The #openweb is the soil, #OMN the seeds

We are feeling a cultural current many of us recognise but rarely name clearly. A feeling that something fundamental has gone wrong, not just politically or economically, but culturally. An experience that imagination has narrowed, participation has thinned, and people are increasingly pushed into the role of spectators rather than participants in shaping the world.

This didn’t appear overnight. It grew out of decades of #neoliberal restructuring that reshaped culture, technology, and social life. Collective institutions were hollowed out, public spaces became marketplaces, creativity became branding and community became “audience”. Instead of shared projects, we were offered platforms, instead of commons, we were given services, instead of any participation, metrics.

This cultural shift produced a generation who feel the weight of a system that seems unavoidable – a reality that presents itself as permanent even as it fails to meet human needs. People sense the limits, but struggle to imagine alternatives because the cultural language for collective agency has been systematically eroded.

This is the environment the #dotcons thrive in, where the #closedweb turns culture into extraction and participation becomes only more engagement metrics. Community, user base, conversation content streams are where cooperation is #blocked due to competition for visibility.

And over time, this reshapes what people think about organising itself. Grassroots action begins to look unrealistic, messy, and inefficient compared to polished controlled platform experiences. Then trust disappears, replaced by algorithmic mediation and institutional management.

Yet beneath this dominant culture, another current has always existed, the #openweb culture, rooted in collaboration, experimentation, shared stewardship, and imperfect but real participation. IP protocol stack built on mailing lists, wikis, federated systems, grassroots media, DIY infrastructures, spaces where people build together rather than consume.

This culture never fully disappeared, as it was needed by the mainstreaming, it was just pushed to the margins. The #OMN project grows from this undercurrent, not as a reaction against technology, as a continuation of the parts of internet culture that treated technology as commons rather than a commodity. It #KISS recognises that infrastructure shapes social behaviour, and that rebuilding a healthier culture requires rebuilding the spaces where people meet, publish, and organise.

The difference is social logic, from social platform ownership grows to shared protocols, from central moderation to community mediation, from passive users to active participants. It’s the change from scale-as-growth to scale-as-federation.

Importantly, this isn’t nostalgia or any path to purity politics. The culture that produces #OMN understands that systems are messy. Grassroots projects fail, fork, and struggle. But instead of seeing this as weakness, it treats messiness as the natural process of collective growth. Composting rather than perfection.

The mistake of both corporate platforms and #NGO approaches is trying to engineer clean solutions to fundamentally social problems. The #geekproblem looks for perfect systems; the grassroots path builds resilient ones through ongoing practice.

This is why affinity groups, federated networks, and the #4opens matter. They create structures where trust emerges from shared action rather than imposed authority. The culture behind #OMN is not defined by ideology alone, it is defined by lived practice of people who build together and communities that govern themselves, to remain open to change

In a world that tells us “there is no alternative,” the simple act of building functioning alternatives becomes quietly radical. And when enough small, federated efforts connect, what once felt impossible begins to look normal again. That is how cultural change happens, not through grand declarations, but through many small working examples growing from shared soil.

The #openweb is that soil, #OMN is the seeds.

For sceptical #FOSS engineers, this isn’t an argument for abandoning structure, security, or technical rigour, it’s the opposite. The lesson from decades of open-source development is that trust does not mean naïveté; it means building systems where failure modes are expected and mitigated through transparency, modularity, and federation. #OMN applies these same engineering principles socially: small loosely-coupled groups instead of monoliths, open protocols instead of platform lock-in, observable processes instead of hidden governance.

If “pure trust” sounds unrealistic, think instead of reproducible builds, version control, and peer review, trust emerges from verifiable processes and shared ownership. The goal isn’t utopian social engineering; it’s creating resilient sociotechnical systems where collaboration scales horizontally because no single node becomes a point of failure or control.

#KISS

An affinity group is not just “a group of people who agree”

An affinity group is not just “a group of people who agree”

A practical bridge-building approach for the #openweb / #OMN – for grassroots organisers, Fediverse communities, and sceptical #FOSS engineers.

An affinity group is not simply “a group of people who agree.” It is a functional social tool: small enough to build trust, structured enough to act, and open enough to grow.

A working path is to start with purpose, not only ideology. The biggest mistake is forming around identity or theory rather than function. Affinity groups work when they are built around shared work, not shared labels. So for #OMN, instead of saying “let’s build an affinity group for radical media,” we try something concrete like: “a small group committed to building and testing OMN publishing workflows for real users.” A clear, practical purpose lowers defensive reactions and creates common ground.

Ideal size and composition matter. Affinity groups historically work best with around 4–8 people – large enough for diversity, small enough for trust. This avoids both NGO-style bureaucracy and lone-founder burnout. Useful roles include: builder (technical), organiser (social process), storyteller or documenter, critic/tester (essential for reducing groupthink), and connector (linking to the wider network). These are roles, not hierarchy.

Trust must be built through practice. Many people distrust grassroots projects because they have seen “pure trust” models fail. So don’t rely only on ideological alignment, build procedural trust instead. Examples include small, regular deliverables (“what did we actually ship?”), rotating facilitation, transparent public logs where possible, and shared infrastructure ownership, so no single person holds control. Trust grows from repeated, visible action.

Clear boundary rules prevent both NGO capture and chaos. Without boundaries, affinity groups dissolve. Keep rules simple and aligned with #KISS: anyone can observe, participation requires contribution, decisions are made by consent or rough consensus, and there are no permanent leaders, focus more on rotating roles. Forking is allowed, following federation principles. This mirrors ActivityPub socially as well as technically.

Mediation is built into #OMN. Use soft mediation practices such as assuming good faith but verifying through actions, and asking whether behaviour supports the shared task. When conflicts cannot be resolved, allow parallel experiments rather than endless arguments. This avoids the classic problem of well-meaning people unintentionally derailing collective work.

Avoid the #NGO trap from the start. Instead of mission statements, boards, and strategic documents, focus on working notes, small experiments, and iterative prototypes. Document reality rather than intentions. NGO structures often push power upward; affinity groups keep power at the edges.

Bridge-building with #FOSS and Fediverse communities is essential for adoption. Frame #OMN affinity groups as neither anti-engineering nor anti-structure, but anti-centralised control. Messaging like “we’re applying federation principles socially, not just technically” resonates strongly with #ActivityPub builders and open-source contributors.

Growth should happen through replication, not scaling. The affinity group is not the movement – it is a seed node. New participants do not simply accumulate; instead, new affinity groups form. Groups coordinate through federation via shared protocols and culture. This approach mirrors #Indymedia nodes, the early Fediverse, and many successful activist networks.

Concrete first steps: identify 3–5 people already doing related work; define one narrow OMN goal; hold a weekly 60–90-minute working session with a public log; rotate facilitation from the beginning; and ship something small within two weeks. Momentum builds legitimacy.

Affinity groups solve three problems simultaneously: they prevent NGO-style centralisation, reduce lone-founder burnout through shared responsibility, and resist #dotcons growth-for-growth’s-sake logic. In many ways, they are the social equivalent of federation.

People need permission to stop controlling

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 a personal problem – it’s a culture clash problem. And yes, mediation, especially embedded mediation, is what we’re building into #OMN to correct direction. 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 optimising for risk reduction by centralise decision-making to push standardisation. They measure success through outputs and metrics, and assume governance must prevent failure.

Trust logic (#DIY / grassroots / early #openweb) is about optimise 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 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 recognise 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 escalates conflict. Instead, we can focus on redirecting energy into specific roles or 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.

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 ecological balance.

#KISS #DRAFT

Composting the myths: power, hidden religions, and why the #openweb matters

Let’s look at an example of how belief systems shape political reality. Some people still deliberately conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This confusion isn’t neutral, it shapes how discussions are framed, who gets silenced, and which political paths remain possible. Let’s be clear:

Anti-Semitism is racism. It targets Jewish people as a people. It is hate, exclusion, and violence, and it must be opposed wherever it appears.

Anti-Zionism is political opposition to a state ideology and to actions carried out in its name, particularly when that ideology manifests as ethnic nationalism, apartheid, and genocide. Criticising state power and political structures is not racism; it is part of political accountability.

Much of the current framing is not about honest thinking, it is about strategy. By collapsing these two terms together, critics of state violence can be delegitimised without engaging with what they are actually saying. Debate is shifted away from material realities and toward defensive arguments about identity.

We need to refuse this mess-making. Instead of getting trapped in endless semantic battles, shift the focus toward power and consequences of who holds power? Who is being harmed? What structures enable that harm? Then, how do we build paths toward justice that do not reproduce oppression?

Moments of political rupture – scandals, revelations, shifting alliances – expose how #mainstreaming narratives are constructed and maintained. When these moments occur, people become more open to questioning “common sense.” That creates opportunities for real social change and challenge.

The goal is not to win rhetorical battles inside broken frames, but to move discussion toward ethical clarity and collective responsibility. Focus on actions, structures, and outcomes, not weaponised labels designed to shut conversation down.

A radical view of the Palestine

This dynamic reflects a broader pattern. People often live inside belief systems that function like religions, even when they present themselves as purely rational. These systems shape what appears normal, possible, or inevitable, and define which questions are allowed.

Modern economics is one of the most powerful of these belief systems. Despite presenting itself as objective and scientific, much contemporary economic thinking has only a tenuous connection to physical reality – ecosystems, material limits, social relationships, and lived community experience. Instead, it operates through abstract models centred on growth, competition, and individual optimisation. These abstractions become controlling myths of markets become invisible gods, “efficiency” becomes moral virtue and growth becomes salvation.

Humans have always created symbolic systems to understand complexity. The problem emerges when these systems detach from the material world. When that happens, distorted decision-making becomes inevitable. Ethnic cleansing, #climatechaos, ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, and recurring conflict are not anomalies, they are predictable outcomes of a worldview that treats nature and community as externalities.

One of the deepest misunderstandings reinforced by liberal ideology is the belief that society is simply the sum of independent individuals. In reality, the individual – their freedom, reason, and identity – emerges from social relationships. Strong individuals are produced by healthy collective structures, not opposed to them.

This insight sits at the heart of anarchist and commons-based traditions, and it was central to the original spirit of the #openweb. This is why the open web – and #OMN – matter, they represent a break from economic fundamentalism because they treat infrastructure as commons rather than commodities by prioritises interoperability, shared stewardship, and collective agency over enclosure and extraction.

By strong contrast, the #mainstreaming #closedweb (#dotcons platforms) reflects economic dogma of enclosure instead of openness, surveillance instead of trust and platform ownership instead of shared governance leading to individual extraction instead of collective flourishing.

The tragedy is that many “alternatives” risk reproducing the same patterns because they inherit the same assumptions. This is why #OMN matters, it isn’t simply another technical project, it is a shifting of the underlying social logic from product thinking to ecosystem thinking, from institutional control to community process (#4opens), from scale as success to resilience as success, to move from abstract models to lived social reality

If modern economics functions as a religion disconnected from nature, then grassroots digital commons are a form of re-grounding. They reconnect technology with human needs, ecological awareness, and collective agency.

We need to be composting the myths. Across both examples – geopolitical narratives and economic ideology – the task is similar: compost the myths. Recognise which assumptions no longer serve us so that new forms can grow. That means questioning inherited narratives, rejecting reactionary nationalism, and building alternatives rooted in shared stewardship and open process.

The #openweb, at its best, is not nostalgia or utopian fantasy. It is a recognition that healthy systems grow from real communities and collective care. And perhaps the most radical step is simply this: step outside our inherited belief systems long enough to remember that we built the web together – and we can rebuild it differently.

Best not to be evil about this. #KISS

It’s interesting to think about the idea of good and bad faith when dealing with people in change and challenge interactions. If you spend time in life doing activism, this will be an ongoing, unpleasant reacuringing relationship. When pushing aside, pushing back #mainstreaming there will be a lot of bad faith coming at you, your good faith is the best and likely only defence.

Funding Proposal: Open Media Network (#OMN) – Building Portable, Human-Centred Digital Commons

https://nlnet.nl/fediversity

Project Title

Open Media Network (OMN): Portable Digital Commons for a Federated Europe

Summary

The Open Media Network (#OMN) is a real grassroots initiative to build sustainable, human-centred digital infrastructure aligned with the principles of the #openweb and the #4opens. To providing easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and freedom at their core – OMN focuses on creating living social ecosystems alongside technical infrastructure.

At a time when the European Union is investing in alternatives to dominant platform monopolies (#dotcons), The OMN addresses a critical gap: ensuring that open infrastructure remains socially grounded, decentralised in governance, and accessible to grassroots communities, not only institutional actors.

This project proposes to develop practical tools, governance models, and community infrastructure to support a resilient federated ecosystem built on open standards such as #ActivityPub.

Problem Statement

The digital public sphere is currently dominated by large corporate platforms that centralise power, restrict portability, and commodify user participation.

The EU’s growing investment in digital sovereignty and open infrastructure presents a historic opportunity. However, there is a structural risk of replacing Californian platform capitalism with European platform capitalism; building technical infrastructure without sustainable social ecosystems; funding professionalised, institutional actors while excluding needed grassroots innovation.

Healthy digital ecosystems require tension and balance between institutional stability and grassroots experimentation. Without this, “commons infrastructure” risks becoming technocratic infrastructure lacking community participation – leading to failure, abandonment, and wasted investment.

Project Vision

The Open Media Network aims to develop a federated, portable digital ecosystem where: individuals and communities retain control over their data and identity; services are interoperable and portable across providers; governance is participatory and transparent; grassroots actors can build and sustain independent infrastructure.

The goal is not only technological decentralisation but social decentralisation, ensuring that federation is lived practice rather than technical abstraction.

Objectives

Portable Hosted Services. Develop and deploy easy-to-use hosted services based on open standards that prioritise: service portability between providers; user-controlled data ownership; interoperability via ActivityPub and related protocols.
Grassroots Governance Models. Design and test governance frameworks rooted in #4opens principles, with open data where appropriate; open process and decision-making; open standards and open participation. These models will be documented as reusable frameworks for wider adoption.
Experimental Commons Infrastructure. Create an experimental environment where: grassroots communities can launch federated services; low-resource groups can participate without heavy technical barriers; experimentation is encouraged alongside stability.
Historical Memory and Knowledge Transfer. One of the recurring failures of digital movements is loss of institutional memory. OMN integrates documentation and archiving into the infrastructure itself, ensuring lessons learned are preserved and accessible.

Key Activities

Develop and maintain ActivityPub-compatible hosted services.

Build onboarding pathways for non-technical users and grassroots organisations.

Establish pilot communities using OMN infrastructure (e.g. activist media, local networks, cooperative publishing).

Produce documentation and toolkits for governance and sustainability.

Engage with EU initiatives (e.g., NGI Commons) to bridge grassroots and institutional approaches.

Innovation

Unlike many decentralisation projects that focus primarily on technical architecture, OMN emphasises social infrastructure as core technology; governance experimentation alongside code; low-barrier participation for grassroots actors. This creates a resilient ecosystem where innovation emerges from diverse communities rather than centralised development teams.

Expected Impact

Increased adoption of federated technologies across grassroots communities to reduced dependency on proprietary platforms. Strengthened European digital commons aligned with democratic values by development of replicable governance models for decentralised ecosystems. Long-term sustainability through community ownership rather than platform lock-in.

Alignment with EU Priorities

This project supports digital sovereignty and European autonomy, open standards and interoperability, sustainable digital commons, privacy and data portability and innovation through diversity and experimentation.

Sustainability Strategy

OMN operates on a low-cost, distributed model, prioritising: community stewardship; cooperative hosting paths; modular infrastructure that can be replicated and adapted. Rather than scaling toward centralisation, sustainability emerges through federation and shared maintenance.

Consortium and Community

OMN builds upon decades of grassroots media and openweb experience, including work on Indymedia and federated social networks. The project actively collaborates with FOSS communities, federated platform developers, grassroots media networks and independent infrastructure providers.

Funding Request

We seek funding to support: development and seed infrastructure hosting, coordination and community facilitation, documentation and knowledge sharing leading to governance experimentation and research.

Closing Statement

Europe has a unique opportunity to build digital commons that avoid the failures of platform capitalism. The Open Media Network provides a grassroots pathway that complements institutional initiatives, ensuring that the future European internet remains participatory, portable, and human-centred.

Projects

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN++functions we need to add a README to the project page https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/Open-Media-Network

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

https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia/indymedia-reboot

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens

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

Building #OMN projects

Need to add this for context – How can we talk about the #NGO mess as hard blocking https://hamishcampbell.com/the-ngo-mess-is-hard-blocking-2/

The #openweb reminds us that meaningful autonomy comes from shared infrastructure, collective governance, and mutual trust. Projects like #OMN are built on this understanding: individuals do not create networks alone; networks create the conditions that allow individuals to flourish. Real freedom grows from commons-based collaboration, not from isolated platforms or competitive silos.

The EU opportunity and danger, what grassroots projects can offer

What can grassroots #openweb people actually do when the EU is building alternatives to #dotcons, but with very real risks of recreating European versions of the same problems? This is a historic moment, for the first time in decades public funding is flowing toward digital commons and infrastructure sovereignty is being taken seriously. Federated technologies like #ActivityPub are gaining traction, largely due to years of grassroots work which is leading to initiatives such as @NGICommons attempting to support open infrastructure.

But alongside this opportunity comes an obvious risk, that they replace Californian platform capitalism with European platform capitalism. The danger: is European #dotcons. Institutional “common sense” – especially when combined with bureaucracy and the #NGO class – tends to reproduce familiar patterns of projects prioritise compliance and institutions over communities. Tech governance becomes professionalised and detached from users and seed communities. Yes, open standards exist, but power centralises anyway as funding rewards scale, stability, and safety rather than needed native grassroots paths.

The result is predictable, European #dotcons. The structural problem is institutions optimise for safety when #EU funding systems are designed around risk avoidance, measurable outcomes to build controlled delivery structures. This leads to only professional actors and institutional partnerships. Grassroots projects – messy, political, horizontal – rarely fit comfortably into this narrow thinking.

So even when the intention is to “build commons,” the outcome becomes safe-looking infrastructure that lacks living social ecosystems. The commons turn into infrastructure without community, and frequently fail, leaving funding poured down the drain and more #techshit to compost.

Why grassroots counter-currents matter is that healthy technology ecosystems need tension between institutional builders for stability, grassroots radicals for innovation and activists for accountability. This balancing leads to communities and real-world grounding.

Without this tension, governance ossifies and technology becomes abstracted from users. Political imagination shrinks and becomes #blocked. Grassroots projects like #OMN represent the compost layer, the messy soil where new forms grow. Institutions rarely generate this energy themselves.

Where initiatives like #NGICommons sit is that some people inside these initiatives genuinely want openness. Much like early Google’s “don’t be evil” phase, there is still a window of possibility. This means influence is still possible and direction is not fully locked in. Individuals inside may be allies, even if institutional structures trend toward mainstreaming. The danger is not simply bad intentions, it is the structural gravity toward institutionalisation.

We need practical strategies (not just critique) to move grassroots actors to shift direction, critique alone is not enough. Practical engagement matters to frame grassroots work as ecosystem infrastructure. Don’t argue only from ideology, speak in terms institutions understand: that tech ecosystems need experimental edges as monocultures fail. We need to argue that diversity increases resilience.

Policy language travels further, when we push for small “wild funding” streams. Instead of demanding institutional transformation, push for small structural openings:

microgrants

low-bureaucracy funding

experimental tracks

funding for governance experiments, not just technical deliverables.

Small budgets can create disproportionate impact.

Promote ActivityPub + social governance together as many EU projects adopt federation technically while retaining centralised governance culturally. We need to communicate that federation without social decentralisation is fake decentralisation. This is where #OMN has strong positioning.

Build parallel legitimacy, not only opposition, as institutions might respond to working prototypes with visible communities that demonstrated outcomes. Critique alone rarely shifts funding flows. Working alternatives do.

We need to find sympathetic insiders, every institutional structure contains pragmatists, a few idealists and sometimes meany reformers. So bridge-building matters. Not everyone inside #NGICommons or EU initiatives is an opponent, some are actively trying to resist corporate capture from within.

The EU currently has three possible futures:

European #dotcons – platform capitalism with EU branding
Technocratic infrastructure without social life (#techshit to compost)
Living digital commons grounded in grassroots communities.

The third path requires messy activism with strong social processes (#4opens) and historical memory rooted in #openweb culture. Without pressure from the grassroots edge, institutions drift toward the first outcome by default.

The deeper insight is that grassroots movements do not need to “win” against mainstreaming. They need to remain the compost layer that keeps the ecosystem alive. That means critique combined with collaboration where possible, strong and grounded independent experimentation and most importantly refusal of capture.

Why mainstream EU tech funding needs counter-currents, why tech activism matters

Privacy in the age of #Dotcons

Let’s be honest, we already lost metadata privacy. The #dotcons, the surveillance state, and the data brokers see everything. This isn’t a warning about what might happen, it’s the reality we live in today’s mess. In normal peoples lives every click, every message, every connection is tracked, logged, and monetised. There is no going back to the sealed, closed-off privacy of a pre-digital era. Not legally, not technically. The dream of private digital spaces was always fragile, and today it is gone in the #mainstreaming

So what can we do? The answer is radical, counterintuitive, and deeply political: we open the metadata bag, to make the hidden flows of power visible. Every algorithm, every tracking pipeline, every corporate and state extraction point should be exposed, audited, and understood. Transparency becomes a shield against abuse because secrecy is the tool that enforces power asymmetry. We stop pretending that corporate surveillance is acceptable, or that peer-to-peer transparency is inherently dangerous. The logic flips: if everyone can see what is happening, then no one can hide exploitative behaviour behind opaque systems.

Yes, this is uncomfortable, radical transparency is not convenient, it forces us to confront how deeply control and extraction have penetrated our lives. It means admitting we’ve been stripped naked by Google, Amazon, and the NSA. But in a world where we are already exposed, radical transparency becomes the preferred path to justice.

The question is no longer “how do we hide?” – because hiding is largely impossible, but “how do we share wisely, and govern openly?” In practical terms, this means:

Open metadata protocols that let communities see what is being collected and how it is used.

Collective oversight of platforms and systems, ensuring that algorithms are auditable and accountable.

Peer-to-peer transparency, where participants in networks control their data and can trace its flow.

Commons-based governance, so that data isn’t captured by a few corporations or states, but managed in the public interest.

Outside often delusional #geekproblem ghettos, privacy as an individual, sealed-off right, is dead. But privacy as collective control over visibility is still possible. It’s not about hiding; it’s about choosing who sees, how it’s used, and under what paths.

The #OMN path treats transparency not as a threat, but as power to know, power to act, power to hold institutions accountable. By making information visible and governance participatory, we reclaim control in a world that has tried to strip it away. In short, in the age of the #dotcons, radical transparency is the new privacy. And it is not only possible, it is necessary.

#KISS

Power, the social cost we keep talking past in #FOSS

A post sparked Hacker News spouting of noise and smoke. It looks like “just fork it.” phrase in #FOSS culture provokes heat. So worth a second look, for some it’s the purest expression of freedom, to others, it’s a conversation-stopper that quietly protects power. What’s striking isn’t that one side is right and the other wrong, it’s that people are too often talking about entirely different things, while using overlapping words, thus the smoke and heat in the linked discussion above.

It’s worth a little time to look at this issue. The pro-fork view is about permissionless agency. From the classic #Geekproblem perspective, “just fork it” is not an insult or a dismissal, it’s a reminder of where power actually lies. The arguments, often bad-tempered, go like this: Open source removes the need for permission, maintainers are not obligated to implement anyone else’s ideas, if you want something different, you can do the work yourself, forks are non-hostile, temporary, and often merge back.

In this view, forking is not fragmentation, it’s pressure relief, to protects maintainers from entitlement, unpaid labour demands, and endless arguments over direction. It’s also what makes #FOSS resilient: even if a maintainer disappears or a project takes a turn you dislike, the code remains usable.

For libraries, tools, and infrastructure components, this works remarkably well. Many developers maintain private forks, carry patches for clients, or experiment freely without any intention of creating a new community. No drama, no schism, no ideology “mess”, just work. From this “native” angle, criticism of “just fork it” sounds like a demand for obligation where none exists.

The counterpoint is that forks aren’t free in social systems, the critique isn’t only about forking code, everyone agrees that’s normal, healthy, and foundational. The tension is when “just fork it” is applied to social platforms, protocols, and shared infrastructure, systems where the software is only a small part of the project.

Running a fork as a new public project isn’t only technical work, it needs: attracting users, building trust, maintaining governance, handling conflict, sustaining moderation and care and thus carrying long-term responsibility. This is where the phrase starts to feel different, in these contexts, “just fork it” is heard not as empowerment, but as exit over engagement, a way to avoid dealing with governance failures, power asymmetries, or unresolved social conflicts inside an existing social project.

From a social #OMN perspective, this isn’t neutral, forking risks: splitting attention, duplicating effort, losing shared history, weakening already fragile commons. Forking may preserve freedom, but it can still destroy value. Forks vs schisms is maybe a way to look at this:

forks – technical divergence

schisms – social rupture

You can fork without a schism, but every schism requires a fork. Many arguments talk past each other on this, because one side is defending the right to fork, while the other is warning about the cost of schisms. These are related, but not identical. Power, ownership, and stewardship, are fault lines about how people understand authority.

One view holds that open source projects are a #feudalistic kingship – benevolent or not – and contributors knowingly accept this. Maintainers owe nothing, forking is the safety valve.

The opposing view sees projects as commons built from collective labour where maintainers are stewards rather than owners, carrying responsibilities that go beyond “my repo, my rules.”

Neither position is imaginary, both exist in the wild. The conflict arises when a project quietly shifts from one model to the other without naming it.

Why this matters for OMN-style projects, they are explicitly social, federated, and historical, they depend on: continuity, shared narrative, visible governance, memory. In this context, common sense “just fork it” instincts unintentionally reinforce the problems #4open paths are meant to solve: fragmentation, invisibility of power, and loss of collective learning.

That doesn’t mean maintainers owe endless emotional labour It does mean that governance and mediation matter as much as code, and can’t be solved by technical exits alone. Two truths at once, the debate becomes clearer if we hold these two truths together:

No one owes you unpaid labour, forking is a legitimate, necessary protection for maintainers.

Social infrastructure is not just software, treating forks as cost-free exits erodes shared commons over time.

When people argue past each other, it’s usually because they’re defending one truth while denying the other. This creates mess, social mess. So to compost this mess, we need to understand better where this leaves us, “Just fork it” is neither a delusion nor a universal solution, it is:

healthy in libraries and tools

essential as a last resort

dangerous as a reflex

corrosive when used to silence governance questions

The real work – the hard, unglamorous part – is knowing which situation you’re in, and being honest about the social costs of the choices you make. That’s not a technical problem, it’s a cultural one, best not to be a prat about this.

This matters because we have social problems created by tech intolerances, #blocking culture. The #dotcons industry’s ability to pull the ladder up behind itself should not be underestimated.

We’ve created digital systems so complex, fragile, and professionally gated that an entire generation is being locked out of owning and understanding their own tools. Communities and people should be able to run their own services, control their own data, and participate meaningfully in digital culture, but few can, because we made everything unnecessarily controlled and complicated.

This wasn’t an accident, it’s a part of the #eekproblem, complexity concentrates power, it creates dependency on experts, platforms, and the corporations that have been quietly erasing the possibility of autonomy. What once required curiosity and modest effort now demands specialist knowledge, constant updates, and institutional backing. The result is a widening gap between those who can build and control systems, and those who are forced to rent/beg access to them.

This is why #KISS simplicity matters, why documentation matters and most importantly why social tooling matters as much as code. And why the #openweb was always about people, not only protocols. When we ignore this, we don’t just lose users, we lose a generation’s ability to imagine, agency, and collective control in the first place.

It’s a real mess we need to compost.

Radical Reductions in Inequality

The current #dotcons economy is not neutral, it is designed to centralise control in the interest of the #nastyfew, platform owners, server landlords, data hoarders. These are the financial intermediaries who extract value without producing social good, this is not an accident or a side effect, it is the business model.

We are told that inequality is the natural outcome of innovation, talent, and efficiency. In reality, it is engineered through enclosure. Digital infrastructure that could function as shared public goods is instead locked behind proprietary systems, paywalls, and terms of service designed to concentrate power upstream.

In contrast, a #4opens world starts from a different premise, that core infrastructure – both physical and digital – should be held in common and governed democratically under #FOSS principles. From platforms to commons, today, most people don’t control the tools they depend on. We rent access to our own communications, our social lives, our work, and even our memories. Platforms mediate these relationships, extract data, and monetise behaviour, while presenting themselves as neutral services. This rental model is currently the primary engine of inequality in digital paths.

When access is conditional, participation becomes precarious. When data is hoarded, power becomes asymmetrical. When infrastructure is privately owned, the rules are set to maximise extraction, not social value. The #4opens dismantle this logic at the root.

Open code means the tools can be inspected, modified, and shared.
Open governance means decisions are accountable and collective.
Open data means knowledge is not trapped behind corporate walls.
Open processes mean power is visible, contestable, and revisable.

Together these break the closed silos that turn users into resources and communities into markets. It’s a working path, not charity or redistribution after the fact, its focus is change and challenge of power at source. When infrastructure is open and shared, value no longer flows automatically upward. Communities build what they need, adapt to local contexts, and retain control over shaping the outcomes. The surplus created by cooperation stays where it is generated, instead of being siphoned off to distant shareholders.

This changes the nature of inequality itself. “Rich” and “poor” stop being treated as natural or permanent categories, they are revealed as outcomes of ownership models and governance choices. Change the structure, and the distribution follows? In a commons-based paths, inequality doesn’t vanish overnight, but loses its inevitability. It becomes something that can be actively reduced rather than endlessly managed. This takes us a step from dependency to autonomy.

Open infrastructure reduces dependency, when communities host their own services, control their own data, and govern their own platforms, they are no longer locked into extractive relationships. This autonomy has compounding effects: Less value leaks out of local economies, more skills and knowledge circulate horizontally, fewer people are forced into bullshit work just to survive, and most importantly, people stop working primarily to make the rich richer.

The most radical implication of the #4opens is not better tech, it’s a different story about the future. If inequality is structurally produced, then it can be structurally dismantled. Not by perfect policy, benevolent elitists, but by first changing who owns and governs the digital systems we all depend on. In that world, inequality stops being framed as a moral failing and economic necessity. It becomes a historical condition, something future generations look back on as a phase we outgrew, like feudalism or colonial monopolies.

Yes, none of this is inevitable, power will resist, enclosure always fights back. But the tools exist and knowledge exists, the choice is political. Radical reductions in inequality won’t come from better platforms or kinder billionaires. It will only come from reclaiming infrastructure as commons, governed in the open, for public good.

That is the promise – and the challenge – of a #4opens world.

Ecological Transformation via Digital Abundance

The ecological crisis is not a failure of technology, it’s a failure of values. We’ve been trapped in a toxic loop where growth = progress, where every solution must expand markets, increase consumption, and generate profit for the #nastyfew. This logic is killing the planet.

A #4opens world pulls up this mess at its root. Digital goods are different, they are non-rivalrous, freely replicable, and infinitely shareable. When knowledge, culture, and coordination move into open digital commons, the material basis of economic growth begins to shrink. We stop burning forests to print manuals, stop shipping plastic widgets to lock in artificial scarcity, stop wasting energy enforcing ownership where none is needed.

This isn’t abstraction, it’s leverage. By shifting value creation into open digital abundance, we reduce pressure on physical extraction. Fewer things need to be manufactured, shipped, stored, and discarded just to keep the economy “growing.” The economy stops pretending that more stuff equals better lives.

From this shift, the real ecological transformation we need becomes possible. Energy systems localise because coordination and design are shared openly. Communities can build, adapt, and maintain renewable infrastructure without licensing fees or corporate lock-in. Circular economies flourish because repair knowledge, supply chains, and governance are commons, not trade secrets. Waste becomes compost, not externality.

Most importantly, culture changes. Consumerism loses its grip when identity, creativity, and social meaning are no longer mediated by buying things from platforms. We stop confusing consumption with participation. We stop mistaking marketing for culture. Life becomes something we do together, not something we rent from #dotcons.

This is not a retreat to austerity, it’s an expansion of possibility. In a post-consumption world, human needs can be met without destroying the biosphere. Care, knowledge, coordination, and creativity grow, while extraction and throughput shrink. The planet breathes again because we’ve learned to value abundance where it exists, and restraint where it matters.

The #OMN path is not “green capitalism” with better branding, it’s a civilisational pivot: using digital abundance to escape the growth trap, and using collective governance to align human flourishing with ecological limits.

That’s not incremental reform, it survival – with dignity.

Real Community, Not Algorithmic Spectacle

The networks we use shape who we are – and the networks we are given by #dotcons are designed to make us spectators. Every interaction is reduced to a metric: a like, a share, a click. We are data points to be monetised, attention to be harvested, behaviour to be predicted and sold. In these systems, connection is shallow, fleeting, and ultimately extractive.

The #4opens offer a different path. When your networks are open, knowable, and modifiable, you stop being a statistic and start being a person again. Not just a profile, not just a follower count – a participant in a living community. You can see who is contributing, who is caring, and who is struggling. You can understand the shape of your social environment and intervene meaningfully, rather than being nudged along invisible pipelines designed to maximise someone else’s profit.

Open systems give us tools to know each other better. Not superficially, through algorithmic suggestions, but genuinely: by making relationships and contributions visible, traceable, and shareable in ways that respect the participants. Collaboration becomes possible without asking for permission. Knowledge, help, and support flow where they are needed. Trust can be rebuilt across distance and time, because the infrastructure encourages transparency, accountability, and mutual care.

This isn’t only about technology, it’s about escaping the isolation of the #dotcons. Social media was sold to us as connection, but it atomised communities into consumable fragments. It told us we belonged to brands, not to people. The #4opens remind us that belonging is not transactional, and connection is not a product.

In open communities, relationships matter more than metrics. Reciprocity replaces algorithms. Long levity replaces virality. Care replaces performance. People organize not for attention, but for mutual survival, growth, and flourishing.

You can get a glimpse of the change and challenge in bodied in such projects as the #Fediverse. It can be radical: networks of care that scale, knowledge that accumulates instead of being enclosed, resilience that emerges from participation rather than extraction. Belonging becomes real again, and communities can function as spaces of power and support rather than channels for profit.

The choice is ours: continue to live as data points in someone else’s spectacle, or reclaim the digital commons as a terrain for genuine human connection. With the #4opens, the infrastructure is ready. The question is whether we will use it to rebuild what has been lost.

Europe, the Fediverse, and the story we failed to tell

A bunch of native #openweb people spent real time, energy, and focus pushing the #EU toward the #Fediverse. This wasn’t theoretical, it wasn’t speculative, it wasn’t a #NGO whitepaper or a #VC funding pitch. It was practical outreach, grounded in working technology and lived experience, aimed at reducing Europe’s dependency on centralized corporate platforms.

One concrete moment of this work was the webinar organised between the European Commission and the ActivityPub community: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/webinar-with-the-european-commission-and-ap-community/1507

The webinars mattered, they demonstrated that EU institutions were genuinely open to #ActivityPub as a viable public infrastructure standard, not as a niche hobby project, but as a way to regain institutional and civic agency without defaulting to US-based platforms.

This is the work we needed more of, but this kind of engagement is slow, unglamorous, and politically awkward. It doesn’t fit VC startup narratives or revolutionary aesthetics. But it is the work required if Europe wants digital sovereignty without surrendering to #BigTech or reinventing the same centralized failures under an #EU flag.

So the obvious question is: what went wrong? Drift, fragmentation, and the return of the #dotcons. Instead of consolidating that momentum, the grassroots fractured, attention drifted, energy leaked away, people burned out or moved on. In the end, outreach was blocked from both sides

And then slowly, predictably, attention returned to the familiar #dotcons, because they are easy, visible, and culturally dominant. They offer the illusion of reach without the substance of agency, in the long run, this is just more #techshit to compost later.

#SocialHub itself documents much of this history. The discussions are there, the threads exist, the intent is visible. But there is little aggregation, little synthesis, and almost no narrative continuity. For anyone not already embedded, it’s hard to see what mattered, what succeeded, and what was quietly blocked or abandoned.

The missing piece is our own history – this is the core failure – we are very bad at telling our own history, this thread says it plainly: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/eu-outreach-if-we-dont-tell-our-story-am-not-sure-who-will/2950

Because we didn’t document, curate, and repeat this story, the same myths keep resurfacing:

“The EU was never interested.”

“Federation can’t work at institutional scale.”

“There were no serious alternatives.”

“Centralized platforms are the only realistic option.”

None of these are true – but they feel true when history is missing. When people don’t know that EU–Fediverse outreach already happened, when they don’t know that viable alternatives already exist, when they don’t know that these paths were actively neglected rather than disproven.

Then people fall – again and again – for the #dotcons mess, believing it’s the only possible future. This matters now, as focus shifts back to tech change, and is exactly why #OMN, #indymediaback, #makinghistory, and #OGB exist, not as competing platforms, not as replacements for everything else, but as infrastructure for memory, communication, and accountability.

Before we argue about funding models, platforms, or scale, we need to get the ordering right:

History — to remember what already worked and what failed, and why

Media — to tell the story properly, in our own words

Governance — to keep power visible, contestable, and rooted in trust rather than myth

Without these, attempts at “European digital sovereignty” will reproduce the same capture dynamics under a different logo. Telling the story is political work, if we don’t tell our story, someone else will, and it won’t be told in our interests. It will be told as inevitability, as market logic, as “there was no alternative.” That story always ends the same way: more centralization, more dependency, more enclosure – followed by another round of cleanup and composting.

We already did part of the hard work, we opened doors, we proved viability. What’s missing is not only technology – it’s memory, narrative, and continuity. Until we fix that, Europe will keep mistaking amnesia for realism, and surrender for pragmatism.

Examples of the problem we need to compost

In #openweb tech, these people are the problem not the solution https://freeourfeeds.com/whoweare

This is spoiler incompetent #techshit and likely funding mess we need to ignore https://cybernews.com/tech/europe-social-media-w/ Then compost.

Diversity is good, but this is a prat move https://www.modalfoundation.org/ the are quite a few of these.