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:

Does this project genuinely follow the #4opens?

Does it build community and governance, not just code?

Is it resilient without permanent central funding?

Does it strengthen the commons, rather than a future platform?

Projects that pass these tests are the ones most likely to flower, everything else tends to wither – food for thought.

#EU #NLnet #NGI #funding

Make some FOSS compost

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?

The tension that’s pushed back into the fediverse the last few years

DRAFT

Scale changes everything as human behaviour does not stay the same as groups scale. The instincts that helped small tribes survive – loyalty, signalling belonging, defending boundaries, competing for status, consolidating influence – functioned well within natural limits. In small groups, feedback was immediate. Consequences were visible. Power was constrained by proximity and material reality.

But when those same instincts operate at contempery social scale, inside complex technological societies, like the current #NGO fediverse, they stop stabilising systems and begin to destabilise them. What once supported survival can amplify fragmentation. What once built cohesion can produce polarisation. What once protected the group can spiral into extraction and enclosure we start to see now. This is not a moral failure of the human species, it is a predictable outcome of scale.

We now live inside systems where ancient social instincts interact with global networks, algorithmic amplification, financial abstraction, and industrial metabolism. The more-than-human crisis – climatechaos , biodiversity collapse, geopolitical fracture – is not collection of surface problems, these are symptoms.

Beneath them are recurring systemic patterns, society-scale incentives. And beneath those incentives are deep assumptions about growth, control, competition, and scarcity. We are not outside these layers, we are embedded within them. So the question becomes what does responsibility look like in a world where powerful structural incentives shape collective outcomes? Where do social thresholds appear when scale removes the natural limits that once kept us in balance? How do we avoid only treating symptoms while reinforcing the deeper forces producing them?

And if our instincts once helped seed the current fediverse, we did see for a moment what a system look like that works with human nature while balancing it against #dotcons reality. This is the path we need to get back to, to understand how the current tensions I outline, in the fediverse makes sense. Because what we are seeing there is not just a #blocking governance disagreement. It is a microcosm of the larger scale problem: how human coordination patterns behave when they move from small, trust-based communities into bigger networked infrastructures.

The fediverse is not separate from this, it is one of the places where we are actively trying to work it out. To start down this path we need to look at how the last #openweb reboot was taken from us.

The #dotcons aren’t just “big tech companies.” They’re a structural class of platforms they follow the same pattern:

Present themselves as open, liberating, participatory spaces.
Attract huge numbers of people with network effects and free access.
Gradually enclose that activity.
Monetise attention by shaping reach, visibility, and behaviour.

The “con” isn’t that they charge money, the con is the bait-and-switch:

First: open participation, organic reach, community.
Later: algorithmic throttling, pay-to-play visibility, advertising optimisation.

The “dot” is the monetisation layer – advertising markets, behavioural profiling, engagement engineering. Even the so-called ethical platforms operate on the same structural logic:

growth first
enclosure second
monetisation through mediated reach
shaping discourse toward advertiser-compatible norms.

You can swap out leadership, branding, or tone, but if the core model is:

capture network → centralise control → monetise attention

… then it sits in the same class.

Naming them 20 years ago as #dotcons isn’t about moral outrage, it’s about clarity, because if we don’t name the enclosure pattern, we end up debating personalities and features instead of structure.

Where this matters for the fediverse is simple – If we don’t consciously build flows, commons, and #4opens practices into the infrastructure and culture, the same enclosure dynamics will re-emerge – just more politely.

The difference isn’t tone, it’s structure. And being clear about what the #dotcons are helps us see what we are trying not to reproduce.

The idea and direction are broadly right (decentralised social web, commons infrastructure, alternatives to #dotcons). but the institutional reality is hollow, not enough resources going into the “native” messy grassroots work that actually keeps things alive.

People like Evan and others stepping into fediverse organisational roles are, from their perspective, trying to stabilise infrastructure, secure insitunal funding streams, reduce fragmentation and make the ecosystem legible to funders, regulators, and mainstream paths. From this side, the fear tends to be that without some coordination and institutional structure, the fediverse stays marginal or collapses under maintenance debt.

Were from the native the grassroots/activist side institutionalisation risks repeating Web 2.0 capture light – NGO-isation, depoliticisation, and slow drift toward mainstreaming and soft #blocking control.

You could see this as basically stability vs autonomy, funding vs independence, coordination vs organic growth. But better to see it for what it is a resource problem (the real bottleneck)
“ZERO resources for what we actually need” is key, and honestly widely felt. Where funding currently goes to protocol development, interoperability standards, software maintenance grants and pointless governance experiments that look credible to funders.

Where resources don’t go on balence to “native” non #NGO community organising, onboarding and social infrastructure that is not mainstreaming. Seeding and growing local/regional native networks. Alternative governance experiments outside formal org structures and most importantly public-first infrastructure (like the #OMN direction) In short technical sustainability gets funded; social sustainability struggles to grow.

#NLnet and geekproblem, #NGO dynamics tend to operate with a narrow philosophy of fund discrete, bounded technical projects that avoid any political positioning to prioritise measurable outputs (code, specs, deployments). This creates structural friction because as infrastructure projects for grassroots media and social organising doesn’t fit neat grant deliverables. Long-term community building is messy and hard to quantify. Native radical or openly political framing scares institutional funders.

So we reinforce a path where money exists, but it flows toward the wrong layers for movement-building. So when dose this balance change? This is the hard truth: systems like this rarely change because people ask, they change when people push parallel practices that make the gap obvious.

What history teaches us in the #openweb is Indymedia didn’t wait for permission, early blogs didn’t wait for foundation approval and Mastodon itself grew outside institutional planning.
Change tends to happen through parallel infrastructure, witch is how the fedivers reboot happened in the first place before our current shift to #NGO structures and people takeing over our shared direction.

So how do we get out of this mess? By finding seed funding and affinity groups to build/use alternatives that demonstrate missing pieces like public-first media networks (#OMN), social layer experiments and governance models rooted in users/admins, not foundations (#OGB). We need this narrative pressure, not just critique, re-framing “Fediverse” as one implementation of broader #openweb rather than the destination and shifting language from platform to ecology.

Resource routing from the current institutions if they are at all capable of this, or giving them a good, if polite, kicking if they are not. Not to knock them out, more to knock them aside, they are still native on balance. The uncomfortable reality we need to compost is the current institutional layer probably thinks they are solving the resource problem – just at a different level (protocol legitimacy, policy access, etc). So the conflict isn’t only “they are wrong” but they are solving a different problem than the one native actors see as urgent.

Where leverage might actually exist if our goal is shifting direction rather than just venting (which is understandable 🙂), leverage tends to come from building cross-admin alliances (server operators are a missing power bloc, framing needs in operational terms (“X infrastructure gap causes Y burnout/failure” and linking fediverse survival explicitly to native grassroots media use-cases.

To work on this it helps to see the factions currently shaping Fediverse governance., a long sometimes over lapping list

The Greybeards of every genda (early web + protocol veterans) worldview The fediverse is the continuation of the original web ethos. Protocols matter more than platforms. Stability and interoperability come first. Cultural roots are early blogging, RSS, XMPP, open standards culture and the early activist web. They are guardians of continuity.
Protocol Purists / Engineering Minimalists (Sometimes overlap with greybeards but culturally distinct.) Tend to dismiss governance and social design as “out of scope.” and tus risk reproducing libertarian-style “neutral infrastructure” assumptions. They protect the protocol but sometimes ignore the ecosystem.
NGO Pragmatists / Institutionalizers (This is likely most of current leadership structures. Think the Fediverse needs to be legible to regulators, funders, and #mainstreaming users. There cultural roots are foundation models, EU funding ecosystems and digital rights etc. Motivationed by legitimacy, policy and funding stability (for them selves, and thus the system, with them running it). There power is they can unlock resources, build bridges outside tech circles and reduce chaos perception. But suffer from very bad bind spots that affectively block by depoliticising radical roots, (un)intentionally reproduce top-down structures and prioritise optics over native needs. They are trying to make fediverse “safe enough” for mainstream adoption.
Grassroots Builders / Commons Activists (Closest to #OMN framing.) Build and support the Fediverse as a social movement, not just infrastructure with native paths. Community governance and mutual aid are core so technology must serve social transformation. Roots sprin from early Indymedia, anarchist/left activist tech, free culture and early autonomous networks. Tere mission is native to te fedives of reclaiming media infrastructure, resist #dotcons capture to rebuild collective spaces. They bring real world experience of community building, lived experimentation and resilience outside funding cycles. But have there own blind spots with resource scarcity, fragmentation and continuing mess internal ideological conflict. They carry the original radical energy but struggle with institutional power.
Instance Admins (The Hidden Power Layer) are often overlooked but crucial. Thy are te fedivers, keep servers running, manage moderation chaos, with ractical solutions over ideology spiky or fluffy. Being motivated by sustainability, reducing burnout and keeping communities healthy. Tey ave the only real operational experience and work with native distributed authority. But tend to be to blind to organising as a collective political voice as there influence is diffuse. If they coordinated, they could reshape governance overnight.
Commercial Entrants / Platform Builders with the #NGO paths becoming more powerful. They tend to a narrow non native view of the fediverse as infrastructure for scalable products and interoperability as competitive advantage. Examples would be venture-backed or startup-aligned platforms motivated by growth, monetisation models compatible with federation and early positioning before governance can settle. They have power and voice due to resources, UX focus and marketing reach. But being non native they lack “users”. Tey are blind to the risk of slow platform capture and are anatanistic to the tension with grassroots values. They introduce gravity toward mainstream web patterns.
The Silent Majority (Users) are often ignored in governance discussions. In this #NGO push they are seen as needing usable, safe social spaces and not deeply ideological. This leads to adoption patterns shaping the ecosystem more than debates do witch deeper cultural fault lines.
Large Instance Admins (network gravity), they are admins of large or historically central servers, culturally influential communities have some power with federation choices shape network topology. Blocking decisions define social boundaries. They can indirectly decide which communities thrive, what norms spread and what software gains adoption. No vote, but impact.
Narrative Shapers (discourse power) mostly the more fluffy, #NO frendly bloggers, long-term fediverse personalities, visible commentators and conference speakers define what problems are “real”, what language becomes default and try and define what counts as native and reasonable. Some example might be shifting conversation from “openweb” to “socialweb”, framing decentralisation as safety vs freedom. These narratives shape funding, developer interest, and user expectations.
Funders (hard coded steering) for most people this is slight and not seen as direct control, for others more strong directional influence. Examples include: grant bodies, research funding ecosystems, EU-aligned digital infrastructure programs. On balance the vast majority of this funding goes to corrupt insiders and is thus simply poured directly down the drain. But the stuff that works, like #NLnet has real power, funding doesn’t dictate outcomes, but it decides which problems get resourced to indirectly defines priorities. But if this is not balenced by social governance funding it quietly becomes invisible.
Bridge Figures (social connectors) are hugely underestimated. They are people with experience across multiple factions of dev + activist hybrids, long-term organisers and translators between tech and social communities. There power is in balanceing conflict, helping which conversations cross boundaries and legitimize ideas by engagement. Without them, silos harden.
Default Software UX (silent governance) The interface itself shapes behaviour were Mastodon UX norms influence culture more than policy debates, defaults create expectations. Examples: content warnings, quote-post absence/presence, moderation tools. UX becomes governance.
Momentum and path dependency is possibly the biggest hidden power. Once a protocol interpretation, a moderation norm or a deployment pattern gains early momentum… it becomes hard to change, regardless of governance discussions.

These factions aren’t just political, they divide along deeper axes.

Infrastructure vs Movement. Protocol purists + many greybeards → infrastructure-first. Grassroots → movement-first.
Stability vs Experimentation. NGOs + institutional actors → stability. grassroots + indie devs → experimentation.
Legibility vs Autonomy. NGOs seek legibility for funding/policy. grassroots value messiness and effective autonomy.
Governance vs Emergence. institutionalists want hard (oftern invisable) governance frameworks. Others believe governance should emerge (visably) organically

The insight meany people miss is that the biggest conflict is NOT what they might think left vs right or tech vs social, it is people trying to make the fediverse safe for scale vs People trying to keep it open enough for transformation. Both believe they are saving it. This is where things actually make sense, because formal governance in the fediverse is weak compared to influence networks. Most frustration comes from people arguing about structures that “don’t actually hold power”, while missing the forces that shape direction.

We need a more realistic map of the unspoken power dynamics shaping the fediverse, these are not generaly official roles – they’re influence patterns. Maintainers as gatekeepers (code gravity), who are core maintainers of major projects (Mastodon, Akkoma/Pleroma forks, Pixelfed, Lemmy, PeerTube, etc.). Protocol implementers of what ships shapes reality. What doesn’t get merged doesn’t exist. without formal authority they define the roadmap simply by deciding what is worth implementing. This has a strong hidden effect that governance debates often become irrelevant if maintainers don’t prioritise them. Some example dynamics are social governance features get ignored because they’re “not technical”. UX decisions shaping culture without explicit discussion etc.

The core dynamic that is hidden is most people assume power = foundations or organisations. Where the reality is power = maintainers + large instances + narratives + funding gravity. Formal structures, and the little native governance we have mostly follow these forces, not in any way balance them in.

So were dose the stress come from and why this creates frustration. Grassroots actors often see decisions emerging without any transparent process, norms solidifying without any affective debate and institutions appearing to “take over”.

Where institutional actors see chaos without coordination and feel deep phsicological, and self serving need for pressure to stabilise. Both misidentify where decisions actually originate. The deepest unspoken divide is people are defending different emotional survival strategies, until this is recognised, discussions loop endlessly.

What do you think, if you think about this at all?

People need free space to stop controlling

Here we need to describe a real structural problem that shows up again and again in grassroots projects. Well-meaning people arrive claiming to help “community”, but operate through control patterns learned from institutions, #dotcons platforms and professional #NGO culture. They work very hard, believe they are doing good, and unintentionally damage horizontal processes they want to become a part of.

This isn’t primarily only a personal problem – it’s more useful to see this as a culture clash problem. And yes, mediation, especially embedded mediation, is what we’re building into #OMN to correct the shift in direction. So, let’s break this down in to practical approaches that actually work in messy grassroots ecosystems. First we need to name the real tension clearly, the conflict is NOT good people vs bad people, activists vs NGOs and grassroots vs professionals. The real tension is: Control logic vs Trust logic

Control logic (learned from #dotcons / NGO structures) is about optimizing for risk reduction by centralizing decision-making. They measure success through outputs and metrics, and assume governance must prevent failure.

Trust logic (#DIY / grassroots / early #openweb) is about optimizing for participation and learning by distributed responsibility and messy iteration. Success is measured by living community, where governance supports emergence rather than preventing mistakes.

Most people don’t consciously choose control, they import it because it’s what they know. So #OMN mediation starts by framing this as different operating paths, not moral failure. We build “translation layers” instead of confrontation, the worst outcome is ideological escalation, leading to #blocking.

Instead, we try to create structures that translate between cultures. Examples: Write governance docs describing WHY things are messy, explicitly explain “social messiness is intentional design”. We to do this to frame openness as resilience, not lack of structure.

People from institutional backgrounds need basic permission to stop controlling. We can try and use process friction as onboarding, maybe sending people through archaeology (reading posts, repos, etc). Might be actually GOOD – but only if framed constructively. Instead of “read this before asking questions” we could try “The project is built through shared learning – exploring this material helps you understand why we work this way.” Make friction educational, intentional, welcoming but firm, not defensive.

One contradictory thing is that we need to recognize is the hardest workers are risk points, the worst ones work the hardest. Yes, because control-oriented people express care through effort, effort becomes legitimacy, legitimacy becomes informal authority. What’s the solution maybe to balance effort and decision power, decisions require some consensus and transparent process, not only labour contribution. We can also help by make invisible labour visible (care work, mediation, maintenance).

On this path, we need to introduce “soft boundaries” instead of hard blocking, as hard blocking only tends to escalates conflict. Instead, we can focus on redirecting energy into specific roles and tasks, channel control impulses into infrastructure or documentation. Example: “That’s an interesting governance idea, can you prototype it in a parallel working group?”. This, preserves autonomy, avoids direct rejection and tests ideas in practice. documented failer is still good compost.

What works if you have the resources and patience is to teach #DIY culture implicitly, not by argument. Many problems come from lack of exposure to horizontal culture, best not to lecture about #DIY, instead make participation experiential, let people see how trust works through doing. Design processes where newcomers experience collective decision-making, and failure is visible but safe.

Structural mediation patterns for #OMN are strengthened by regularly asking:

Are we slipping into control patterns?

Are we excluding through complexity?

Are we drifting too far into informal hierarchy?

Make this normal so that multiple pathways allow for experimental edges, stable core infrastructure and messy periphery. People can self-select into environments matching their comfort level.

We should always be making visible social values, not just technical #4opens. This needs to be explicit: openness to disagreement, expectation of plural narratives, composting failure, a powerful governance guidance – Compost works because decomposition is allowed, friction produces transformation, nothing is wasted, but everything changes form. Translating into policy – that conflict is expected, critique is welcomed but must produce something, few things are sacred – but everything is documented.

The deep strategic insight (important) – is the goal is NOT to eliminate control-oriented people, we need them as healthy ecosystems require institutional thinkers (stability), grassroots experimenters (innovation), activists (accountability) and bridge-builders (translation). The problem occurs when one mode dominates. So mediation is about maintaining the needed social/ecological balance.

#KISS #DRAFT

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