Tag: dat

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

Building bridges instead of walls

Activist tech has been stuck in “bunker mode” for 20 years, and the only way out is to start building #4opens native, commons-first systems that store, share, and protect movement knowledge in ways that don’t require a priesthood of insiders to operate.

Activist tech has been stuck in a defensive crouch

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

All public movement data sits in the commons.

Metadata + content are mirrored across multiple federated nodes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real world tackling the #geekproblem

With rebooting the #openweb we run headfirst into the #geekproblem, a recurring pattern where: Technically brilliant people build powerful tools …but those tools remain socially unusable …or solve only geek problems, not the needs of actual communities. It’s not malice, often it’s idealism, but it creates a dead-end culture of endless prototypes, abandoned standards, and empty tech demos. Meanwhile, the real-world crisis deepens.

The work we need is bridges building, let’s try this ere “P2P news app” built on #dat Hypercore/Hyperswarm is exciting. Yes, it’s similar to Nostr in structure: distributed relays, client-side aggregation, unstoppable flow. But as with Nostr tech isn’t enough. We are social creatures. A usable system needs:

  • Clear use cases rooted in human relationships – not just tech possibilities.
  • User-facing front-ends that invite participation, not gate it.
  • Interoperability with existing protocols (ActivityPub, ATProto, etc.) to avoid siloing.
  • Bridges between architectures – e.g. client-server ↔ P2P – so that real-world adoption is gradual and survivable.

The good news, the wider #OMN project is already a sane path forward, with a #KISS hybrid path. The plan is in bridging #P2P and client-server as a way out of this. Something like:

A lightweight server bridge that serves data to client-server users (ActivityPub, fediverse, legacy web),

While simultaneously feeding a P2P mesh, with each peer storing and distributing redundant objects,

So that over time, client-server becomes the bootstrapping layer, and #P2P becomes the long-term archive + resistance layer.

“Data is just object flows – how the user gets the object is irrelevant technically.”

This is the kind of thinking that gets us out of the traps, by moving from protocols to people. This isn’t just about code, it’s about culture. The #geekproblem won’t be solved by more architecture diagrams, it needs movements that embrace imperfection and prioritizes social use, visible, working front-ends people can contribute to and understand, documentation and tooling that builds capacity in others, not silos around the brilliant few.

What next? For the devs:

  • Can the p2p-news-app codebase be modularized to plug into #OMN projects as a data backend, even in a basic way?
  • Can we bridge shared data objects across protocols (e.g. post metadata flows from P2P → ActivityPub), even if janky at first?
  • Can we prototype a simple but cross protocol usable frontend, the examples is the work on #makeinghistory and #indymediaback, that lets non-geeks see and touch the network they’re part of?

    Yes, for the movement, keep things messy but moving. Avoid dead ends by always asking: 
"How does this empower non-technical users to organize, document, and publish together?"

Keep the tech grounded in the social fabric, the activists, journalists, organisers, and rebels this is all meant to serve. If you’re reading this and thinking, “I can help,” please step forward. There’s space in wider tech/social #OMN and #MakingHistory for everyone, coders, writers, designers, testers and storytellers.

Let’s build bridges, not silos, let’s build tools people can use, not just tools geeks can admire, let’s do this together.

Telegram messaging app is dieing

Telegram partnering with Elon’s #AI to distribute #Grok inside chats is a clear line crossed. This matters because private data ≠ training fodder, bringing Grok (or any #LLM) into messaging apps opens the door to pervasive data harvesting and normalization of surveillance.

This is an example of platform drift: Telegram was always sketchy (proprietary, central control, opaque funding), but this is active betrayal of its user base, especially those in repressive regions who relied on it.

Any #LLM like Grok in chats = always-on observer: Even if “optional,” it becomes a trojan horse for ambient monitoring and a normalization vector for AI-injected communication.

“Would be better if we had not spent 20 years building our lives and societies around them first.”

That’s the #openweb lesson in a sentence, that the #dotcons will kill themselves. This is what we mean by “use and abuse” of these platforms which have been driven by centralization, adtech, and data extraction, that they inevitably destroy the trust that made them popular. It’s entropy baked into their #DNA. As Doctorow calls this #enshitification, the tragedy is how much time, emotion, and culture we invested in them – only to have to scramble for alternatives once they inevitably betray us.

What to do now, first step, remove data from your account then delete telegram app, not just for principle, but for your own safety. Move to alternatives – #Signal for encrypted, centralized messaging (trusted but closed server). There are other more #geekproblem options in the #FOSS world but like #XMPP, #RetroShare, or good old email+GPG can work too, but they can be isolating, so stick to #signal if you’re at all #mainstreaming.

Then the second step, build parallel #4opens paths by supporting and develop alt infrastructure like the #Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.), #OMN (Open Media Network – decentralized media), XMPP and #p2p-first protocols, #DAT/#Hypercore, #IPFS, or #Nostr etc.

Yeah, things will get worse before they get better, what we’re seeing now is the terminal phase of the #dotcons era. These companies are devouring themselves and will eventually collapse under the weight of their contradictions. The question is, will we have built anything to replace them?

If not, authoritarian tech (like Elon’s empire) fills the void. That’s why we rebuild the “native” #openweb, even if it’s slow, messy, and underground. That’s why projects like #OMN and #Fediverse matter. If you’re reading this, you’re early to the rebuild, welcome, let’s do better this time.

User Story #makeinghistory

The “User Story #makeinghistory” outlines a process for digitizing the Campbell Family archive, which contains significant historical materials related to activism and political movements. Here’s a breakdown of the steps involved:

Setting up the Application: The archive sets up a desktop computer or a hosted VPS instance to install the #DAT based p2p application for “makeinghistory.”

Uploading Digital Files: They use the application to create an account and start uploading directories of digital files from the archive, adding basic metadata if possible.

Building a Community: The archive builds a community of users, including family members and wider activist groups, to seed an affinity group and encourage them to install the application on their devices.

Column Structure: Users see columns like “new” and “recent” along with others added by users working on the same accounts. These columns contain boolean logic lists of the data in the account.

Data Interaction: Users can interact with the data, adding metadata, information, and editing hashtags. They can swipe through items and modify data as needed.

Categorization: By editing hashtags and data, items move into category columns and into the recent columns.

Engagement: Users actively participate in categorizing content instead of passive scrolling. As others add metadata, it updates the feeds of other users, encouraging them to return and contribute.

Story Feature: Archived categorized metadata-enriched data flows are turned into cohesive narratives using the story feature, providing overviews and linking multiple items and categories.

Sharing History: The created histories can be shared with the wider world, providing grassroots quality history in addition to traditional top-down narratives.

Impact: People use these stories to inspire real and lasting social change, recognizing the importance of history in driving progress.

The “User Story – Resistance Exhibition” extends this concept to an exhibition setting, where visitors can participate in archiving and storytelling using a app installed at the exhibition. This creates a participatory space where people can engage with historical materials and contribute to ongoing projects. All data collected is public and available for use in other projects, emphasizing openness and collaboration.

The new and old #openweb protocols

A.

The #nostr crew are the children of #web3 mess, they are a bit reformed, let’s see.
Then the #BlueSky are the reformed children of the #dotcons
The #fediverse is the child of the #openweb

Q. Where would you put #dat or #ssb and in general the #p2p post-web tools?

A.

#dat is a child of the #geekproblem if it is reformed or not, you can maybe tell me?
#SSB was a wild child, now sickly/lonely with the #fahernable kids gathering round #nostr
#p2p was the poster child of the era of the #openweb it was caught in the quicksand of legal issues, the shadow that was left was eclipsed by “free to use” #dotcons Now finds it hard to come back due to mobile devices not having an IP address, thus most people not actually able to use p2p reliably.