Let’s do a brief breakdown of the core structural problems of centralized platforms and how they warp social interaction. This ties directly into the #geekproblem, #4opens, and the broader issues of #dotcons and digital feudalism. Key issues:
Centralization breeds #feudalism. One big virtual server means a few people have all the power while the rest are serfs.
“Ease of use” is often a lie. It just means the real costs are hidden, either pushed onto users (moderation, unpaid labour) or externalized (data exploitation, environmental costs).
Advertising poisons everything. It’s a moral hazard because platforms optimize for ad revenue, not people’s or community well-being, leading to manipulation and surveillance.
Moderation cannot be outsourced. Centralized platforms fail at moderation because they have to apply feudal control instead of organic, community-led governance.
As it’s used now, the algorithm is not your friend. It reinforces biases, kills discovery, and turns users into dopamine addicts, making them less able to engage meaningfully.
Buying influence kills real communities. When orgs and brands dominate a space, the authentic social fabric collapses.
The #openweb Alternative? The #4opens and #OMN offer a radically different path, where trust replaces control, decentralized, transparent networks let communities govern themselves. Organic discovery beats algorithms, instead of being trapped in echo chambers, people explore through human curation and paths.
The Fediverse is a step, but it’s still struggling with #geekproblem governance issues. The real challenge is breaking out of the social #postmodernist loop and building solid, trust-based, grassroots media and social spaces to shape the change challenge we need.
The #dotcons#mainstreaming internet is designed to pacify and extract, we need to build for resistance and renewal #KISS path is native #openweb
The #geekproblem locks us into hardcoded #feudalism, power structures baked into the code itself, with server admins as kings, users as serfs. To break this, we need to build trust-based paths first and let security emerge from that, rather than bolting it on after the fact. What actually needs to be secured?
The account → If the instance isn’t secure, the account isn’t either.
The activity feed → The flows need to be secured to prevent manipulation.
The credit (data attribution) → Maybe hashing media objects?
But rather than obsessing over client-server security, we accept that trust must be social, not just cryptographic. #4opens keeps security honest, openness exposes flaws so they can be fixed.
The #encryptionists problem, is that they act like encryption is the solution to everything, but in reality, most people’s security is already broken at the device level, old phones, proprietary blobs, built by #dotcons. If you encrypt your messages, but the recipient’s device is compromised, what’s the point?
Open vs Closed
Closed breeds monsters—plots happen in the dark, and truth is impossible to judge.
Open exposes monsters—they might still exist, but they can be tripped up and countered.
The #Fediverse, #OMN, and #openweb need messy, trust-based networks, not fantasies of absolute control. Security isn’t about paranoia, it’s about transparency. The takeaway, we can’t solve security in a world where most people’s devices and networks are already compromised. Instead of a head-in-the-sand approach, we embrace the mess, trust the process, and build open systems that expose threats instead of pretending to eliminate them #KISS
Yes, it’s a feedback loop, geeks build the infrastructure of our digital world, but their worldview is trapped inside that same infrastructure. The #geekproblem is the inability to step outside their own frame of reference, even when the failures of their approach are pointed out hundreds of times over a decade.
They think in technical solutions to social problems, and because those solutions look logical to them, they assume the problem is fixed, even when it clearly isn’t. Worse, they don’t understand why people reject their fixes, so they blame the users, not their own blind spots.
It pushes crossover left/right tech governance that lacks any grounding in real-world politics or social movements.
It gets stuck in endless debates where nothing ever changes, because geeks can’t see what’s outside their own mental models.
It defaults to #postmodernism, where everything is relative, nothing is real, and any attempt to define truth is dismissed as controlling “them”.
It refuses to accept accountability because the tools they build don’t support it.
Example of the #geekproblem? We have already pointed to #indymedia, where geek-led decisions undermined the very social movements the tech was supposed to support. And we see it today in Fediverse governance, where geeks cling to process without understanding power.
The #4opens exposes these problems, but geeks still can’t see them. Why? Because openness forces social accountability, and geek culture resists that. The way forward? We need diverse voices in digital spaces, not just geek monocultures. The Fediverse, #OMN, and other #openweb projects need balance, geeks build the tools, but they shouldn’t be the ones defining the social governance of those tools.
So yeah, go round in circles with geeks all you want, but until they acknowledge there’s a problem, nothing changes. Instead of fighting them, we should be building outside their bubble, bringing in people who have some understanding of social processes, and making the #geekproblem a public discussion.
Because if they won’t see the problem, we’ll just have to work around them somehow, ideas please?
Much of academia post-1990s is just a shadow of the #deathcult, stripped of radicalism and repackaged into careerist, bureaucratic loops. It became another self-referential path, detached from real world struggles. The privatization of knowledge through paywalled journals, corporate funding, and NGO capture made sure of this.
The same thing happened with #FOSS and #opensource, once about radical openness, it was watered down when organizing shifted to closed chat systems and corporate-friendly platforms. We lost the #openprocess that made early public archives powerful.
Then you have, Modern Art, once revolutionary, was quickly absorbed into the cultural arm of the #deathcult, turning radical expression into a commodity for the #nastyfew. It’s the same cycle over and over:
A movement starts as a real challenge to power.
It gains momentum.
Power co-opts it, waters it down, and sells it back to us.
People will keep doing stupid things, that’s inevitable. The job is to call it out, push better paths, and make sure they don’t repeat the same mistakes. It’s not glamorous, and it won’t get you applause, but that’s how real social change works.
The cat meowing, the #fashionistas, whether intentionally or not, keep blocking the left’s paths by turning everything into aesthetics and performance rather than actual power-building. They chase whatever is trending, constantly rebrand, and ultimately reinforce the #mainstreaming forces they claim to resist.
Meanwhile, the right organizes, funds, and builds real infrastructure, they don’t waste time on purity politics and endless internal fights. That’s why they keep winning.
So what do we do?
Stop trend-hopping, we need long-term strategies, not just momentary viral moments.
Build real alternatives, tech, media, organizing spaces that serve movements, not just “woke” branding.
Own our narratives, not get trapped in the spectacle of liberal discourse and right-wing outrage cycles.
Get our hands dirty, shovel through the #techshit, compost the failures, and grow something real.
This is about taking control back, not only reacting to the crises the nasty few push us to manufacture. Radical media, the #openweb, grassroots organizing, these are the things that cut through the noise and shift power back to where it belongs.
The #4opens act as a foundation to hold back the tide of the post-truth world, they enforce transparency, accountability, and community control. Without them, everything drifts into manipulation, closed power structures, and co-option by #dotcons.
It’s a chicken-and-egg issue because we need social trust and active participation to maintain the #4opens, but those same values are constantly eroded by the #mainstreaming forces of the #deathcult.
The #OMN is crucial because it builds digital commons as a form of social technology. It’s not just about the tech, it’s about the relationships, trust networks, and shared values that make it work. Once we have this space, what we do with it is up to us, but it has to be grounded in real, radical alternatives, not just another tech silo.
That’s where the rebooted #indymedia project comes in. It’s built on the #PGA hallmarks, which means it’s explicitly anti-capitalist, decentralized, and activist-driven. It can’t function within the corporate media sphere, so it has to exist in a #TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone)—a liberated, self-organized space outside of state and market control.
Wikipedia gives a decent artsy take on #TAZ, but in practice, it’s about creating spaces where radical alternatives can actually live and grow. #PGA is the backbone, an old grassroot global framework for direct action and real-world resistance.
The key is building trust-based networks that aren’t easily co-opted. If we don’t do this, the cycle repeats: good projects get absorbed, neutralized, or just fade into irrelevance.
The #NGO crew can be poison, not because they’re bad people, but because of how social structures and agendas shape behaviour. For the social health of the #openweb, we need to be mindful of what we take in. Just like in nature, some things are toxic in large doses. “Nice” doesn’t always mean “good.” There’s no contradiction here.
But remember, shit makes good compost! Instead of just being cynical, let’s grow something better from this mess. A healthy #openweb world is still possible.
The Real Problem, is that too many people have been stuck in the #dotcons feedback loop for too long, lazy consumption feeding corporate control, which in turn dulls critical thinking, making people even more dependent. The illusion of #mainstreaming “ethical” alternatives all reinforce this cycle.
This post isn’t aimed at anyone in particular, but if you feel called out… well, maybe think about why.
Q: Why does this matter?
Because right now, #fashernistas (trend-chasers) and their projects are flooding into the #openweb space. Some of these projects are good, but many are just recreating the #geekproblem, building things that look different on the surface but are more #techshit repeating the same mistakes.
We use the #4opens as a litmus test for these projects:
Open Data – Who controls it?
Open Source – Can it be independently verified and improved?
Open Process – Who gets to decide?
Open Standards – Can it be freely networked and flows built upon?
If we don’t actively promote and support real alternatives, people will just step to more of the next “ethically marketed” #dotcons. If we don’t do #PR, they will, and they have far bigger budgets.
Q: What’s the deal with #hashtags, they empower people to break out of controlled algorithms.
Click a hashtag → See real conversations outside your curated bubble.
Follow a hashtag → Keep up with a movement, not just what a platform wants you to see.
Use hashtags → Help build DIY, horizontal networks that weaken centralized control.
Simple truth: Hashtags can be used to give you more power, and take power away from the algorithmic walls of the #geekproblem and #dotcons. They help connect ideas, people, and actions outside #mainstreaming corporate control.
Not using them? That’s fine, but why actively reject something that makes change easier? Social transformation isn’t painless, but it’s doable. A simple first step is to just start using shared social hashtags, and when you get pushback, stick with it.
Nobody said social change was easy.
The #mainstreaming progressive are finally moving to what I have been saying in the hashtag story. They are talking about the #blocking of left paths by our #fashionisters, we do need to work at shovelling this mess to grow the seeds we need for change and challenge.
I’ve been part of the #Fediverse since its earliest days, helping to build it from the ground up. The #OMN ran five instances for the first four years, supporting communities as they explored decentralized social spaces. I’ve organized events, facilitated discussions, and continuously worked to nurture the Fediverse’s growth as a living example of what the #openweb can be. You can explore more about this journey here.
My involvement in grassroots media and open technology stretches back to the birth of the web itself. I was part of the early internet experiments that challenged #mainstreaming narratives and built alternative channels for expression and connection. Projects like Undercurrents, the UK’s radical video collective, pushed past and back against corporate media control, documenting grassroots struggles and amplifying unheard voices for change and challenge.
From there, we launched #Ruffcuts, distributing activist films on copyleft free to distribute CD-R’s long before YouTube or streaming platforms existed. Soon after, #Indymedia emerged as a global decentralized federated media network, proving that open publishing and collective moderation could empower movements worldwide. This work eventually evolved into #visionOntv, an early attempt to build a peer-to-peer video distribution network, harnessing the power of collective storytelling to counter the corporate narratives.
After campaigning agonist climate change for 20 years I bought a lifeboat (an apt metaphor) to sail through Europe with #Boatingeurope, I connected with diverse communities, sharing media tools and spreading the message of #DIY media. These projects were all part of the same thread, a continuous push to create #DIY spaces where people can connect, collaborate, and tell their own stories without #mainstreaming gatekeepers.
The history of the Fediverse carries valuable lessons from these past experiments: the tension between decentralization and fragmentation, the struggle to balance grassroots governance against the creeping influence of #mainstreaming commercialization, and the ongoing need to keep human connection and community at the centre of technology.
By learning from the past, we cultivate a more resilient, cooperative, and truly #openweb path, one that resists the extractive logic of the #dotcons and embraces collective action and care. The path ahead isn’t easy, but the roots we’ve already planted run deep. Let’s keep growing, composting the mess, and building the future we need. 🌱
In a world where digital activism is all surveilled, we need to understand better the balance between open and closed security. If you’re doing anything politically sensitive or “#spiky,” the safest option is to organize offline. Government analysts, corporate spies, and bad actors easily map connections inside the #dotcons and gather intel through the #openweb.
The challenge is that, while secure communication tools exist, relying on them requires an almost impossible level of tech literacy and trust. Maybe 0.001% of people can confidently lock down their systems, but the remaining 99.99% can’t, or won’t. And even for the most tech-savvy, there’s always the risk of compromised firmware, backdoors, or people error.
Historically, the danger isn’t just theoretical. Police spies have infiltrated activist circles for decades, as detailed in resources like Police Spies Out of Lives. Activists who relied on #closedsecurity were often devastated when trusted comrades turned out to be state agents, the real-world equivalent of someone copying and pasting your encrypted chat to their handlers. Worse still, for every state spy, there are likely ten corporate or private agency spies, each with their own motivations.
From a social point of view the #geekproblem path to perfect privacy is an illusion. So where does that leave us? The truth is, there’s no hard tech fix to human social networking. Tools can help, but social solutions are much more vital. If you are on the #fluffy path or only on the edge of #spiky, working openly and embracing the #4opens model can mitigate harm by removing secrecy as a vulnerability. If there are few secrets to steal, spies lose much of their power.
At the same time, digital skills are essential. People, especially current generations, are organizing online, and the line between online and offline is non-existent to them. Telling them to “just organize offline” will likely get you a dismissive “OK boomer” in response. But just with the police spy history, there will be a cost to people who dismiss this history, we do need to understand better both the possibilities and the risks.
The goal, then, isn’t to choose between open or closed security, but to build a hybrid path. Use the #openweb to find each other and share public information. Use secure tools for truly private discussions, but with the awareness that no tool is socially foolproof. And most importantly, build strong social bonds and resilient offline communities, because, in the end, trust is the only real valuable security layer we have.
Let’s embrace the mess, recognize the dangers, and navigate this landscape with care.
#mainstreaming#liberalism has lost its way. For the past 20 years, many self-described liberals have spewed out bilge water disguised as “common sense.” But when pressure mounts, they reveal themselves as dogmatic and intolerant, almost as if they aren’t truly liberal at all.
How did we end up in this mess? The #deathcult, #stupidindividualism, and the rise of #dotcons shaped the dominant version of “common sense,” warping it away from collective care and into something narrow and self-destructive. It’s worth reflecting on this if we want to reclaim a liberal liberalism, rooted in genuine openness and social good.
In practice, we can compost this mess by focusing on #nothingnew paths. Two longstanding cultural projects already embody this, working in non-federated ways for over a century. Now, we can add technical federation to the mix, building on 5+ years of #ActivityPub rollout.
This gives us two powerful, #openweb-native paths forward:
Grassroots #DIY culture — Local, self-organized, and messy, but thriving outside corporate control.
Technical federation — Interconnected systems designed to distribute power and ownership.
Both of these paths lead somewhere meaningful:
#indymediaback (part of the #OMN project) to rebuild radical grassroots media.
#OGB (based on #EU outreach on #socialhub) to create open, federated governance.
These aren’t pointless projects, they’re a chance to break free from the suffocating grip of the #deathcult and build something resilient, human, and actually free.
Shall we pick up the shovels and start composting? 🌱
In a #4opens project like the #Fediverse, this article’s framing makes no sense as a native view of the #openweb. The data exists in a commons — and while you could apply a #CC licence and try to enforce it. In the end, #4opens is just that, #opendata. But as the article highlights, there are real issues in understanding how open systems intersect with state and corporate surveillance.
Fediverse & Mass Surveillance — A research article breaks down how the Fediverse presents both challenges and opportunities for state surveillance.
🔗 Read the research
"Non-centralized social media appears to be undergoing a 'Killer Hype Cycle,' where users dissatisfied with centralized platforms flock to alternatives like Mastodon. But with this influx comes an increase in publicly available data for researchers, corporations, and state agents alike."
Corporations mine federated media for profit.
State agencies catalog user data for tracking and control.
This is a reminder that you are doing anything #spiky political it’s much better to organise off the internet as government analysts easily search and map connections between people across the #openweb as much as they already do more directly through the #dotcons
This isn’t a #ecryptionist call to lock down the #Fediverse, that would be beyond stupid, but a reminder that openness requires awareness and collective defence. A truly #openweb using the #4opens needs to face these threats head-on, with social solutions and federated resilience at the core of its path and design.
This is a key point that often gets misunderstood. #Mainstreaming isn’t inherently good or bad—it depends on who is influencing whom.
Good #mainstreaming = Bringing #openweb values into the mainstream (transparency, decentralization, cooperation).
Bad #mainstreaming = The mainstream (corporate control, surveillance capitalism, hierarchy) infusing itself into the #openweb and reshaping it in its own image.
In the current context, mainstreaming is mostly bad because it tends to dilute radical alternatives into market-friendly compromises. The #deathcult (neoliberalism) doesn’t absorb things in good faith—it co-opts and neutralizes them.
That’s why we need mediation, pushback, and a clear understanding of context when talking about #mainstreaming. Sometimes it’s the right move, but right now, the priority is defending and growing the roots of the #openweb before our # #fashionistas can sell it off as a brand.
One of the best things about the Fediverse is that real people and community’s get to choose what kind of digital paths they want to take. Don’t want #Meta snooping around? Join or host an instance that blocks them out. Prefer not to have people search your content? Lock it down in your settings. Want to mediate the strong #blinded flow of “normies”? Close the doors via your instance settings. It’s a “nativist” system that offers a radical degree of agency compared to the #dotcons.
But what happens when people start demanding that their version of the #Fediverse become the default for everyone else? That’s where things get tricky, and where we risk losing the most valuable aspect of this messy, decentralized network: the bridges between worlds. The danger of closed loops, it’s understandable that people want their corners of the #Fediverse to feel safe, sustainable, coherent, and aligned with shared values.
The problem is that when we focus on tools so that every group can retreat into its own echo chamber, we recreate the failures of the wider #dotcons web: fragmented bubbles where ideas stagnate, and meaningful conversations can’t happen. This is what I mean when I talked about #mainstreaming echo chambers, the tendency for people to isolate themselves in what feels comfortable, which ultimately makes everything smaller.
The irony is that this impulse to close off is, in a way, the same as the desire to keep the Fediverse open. Both are reactions to the failures of centralized tech platforms. People who want to mediate #mainstreaming influences are trying to nurture the fragile seedlings of the grassroots culture they’ve built, while those advocating for broader adoption hope to prevent the network from collapsing into irrelevance. Both impulses come from wanting the Fediverse to survive, they just express that desire in too often opposite #blocking ways.
The failed bridge of #FediverseHouse is a normal path. This tension came to a head with projects like #FediverseHouse and #Fediforum, which aimed to be a gathering space but ultimately failed to build lasting bridges. It wasn’t because people didn’t care, it was because there wasn’t enough understanding of how to hold that tension between the grassroots and the mainstream without one swallowing the other. The projects lack the simplicity of #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and got tangled in the same old dynamics of control and fragmentation.
Keeping the bridge in place has a lot to do which sharing resources, in non #mainstreaming ways, yes, we understand, this is a hard leap for meany people but only people who can make this step can acturly be useful in the end to the “native” #openweb paths. The solution isn’t to pick a side, but to intentionally hold the bridge. In a smaller, view, that might look like running accounts across multiple instances and boosting content between different ideological spaces to keep ideas flowing. It might mean advocating for #4opens values even in mainstream-leaning spaces, or gently nudging the more isolated pockets of the Fediverse to stay curious about what lies outside their walls.
The Fediverse doesn’t need to be one thing, that’s its strength. But if we let the bridges decay, we lose the possibility of cross-pollination, of radical ideas seeping into #mainstreaming consciousness, or of everyday people stumbling into a space that makes them question the status quo. Instead of fighting, as we so often do, to make one version of the #Fediverse dominant, maybe the real work is in keeping the network alive, messy, imperfect, but always connected. Because it’s in those connections that real alternatives grow.
We’ve had 40 years of head-down worship of the #deathcult, and now very few people dare to lift their heads to look around at the mess we live and die in. It is really hard to communicate to #mainstreaming people inside the #dotcons that today, way too much mainstreaming is simply parasitic. That the balance is out with them feeding, draining the life from grassroots #DIY creativity, to consumes it, and then discards the husk. This is in part why our liberal society and wider ecology are in crisis. We let “them” devour and discarded the very cultures that regenerates our lives.
Punk emerged as a raw, anti-establishment eruption of energy: people building their own venues, pressing their own records, and living outside the system. Within a decade, the mainstream chewed it up, spat out mall-punk aesthetics, and sold rebellion back to kids as a fashion statement. The original #DIY culture that sustained community withered, while corporations wore its preserved skin to sell the same cultural emptiness punk rose to resist.
Or take the light green movement. Grassroots dark green eco-activism in the ’70s and ’80s was fierce and uncompromising, with people physically blocking bulldozers, building tree-sits, and creating autonomous zones. Today, the “green” label is a marketing gimmick, plastered on disposable products and corporate ad campaigns. The radical core of systemic change has been devoured, leaving a husk of performative (stupid)individual actions like buying metal straws.
Even the internet itself — once an open tool of ideas, built by native #DIY culture and hackers who wanted to share knowledge freely — was, after a ten-year fight, enclosed by the #dotcons. They bought the creativity, built walled gardens, and replaced collective digital commons with algorithmic echo chambers. What was once a chaotic, messy, generative space became a polished, ad-riddled shopping mall.
This cycle repeats because people don’t see the consumption happening in real time. They’re taught to see success as visibility, and visibility as validation. But by the time a radical idea becomes visible to the mainstream, it’s usually already being gutted from the inside. The #mainstreaming only lets radical ideas and actions in when they’ve been defanged, made safe, and rendered useful to perpetuate the status quo.
The result is today’s society running on empty, haunted by the hollowed-out shells of the movements that imagined another way of being. And because we’ve been taught to equate progress with endless consumption, of ideas, identities, cultures, few people realize they’re living in a landscape of corpses.
The question is: how do we shovel this mess to change this cycle? How do we protect the roots while letting the flowers bloom? And how do we get people to lift their heads, shake off the #mainstreaming trance, and see the compost we’re standing in, the fertile ground where real alternatives do grow? How do we change and challenge what is mainstreaming?
Note: This is a #fluffy attempt at communicating to the #mainstreaming. In reality, this post is about #activertpub and the #Fediverse. I’ve already written extensively on this, but I don’t think those pieces break through to the #mainstreaming. So, I used other examples to illustrate the issue.
Signal-to-noise is a hard conversation to have. In our #postmodern world, the very idea of common agreement on what constitutes signal or noise feels elusive, even when it’s often obvious to the community.
The undermining of shared narratives fractured our sense of collective reality. In the absence of common ground, every perspective risks becoming its own echo chamber, amplifying what it values as signal while dismissing conflicting views as noise. This dynamic plays out in countless social and political spaces, shaping how movements grow or fracture.
Take the #climatecrisis: for decades, scientists have raised alarms, presenting real evidence of human-driven climate change. To the scientific community, this is pure signal — an urgent call to action. Yet, in the polluted information ecosystem of #dotcons social media, this signal is drowned out by noise: conspiracy theories, corporate disinformation, and nihilistic fatalism. The noise isn’t random; it’s cultivated to create doubt, intentionally distorting the clarity of the signal.
In activist communities, the tension between signal and noise surfaces as the #fluffy vs #spiky debate. The push for kindness and inclusivity (#fluffy) is valuable, but when weaponized to silence critique and #block hard conversations, it becomes noise that stifles necessary friction. Conversely, sharp, uncompromising confrontation (#spiky) can cut through noise to deliver a clear message, but this is too easy to #block, by “common sense” dogmatism and can also all too easily tip into performative aggression and endless infighting, it drowns the original signal in static.
The same dynamic unfolds in the political sphere. Movements like Black Lives Matter or Palestinian solidarity campaigns face relentless attempts to distort their message. The core signal, calls for justice, equality, and liberation, gets obscured by deliberate noise: fearmongering narratives, tokenizing gestures from corporations, or bad-faith actors hijacking discussions to sow division.
Yet, communities often have an intuitive sense of what is and isn’t noise. They might not always agree on the edges, but collective experience and shared values act as a compass. The challenge lies in cultivating enough trust to navigate that together, to hold space for disagreement without succumbing to the paralysis of endless debate or the allure of easy scapegoats.
In the end, the conversation itself is part of the signal. The flows of discussion, the messiness of negotiating meaning, and the work of collective sense-making, all of this generates the compost from which new understandings can grow. But that only works if we resist the temptation to #block, dismiss, or isolate ourselves entirely.
The goal isn’t to eliminate noise (an impossible task) but to build resilient communities that can amplify signal through the static. Because in a world where everything is contested, the most powerful act is to keep listening, keep speaking, and keep tending the roots of shared meaning.
In activist spaces and grassroots communities, the tension between #fluffy and #spiky approaches is a well-worn dynamic. Fluffy represents a gentler, consensus-driven path, centred on kindness, inclusion, and collective care. Spiky, on the other hand, is sharp-edged, direct, and confrontational, willing to disrupt and break things to push for change. Both paths have their place, but the trouble arises when fluffy turns dogmatic, morphing into a hard passive-aggressive policing that silences needed dissent.
Dogmatic fluffy presents itself as kindness, but when it becomes rigid, it is just as destructive as unchecked aggression. People get shamed for stepping out of line, challenging dominant group norms, and advocating for more assertive tactics. This isn’t only a theoretical issue, it actively fractures movements, creating an echo chamber where only approved, safe opinions are allowed to circulate. Its activism dressed in softness but wielding the same #mainstreaming blunt force as the systems we set out to dismantle.
The danger lies in the #blocking of paths to meaningful discussion. When conversations are shut down in the name of maintaining harmony, we lose the ability to take difficult paths. The #fluffy-spiky debate needs to be dynamic, a living exploration of what tactics are effective in different contexts. Sometimes, gentle community building is the answer. Other times, the situation calls for confrontation and disruption. But when one side forcibly silences the other, we stop evolving.
It’s good to remember #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Complexity is necessary, but so is cutting through the noise. If our movements become bogged down in internal purity tests, we soon lose sight of the actual struggle. With, people stepping away from the #dotcons and looking for alternatives. We need to offer spaces where messy, honest, and sometimes uncomfortable conversations can happen, not sterilized bubbles where dissent is treated as betrayal.
Real movements thrive in the tension between fluffy and spiky. The key is to stay flexible, to let people navigate those paths without turning one into a dead-end. Fluffy doesn’t need to fear spiky, and spiky doesn’t need to dismiss fluffy. They’re both tools, both necessary. And if we can hold space for that complexity, we might just build movements resilient enough to withstand whatever the #deathcult throws our way.
What do you think? Should we lean into the discomfort and keep the debate alive?
UPDATE: it needs to be said that #blinded dogmatic #fluffy people can become nasty #fuckwits without a clue, what do you think we can do with this mess?
