Tag: blocking

LIVE at c-base a #fluffy Fediverse conference

It’s been going on for the last few years, let’s look at a current example. Live at c-base is a #Fediverse event that highlights the need for composting the dogmatic #fluffy mess making to keep balance in our shared #openweb reboot. With our #fluffy crew talking about the shared reboot, on the surface it looks positive – friendly conversations, smiles, the right hashtags – but underneath it reveals a deeper problem: there is zero balance at these events. This is the third event I’ve seen with the same issue: the same small group, the same narrow framing, the same blindness. It is not healthy. It is not balanced. And it is not a good path to stay on.

What we are seeing, again and again, is a kind of #blinded #blocking. A narrow circle, reproducing itself, shutting out the very people who dug the digital soil for the seedling stage of the current #Fediverse growth. Sadly, #blindness and #blocking makes these people prats, not because they don’t care, but because they can’t see beyond their narrow bubbles.

Composting the mess, we need to be honest here. We all make messes in movement spaces, and the only way forward is to compost these messes. Composting means breaking down what is toxic, unbalanced, or self-serving and transforming it into nutrients that can grow something better. If we ignore the problem, the mess just piles up until the whole project smells. If we compost it, we can build soil, roots, and future growth.

Where’s the hope? Right now, hope is hard to see in these paths. A purely #fluffy approach – friendly, soft, smiling – is good for atmosphere, but it slides into dogmatic blindness. Fluffy alone does not challenge power. Fluffy alone does not create balance. Fluffy alone does not compost.

What we need is spiky/fluffy. We need the warmth of fluff but also the edge of spike, the courage to challenge, to draw lines, to say when things are going wrong. Without this, we share the same blindness, wrapped in smiles and funding applications. One thing that might explain this narrowness is that we are in the middle of a generation change. The original crew who put real work into growing the #Fediverse in its seedling years are no longer invited, and the real problem is that to this new fluffy crowd the last generation are mostly invisible.

Looking at the Berlin Fedi Day schedule the only person I recognise from that seedling stage, that built the current working reboot is Christine Lemmer-Webber, and they were always firmly within the #NGO-fluffy camp. Everyone else? New faces, from before, like Evan Prodromou who played no role in the atavism of the seedling stage or the people from after ??? Who to often bring the #NGO and funding paths that is at the root of current mess making.

One such event would be understandable. But three in a row? It looks less like an “accident” and more like a PRAT move, hardcoded fork of our shared project. A fork that speaks with arrogance “for all of us” while shutting out the #spiky voices of the community who helped built the current #fedivers path. Towards balance, where do we go from here?

  • Name the mess: We can’t fix what we won’t face. #blinded #blocking is real, and it needs to be called out. This is what I am doing here.
  • Compost, don’t cancel: These are not enemies, just our #NGO, #fashionista in need of wider perspective. We don’t waste energy and focus in burning them out; we compost their mess into fuel for growth, they are a part of the debate.
  • Spiky/Fluffy events: The next gathering should explicitly mix both tendencies. Spikiness to challenge, fluffiness to care. That balance is the only way to keep hope alive, let’s not be prats on this, please.
  • Reconnect with roots: We need to bring back more of the seedling stage #Fediverse builders and seedling voices, not as nostalgia but as grounding. The roots matter if the tree is to grow.
  • Expand the circle: No small group should speak for the whole. Open doors, open process, open web. #4opens. A part of this is embedded in the closed funding of these events and process.

Final thought, right now, what we’re watching is real prat behaviour, dressed up in smiles and #NGO funding. That’s a dead end. If we want the #openweb reboot to be more than another hollow fad, we need balance, humility, and compost. The fluffy mess won’t compost itself. That’s our job.

You likely need a shovel #OMN to work on composting. Or if you want to continue with this kind of mess making then clearer naming the events for the minority they invite and host would help to make less mess, a few #NGO groups have started to do this like #FediForum and the #SWF now have less imperialistic language, which is at least is a little less blinded.

#fediday #c-based

It’s Not About You

The Fediverse is native to the open web

We are having a tech reboot for the last few years, federated seems to be where it’s at right now, and it makes sense, the #fediverse is flourishing where so many “#web3” or pure #p2p projects stumbled. This isn’t to say #p2p is bad. But for a peer-to-peer social network to actually work and be social useful, it would need mechanisms for collectivising: shared moderation, subjective trust, a way to handle conflict. Purely (stupid)individualist solutions have been tried before, and they don’t hold together at all beyond a tiny scale. Atomised people cannot build any lasting commons.

The strength of federation as a path is that it collectivises by default. Servers are groups, not individuals, decisions are made within communities, not in isolation, this builds resilience. What is currently #blocking this path is our #fashionistas and #geekproblem people, who are still clinging to parts of #mainstreaming “common sense!. If you try to vertically scale, if you dream of competing head-on with Silicon Valley, running giant datacentres with teams of sysadmins, you’ve already lost. That’s their game, their best proficiency. You cannot beat them at it.

The path forward is to do something they cannot do without breaking their own business model. Something they would never want to do even if they could. That’s the opening. That’s the #OMN path. So let’s be clear about what the current #openweb reboot and the #fediverse is not:

  • The fediverse is not an electricity grid. You don’t have to be plugged in everywhere for it to function.
  • The fediverse is not feudalism. You are not a serf bound to some lord’s server. You can leave, fork, migrate, or self-host.
  • The fediverse is not a commodity. It is not like a telephone line or a utility service to be packaged, sold, or regulated in the same way.
  • And no, the fediverse is not a big truck that carries data down the highway. It’s a messy garden, a bazaar, a commons.

The #fediverse works because it is untidy, diverse, and decentralised. It’s a network of collectives, not a monopoly machine. The #OMN path and vision is to lean into this: not to replicate the #dotcons in smaller, scrappier forms, but to compost the mistakes of the past and grow something native, nourishing, and #4opens.

The #OMN isn’t about isolated gestures, it’s about building federated, trust-based media networks that actually work at scale. Right now, the truth is simple: you can’t just join or create one tomorrow. Why? Because the path needs composting first.

By composting, we mean taking the wreckage of past projects – messy, co-opted, burned-out, over-managed, or over-centralised – and turning it into fertile ground. From this social fertile soil can we grow #OMN that support:

  • Open, federated collaboration
  • Shared media creation and distribution
  • Affinity group – based moderation and governance
  • Strong social resilience against co-option by corporations or #dotcons

We need to then bride this existing federated path into the seed #p2p path with social tools that work and hold this bridge in place. The #OMN is a work in progress, and that’s intentional. It’s about building the crew, the culture, and the infrastructure before anyone can just “join.” This isn’t a platform you log into; it’s a path we create together, step by step. Until we do that composting, passive participation isn’t possible, the first step is #KISS that’s exactly what we’re focused on making happen.

A poet’s view of the path

Mess and more mess, “diversity”

We need to look at our paths and current the controversy in “diversity” in our #deathcult worship, to see the need to compost more of the current mess. The problem with “pushing diversity” isn’t diversity itself, that’s fine – essential, even – the problem is in the ideology shaping the push.

Much of it comes from #mainstreaming progressive liberalism, which operates inside the logic of the deathcult. It reduces diversity to a checklist, a branding exercise, a way to appear “inclusive” while leaving power untouched, not liberation, more about management.

When we enter into this mess, conversations about diversity collapse into the mixing of right and left framings, with too much suspicion on all sides, endless accusations. Instead of solidarity, we end up with #blocking. Instead of building, we burn out. The is no good outcome.

This is the normal worship of the #deathcult, the endless loop of optics and control, where movements fracture and collectives suffocate with “diversity strategies” that have no relation to grassroots realities.

The path as ever is compost. Take the mess – the liberal tokenism, the reactionary backlash, the burnout – and compost it into something alive. Composting means, returning to grassroots voices, not #NGO checklists, seeing diversity as lived struggle, not branding. Grounding it in #4opens, where openness makes co-option harder, to turn toxic blocks into fertile soil for needed collective growth.

The #OMN path is simple: it’s not about ticking boxes or replicating liberal #NGO frameworks. It’s about federated, messy collaboration that actually works. Diversity is not a corporate slogan, more a the lived struggle. If we can compost the deathcult ideology that poisons this, diversity becomes strength rather than a management tool.

The question is, are we willing to compost the liberal mess, or do we let it keep rotting movements from the inside?

From “Woke” Capital to MAGA Capital – A Case Study

In the US, every presidential election is sold to us as a transformation of the nation. The chattering class pundits and their #fashionista followers tell us: a new people have been elected alongside a new government. Obama, Trump, Biden, each framed as a seismic cultural shift. But if you care to look, the reality is different: turnout is low, margins slim, the electoral college dulls change. What’s hyped as a national rebirth is just the normal reshuffling of the same #deathcult mess.

Still, perception matters. After Trump’s re-election, the “zeitgeist shift” rippled through politics and corporate boardrooms. Suddenly, dozens of corporations rolled back their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (#DEI) programs. Woke capital simply pivoted into #MAGA capital.

Liberal woke capital was about projecting inclusion as market expansion: Pride logos in June. Minorities cast in blockbuster films. “Inclusive” ad campaigns. It looked progressive, but it is the normal markets: new demographics = new customers, just sometimes the invisible hand holds a rainbow flag.

MAGA Capital, in contrast, is about disciplining workers and pleasing investors. It’s about showing loyalty to the strongman, not customers. DEI didn’t collapse because “the people rejected it.” CEOs saw an opening: align with Trump, roll back diversity, keep profits flowing.

In the media, the firings of Colbert and Kimmel crystallized this shift. Networks needed mergers approved. “Ratings” were the excuse, but raw political loyalty was the reality. This is crony capitalism: the stockholder and the strongman aligning. Trump, the fake businessman from TV, borrows legitimacy from profits and ratings, hiding authoritarianism in smoke and mirrors “democracy”. This is the logic of the #deathcult: all values are disposable, as long as accumulation continues.

Lessons for the #OMN path. The shift from Woke to MAGA shows how fragile diversity is when it’s managed as a brand. It’s reversible, hollow, and always subordinated to capital. For the #OMN and the #openweb reboot, the lesson is simple: Don’t outsource diversity to branding exercises. Don’t confuse representation under capitalism with liberation. Don’t build systems where power pivots on a corporate whim. Instead, compost the mess. Root diversity in lived struggle. Anchor it in the #4opens so co-option is harder and collaboration is resilient.

What should be more obvious is that capital, the #nastyfew, its servants, doesn’t care about values, only accumulation. If we want diversity, inclusion, and justice to be real, we have to build them outside the #deathcult logic, in federated, grassroots spaces that don’t bend every time the political wind shifts.

The question remains: will we keep chasing the mess of spectacle – Woke vs. MAGA, or will we compost it and build something more rooted, messy, and alive #KISS

Pick up a shovel, the work is ours

The right-wing feeds on division.
The left-wing grows from trust.

This simple #KISS truth is buried under decades of shit.

Stalinism’s dead weight.
Postmodernism’s cynical fog.
Neoliberalism’s greed-choked rot.
All piled onto our social soil.

Now we stand in the stink:
social, technological, political, philosophical mess.

We don’t deny it.
We compost it.
We turn the pile, let it breathe,
make decay into fertile ground.

From this soil, we grow a humane culture.
Trust. Commons. Care.
A path beyond the #deathcult.

Pick up a shovel.
The work is ours.

#OMN #4opens #KISS

The victimhood narrative needs composting

What is #blocking this simple step away,
one reason is the #mainstreaming insist you use the “proper channels”
is because they own the channels.
They wrote the rules. They staffed the committees.
They built a maze where the end is always defeat.

That’s why they’re so confident it “won’t work.”
Because it isn’t designed to.
The proper channels exist to bleed energy,
to bury dissent in paperwork and “stakeholder processes,”
to keep power safe where it already sits.

The #OMN takes the opposite path.
No hard gatekeepers. No “proper channels.”
Just open flows. #4opens all the way down.

Instead of wasting years trying to squeeze through their pipes,
we compost their mess and build new streams.
Trust networks. Shared publishing.
Messy collectives that actually do the work
instead of talking it to death.

That’s what really scares the #mainstreaming people most.
That we don’t need their channels at all.
That we can walk away and build our own.

The deep wound a lot of people carry – and it’s not personal, it’s structural. When “you” don’t feel “respected,” when the mainstream has no time or use for “you”, it’s because their whole machine is built on efficiency of exclusion. They don’t even see “you” as a subject in the conversation – you’re treated as noise, not signal.

And when the alt paths are blocked – often by the same smiling faces, the same gatekeepers in different clothing – the feeling is doubled: shut out by the mainstream, and suffocated by those who claim to be building alternatives.

This is by design, the “common sense” mainstream wants you atomized, silenced, despairing. The #fashionistas push you into disciplined frameworks, their branding, their “proper channels.”

What happens then? Most people turn inward. Cynicism. Burnout. Bitterness. Or they retreat into bubbles that feel safe but become sterile. That’s the trap.

The composting metaphor matters here. The disrespect, the exclusion, the blocking, it’s all stink. If we don’t turn it, it just festers and poisons everything. If we do turn it together – shovel in hand – it becomes the soil of solidarity, resilience, culture.

The act of composting is, naming the disrespect (without internalizing it), pulling people back from isolation into trust networks, refusing to fight on their terrain (mainstream channels, fashionista frameworks), building small, living alternatives that don’t need their validation.

The painful truth: you will never get “respect” from #mainstreaming. The dignity comes from walking away, composting their waste, and growing something rooted in trust not division.

#KISS

Who are the #nastyfew?

This should be obvious to anyone who as some knolage of left politics. They are the people who always rise to the top when #mainstreaming takes hold. You see them on TV, in parliament, running #NGOs, managing #dotcons tech projects.

On the surface, they don’t always look bad – in fact, they often present as competent, articulate, even charming. But scratch that surface and the pattern is clear: their drive is not shared flourishing, it’s possession and control.

This minority #nastyfew, from a historical view, are today’s bourgeoisie. Marx outlined (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie), that the bourgeoisie historically gained their power through ownership of the means of production – factories, land, capital – while the working class had nothing but their labour to sell. The bourgeoisie used their control over wealth and coercion to keep society in balance, a balance where they stayed on top and everyone else stayed dependent.

The same dynamic runs through our present, the #nastyfew work to preserve a status quo that serves them. They exploit labour (waged or unwaged), capture resources, and use subtle or blunt coercion to suppress any change or challenge.

Those who hold power – social, technical, financial – remain the #nastyfew unless we actively work to compost them.

Then, in our cultural circles, we have our own “common sense” #blocking, the “parasites” who feed from progressive paths.

  • #fashernistas – chasing visibility, hashtags, and trends instead of substance. They drain energy by endlessly cycling the latest buzzwords while ignoring the compost underneath.
  • #Blinded dogmatic liberals – well-meaning perhaps, but so trapped in their own ideology that they block radical change without even seeing it.
  • The wannabe #nastyfew – those who orbit power, adopting the habits of control in hopes of rising up themselves.
  • Neo-liberals in disguise – the most dangerous, because they consciously wear the clothing of other paths: climate, diversity, openness… while quietly feeding the #deathcult of enclosure, growth, and control.

Some of these act blindly, reproducing harmful patterns without much thought. Others are deliberate: they know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it to consolidate control.

The unthinking #mainstreaming majority are shadows of the above. They’re not directly malicious, but they absorb the surface story: They repost the slogans. They nod along with “common sense” solutions pushed by the #dotcons and NGOs. They go with the flow, even when the flow is a sewer. Without working composting, they become the mulch for the #nastyfew to grow stronger.

The “nice liberals”. Not all liberals are destructive. Sometimes they play a healthy role: They keep projects afloat by doing practical work. They can mediate between radicals and the #mainstreaming. They often mean well, and can be allies if they’re not left holding the steering wheel all the time. They’re not the compost, they’re more like the worms: sometimes useful, sometimes wriggly, but part of the soil cycle.

And beyond, there are what has value, the progressive radical paths – both #fluffy (trust, care, openness) and #spiky (confrontation, defence, rupture). That’s another layer of the compost pile, and deserves its own focus. The key point: the #nastyfew and their parasites will always try to rise up in any fertile ground. The progressive trick is to compost them early – recycle their energy, block their possessiveness, and keep the soil rich for new seeds.

To recap, let’s look at some history. When the #openweb reboot began about a decade ago, it was rooted in grassroots values: #4opens, federation, collective governance, affinity trust networks. But as soon as the energy started to gather, the #mainstreamin pushed in:

  • #Dotcons pivoting into the space – Facebook rebranding as “Meta” and trying to swallow the Fediverse through the #Threads/ActivityPub move. This is enclosure dressed up as “openness”.
  • Standards capture – The #NGO actors increasingly gatekeeper the “neglected” #W3C processes, pushing, more corporate-driven priorities while blocking messy grassroots paths that did the shovelling to grow the reboot during the seedling years.
  • Control of resources – a few “elitist” individuals began hoarding power over infrastructure, domain names, and repos, reproducing the same top-down model we’re supposed to be escaping.

The result? We are seeing the #mainstreaming channeling energy away from collective growth into more controlled, branded silos. The Fediverse started as messy, small-scale, radical. But the same pattern repeated:

  • SocialHub degeneration – once the buzzing hub for ActivityPub, it decayed into a handful of blockers. The sometimes competent-and-charming surface masks a deeper instinct for control. Threads stagnate, dissent is suppressed, and the soil turns barren.
  • Mastodon centralization – while #Mastodon has been vital, its dominance has also let a single dev-team shape the Fediverse “common sense”. That concentration of reputation and technical control looks very much like a wannabe mini-bourgeois class rising.
  • #NGO incursions – funded NGOs present themselves as allies, but bring managerialism, paywalls thinking, and “stakeholder” logic. Instead of composting conflict, they plaster over it with workshops and careerism. Then #block the people who complain.

This is the #Fediverse version of “workers remain workers, employers remain employers”: contributors remain contributors, gatekeepers remain gatekeepers. We face the issue of possession over collaboration – we see that collectives fracture when individuals cling to admin roles, mailing lists, funds, and leadership positions. Possession rots trust and then groups wither.

The people who hold (and hored) resources, contacts, and media attention become more deadened than path, even if they started with good intentions.

The composting lesson, is that over and over, the #nastyfew and their parasites repeat the bourgeois pattern at scale: They present as competent and charming. They consolidate possession and control. They preserve the status quo by suppressing dissent.

And over and over, the solution is the same: compost them. Turn the piles of #techshit and #NGO mess back into fertile ground. Protect the seeds of grassroots tech trust, keep the social soil messy and alive.

The #OMN is based on
human beings doing the right thing.

And they will not,
and it will fail.

Human beings doing the right thing,
and they will not,
and it will fail.

And they will not,
and it will fail.

And will fail.

This is the challenge
in the era of the #deathcult:
A culture that feeds on fear,
on greed,
on possession.

Seeds are planted,
but the soil is barren.
Trust is offered,
but hands close into fists.
A path is drawn,
but the walkers scatter into shadows.

The #OMN is fragile,
thin green shoots
in a field of ash.

It asks the simplest thing:
Do the right thing.
Not once,
but again,
and again,
and again.

And if we do not?
It will fail.

And if we do?
Perhaps,
seeds will take root,
and grow beyond the compost,
beyond the #deathcult,
into the messy, open,
living forest.

Compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth

Compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth

It’s good to see more people turning their focus back to the #openweb. But for the past five years of the #reboot we’ve been distracted in a signal-to-noise mess from the #fashionistas. That waisted time needs to be over, we need to start looking clearly at both internal rot and the external threats.

A good first step to this is in balancing the realisation that we actually have far more direct power to deal with the internal mess than we do over the external #dotcons and their #closedweb “common sense” colonialisation. That’s why we need to put activism into composting the internal #blocking (see: https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost). Composting isn’t just a metaphor – it’s a way to recycle the piles of #techshit we’ve built up into soil that can grow new #openweb seeds we need to cultivate.

I understand the normal focus on the external #dotcons, yes, we need to balance this to keep pushing back against the external enclosures. But inside our own spaces, it’s clear that possessiveness, in code, in reputation, in control over projects, undermines cooperation and destroys trust. It wastes resources, it corrodes integrity – People often destroy what they love, not out of hate, but out of possession.

This is directly relevant to the degeneration of the #SocialHub project (see: https://hamishcampbell.com/why-teach-everyone-to-code-has-become-a-dead-end-slogan/). What was once the lively centre for the #ActivityPub and #Fediverse reboot is now reduced to a handful of unthinking “problem” people circling the drain. That’s not unusual, it’s a normal outcome when we fail to compost mess.

The lesson is simple: compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth.

What can you do? Use the compost metaphors (#techshit, seeds, soil) into accessible non-branded messaging that sticks. You can help with editing to transform the long posts into shareable, short-form content for Mastodon, Fediverse, and allied networks.

Help is needed in curating and organizing existing #OMN writings into a structured wiki-style knowledge base. To build summaries, FAQs, and primers for newcomers who hit the projects cold. We need draft “composting guides” – how to deal with #blocking, #fashionistas, and #geekproblem inside communities. Moving this simple documentation to the Unite Forge and other new #OMN tools. Helping draft roadmaps that explain what’s built, what’s missing, and what needs contributors. Producing explainers on why #OMN is different from #dotcons and #NGO capture, why being grounded in #4opens matters.

Write out templates for horizontal decision-making (#OGB style) that projects can adapt. Suggest practical ways to “compost” blockers while keeping the wider network fertile. Help draft neticate rooted in #KISS + #4opens rather than #NGO-speak.

Each of these can be grown into living resources: wiki pages, blog posts, shareable guides, or activist toolkits – depending on where you want the energy to flow.

Who are the #nastyfew?

Why “teach everyone to code” has become a dead-end slogan

The geek answer (bad faith or blindness): “If only everyone learned to code, then society would be fairer.”

The activist answer: Code is part of the landscape, but culture, governance, and lived practice matter more. We don’t escape domination by teaching more people to type commands, we escape by changing what we do together with the tools.

Why “teach everyone to code” has become a dead-end slogan – it’s been tried, it’s been funded, and yet it hasn’t shifted power one bit. If anything, it’s reinforced the tech priesthood instead of breaking it.

The #geekproblem is exactly this blindness: geeks mistake tools for culture, skill for power, and training for change. They can’t see that the last 20 years of “learn to code” projects have failed precisely because they sidestep politics, trust, and social fabric. It’s comfortable, because it keeps power where it already is.

So, coding literacy might be useful, but it’s not transformative without social literacy – trust, collective governance, open processes. The real activist social tech path is to compost geek mess-making and build alt-cultures where tools serve the collective, not the priesthood.

Otherwise, “coding for all” is another flavour of #blocking – keeping us stuck, distracted, and blind. This is a useful example of the blinded #geekproblem. I use the word blinded to illustrate that people can’t see the sense in front of their faces. And I use the hashtag #blocking to show the outcome of this common “sense” blindness #KISS

Coding is not automatically social power, but in some contexts it does act as power, and understanding when/why helps unpack the #geekproblem.

  1. When coding is not power

Most coding done in industry is low-level labour: writing scripts, fixing bugs, maintaining old systems. These programmers aren’t powerful; they’re workers. Their code serves capital.

Teaching kids to code (“everyone can make an app!”) rarely translates to actual power, because the infrastructure, distribution, and governance of platforms remain controlled by corporations.

Coding on its own doesn’t equal voice. A line of code in a corporate repo is no more socially powerful than a line in a personal diary if the person coding has no agency over how it’s used.

  1. When coding is power

Coding becomes power when it bridges infrastructure + governance + culture.

Building #openweb infrastructure: If you can write the protocols or standards (e.g. ActivityPub, TCP/IP), you shape the possibilities for everyone downstream. That’s a kind of structural power.

Gatekeeping: If you control the codebase of a popular project, you can decide what features exist, whose contributions get merged, and which voices are excluded. This is soft but real power.

Automation and scale: Writing code that automates tasks (e.g. bots, algorithms, moderation tools) gives leverage over many people’s experience, especially when hidden in the background.

Narrative + legitimacy: In activist or grassroots spaces, coders too often get treated as “high priests” because they appear to have magical abilities others lack. This cultural framing inflates their social weight.

  1. The Catch (where the #geekproblem lives)

Coders confuse technical power with social change. They think: “If I can write the tool, I can fix the politics.” But tools reflect cultures. Without collective governance, tools just reproduce existing hierarchies.

The illusion of inevitability: because software underpins modern life, geeks assume society must organize around them. That blindness is what we’re pointing to.

When geeks push “everyone must code” as the path, they miss that most people don’t need to code to have power, they need agency in decision-making and trust networks.

  1. How it really works (coding + social power)

Coding has power when embedded in movements that control their infrastructure. Example: early #Indymedia coders had real social power because their code directly enabled publishing outside corporate media – and at the start they were accountable to activist collectives.

Coding has power when it’s used to mediate flows of attention, trust, and resources. For example, algorithms that boost or bury voices. In grassroots hands, that can be liberatory; in corporate hands, it’s oppressive.

Coding becomes shared power when it is paired with open process (#4opens), shared governance (#OGB), and cultural literacy. Otherwise, it’s generally more priesthood, likely for the #deatcult in the end.

So: coding is like fire. On its own, it’s just heat and light. In the hands of a few, it’s a weapon or a fortress. In the commons, with shared tending, it’s the hearth – collective power.

To recap, coding as social power: Myth vs Reality

Myth 1: Coding = empowerment
We’ve been told that “if everyone learns to code, everyone will have power.” Twenty years of coding bootcamps, “learn to code” initiatives, and school programs prove otherwise. Most of this simply trains people to slot into corporate pipelines. The power stays where it always was.

Reality: Coding on its own is labour, not empowerment. The infrastructure, governance, and distribution layers decide where the power flows. Without culture and collective governance, coding is just fuel for someone else’s engine.

Myth 2: Coding makes you special
Coders often act like priests, holding secret knowledge. In activist spaces, this creates the illusion that coders alone can “save” or “lead.” That’s the #geekproblem in action.

Reality: Tools are only as powerful as the cultures and processes around them. A coder without collective accountability is just another gatekeeper. A coder inside a collective, with open governance (#4opens, #OGB), can help shift power outward.

Myth 3: Coding will fix politics
The geek fantasy: “If I build the right app, the politics will fix itself.” We’ve seen this with countless “alternative platforms” that end up reproducing the same hierarchies.

Reality: Politics is culture, trust, and process. Code can mediate, amplify, or automate, but it cannot replace politics. Tools without culture are empty shells; culture without tools is still possible.

The compost view is the task isn’t to make everyone a coder, but to compost the priesthood and grow cultures where coding is a part of the collective. That’s the #KISS answer: code can support social power, but it is not social power.

What to do to compost this #geekproblem mess:

  • Build cultures, not just tools: Stop pretending apps fix politics. Tools only matter if they grow inside strong cultures. Put people first, tech second.
  • Open the process (#4opens): Keep everything open: code, data, governance, strategy. Power hides in shadows; openness dissolves the priesthood. If it’s not open, it’s not our path.
  • Practice collective governance (#OGB): It helps when decisions about infrastructure are made more horizontally. Coders are part of the collective, not above it. Shared governance turns coding from priesthood into common fire.

The path out of the #geekproblem is in composting geek blindness and building living cultures where coding is a part of growing the commons.

For an example, this post is relevant to the degeneration of the #SocialHub project, which for meany years was the place for #ActivityPub and #Fediverse #openweb reboot, but now what’s left of the social side is the few remaining active unthinking “problem” people.

This is a normal path and outcome, that we need to compost to keep growing seeds #KISS

People destroy things they love, not from hate, more from possession

The OMN with indymediaback and makeinghistory are paths

Most of the mess, and most of the #blocking, comes down to the same old story – ownership and control. Who holds the keys? Who decides? Who gets locked out? Instead of wrestling in that cage, the #OMN takes a simpler path: we walk away.

We put a class of media into the commons, governed openly through the #4opens: open data, open process, open source, and open standards. That means no one can close it down, hoard it, or fence it off for profit. The value comes from the shared pool, not from gatekeeping.

This is the heart of #KISS in the #OMN: make the flows work first, in ways people can understand, and build trust on top of that. The tech exists to serve these flows, not to dictate them. This isn’t about perfect crypto or hard lockdowns; it’s about commoning media so that everyone has the right to read, share, and build on it.

Yes, the #mainstreaming mess will eventually follow us – as it always does. But the plan and hope is that by the time it catches up, the habits, culture, and expectations we’ve grown around open media will have shifted society enough that the old traps won’t work the same way. If we’ve done our job, the default will be more open, collaborative, and accountable, not locked down. That’s the #KISS path: simple, resilient, and grounded in the commons.

On the #OMN with #indymediaback and #makeinghistory paths – We’re not talking about a single bridge, but a federated ecosystem, with the current example of both #DAT and #ActivityPub running on the same server, sharing a common database of media objects. As the data flows, text and metadata are redundantly stored in the open (#4opens). That way, if one server gets hacked, it can simply be rolled back and restored from the wider pool. #KISS

The P2P side works much like #nostr in that it can have a list of flows in and out to servers and can use any of these to publish and receive media on the #openweb. The advantage of the #p2p app side is that each local app in a backup for the online servers (see #makeinghistory), which as critics say can be, and will be, taken down some times. Also, they will work in their own right for people who need a more locked down path, and this will be needed in more repressive spaces and times. The clear advantage is this still gives them outflows to the wider #mainstreaming client server media outreach, to what matters, effect, so it ticks both boxes.

We aim to solve technical issues with human-understandable social paths, not hard tech for its own sake. Yes, in a minority of cases hard tech will be needed – but that’s for the #geeks to solve after the working social paths are clear, not before.

We fix problems through #KISS social processes and #4opens transparency, not by defaulting to encryption and lockdown. Hacking is outside the focus scope of the #OMN. What we’re building is about trust and flows, not code as an end in itself. Hacking belongs on the #geek paths – useful, but only after the trust and flows are established. The code should be there to secure what’s been built, not to block it before it exists.

Without trust and working flows, there’s no value at all, no matter how secure, encrypted, or elegant the tech stack. If the campaigns, activism, and people aren’t using it, the system is pointless. And being pointless is something we need to be more honest about. Building for the sake of building, while ignoring the social, community layer, feeds the #geekproblem and starves the movement.

So, what can people actually do in the real world to make this path happen?

  • If you have resources, you can help fund the development work – keeping it in the hands of the people actually building the open commons, not some corporate gatekeeper.
  • If you’re technical, you can code the applications and servers that power the flows. We need builders who understand that trust and usability come first, not shiny tech for its own sake.
  • If you work in UX or testing, you can make sure what we build is something real people can actually use and trust – simple, clear, and accessible.
  • If you do media, you can tell the story. Write, film, photograph, blog, podcast – whatever it takes to spread the word. The more people hear about an alternative that works, the more chance it has to grow.

Whatever your skills or resources, the important thing is to get involved in the flow. This is not a spectator sport, and the is unlikely to be pay, it’s #DIY so the commons will only be built if we build it together. #KISS #4opens #OMN

Rebalance, by shifting focus from tools to cultures

Appropriate technology in activist tech means tools built for our real contexts, not for Silicon Valley fantasies or bunker-dwelling paranoia. It’s about lightweight, repairable, understandable systems that communities can actually run, adapt, and share. Right now, the #geekproblem pushes us toward shiny, #dotcons shaped over-engineered toys that serve developer ego more than people and community need or bloated encryption stacks nobody understands, federated protocols that collapse under complexity, and endless half-finished “next big things” with no grounding in any actual social use.

We need to drag the conversation back to fit for purpose, tech that works in the messy, underfunded, real world of activism, where trust and openness are the foundation, and security is woven in without becoming a fetish that locks us away from each other.

The #fedivers #openweb reboot of the last ten years is a good first step, but it still embeds meany of the #mainstreaming issues and has the deep #geekproblems culture in its tech stacks. A second step is needed from this is, the social understanding, that security doesn’t come from code alone, it comes from the community that surrounds it, and that without a living, visible, and shared culture, the best tools are just dead weight.

The path starts with embedding our tools inside open, self-documenting, collective cultures. If you can’t see how decisions happen, you’re just replacing one opaque power structure with another. Forget the myth of the “perfect” platform. What we need are messy but resilient spaces, a diversity of nodes, loosely connected, each carrying its own part of the load.

Build commons-first infrastructure, to re-anchor our work in openness, federation, and trust-based networks baked in from the start. The baseline is #4opens – open data, open source, open standards, open process – non-negotiable.

On this path, the #OMN (Open Media Network) can be the publishing spine: a trust-based network where stories, actions, and knowledge move between activist spaces without corporate choke points and #blocking.

We must bridge into existing real-world struggles – unions, climate justice, housing fights. Tech that only talks to other techies is just another dead end.

Stop digging the same hole, we stop wasting energy on projects that make us smaller and weaker:

No more encryption fetishism. Encryption is the lock on the door, not the whole house.

No more closed, invite-only dev silos. If you can’t talk openly about the work, it’s either the wrong work or the wrong space.

No more “founder cult” projects that collapse when one person burns out or drifts off.

Security is not enough, survival is not victory, we can be safe and irrelevant – or vulnerable and changing the world by breaking corporate dependency, by building the infrastructure of a post-#dotcons world. This isn’t about perfect software, it’s about building the cultures that can use it – and win.

Short stories on this subject:
Oxford – Going with the flow
Stalls and Code

So what is it that currently blocks this needed change and challenge? #Geekproblem is about when the “solution” Is the problem. One of the most frustrating things is how often its defenders mistake their narrow fixations for universal solutions, or worse, offer them up in bad faith to derail the real conversation.

You’ll raise an issue – social, political, cultural – and instead of engaging with the messy, human, collective work needed to address it, the geek brain rushes to replace it with a neat technical patch. The tool, the workflow, the protocol. As if the complexity of human trust, governance, and solidarity can be debugged into submission.

This isn’t just misunderstanding; sometimes it’s sabotage. By framing the “solution” purely in terms of tech or procedure, they strip the problem of its social and political context. What remains is something sterile, depoliticised, and ultimately unfit for purpose.

It’s why I keep bringing this up. Because if we don’t name the #Geekproblem for what it is, we’ll keep circling in the same loops, patching over social fractures with shiny but hollow code. The answer isn’t more complexity; it’s #KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Simple in the sense of clear, human-first, and grounded in open, accessible processes.

The truth is, solving problems in the #openweb isn’t about cleverness or code alone. It’s about people, and unless the geeks can learn to work with that, rather than overwrite it, they’ll stay part of the problem, the #geekproblem

Please, please try not to keep being a prat about this.

Smiling-faced vileness: How enforced politeness becomes a weapon in grassroots paths

Why Most Fediverse Codebases Are Languishing

In this #openweb reboot, do you ever stop and wonder, really wonder, why most of the codebases outside #Mastodon are languishing? It’s not a technical issue. It’s not “a lack of funding” (though that’s what they love to talk about). It’s not even about network effects, not really. It’s because they’re all following Mastodon’s lead, straight into the #NGO world.

This is a path paved in smiles and slow death. A warm bath of #NGI grant cycles, #NGO diversity reports, and performative panels. On this dead-end, the goal isn’t to grow, challenge, or change. The goal is to survive, to be tolerated, within existing institutional structures.

Let’s be honest: this is such an obviously pointless and self-defeating direction that it’s stunning more people aren’t calling it out. Why is it pointless? Because in the #NGO world, success isn’t the point. The hierarchy already has its chosen project. It has its darling. And surprise surprise – that’s Mastodon.

Everyone else is there to tick the diversity box. You’re the “alternatives” that prove there’s choice, even if there isn’t. You’re invited to speak, but not to decide. You’re encouraged to exist, but only if you don’t matter.

So these projects stall, not because they’re bad ideas, or bad code, or have no community.
But because they’ve internalized powerlessness, shaped by institutions that reward conformity and punish genuine independence.

Here’s the bitter truth: If you want your project to thrive, you have to stop only begging at the gates of the palace. You have to stop only trying to be included, you have to also build outside their logic. That’s what the #OGB (Open Governance Body) is about, not building consensus at the top, building trust at the roots.

That’s what the #OMN is about, a web of native projects, not another hierarchy with a different brand. We don’t need to only “be taken seriously” by NGOs. We really need to #KISS build governance that works without them. And what we don’t need is more performative panels, we need compost, shovels, and seeds. Let #Mastodon be the flagship, in the long term, it’s likely to drift into irrelevance, or rot into compromise. Let the rest of us get on with building the working path.

You don’t have to only attack problems, you can also build round them and leave them to decay, then shovel over the mess to compost, the problem we face now is that we need a shovel, a first step is to build that #OMN

Some strategies to mediate the #blocking mess in a way that stays true to the #4opens:

1. Compost the Conflict. Don’t try to avoid the mess – use it.

Acknowledge blocking as an emotional reaction to risk/fear/powerlessness.

Create safe compost heaps where disagreements can break down slowly (forums, slow chat, moderated conversations).

Let things rot before replanting — time is part of the process.

Tools:

Slow-fed moderation queues

Forkable, linked discussions

Bridge-building protocols

2. Build Friction Where It Helps. Instead of forcing “smooth consensus,” engineer positive friction.

Let friction surface hidden assumptions early, but contain it constructively.

For example, structured disagreements (Yes/And).

Use #4opens to keep the process visible and trustworthy.

Tactic: “This disagreement stays open – until it breaks something or blooms something.”

3. Create Walkable Paths Around Blockers. If someone/some group blocks – don’t go through them, go around them.

Design with pluralism and linked forking paths as core strengths.

Accept divergence — allow others to #4opens fork rather than forcing them to bend.

Metaphor: Every open path has forks. We need more people walking, fewer people standing still yelling.

4. Bridge the ‘Trust Gap’ with Small, Lived Examples. Many people block because they don’t trust the process – they feel tricked, ignored, or co-opted.

Rebuild trust through visible, small-scale functioning examples — real communities doing real things with the #4opens.

Highlight stories where governance and code worked together.

Stay humble: don’t oversell the vision; show, don’t tell.

5. Normalize Changing Your Mind. Most blocking happens because people are afraid of losing face, status, or being co-opted.

Create spaces where changing your mind is not shameful — it’s rewarded.

Public “reconsideration threads,” “I changed my view” badges, etc.

Use organic intellectuals who model doubt and curiosity, not just certainty.

Reframe the debate using values: trust vs. fear, openness vs. control, native vs. extractive.

You don’t solve #blocking by trying to make everyone agree, you solve it by making space for disagreement to stay open and generative – not as a problem, but as part of the compost from which better paths grow.

This is how we unblock the current monocultures.

Signal, Noise, and the Mess of #Mainstreaming

“Because controversy equals attention and attention equals brand recognition.” LINK

Yes, an interesting thread on advertising. But let’s add to this view in wider paths:

Mainstreaming controversy = attention.

Alt controversy = #blocking, by ignoring.

This mainstreaming/alt mess making is not about real disagreement or dynamic ideas. It’s about channelling noise that flatters the existing structures and silences anything genuinely alternative. This isn’t controversy, it’s signal-to-noise warfare. And right now, the noise is winning.

Let’s be blunt. On the subject of this site, nearly every so-called “alternative” tech event funded or structured by #NGO culture is riddled with parasites – projects more interested in their next grant or their place at the conference table than building anything outside the status quo. They’re not evil – just placated, softly herding us back into the polite cages we were trying to escape.

They block by doing nothing, block by talking too much, block by looking away when real change knocks. They block by turning real signal into noise.

The actual energy, the radical possibility, is elsewhere. The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is designed with this in mind: not to convince the already-compromised, but to build something permissionless and let it loose. Let people feel the value, or not. No “hard” hand-holding, no pre-approval, no gatekeepers.

It’s a #KISS project: Keep It Simple, Stupid. We’re building for the people up shit creek without a paddle, not the people arguing about paddle aesthetics on a conference panel. We don’t need more “controversy” to win attention in the #NGO #PR-sphere. We need real signal, real builds, real grassroots governance to share power.

And yes, we do have a problem with apathy and Laissez-faire “common sense” that lets this cycle repeat. So let’s stop waiting for the right moment or the perfect audience. We build with this problem in mind. We design #DIY structures that can work in the real mess.

Why #NGO and fluffy #openweb tech events should include radical real grassroots projects

If you need a working definition of the #geekproblem, it’s the habit, no, the reflex, of putting the social side of tech outside of tech. It’s the behaviour of someone sticking their head in the sand and mumbling, “That’s not my department.”
It’s “I just write the code.”
It’s “We’re neutral tools.”
It’s “Let’s keep politics out of it.”

This isn’t just naivety, it’s a deep, culturally reinforced avoidance of responsibility. And it’s one of the key reasons why even alternative tech replicates the same failures and power structures as the mainstream.

Worse, this behaviour is too often mainstreamed in the alt-tech spaces themselves, turned into best practice by #NGO people who should know better. It becomes active #blocking of any progress on alternative paths. New governance? Too political. Radical accountability? Too messy. Grassroots involvement? Too slow. Let’s just build it and hope for the best.

We can’t afford this any more, in the midst of #climatechaos, rising authoritarianism, and the enclosure of digital commons, building better tools without building better relationships, better communities, and better politics is a dead-end.

This is the core of the #geekproblem, and if we’re serious about anything more than shiny toys, it’s something we must talk about at our conferences, meetups, and hackathons. Let’s stop pretending code is apolitical, let’s start with this: tech is social, or it is very likely more wortless #tecshit.

Let’s be blunt, “inclusive” tech/#NGO events talk about change but don’t platform the people doing the hard, messy work of building this path. This is a real problem, rooted in comfort, control, and careerism.

Radical grassroots projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN) exist precisely to challenge the #mainstreaming mess, not to dress it up. We aren’t here to repeat feel-good slogans and deliver polished #PR. We’re here to offer lived solutions grounded in the #4opens and decades of collective, hands-dirty work.

So why should OMN and similar voices be invited in?

  • We speak from the grassroots, not the conference stage.
  • We build tools that people have historically used, not just write funding proposals about.
  • We hold space for #DIY, for #p2p, for real change, not only the reform theatre.

If your event doesn’t include these voices, like almost all of them, it’s the #mainstreaming problem of locking out knowledge, networks, and resistance, which the events #PR claims to support. This clearly makes the people involved into hypocrites.

On a positive, #KISS, this doesn’t need to be a fight, let’s make events better together. Can you imagine real dialogue between grassroots builders and NGO funders? Imagine shared workshops where friction leads to function, messy, honest space that acknowledges power dynamics – and really then starts to do something about this mess.

Want a better event?

Put grassroots groups on the stage, not just in the audience.

Pay people for their time — especially those working outside institutions.

Focus on practice, not just policy.

Drop the gatekeeping.

Build open process into your event — make your own structure accountable to the #4opens.

But, remember, we aren’t going just to play nice, to be seen, we’ll come to compost the status quo, and plant something that might actually grow. Let’s try and maybe do this right, please.