neoliberalism is not something entirely new. It is an extreme form of capitalism, and history has seen similar periods before. One example is Britain’s response to the Irish Potato Famine, where market ideology took precedence over human need, contributing to mass starvation, displacement and suffering.

After the Second World War, many countries moved towards forms of social democracy. Capitalism was softened by stronger public services, labour rights and welfare systems. These reforms were far from perfect, but they recognised that completely unrestrained markets created instability and injustice. In part this “liberal golden” era was held in place by there being an alternative of soviet communism.

From the late 1970s onwards, much of that understanding was forgotten. Deregulation, privatisation and financialisation became the dominant ideology once again. Politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders represent attempts to move back towards that earlier social democratic settlement. Though this compromise path of social democracy is not a final answer, as it still operates within capitalism, but it is certainly preferable to the #neoliberal model that currently dominates. As radicals, though, we should aim higher. We need to build systems based on commons, cooperation, ecological responsibility and democratic participation, not simply manage capitalism more fairly.

This is where #OMN (Open Media Network) comes in. The problems we face are not only economic, they are also about communication. Today’s digital infrastructure is dominated by #dotcons: corporate platforms that monetise attention, shape public debate and concentrate power. Facebook, Google, Apple, X and similar platforms have become essential infrastructure while remaining accountable only to capital rather than communities.

The answer isn’t simply better regulation, it’s rebuilding the #openweb. Like the #Fediverse, the #OMN is one small contribution towards this path: creating media and communication infrastructure based on the #4opens – Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards and Open Process – so communities can shape their own communication instead of renting it from billion-dollar corporations.

People also ask why I use so many hashtags, the answer is simple, the web is made from links. Hashtags are one of the few linking technologies that work across platforms. They allow conversations to escape individual silos and become discoverable across the wider web. They are not meant to replace ideas; they are signposts pointing towards larger conversations that matter. Yes, they can look cryptic, but every shared language starts somewhere. If we never create language for new problems, we remain only trapped inside the vocabulary of the systems we’re trying to change and challenge.

Changing language doesn’t change the world by itself, but it can change how we think about the world, and changing the conversation is often the first step towards changing society itself. That’s why I still use #deathcult, not as an insult, but as a way of naming a system whose destructive logic has become so familiar that people struggle to imagine anything different. The challenge now is not simply to criticise that system, it is to build practical alternatives.

One thing has shifted over the last few years: it’s becoming #mainstreaming to recognise that #neoliberalism is a #deathcult. Composting this mess is the path of #OMN, the #openweb, and the #4opens.

For those who like to believe in social democracy, this isn’t an argument against the gains it has won. Strong public services, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and democratic institutions have all made life better for millions. They matter, and they are worth defending.

But we should also recognise their limits. As long as investment and production remain under the control of capital, democracy stops at the workplace door. We get to vote for governments, but rarely over what our economies produce, how resources are used, or whose needs come first.

The next step is not simply kinder capitalism, but extending democratic principles into the economy itself. Building commons, cooperatives, public ownership where appropriate, community governance, and digital infrastructure that people collectively control. That’s the direction #OMN points towards: not replacing one elitist crew with another, but growing the practical foundations of economic democracy from the grassroots up.

#KISS

Oxford boaters every day commons

In the growing mess, there will be increasing experience of commons as lived infrastructure, not theory, not an idea waiting to be implemented. As the #mainstreaming keeps failing people will need practical, community ways of meeting shared needs that works and exists wherever people cooperate outside of markets and hierarchy. Commons are not abstract systems, they are what people do when they stop waiting for permission.

We have a recent example – #Oxfordboaters – it is messy commons in real time, not a perfect system, more a lived commons under pressure. A community trying to juggle shared infrastructure (boats, moorings, water systems), shared risk (flooding, breakdowns, legal pressure), shared survival (housing precarity, cost of living, access to services) and shared conflict (governance, trust, personality tensions). This example is what commons actually look like in practice, not clean, not tidy, not ideologically pure, but functioning through necessity.

When the state and market do not meet needs, people fall back on each other, sometimes the commons’ path… The lesson we learn: it is easy to see, commons are not harmony, they are coordination under pressure. What we can also see is the mistake #fluffy people make in thinking commons are about agreement, they are not, commons are about negotiating conflict, sharing risk, maintaining infrastructure, building trust over time so we can recover from failure repeatedly. The last 4 months of #Oxfordboaters show all of this, the hard truth – Commons fail when they cannot evolve governance faster than crisis accumulates – this is not a moral failure, it is an organizational challenge.

So why do commons break – and why do they keep coming back. Like most grassroots paths, #Oxfordboaters reveals three recurring pressures:

External pressure – State regulation, land pressure, legal ambiguity, the enclosure dynamic never stops.
Internal fragility – Informal systems rely on trust and this trust gets strained under stress, inequality, and burnout.
Governance lag

Decision-making structures rarely evolve as fast as the problems they face, this is a pattern across almost all commons. Commons do not fail because people stop caring, they fail because complexity outgrows structure. But there is a happy part of composting mess – failure is a part of commons evolution, commons are not stable objects, they are adaptive processes. Oxford boaters shows that even broken commons still generate mutual aid, shared knowledge, infrastructure repair and survival capacity. Yes, in common sense market logic, this would be “inefficient”, in commons logic, it is resilience under constraint.

The #OMN project framing is why this matters beyond boats. The Open Media Network (#OMN) view is simple – we are not just trying to describe commons. We are trying to improve their ability to survive contact with reality. This Oxford example is not a niche story, rather a micro-version of housing systems, digital networks (#fediverse, #openweb), activist spaces, climate adaptation communities and post-institution survival systems. These same patterns repeat everywhere, when systems fail, people build commons whether they call them that or not.

The dangerous mess is we have unlearning communing, the cultural – 40 years of #neoliberal thinking has trained people to believe that trust is weakness, cooperation is fragile, governance must be top-down and commons are “messy exceptions” rather than default behaviour. So even when people build commons, they then try to formalize them into hierarchy by shaping them into organizations or burn out trying to manage them individually. This reaction is the mess we need to compost, our example, Oxford boaters currently fails inside this tension.

Maybe people can learn what actually works, the pragmatic commons path, a few patterns consistently work: small, local decision loops, visible shared infrastructure, flexible governance that evolves to grow redundancy (no single point of failure), permissionless participation and clear boundaries for conflict resolution. This is not simply, but it is a long working #KISS maintenance path.

In the wider world, markets and states are reaching the limits of adaptive capacity, commons are no longer optional, they are what remains when institutions fail to scale care. The #OMN conclusion is simple, commons are how we survive collapse. In the wider ecological context is growing to be unavoidable, with the overlapping crises, ecological, economic, political, informational.

The current mess, and delight at Oxford boaters is a signal, a messy, imperfect signal that says: people will rebuild cooperation when systems break down – but also that we need better ways to support this. Commons are not about perfection, they are about persistence, they are survival systems that people can actually live inside. Our example shows both the fragility and the necessity of this work. The question is not whether commons will exist, it is whether we will learn fast enough to stop repeating the same failures in every new form.

If you are wondering why I keep documenting the issues around activism, this is why, next time, maybe we can learn, maybe we can mediate our “libertarian cats” a bit better and get a less messy path, because we cannot keep making the same mistakes over and over.

I have been through this mess hundreds of times over 40 years of working on change and challenge, outreach and community building. This is not theory, it is experience. Activism and commons spaces are messy by nature, that is part of their strength, but if we don’t learn, the same patterns keep returning, so at the very least:

Can we please fuck up differently this time?

Document the lessons.

Build the memory.

Keep the commons alive.

Thanks for your time, now get out and compost the mess.

#OMN #commons #openweb #fediverse #4opens #climatechaos #mutualaid #socialsystems #realitycheck

Rainbow Culture: The Dream, the Mess and the Commons

The first thing many people notice about a Rainbow Gathering is what is “missing”. There are no ticket booths, no commercial stages, no vendors selling branded experiences, no cash registers. Thousands of people gather in a forest to create temporary villages and cities to share food, build kitchens, make music, care for each other and then disappear again as if they were never there.

The absence of money can seem like a strange fantasy, but the deeper story is that it is not a just a rule, the refusal of commerce was the original idea, Rainbow was built around a simple but radical question – What happens if people try to organise life around sharing instead of buying? Not as theory, not as a manifesto, but as a lived practice.

The idea was the path – The Rainbow Family emerged from the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period where many people were questioning war, consumerism, hierarchy and the social structures around them. There were many competing ideas and paths about how change should happen, some believed confrontation and disruption were necessary, others believed a different approach was needed – Instead of only fighting the existing system, create something outside it, create a living example as a base from growth, temporary spaces, flows where people could experience that another way of organising liveing was possible.

The point was not simply to protest capitalism, the point was to demonstrate that a very diffrent path in life, cooperation was possible. The free festival became the foundation – Food shared freely, skills offered freely, music created freely. People contributing because they wanted to, not because they were being paid. Noncommercial was not separate from the message, it was the message – they setout to grow a real working temporary commons.

The Rainbow Gathering became a real world, but seprated, working flowing commons for the last 50 years in meany different country’s and parts of the world. A place where the normal, “common sense” rules of the market were totaly excluded and where basic needs of the community were organised through collective effort – Kitchens, water, medical care, childcare, information sharing, conflict resolution. On this practical, working alt path the important thing was not that everything was perfect, it was that people create the working infrastructure of a very different culture.

This is the part often misunderstood, a commons is not the absence of organisation, a commons is a different kind of organisation, that requires participation, responsibility and people that care. One core lessern of the 1960-70’s is that freedom without responsibility does not create a commons, it creates a sometimes butifual tragedy. The rejection of money was both symbolic and very practical, money does more than exchange goods, it creates relationships between buyers and sellers, it introduces ownership, competition and hierarchy what the Rainbow crew called, in there folksy – spiritual way – Babylon.

Why? Because if someone can buy influence, buy comfort or buy power, the social relationships fundemently change. The Rainbow path was, remove the market inside the space and see what grows instead. The “Magic Hat” became one solution, the gathering still existed in a world where food, supplies and transport required money, the difference was that money was moved into the background as a part of the wider gift economy that shapes these nomadic villages and citys

With the magic hat people contributed anonymously, resources become collective, the camp itself remained based on sharing. It was not pretending the outside world did not exist, it created a different relationship, the value was about belonging. This path treated humans as creators – a culture where at best nobody was left behind as only a consumer, nobody was only a customer, nobody was reduced to economic value, instead a culture were everyone had something to contribute to grow there sense of belong.

This is why Rainbow connects with wider commons movements, the same question appears in many places – Can people build systems based on cooperation instead of extraction? Can communities create value without everything becoming a product? Online this is also the question at the heart of the #openweb that meany people fail to talk about, online this is a mess we need to compost.

The problems – every commons faces the same challenges – that people are messy, the same openness that pushes participation also pushes nasty problems. Rainbow developed its own language for this “Drainbow.” The word describes people taking more than they give, people who consume the resources of the gathering without contributing. At one level, this is a problem, as a community based on mutual aid depends on people participating, a commons duse need boundaries. But if those boundaries become a way of creating insiders and outsiders, the original path is weakened.

This is the ongoing Rainbow tension – how do you stay open without being overwhelmed? How do you protect the commons without creating hierarchy? It is a living contradiction, that still exists, the ongoing blaenceing still demonstrates that people can cooperate on a huge scale for 50 years, but also how difficult cooperation can be to sustain. Consensus can be beautiful, but it can also be exhausting, leaderlessness prevents domination, but it can also creates confusion, openness creates freedom, but this creates vulnerability.

These are the challenges of any attempt to build a different culture. There is also a modern lesson here – When we describe movements like Rainbow, there is a tendency to turn them into either mythology or failure. Either “Look at this perfect alternative society.” Or “Look at this chaotic disaster.” Both extremist common sense views miss the point, the important question is what did people learn by living this life?

Culture is not built by perfect systems, it is built through practice, through mistakes, through correction – through people returning and trying again. Rainbow shows that the infrastructure matters – The kitchens mattered – The councils mattered – The shared practices mattered. The technology we use even in back to the land movements like rainbow is social. The same is true for open media were a new publishing system will not create a commons by itself.

The Rainbow story is not that humans can’t escape all conflict, humans bring conflict with them. The story is that conflict can happen inside a different framework, a framework based on trying, sharing, learning and repairing. That another way of organising is possible, 50 year of rainbow show that people are capable of creating temporary worlds outside the dominant logic.

Yes, commons are fragile, but they matter, on this alt juorny the path is not a finished destination, and like every commons, they survive only when people keep tending them.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #commons #indymediaback #Oxfordboaters

The everyday con: How the #deathcult turns crisis into extraction

The story is simple once you stop looking at the green branding and start looking at social power. A powerless tenant farmer in the Cairngorms watches land his family has worked for generations sell for ten times what it was worth only a few years ago. Not because farming suddenly became more valuable, but because carbon became a speculative asset. A corporation somewhere needs a green badge, farm land becomes the badge, our agriculture disappearing becomes the cost. This is not a “mistake”, its normal, this is the “common sense” system working as designed. #ClimateChaos under capitalism becomes another market opportunity, another asset class, another enclosure of the commons.

The mechanism of the #Carboncon, a corporation that has power can carry on almost exactly as before climate change became an issue: same factories, same flights, same extraction, same emissions, same growth ideology. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants trees on it, and announces to the world that it is now “carbon neutral.” If it wants more PR sparkle, it calls itself “carbon negative.” Nothing fundamental changes. The emissions are still happening, extraction is still happening, the destruction is still happening.

What changes is the accounting story, a piece of land somewhere else is converted into a tradable abstraction that launders the corporation’s image while allowing business-as-usual to continue. This is the logic of #neoliberalism applied to ecology – if there is a crisis, turn the crisis into a market. Our glaring current example of this is BrewDog and its greenwashing cycle, #BrewDog becomes a perfect illustration of the mess, in 2020 the company bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, partly funded through public grants, promising millions of trees and “carbon negative” operations.

Then reality hit a large number of trees died, peat disturbance has released stored carbon, regulators ruled the carbon-negative advertising misleading, the branding quietly disappeared, and the estate was later sold into the carbon-offset market. Public money in, #PR campaign launched, trees dead, farmer displaced, badge worn, land commodified and Carbon credits traded – Business continues as normal, round and round the #deathcult spins.

This should sound historically familiar: The Highland Clearances never really ended, the justification changed. Then it was sheep, now it is carbon. Communities are again being displaced by distant capital as land is consolidated into investment portfolios instead of living local economies. The mess is productive mixed-use landscapes are transformed into speculative ecological assets managed for investors, corporations, and global finance.

This is enclosure updated for the era of #climatechaos. Around half of Scottish estate sales in recent years have gone to investment funds, corporations, and large trusts rather than people intending to actually live on and work the land. At the same time local communities are priced out, young farmers are locked out, food production declines, rural life becomes hollowed out, and decision-making moves further away from the people directly affected.

The language changes, the extraction remains the same, the deeper problem is that people still expect the systems causing the crisis to somehow solve the crisis. But capitalism does not solve crises, it monetises them – when pollution becomes profitable, pollution markets appear, when climate collapses, carbon markets appear, when social breakdown accelerates, surveillance markets appear, when loneliness spreads, platform monopolies appear. The system feeds on crisis because crisis creates new opportunities for extraction #KISS.

This is why the #mainstreaming obsession with “green growth” is ideological theatre, infinite growth on a finite planet was always insane, adding green branding does not make it sane in any way. The carbon market does not reduce emissions, it redistributes responsibility while preserving existing power structures. The food grown by local farmers is real, the communities rooted in landscapes are real, the accumulated ecological knowledge is real. The carbon spreadsheet is an abstraction traded by financial actors who have little or no connection to the land itself.

This is where projects like #OMN matter, its path is about rebuilding the social infrastructure needed for collective action outside the control of #dotcons, PR agencies, NGOs, and corporate gatekeepers. Because right now, the stories people hear are shaped by institutions whose survival depends on preserving the existing system. The corporation has a marketing department, the local people usually does not, so the lies travel faster than the truth.

The #openweb matters because communities need their own media infrastructure to organise, communicate, document to resist enclosure in all its modern forms. Without this, even resistance becomes mediated through controlling paths designed to neutralise it. A society built on commodification will commodify nature, society built on extraction will extract from ecological collapse itself, society built on #stupidindividualism will struggle to defend commons and collective life in any meaningful way. This is why we need to become the change and challenge, not through current common sense purity politics, not through #fashionista performative consumerism, and definitely not through corporate-approved and funded activism.

But through rebuilding #OMN commons-based culture and infrastructure from the ground up, by compost not branding – our tools are shovels, not greenwashed investment portfolios. The future depends on whether we keep feeding the #deathcult or start growing alternatives.

#OMN #OpenWeb #ClimateChaos #CarbonCredits #Commons #FoodSovereignty #MutualAid #LandJustice #Enclosure #Deathcult #Dotcons #Mainstreaming #4Opens #NothingNew

The #encryptionist detour

Let’s look back to before the #Fediverse reboot, to be honest about the last two decades of #openweb failure, for a long time we got pulled off the path – not only by enemies, but by a mix of fear, fashion, and half-understood technical “solutions” that felt right to fearful people at the time. The rise of the blinded #encryptionist mindset came out of real conditions of mass surveillance revelations (Snowden era), common sense #neoliberal distrust of states and corporations and the real harms of our worship of the (same neoliberal) #deathcult of the #dotcons

At the time encryption mattered – and still does – private space matters, protection matters. But what happened next is where things went wrong – we shifted focus from necessary tool to blinded totalising path. For the #geekproblem and its fashionista followers – encryption shifted from being a tool in the stack to the answer to everything.

Instead of asking what should be public? – what should be private? And how do we build shared, accountable space? We got a flattened answer of “make everything encrypted and trust-less” that sounds good to the blinded fear filled crew as It feels “safe”. But if you are not blind, it obviously undermines the foundations of the #openweb we were working on, as the #openweb isn’t built on secrecy – it’s built on shared visibility, trust, and negotiation.

This was mess, enter #blockchain and #DAO – the peak of the detour, this is where the #fashionista layer really took over. Into this already confused path stepped #blockchain, #NFT’s and #DAO governance models of token economies. The mess making was wrapped in smoke and mirrors language of decentralization, autonomy and trustlessness to “fixing governance”.

But look at what they actually did – financialization of everything, instead of building commons, we got tokens, ledgers, “market” incentives leading to speculation. This is a easy to see failed imagination of market logic reintroduced through the back door of wealth = power, not in any way new, it’s smoke and mirrors to hide the same old system the native #openweb path was supposed to move beyond. This detour directly contradicts gift economies, commons-based governance and trust-based collaboration, it was used to push this needed path out of sight.

It’s the normal mess of fear based #stupidindividualism of governance avoidance disguised as governance. DAOs didn’t in any way solve governance, they simply avoided it as real governance is messy, social, contextual, rooted in trust and relationships. DAOs tried and failed to replace this with hard voting mechanisms, token-weighted decisions and rigid rules. That’s not in any way useful governance, that’s automation of power to remove the human layer instead of engaging with it, its pure #geekproblem that our #fashionistas were to blind (or self-interested) to see past.

This is the same problem we are repeating today (still in embryo) with the current new crew taking over pushing the fedivers #openweb reboot – this time its not only encryption – but it’s the same mess of shifting focus away from what actually matters, the same distraction. What can we compost from the last mess, to shine light on this current path, back in the day people were busy writing whitepapers, launching tokens, debating protocol layers. Were they should have been building communities, maintaining infrastructure to grow trust networks to support real-world #KISS.

This misdirection of focus, resources and energy is the recurring damage as attention is diverted away from the soil layer into tiny self-interested abstract cliques that never take root. The #geekproblem and the #NGO loop feed this mess, as the fashionista class capture does not happen in isolation. It is amplified by two reinforcing dynamics – the #geekproblem – preference for technical certainty over social mess, belief that systems can replace relationships, discomfort with ambiguity and lived complexity. The #NGO layer with its need for fundable, legible “solutions” – leading to a preference for clean frameworks – over messy reality – career pathways built on producing narratives, not outcomes.

Put these together, and you get complicated “solutions” that look impressive, but don’t work in practice. Back then we had a decade of drift we need to not repeat now. Back then we ended up with over-engineered systems nobody uses, governance models disconnected from lived communities and fragmented efforts chasing the next “solution”. This weakened focus on building actual alternatives, meanwhile over the same vacuum the #dotcons carried on consolidating power.

The reality check for today is that we built a pile of #techshit, and we are doing the same now with the current takeover crew of the #Fediverse. The last time because we failed to compost the accumulated outcome of the mess of abandoned projects, broken promises, conceptual clutter we still have the current confused direction. We need to now compost this historical mess, as keeping pretending this is fine is part of the problem, it’s not fine. But – and this matters – this “shit” doesn’t need to be useless, it’s compost.

The native path we didn’t take (but still can), was always simpler, and still is, to build in public (#4opens), separate public and private space (#KISS), focus on trust, not “trustless”, grow from real communities, not closed cliques. We need to develop governance as lived practice, not only code, this is what #OMN and #OGB are pointing toward – human networks first, tech as support, not driver, openness as default for shared knowledge, privacy where it actually matters.

If we’re serious about a future – it is to stop chasing totalising tech fixes, stop “common sense” financialising community, stop pretending governance can be automated and start growing from the soil up. And most importantly shift from control → collaboration, from abstraction → grounded practice to shift from narrative → lived reality.

The point is the #encryptionist turn wasn’t (only) evil as it was a reaction to real harm. But it became a dead end when it tried to replace the social with the technical. What we need to lean from this to shift the current mess is if we want a real #openweb we don’t need more “solutions”, we need to get our hands dirty again to compost the mess to make soil to plant something much more real that can grow.

#openweb #4opens #OGB #OMN #geekproblem #techshit #KISS

The Crew – Paths to Growth?

So what path should we be focusing on to balance this current oligarchy mess. The #OMN (Open Media Network) is decentralized, grassroots, focused on an “open process” rather than a fixed, top-down control structure, it’s a governance model:

Continuous ecological process, as navigation through lived memory rather than a set of static rules.
Decentralized & community-driven, from users, producers/creators, and admins, aiming to balance out central authority.
Federated coordination, strong transparency were no one has to agree, but reasoning and actions are publicly visible to produce accountability for public mess making.
The #4opens Principles – building on open data, open source, open standards, and open process.
Emergent structure, grows organically through “lived collaboration” and social federated tech flows #OGB (Open Governance Body).

The #OMN is on this path to growing an alternatives to corporate-controlled platforms (#dotcons), to grow a “public-first” digital commons.

People resist visible structure

The #dotcons, #mainstreaming, and Build to Walk Away

Three years ago I was trying to explain something simple in language liberals might actually hear. They talk about “platform capitalism.” Fine. But I’ve been calling it the #dotcons for 20 years – because that’s what it is – a con. The last 30 years of tech hasn’t just drifted into this mess. It’s been shaped, step by step, enclosure by enclosure, into systems designed to extract value from us. What we now call the internet is, in large part, a machine built to manipulate, capture, and profit.

The old #openweb got fenced in, and most people, especially polite liberal society, went along with it. So we need to talk about the return and the problem. Now we have a shift of the #mainstreaming is flowing back toward the #openweb, that should be a good thing. But there is a problem: people don’t leave the #dotcons behind when they move, they bring the culture with them. What we’re seeing is a flood of the same patterns – extractive behaviour, ego performance, status games. Not from one “side,” but from everywhere. The habits built inside the #dotcons don’t magically disappear just because the platform changes.

So the real issue isn’t technical, it’s cultural. If we don’t actively mediate this influx, we won’t rebuild the #openweb – we’ll just recreate the same broken systems in slightly different code. So why do I talk so much about compost, and mess not being the problem. Mess is necessary, but only if it composts – if it breaks down into something fertile, right now, we’re mostly just piling it higher.

This is where projects like #indymediaback and #OGB matter. They’re not perfect, but they are native to the #openweb path: grounded in trust, process, and the #4opens rather than control, branding, and capture. The question isn’t whether #mainstreaming is good or bad. The question is: how do we hold the cultural line so that what grows is something genuinely different? Because if we don’t, the #dotcons don’t need to defeat us, we’ll blindly rebuild them ourselves.

So why do I argue we can’t just leave the #dotcons? This is where people get it wrong, every time the #dotcons tighten control – censoring, tweaking algorithms, shifting rules – the reaction is the same: leave, build the #openweb. Yes, build the #openweb, but the idea that we should stop organizing inside the #dotcons right now? That’s a trap, because billions of people are still there. The conversations, the communities, the movements, they haven’t magically migrated. Walking away doesn’t free those people, it abandons them, leaving the space to be shaped entirely by the #deathcult and the forces already in control.

This is #nothingnew. The #dotcons are #closedweb infrastructure. They serve power because they were built to serve power. Expecting anything else is misunderstanding the system. The real question has never been: are these platforms good? It’s: what do we do, given that this is where people are?

The #geekproblem and the exodus fantasy, is a persistent fantasy – a classic #geekproblem – that if we just build better tools, people will come. They won’t, not on their own. A clean exodus to the #fediverse or any #openweb space doesn’t happen because we post about it. Movement-building has never worked like that, people move through relationships, trust, and shared struggle – not technical superiority.

So if you abandon the spaces where people already are, you cut those pathways. The #OMN approach has always been simple to use the #dotcons as a bridge, not a home, only seed organizing where people already are while focusing on growing the #openweb in parallel by clearly keep our foundations in the #4opens. This isn’t about purity, it’s about effectiveness, don’t fall into #stupidindividualism, the idea that personal withdrawal is more important than collective reach. This is about infrastructure and grounding, if the #dotcons can switch you off at any moment, they cannot be your foundation.

That’s why we need:

indymediaback as publishing roots
activitypub and the #fediverse as distributed infrastructure
OMN as a bridge between cultures and spaces

This is the practical expression of the #4opens: not just open code, but open process and open trust. Don’t build your house on someone else’s land, but don’t stop talking to the people still living there either. Stay in the fight, when the #dotcons clamp down, it’s not a surprise, it’s a signal of what they are, and what they’ve always been.

The answer isn’t to run away, it’s to root ourselves somewhere that can’t be shut down, while continuing to show up where the people are. Build the #openweb, stay in the fight, keep it simple #KISS

Gates vs Bridges: the obscure politics of the #geekproblem

In the #geekproblem mindset, crossing a protocol flow is a gateway were in #openweb terms, it’s a bridge. That difference is not technical – it’s social – the difference between CONTROL and TRUST. A gate is something you lock, permission, authentication, enforcement were a bridge is something you cross, connection, flow, relationship. In the physical world, we don’t put gates on bridges as a default, but in software, we keep rebuilding them, and then wondering why things fragment.

RSS is a bridge.

Closed APIs are gates.

This should be obvious, but it keeps getting lost inside coding culture.

This isn’t just a #mainstreaming problem, if this critique only applied to Big Tech (#dotcons), it would be easy, but it doesn’t. From 30 years of building in alt-tech spaces – hundreds of projects, no bosses, no corporate control – the same pattern keeps reappearing. Control creeps in, what’s striking is that this cuts across both mainstreaming “professional” engineering culture and radical, horizontal, “alternative” tech spaces. That’s why it’s an overarching #geekproblem, the shared cultural bias toward CONTROL in both code and community design.

The deeper issue is social blindness, at the root of this is something uncomfortable – A lack of joined-up social thinking – when a relatively small technical minority designs systems based on limited social experience, abstract models of human behaviour and little grounding in historical or grassroots movements.

When these systems scale globally, the result is tools fail to support humane, collective use, and undermine trust instead of building it, they reproduce the same power dynamics they claim to escape. This feeds the wider #dotcons worldview – even when the intent is “alternative”. It’s not just “the spirit of the age” it’s a worldview of a narrow culture that has become infrastructural. We’re all, to some extent, still operating inside this #deathcult logic, even when we think we’re critiquing it.

So a good first step is looking at who is funding the problem, this is where foundations and FOSS funding bodies need to look closely. A lot of funding unintentionally reinforces gate-based architectures, complexity that centralises control and abstract innovation over lived social practice. We keep funding new gates, then asking why the #openweb doesn’t grow. It #KISS that if people cannot mentally model a system, they cannot govern it, if they cannot govern it, power centralises every time.

A different path is bridges and flows. Projects like #OMN and #indymediaback take this different approach of start with flows, not platforms, building bridges, not gateways. The focus is on keeping systems simple enough to understand (#KISS) to grow trust as social and visible, not hidden in code. Using the #4opens as grounding, not branding, we understand none of this is new, that’s the value of #nothingnew. As I keep pointing out it’s how RSS worked, early Indymedia worked and large parts of the existing Fediverse still work (when not over-engineered).

On #blocking and conflict – Yes, it’s sometimes necessary, but often it’s a symptom of deeper failure of rigid, internalised worldviews, lack of shared mediation tools and systems designed for exclusion rather than negotiation. It’s easy to block, it’s much harder to build bridges, so the real question is how do we design systems that reduce pointless conflict without exhausting the people inside them? Food for thought (and compost).

We’re all carrying some of this mess, it’s fine – it’s compost. But if we don’t consciously shift from gates to bridges, we’ll keep rebuilding the same broken systems, just with nicer branding. As bridges scale trust – Gates scale control, to mediate this mess, the hard question we need to ask the #mainstreaming is which one are they funding?

#openweb #4opens #OMN

Our #geekproblem needs to think about this “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

This applies to code too, the social structures developers work inside shape the problems they see, the solutions they build, and the assumptions buried in the code.

You don’t escape politics by writing software. You often just hide the politics inside the software.

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?

Broken institutions, and the need to rebuild the commons

For progressive and radical people, the central political questions of our time is simple to ask but hard to answer – Why is it so difficult to rebuild the institutions that were destroyed in our #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s? And more importantly why does the impossibility of rebuilding them make it so hard to change the needed balance of power in society? These question matters for working on the future of the society and most importantly the grassroots part of this: #openweb, grassroots media, and projects like #OMN.

The hollowing out of institutions, in the 20th century, politics used to be deeply institutional. People didn’t just express opinions, they joined organizations. If you marched in a protest, we usually marched as a member of something: a trade union, a political party, a civil rights organization or community association. These organizations formed the infrastructure of democracy, connecting everyday anger and hope to real power.

But beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, much of this infrastructure was deliberately dismantled. Union power was broken, mass political parties were hollowed out, and community organizations lost resources and influence. The result is the political landscape we inherit, a society with political anger but without any working political structures.

Today we live in what #fashionistas and academics call #hyperpolitics or what I call #stupidindividualism in the hashtag story. Yes, some people are more politically engaged than they were in the 1990s or early 2000s, more fluffy protests, #dotcons online political discussion, but this engagement is almost all unstructured in the old sense.

Millions may join a protest or share a political message in the #dotcons, yet very little, if any lasting organization emerges from this. This surface engagement creates a strange paradox of huge drifting mobilizations leading to little if any structural change. We can have the largest protests in history – yet the underlying power structures remain completely untouched.

Closed #dotcons social media lowered the cost of expression, but algorithmic ally shaped it into smoke and mirrors. Let’s take a moment to lift the lid on this #techshit mess, the role of media in this is complex, on the positive side, #closedweb platforms drastically reduced the cost of political expression.

Forty years ago, if you wanted to express a political opinion publicly you needed a newspaper, radio station, a public meeting or to stand in a square shouting. Now you can reach thousands of people instantly, but there is a downside that #dotcons smoke and mirror online engagement replaces the slow work of institution-building. Posting, sharing, and reacting can feel like participation, but it has little role in building the durable structures needed for any long-term change or challenge.

So why do the current hard right succeed without institutions? There is an uncomfortable asymmetry between left and right, the right carry out its agenda without building mass organizations, because it relys on existing #elitist power structures, wealthy donors, state institutions and traditional corporate media.

The left cannot rely on these, historically the left needed mass organizations because its power came from collective action – workers, communities, movements – without those structures, left politics becomes, mess, fragmented and reactive. This is why protest waves can be enormous but still fail to shift any real policy.

Then we have the #undeadleft problem where vertical left responds to this crisis with nostalgia, there imagination stops at rebuilding the mass political parties and institutions of the 20th century. But this is to often like trying to animate a corpse, even if you could recreate it, the environment has changed so much that it wouldn’t survive.

At the same time, the opposite response – abandoning institutions entirely to relying purely on digital networks – also fails. Purely online movements dissolve as quickly as they form. We need a #DIY hybrid path based on federated #4opens institutions like the tools we are building and rebooting with the #OMN projects.

Not rigid old institutions, not purely online networks, but something that seeds the in between. The path is not to create another platform, it is to expand #federated #p2p infrastructure for collective media and collective politics. The original #openweb worked because it supported networks of communities, independent publishers and grassroots movements. The corporate #dotcons replaced this with extractive platforms designed for profit and control.

On this path #KISS rebuilding the commons means rebuilding the social infrastructure of media, not just tools, but institutions and practices that persist to allow collective voices to organize. The simple truth, for real political change, we cannot rely on viral posts, temporary movements or algorithmic attention. We need structures that last, connect people, that turn energy into horizontal power. That work is slow, messy, and unfashionable, but like digging compost for a garden, it’s the only way anything grows.

A path to start to compost this #techshit is growing horizontal tools from the #Fediverse for real change (#OMN).

If the problem of our time is political energy without institutions, then the opportunity is clear,
build new institutions native to the #openweb. Not simply recreate the rigid organizations of the 20th century, and not fall into the hollow performative politics of the #dotcons. Instead, we grow native horizontal digital tools to help people organize, coordinate, and act collectively. This is where the Fediverse and projects like #OMN matter.

The #Fediverse already proves that distributed infrastructure works, but right now it is mostly used for conversation. If we want meaningful change and challenge, we need to extend it into practical coordination and collective action, by build tools for organizing, not just talking

Current social media tools are built for attention and engagement, not organization. What we need to add to the mix is simple #4opens tools that help people form groups, coordinate action, share resources, document activity and most importantly maintain continuity over time (#makinghistory). The Fediverse already has #fashionista and #geekproblem pieces of this:

Mastodon / Pleroma → conversation

Mobilizon → events and gatherings

PeerTube → video publishing

PixelFed → visual storytelling

Lemmy / Kbin → community forums

These existing pieces can become seeds to be woven together into workflows for collective action. On this path we need to remember the goal is not more platforms, it’s practical ecosystems. For this to work a first step is rebuilding commons-based media. A core idea behind #OMN is returning to something like the #Indymedia publishing model, but rebuilt using modern federated tools. Instead of a single website, imagine distributed publishing nodes where local groups post reports, media is shared across networks, discussions happen across servers and archives remain accessible and most importantly meaningful.

This builds collective memory, something the algorithmic feeds of the #dotcons constantly destroy – Movements need memory to learn.

#makinghistory is the same code-base as this grassroots media project

One reason mass organizations collapsed is that participation became too heavy, people don’t want to “join a church” politically any more. So tools should allow different levels of engagement, casual participation, occasional contribution, active organizing with core stewardship. The #Fediverse naturally supports this because it allows loose affiliation rather than rigid membership. You don’t need permission from a central authority to participate.

To make this work we need to focus on infrastructure, not branding. A common #NGO trap in activist tech is building new branded platforms that compete with existing networks. That approach usually fails, the better path is infrastructure building based on protocols instead of platforms for #4opens interoperability instead of silos, tools that connect existing communities. This was the original power of the #openweb, protocols scale, platforms capture.

Keep the tech simple (#KISS), as the biggest barrier to grassroots technology is complexity, many promising projects fail because they become too technical for real communities to use. So the rule should always be KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Tools should be installable easily, understandable by non-geeks and maintainable by small communities to grow resilience without large funding. If only developers can run the system, it will never become a movement infrastructure.

Compost the failures (#techshit) is another key idea, recognizing that the tech world constantly churns useful waste – old tools, failed platforms, abandoned code, all of this is #techshit that can be composted instead of chasing fashionable new tech, we reuse working ideas, simplify existing tools to combine proven approaches. The #openweb already solved many of these problems decades ago, sometimes progress means going back to what worked.

Build trust networks, as the most important layer isn’t technical – it’s social. Horizontal networks only function when there is trust and shared culture. The #Fediverse works because communities can federate with trusted peers, block hostile actors, build local norms. This allows networks to remain open but resilient – the challenge is nurturing communities of practice around the tools.

Grow slowly and organically, movements that scale too quickly often collapse. The better model is ecological growth with small nodes → connected networks → resilient ecosystems, just like compost turning into soil. The goal is not explosive growth, its sustainable infrastructure for collective action.

The real challenge is the biggest obstacle isn’t technology, it’s the #geekproblem – the gap between technical culture and social reality – too many tech projects assume that better tools automatically produce social change, but tools only matter when they are embedded in real communities and struggles.

The work of projects like #OMN is bridging that gap, shovels, not silver bullets, we don’t need magic platforms, we need shovels, tools that help people dig, build, connect, and organize together on the native #openweb. If we can do that, the Fediverse becomes more than an alternative social network, it becomes infrastructure for democratic power.

What projects like #OMN can learn from history

A note to #FOSS funders

I’ve been working at the heart of this space for more than 30 years, funded and unfunded. In that time I’ve seen hundreds of alternative tech projects start with energy and good intentions, most of them wither on the vine, a very small number flower.

After watching this cycle repeat for decades, one thing has become clear: the projects that survive and grow almost always follow a simple pattern. I call this the #4opens, other people describe similar ideas as open source development, open governance, or commons-based development, the label doesn’t matter – the practice does.

If you want to know which projects will flower and which will wither, look at the ground, not the words. The #4opens ask four simple questions:

Open data – can people access and reuse the information?

Open source – can people read, modify, and share the code?

Open process – can people see and participate in how decisions are made?

Open standards – can different systems interoperate and grow a wider ecosystem?

Projects that are open in all four of these ways, with OK #UX tend to build living ecosystems, projects that are only partially open tend to stall or collapse. Over the years two patterns constantly undermine good projects.

#geekproblem – A teenage mix of arrogance and ignorance that is surprisingly universal in tech culture. Developers assume technical elegance (and complexity) will automatically solve social problems. They constantly underestimate governance, community, and messy human reality.

#dotcons – The opposite pressure, corporate platforms pushing business models that prioritize extraction and growth over human need. They happily wrap themselves in the language of “open” while building fundamentally closed systems.

Both pressures distort funding decisions, both lead to projects that sound open but aren’t. Money is a dangerous subject, yes, funding matters, but money inside infrastructure projects to often distorts them. For #openweb work, a useful rule of thumb is – Keep the core simple, focus funding on maintaining the #4opens infrastructure, let many different organizations, businesses, and NGOs build external services and applications on top not as foundations.

This keeps the core commons stable while allowing diversity and experimentation around this, the #KISS principle applied to digital commons. When funding pushes too many external agendas into the core, projects become heavy, political, and fragile.

Some uncomfortable truths, over the last decade we’ve been told several stories about security and scale that simply don’t hold up. There is no security in CLOSED systems, security emerges from open scrutiny and shared responsibility:

There is no security in radical individualism, security emerges from community.

There is no security in “trustless” systems, real resilience grows from social trust.

These ideas have been obscured by hype cycles and by the influence of #dotcons and their shadow allies, the #encryptionists who push purely technical “trustless” thinking. Both camps wrap themselves in the language of openness, but their systems remain structurally closed. Words are wind, look at the ground: #4opens.

The unspoken scaling problem, there is also an unspoken #geekproblem around how we think about scaling. When many developers talk about #p2p, they imagine data-to-data scaling, systems optimised to move information as efficiently as possible. From that perspective, human friction looks like a problem.

But if you see #p2p as human-to-human, the picture changes. Human scaling limits – smaller communities, slower processes, local trust networks – are not bugs, they are virtues, creating resilience and accountability. The data-first path is the one favoured by the #dotcons.
The human-first path is the one the #openweb actually needs. Funders should, but to often are not, be aware of which philosophy a project is building around.

A simple test If you want a quick filter when looking at proposals, ask: