The #algorithm on #YouTube has flipped hard right wing for me, a few other people have said the same, please add if you have seen this as well? If this is widespread, it shows how important it is to get normal people back to the #openweb reboot we are all involved in here.
This is obviously a form of social control, with the dominating of the #dotcons platforms in most peoples lives, plain and simple, the price of us building this domination.
The #hashtag story begins with disempowering the #mainstreaming in our own minds. First step: breaking the spell, realising we don’t have to live inside their frame.
Second step: forming the affinity group circle. Gathering with others who can see through the smoke and mirrors. From that circle comes the power to build the #OMN shovel.
Third step: composting. Taking all the #techshit – the failed projects, poisoned cultures, and dead ends – and turning them back into fertile soil. #OGB
What we do with that soil is up to us. That’s where the future grows. #KISS
The #geekproblem only sees #cavetechnology. But society is far too complex for that, you’d have to kill billions to make it work.
4opens is the opposite: a data commons. Light as a tool to fight with, not darkness to hide in.
We have been stripped naked by the last 40 years of the #deathcult. Every assumption that we lived in a tolerant, “good” world is slipping away. The growing #classwar was historically balanced to stop the possibility of a soviet takeover, as blinded liberals see this, two accidents: a temporary ecosystemic surplus and a temporary post-WWII settlement. Both have been rapidly dismantled. And when the foundations are gone, the liberal illusions fall with them.
What this looks like in the USA, Trump, neoliberalism’s golem, is dismantling his creators’ project. The Democrats wander listlessly like puppets with their strings cut. Client states are facing rebellion without the normal imperial backing. This growing stagnation wasn’t an accident, it was the plan. Just enough suffering to keep people scared, not enough to spark revolt. Just enough democracy to keep people hopeful, not enough to allow change.
If things keep going without major changes, we end up with fascism or authoritarianism in every major country. The next possibility of change is whether China’s technological developments manage to hold global warming under 2 degrees. If not, every border becomes a vicious killing zone, not the “minor” ones we already live with, but a planetary system of militarised exclusion and death.
What would stop this? It’s unpredictable, maybe the reboot of an old ideology, or the dramatic growth of one that barely exists today. A return to #neoliberalism won’t help, and a return to pre-neoliberal #liberalism is impossible. Between 1850 and 1950, ideologies bloomed, clashed, and died. In the last 80 years? Nothing but consolidation and suppression pushed the current blindness. In digital media ecosyteams the #dotcons algorithmic machine is accelerating the mess, the traditional media world is closing.
The suffering is accelerating beyond tolerance, beyond what can be hidden. Some say immiseration brings revolution, but, revolutions comes when expectations of something better are dashed, not when misery drags on. The 20th century Marxism of the authoritarian socialism crowded out other left paths, and when it faded, little remained. #Neoliberals didn’t have to control everything; they just had to preside over a void.
And into this void the blinded #fashionistas pushed the #dotcons. YouTube, Facebook, TikTok – as algorithmic machines of fear and control, that then went on to feed the hard right, who picked up the agendas and traditions of the left with the fall of the past left projects. The right twisted solidarity into nationalism, collective action into mob violence, critique into conspiracism. We fucked this up, and we have to fix it. The fix for this mess isn’t going to come from #mainstreaming policy papers or NGOs. The real fix has to come from the messy, grounded rebuilding of #classwar based open networks to grow grassroots trust.
To make this change we need an affinity group to short circuit the hopelessness they sell us, yes, it’s easy for the few to see that this hopelessness is a lie. But shifting to the majority to rebuild #mainstreaming is a much bigger project. So a small step is projects like the #OMN. If we don’t plant something better like this, we will be force-fed the future YouTube and Meta have already chosen for us. And that future looks a lot like fascism dressed up as entertainment.
I normally talk and work on big issues, let’s look for a moment at smaller steps. To make a big change, we need to start with practical paths (everyday grassroots & do-able). A personal short step is to detox one feed, not your life. Pick one algorithmic platform and shrink usage: unfollow, mute, or temporarily uninstall the app. Replace 15–30 minutes of scrolling with one intentional action by using replacement tools (not perfect, but better).
Try ActivityPub/Fediverse clients (Mastodon, PixelFed, PeerTube), RSS readers, or small community forums. Start with reading, not posting – build habit.
Curate your attention, subscribe to a few human-edited newsletters, local news, or blogs (#RSS). Teach friends how to set up an RSS reader or follow a small subject blog.
Practice media hygiene, verify before sharing. Pause, check one source, ask “who benefits if this spreads?” Be boringly sceptical.
Vote with time and money, support small creators directly (tips, buys, memberships) and donate to independent projects like community news sites, local papers, or tech co-ops.
Community & organising moves, host local “show-and-tell” sessions. 1 hour: show alternatives, how to use RSS/Mastodon/PeerTube, and why they matter. Bring tea.
Build small trust circles, start a group that publishes a single short community bulletin or podcast – keep it non-algorithmic and share by link.
Make open culture visible, put simple “we’re #openweb-friendly” stickers/links in local cafés, libraries, community boards. Make it easy to find one another.
Teach the next person, each person teaches one other person how to escape one algorithmic trap – then they teach another. Tiny chain.
Tech & product-level tactics (simple, not spectacular). Run a tiny, friendly instance. Local gatherings or collectives host a low-cost Mastodon/PeerTube instance with clear moderation and a friendly onboarding doc. Promote link-first publishing.
Encourage people to put content on a simple blog (or even a shared public wiki document) and share links rather than rely on feeds.
Use interoperable standards. Favours tech that uses open protocols, so people can migrate and mix services without being trapped.
Policy, campaigns & pressure. Demand transparency. Pressure institutions (schools, libraries, local councils) to publish simple rules about algorithmic tools and offer alternatives.
Support regulatory fights that protect attention. Back campaigns that limit manipulative design (dark patterns, endless feeds) and push for algorithmic audits. Amplify worker voices. Support platform workers and former moderators who expose harms – they are crucial allies.
What positive outcomes do we want? (clear, concrete). Less algorithmic amplification of fear. Fewer engineered outrage cascades in our local networks. Resilient, localised media ecology. Lots of small, trusted outlets (indymedia, community radio, blogs) that aren’t driven by ad-engagement. Restored civic trust & shared facts. Communities that can act together because they share a baseline of reality.
Shared infrastructure under community control. Instances, archives, and services run by people and collectives, not opaque ad corporations. More empathy in circulation. Content that rewards kindness and care rather than outrage.
This matters because if we don’t act, the future is already written by the #dotcons. Their algorithms don’t just reflect society, they shape it – twisting attention into fear, isolating people in bubbles of paranoia, and feeding the hard right until cruelty looks normal. This isn’t an accident; it’s the business model.
Every minute we spend scrolling through their poisoned feeds, we’re training ourselves to be more divided, more hopeless, more powerless. That’s their plan: keep us distracted, keep us arguing, keep us consuming, while the world burns and the billionaires laugh at us.
We don’t have the luxury of despair. Walking away from the #openweb and our own traditions of collective action left a vacuum, and the hard right rushed in. They stole our language of freedom, community, and even rebellion, and twisted it into authoritarian poison. That’s on us. We fucked up.
Now we fix it. The alternative is watching the world sink into algorithmic fascism, where cruelty is the currency of attention. The positive outcome is right in front of us: small, messy, grassroots networks where kindness and solidarity are amplified instead of hate. The #OMN, the #4opens, the trust-based paths we already know work.
We compost the #techshit because what grows out of it is hope, and without hope we’re already lost.
The hard right is taking all the agendas, traditions, and paths that the left abandoned, and twisting them to push its authoritarian politics harder. It’s a mess of our own making. When we walked away from the sense-based left paths – trust, solidarity, open debate, collective action – we left a vacuum. The right filled it with fear and control. We fucked this up. Now we have to fix it. #KISS
With the spreading of right-wing propaganda on the #dotcons what we’re experiencing is a late-stage symptom of the #dotcons algorithm machine. Once it starts feeding this level of right-wing “recommended” propaganda, you can be certain that the average person has been saturated with it for years. That’s how we end up with the cultural rot and polarisation we see now.
The dynamic is simple:
Engagement is the only metric → anger and fear drive more engagement than trust or hope → the algorithms amplify right-wing and conspiratorial content.
Normalisation follows → people stop noticing the manipulation, because it comes wrapped in everyday “banter,” “debate,” or “news.”
Politics bends to the feed → #mainstreaming media, #NGOs, and politicians chase the same attention flows, further dragging “common sense” into the gutter.
So yes, getting people to step away from #dotcons and back into the #openweb is crucial. The compost metaphor fits:
#techshit to compost → all the broken, manipulative, ad-driven “social” platforms.
#OMN → a messy, trust-based garden where communities can grow their own media again, rather than being force-fed monoculture by algorithm.
Path forward → build simple, transparent tools (#KISS) and link them to social practices (trust, affinity, #4opens) so people see the difference in their own lives.
The move is urgently necessary because the alternative is to let the rotting #deathcult (#neoliberalism + #dotcons) push smoke and mirrors, feeding on our attention, poisoning our discourse, and steering our politics to the hard right.
The right propaganda, commentators, try to distract us from the extremes of the right by claiming there’s an “extreme left.” Let’s lift the lid on this. The right is driven by individualism and the obsession with “winning” as if it’s a contest. This path breeds selfishness and calculated cruelty with zero empathy – more selfishness, more cruelty. The left, is a strong contrast, it starts from kindness and mutual support. It believes in sharing, in building together. The extreme of that isn’t violent chaos but extreme kindness, extreme empathy. Which side would you rather see amplified by algorithms?
We need to get to work with shovels to compost this mess.
Right now, our digital lives are stuck between two bad choices: Stranded silos, your notes, photos, chats locked into one device. #dotcons capture, hand it all to Google, Apple, Meta, and rent your own history back from them.
We deserve better. What we actually need is simple: Blobs of data that syncs across devices and servers. A conflict resolution flow. Sync is hard, but not impossible, better to resolve a clash than lose flow. A protocol path that isn’t “just another cloud,” but part of a commons.
This is the path of the #OMN (Open Media Network). Bridging client/server with #p2p flows, people power, where people hold their own history instead of renting it back from the #deathcult. To make this work, we need to keep it #KISS so normal people, not just geeks, can understand and use it. It’s not about building a new shiny app. It’s about laying the pipes, tanks, and flows – the plumbing – that keeps our media and our history, as a reflection of us, in native flows.
This is shovel work. This is how we compost the #techshit and grow something real. The choice is clear, stay stuck in silos, lease life from the cloud. Or pick up the shovel and build a trust-based, decentralised future. The tools are #OMN, #4opens. What’s missing is you. That’s the shovel work. That’s the compost. The question isn’t “can we build it?” – the question is: who’s going to pick up the shovel first?
Raw waste → The constant flood of mainstreaming, broken promises of #dotcons, bad-faith #NGO capture, shallow “innovation theatre.” This is the smelly mess we are swimming in.
Shovel work → Activists and communities don’t just sit in the mess. We turn it over, exposing the rot, adding oxygen. This is critique, transparency, and the #4opens in action.
Aeration → Sunlight + openness turns stink into something useful. Lies are exposed, corruption made visible, hidden power structures dragged out.
Soil of change → The same waste that poisoned us becomes fertile ground for new growth, but only if we do the work of turning it. This is how trust-based networks sprout, how #OMN emerges.
What it means in practice
Don’t delete the shit – we compost it. Bad actors, bad processes, and bad tech are made visible and contextualized.
Don’t hoard the shit – silos just trap the stink. Share, federate, distribute — so communities can add their own oxygen.
Don’t wallow in the shit – critique alone is not enough. The point is to grow fertile alternatives.
The composting metaphor says: yes, we’re drowning in #techshit, but we have the tools to turn it into the soil for something humane, resilient, and alive. #KISS
The #OMN is a simple project. But simplicity is deceptive, what makes it difficult for many #fashernista and #mainstreaming people is not the code, not the servers, not even the logistics. The difficulty is that the #OMN is rooted in a different path of human nature.
It isn’t designed to fit the old path of #stupidindividualism. It isn’t built to serve the greed of #dotcons. It isn’t here to bend the knee to the #deathcult.
The #OMN is designed as a transition tool, a bridge to a different path, commons, trust, a living path. Once people arrive, they can build what they like. That’s why the #OMN isn’t just tech, it’s a toolkit for social change and challenge.
#KISS. Keep it simple. Keep it real. I’ve been building this bridge for 20 years, agenst a strong counter flows, we were all pushed off the path when we handed our voices to the #dotcons. When #openweb culture gave way to #stupidindividualism, I was ready to give up.
So I bought a boat and sailed away. #boatingeurope. Not a metaphor – survival. But then came the ActivityPub reboot. The #openweb with the #Fediverse rose again. I came back. Because there was hope. There still is.
And now – five years into this reboot – we face the next predictable crisis: #mainstreaming, the sell-outs, the “respectable voices”, the NGO parasites. It’s normal. It happens to every alt project. And now it’s happening here.
The solution? Compost the mess. Not to attack individuals – most of them aren’t important. What matters are the paths they push us down. Because their “common sense” is the true danger. These are the paths that turn living networks into dusty, dry creeks.
That’s why I keep writing the #hashtag stories: to make these hidden paths visible. So we can see what’s going on. So we can choose differently. Compost the #techshit to grow something real.
Instead of only deleting, we contextualize and critique.
This “compost” becomes fertile ground for better growth.
Grow
New media projects emerge from the toolkit.
Each can shape the #OMN path to fit their community.
A living, adaptive commons.
Principles in practice, KISS → tools stay simple, human-readable, small pieces that fit together. #4opens → open data, open code, open process, open standards. Trust-based networks → rooted in commons, not control. Resilience → many weak ties are stronger than one big silo.
The #OMN is not an app you install. It’s a set of processes + tools to move us from isolation to commons, from #dotcons back to #openweb.
In the USA #techshit mess, #OpenAI is busy wrapping itself in the stars and stripes, pushing the fantasy of “democratic AI” while the democracy fig leaf is collapsing. This isn’t democracy – it’s branding. It’s the normal Silicon Valley laundering greed through the American imperialism.
The #nastyfew, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son, and the Saudis will do fine. They’ll gorge on taxpayer, subsides, pouring billions down the drain, just like the political as normal boondoggles – the useless littoral ships, the Foxconn ghost factory. It’s all the same scam: shovel public money into private pockets, call it progress, leave wreckage behind.
This is the everyday #deathcult at work. The language of freedom and democracy is hollow, with the smoke and mirrors hiding corporate profit motives, sprayed in red, white, and blue gloss. They were never building tools for people, they’re entrenching power, exporting Silicon Valley’s #dotcons extraction model under state sanction.
The rest of us? We get the surveillance, the climate wreckage, the bill. The only thing “democratic” about this current #AI path is how widely the costs will be socialized while the profits remain privatized.
We don’t need more Silicon Valley scams draped in flags. We don’t need “democratic AI” pushing billionaire control. What we need is a living alternative: the #OMN path.
The #OpenMediaNetwork isn’t built on subsidies for the #nastyfew, it’s built on trust, transparency, and tools for the many. It’s messy, human, and alive, rejecting the hollow language of branding and growing on the grounded: #4opens for media, code, governance, and community.
The #OMN path says: we don’t wait for corporations to drip-feed us “freedom” while chaining us with surveillance. We build our own networks. We create media that resists capture. We code grassroots protocols that put groups first, not extractive markets first. We reclaim the #openweb as commons, not a slave plantation.
This is the real “democracy” they are terrified about, and why they keep pushing their stage-managed branding exercise. We need instead people creating together, federating, refusing capture, building resilience in the cracks of the failing empire. The #deathcult is extraction, distraction, and decay. The #OMN is life, connection, and power in our hands. The choice is simple. Which side are you on?
The #dotcons sell us lies. Shiny apps. Smooth words. Addictive feeds. It’s branded corporate greed wrapped in a digital addiction – the drug of distraction, sold to us as “connection.”
The #nastyfew billionaires gorge. They own the servers, the wires, the algorithms. They gorge on our clicks, our labour, our lives. And the rest of us pay.
We pay in surveillance. We pay in broken trust. We pay in climate wreckage, while their jets and data centres burn the sky. The bill is dumped in our laps. That’s the #deathcult we worship.
But we have a choice. If we choose a different path, we don’t need their tools. We don’t need their lies. We don’t need their cages.
We build our own. Messy, raw, imperfect – but ours. That’s the #4opens. That’s the #OMN path.
Not for the market. For the people. Not top-down. Ground-up. Group-first. Trust-first. Messy, real, alive.
This is democracy they cannot script. This is media they cannot buy. This is the #openweb commons, we create together, not consume alone.
The choice is simple. Kneel to the #dotcons. Or rise, and build the #openweb.
Most software today = individualist. Even “collective” tools (Fediverse servers, enterprise SaaS, etc.) are just abstractions that aggregate individuals. The default assumption is the liberal subject: the sovereign individual. The infrastructure is built for self-expression, personal feeds, private chats, me, me, me. That’s why for example, when you step into libertarian codebases like #nostr, the smell of #stupidindividualism is everywhere.
Communities are treated as “groups of individuals,” not as entities. That’s the bourgeois blind spot, a community is not just a pile of people. A village, a crew, an affinity group, a social centre – these are organisms in themselves. They have memory, metabolism, reproduction, decision-making processes that aren’t reducible to a sum of members.
Much of activism and grassroots assemblies already know this, in real life, you’ve seen how assemblies develop rules-of-thumb, consensus practices, and internal cultures. They don’t need hard rules (code) to function; they need space, trust and ritual. What digital tools can do is soft map those existing practices into code, not create more structured #techshit that imposes individualist logic from the normal every day #deathcult priests of Silicon Valley.
So, if we take this different path, what would the balancing of communal-first tech look like? Well, much like the current mod process of good grassroots mastodon instances. Malatesta was right: anarchism is not the absence of “paths”, it’s paths we make for ourselves.
So looking over our shoulder, if we apply this lens to #nostr: The tech is libertarian free market, good for individual broadcasting. If you wanted to fork or layer it for communal use, you’d have to invert its assumptions: design clients that display group deliberation outputs, not only individual chatter. Right now, the #nostr crowd is hostile to this, because they’re blinded by crypto-bro ideology. But the protocol itself is kinda neutral, though the UX is still half-baked.
For #OMN and #indymediaback: This community-as-unit model is already in the DNA (#Indymedia was not a bunch of bloggers; it was collectives federating). The challenge is resisting the gravitational pull of the “common sense”, #mainstreaming, #dotcons control of the #nastyfew who can’t help but push everything to look like personal brands and influencer feeds.
As it should be easy to see, real-world collective practice – assemblies, affinity groups, neighbourhood councils – work differently. The base unit is not the individual but the group, bound by shared process. Thus, we need to build mythos and traditions before tools, decision-making protocols need to be horizontal and social, rather than hard coded digital control. To take this different path, we need to change and challenge the #mainstreaming with #KISS “native” tools, rather than the current mess of retrofitting governance into individualist existing software.
To recap, the unit of measure matters. Most digital tools are still built around the individual user account as the base unit. Everything radiates out from that: identity, control, permissions, content. This encodes #liberal, capitalist assumptions into the tech: atomised people, making “choices,” “connecting” in a marketplace of attention.
The #OMN is there to provide scaffolding for the pat away from this mess: a social layer that privileges collectives over individuals, that federates assemblies not personalities, and that accepts messiness as a feature rather than a bug. This is the path the #OMN can nurture, even if it means swimming against both the #dotcons and the libertarian crypto crowd, because we know that without shared process society collapses into prats, paranoia, and power-hoarding.
Let’s try to compost the mess rather than add to it, the #OMN is a shovel, please try not to be a prat about this, thanks.
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.
It’s good to see more people turning their focus back to the #openweb. For the past five years of the #reboot we’ve been distracted in a signal-to-noise mess from the #fashionistas. That time needs to be over, we need to start looking clearly at both internal rot and the external threats.
A good first step is in balancing the realisation that we actually have far more direct power to deal with the internal mess than we do over the eternal #dotcons and their #closedweb “common sense”. 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. #KISS
I understand the focus on the external #dotcons, yes, we also need 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. It destroys trust, it wastes resources, it corrodes integrity. People often destroy what they love, not out of hate, but out of possession.
Drafting blog posts, polemics, and rallying calls to sharpen the #OMN narrative. Use the compost metaphors (#techshit, seeds, soil) into accessible messaging that sticks. Editing to transform the long posts into shareable, short-form content for Mastodon, Fediverse, and allied networks.
Curating and organizing existing #OMN writings into a structured wiki-style knowledge base. Building summaries, FAQs, and primers for newcomers who hit the projects cold. Draft “composting guides” – how to deal with #blocking, #fashionistas, and #geekproblem inside communities.
Writing simple documentation for the Unite Forge and other #OMN tools. Helping draft roadmaps that explain what’s built, what’s missing, and what needs contributors. Produce explainers on why #OMN is different from #dotcons and #NGO capture, grounded in #4opens.
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.
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 actual social use.
We need to drag the conversation back tofit 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 embeds meany of the #mainstreaming issues and has the deep #geekproblems embedded into its culture and tech stacks. A second step away from this is, the social understanding, that security doesn’t come from code alone, it comes from the community that surrounds it. 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.
What is it that 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.
A community is only viable if enough people care enough to keep it relevant. In this era of #stupidindividualism, most people don’t lift a finger to make that happen.
This is the norm across many #4opens spaces: a near-total lack of interest in building or maintaining shared paths. It’s a textbook case of right-wing Tragedy of the Commons. Developers show up when it suits them, use the space for their narrow needs, then drift off without contributing to the upkeep. They treat community like free infrastructure – something passive they can extract from – rather than a living, tended path.
This same pattern plays out across the grassroots and #FOSS world. Devs focus on their code, their projects, their timelines. Rarely do they look up and engage with the broader ecology that their work depends on. In the #Fediverse especially, most developers ignore shared infrastructure, governance, and the standards they rely on, until something breaks. Then they complain.
Same social dynamics, same outcome: a mess that keeps repeating itself. And until we break that pattern, we’re stuck.
On the alt path, it’s fair to ask for clarity. When we talk about “#openweb projects,” we mean efforts grounded in the values of the early web commons: transparency, decentralization, collective ownership. This includes things like the rebooted #Indymedia, the #OMN (Open Media Network), and the #OGB (Open Governance Body). These aren’t about building shiny platforms, they’re about building the structures and relationships that allow real alternatives to survive and grow outside the #mainstreaming mess.
This isn’t just evangelism, it’s hands-on work: shaping frameworks for local and federated publishing (like the original Indymedia), and now modelling governance and trust systems that resist hierarchy and #NGO capture.
As for government institutions joining the #Fediverse – What we pushed was a bottom-up, native process rooted in people and practice, not imposed solutions. But as is often the case, after we laid the groundwork, the institutional #PR and #NGO crowd moved in and took over.
The “community” we speak of does exist, even if it’s fragmented, marginal, and ignored. You’ll find it in squats, permaculture collectives, activist media spaces, messy corners of the #Fediverse, and in the hands of people still building trust and tools outside the #dotcons. It’s not centralized or funded, so it’s not visible like capitalist platforms are. But it’s real. I’ve lived inside it for decades.
You’re right that real code is needed. But it’s not about one perfect tool. It’s about the network of trust and shared values that can hold many tools and projects together. That’s slower to build, less flashy to show off, but far more resilient and necessary.
The #Fediverse is a good first step. But let’s be honest: we’ve lost the thread when it comes to building tech that walks off the beaten path. Most #mainstreaming energy, and much of the #NGO outreach, still flows into reinforcing the same old ruts: centralization, enclosure, obedience to capital. Anything that doesn’t follow those routes is starved of support and often treated as a threat, a curiosity, or a waste of time.
But it’s exactly that off-path infrastructure we need, not just to resist the current system, but to outlast it. To still be standing when the old ways collapse. That means supporting tools and systems that aren’t profitable, aren’t convenient, and aren’t slick. They’re harder to fund, harder to maintain, but they’re what let us keep moving forward through the coming storm of #climatechaos.
If we don’t build and sustain these alternative tracks, the dominant ones will keep absorbing or destroying everything new. It’s a recursive trap: we need better systems to make better tools, but we can’t build those tools without some of those better systems already in place.
So we need to hold space – with care, mess, and trust – for that in-between.
That’s where projects like #OMN, the rebooted #Indymedia, and the #4opens live. Not trying to escape friction, but embracing it. Mediating it. Letting it guide us toward what’s honest, what’s native, what lasts.
The new litmus test isn’t “Does it scale?” It’s: “Does it spread? Does it take root? Can it compost and regrow?”
It’s important to recognise that friction – the mess, the slowness, the need for constant negotiation – is not a flaw in native paths, it’s a virtue. It’s how trust, mutuality, and accountability are sustained over time. These are not bugs to be eliminated with slick #UX and #VC-funded convenience – they’re part of what keeps a community honest and rooted.
The problem arises when less-native, often externally imposed systems (driven by capitalist or institutional agendas) treat these messy, friction-full spaces as broken or backwards. This is the classic dynamic of imperialism and settler colonialism: imposing order, “fixing” things, extracting value, and in doing so erasing the lived, relational logic of native systems.
If you look through the lens of native/western histories – indigenous struggles vs colonial modernity, the same pattern plays out again and again: the native path is degraded, disrespected, overwritten. In tech, it’s no different. You see it when horizontal, trust-based networks get steamrolled by #NGO capture, institutional gatekeeping, or #VC-funded platforms that sell convenience and control.
So the real work is mediation. Not purity, not retreat, but balancing these tensions in practice: holding space where native paths can grow without being co-opted or crushed, while still reaching out to shift the wider terrain.
We need to stop seeing native approaches as “immature” or “inefficient.” They’re often the only thing holding the line against complete enclosure. The question isn’t “How do we fix the mess?”, it’s “How do we stay with it, tend it, and let it teach us how to do this differently?”
It’s an old but urgent problem: how do we support tech that walks outside the dominant paths long enough to clear new ones? Infrastructure that can challenge the mainstream only survives if we build support systems that reflect different values — trust, openness, and care over control, profit, and scale. Right now, we’ve stopped thinking seriously about this. If we don’t return to this work, building the path as we walk it, we’ll be stuck cycling through the same traps, watching each alternative collapse back into the old defaults.
