VisionOnTV: A Lost Future of Grassroots Video

Nearly 20 years ago, we built something radical. #VisionOnTV wasn’t just another platform, it was a #4opens movement. A bold attempt to break free from corporate-controlled media and give people the tools to create and share activist-driven, alternative television. We weren’t waiting for permission; we were building the future we wanted to see.

Before #YouTube became the advertising surveillance monolith it is today, we had a different vision. One where video wasn’t just disposable clickbait, but a tool for social change. The project was to curated hard-hitting documentaries, radical comedy, underground music, and voices that #mainstreaming #TV wouldn’t touch. Unlike the corporate “content farms”, our focus was on nurturing quality grassroots storytelling, ensuring activist media was just as compelling as anything on TV.

Technically, we were ahead of the curve. Using #Bittorrent for distribution, #Miro for viewing, and Creative Commons licensing, VisionOnTV se out to build a decentralized media network, a vision that today’s #PeerTube is still catching up to. We worked for a world where people weren’t just passive consumers, but active participants in the media they watched.

Of course, the internet went in a different direction. The rise of #dotcons pulled people into walled gardens where visibility was dictated by algorithms, engagement was hijacked by ads, and “independent creators” had to play the platform game or disappear. VisionOnTV stood against that tide, but history didn’t side with us.

Yet, the need for a project like VisionOnTV has never gone away. The corporate grip on media is suffocating, activist voices are still being marginalized, and the fight for an open, people-powered internet continues. Maybe it’s time to dig through the compost of the past and see what new seeds we can plant.

What do you remember about VisionOnTV? And what lessons should we carry forward into today’s decentralized media struggles?

#IndymediaBack #OMN #4opens #NothingNew

People, community, the struggle between #openweb and #dotcons

This is a mess which has been clear to see for 20 years, but people still keep falling into the same traps instead of stepping off the cycle of conflict leading to control. Yes, we had something, we lost it, but as I talk about, we are still refusing to face why.

Let’s use #Failbook as a practical example of a monster that devours our dreams, fifteen years ago, the writing was already on the wall, #failbook and the #dotcons would eat everything. It wasn’t some grand conspiracy, just basic power and control dynamics. People knew this. They saw the cage being built around them, yet walked in willingly. Why? Because in the small picture, it was “easier” to stay inside than to step outside. They thought they were users, but they were being used. Every attempt to “fix” #failbook, the endless ethical tech debates, the “kinder, fairer” alternatives, the #NGO-funded projects promising “a better social network”, misses the core issue: You don’t fix a monster. You stop feeding it and walk away.

This is where the religious metaphor fits, people don’t want atheism (the #openweb), they do want a nicer god (ethical #dotcons). They are still kneeling before centralized power, just hoping for a softer whip. We need to stop worshipping the digital feudal lords and start building something else entirely. One path is to reboot the original #openweb

To do this we need some social history: The #openweb was murdered, and no one faced the consequences, we need a truth and reconciliation process for what happened to the #openweb. Why? Because people refuse to learn from history, and that means they keep making the same mistakes. Look at the waves of migration from open to closed over the last two decades:

The rise of blogs and open publishing (2000s) → The pull into social media walled gardens (2010s)
The rise of the federated web (2000s, early 2010s) → The collapse into corporate-owned silos (late 2010s, 2020s)
The rebirth of the Fediverse (Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc.) → Now being co-opted by NGOs and #mainstreaming interests

Each time, the excuse is different, but the result is the same, we hand over power, they take control, we lose everything. Until we face the fact that we let this happen, that we were complicit, this cycle won’t stop. Every time we fail to call it what it is, the blood-letting/stains soaking back.

The problem with #NGO and co-op models, people love to push the same “solutions” that failed before. Pushing a voluntary project into a hard “not-for-profit” structure kills it, this happened again and again. Look at #indymedia. It worked because it was messy, decentralized, built from the ground up. Run by volunteers, not controlled by a central authority. Rooted in the activist base, not an #NGO-funded agenda. Then came the push to “formalize” it, and what happened?

Funding fights, bureaucracy, infighting.
Projects being hijacked or forced into rigid structures.
Most of the co-op/NGO media projects collapsed.

There is nothing wrong with people building not-for-profit media, but stop forcing voluntary activism into structures that will kill it. The old mistakes aren’t new solutions. They are just mistakes waiting to happen again.

The #OMN and the need for diversity of strategies, the #OMN is built on a simple idea, diversity of strategies is strength. We need:

Commercial models where they work.
Not-for-profit structures where they make sense.
Voluntary activism as the foundation.

Then the basic #4opens of them linking to each other. What we don’t need is people using their own narrow worldview as a #BLOCK on other approaches in the guise of “helping”. This happens all the time, with the #NGO crowd that wants everything formalized, structured, and professionalized, they see grassroots messiness as a problem. The geeks want everything to be purely about the tech, ignoring the social and political realities. The politicos want everything to align with their ideology, even when that means excluding actual working solutions. These proxy fights kill the meany projects before they even start.

The solution is not ideological purity, it’s pragmatic diversity. If we want to break the cycle, we need to stop repeating the same mistakes, stop blocking each other, link and start building with what we have #KISS

One path to this, that needs support https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

The light in this is the #Fediverse, otherwise the last decade in tech has been a complete dead end. We’ve watched the same old mistakes play out, layering more “solutions” onto the #geekproblem without ever questioning the foundation. Instead of building trust, we’ve been sold “security” wrapped in fear, reinforcing the same toxic cycles that keep us locked in place.

The #OMN projects build from the #Fediverse and #openweb reboot to break from this. They are about real empowerment, shifting power by growing trust rather than control. If we keep repeating the same mistakes, we’re just feeding the #deathcult, accelerating the collapse. The #fashernista and #encryptionist obsessions, instead of opening paths to change, have become blind alleyways leading to catastrophe. We need to step back, reassess, and build differently, before the coming decades bring suffering on a scale we’ve barely begun to grasp.

The left, right mess is on repeat

This is at the heart of the contradictions and confusion in the political landscape today. The liberal and left muddle, where elements of economic populism are shared across ideological divides, is something we’ve seen before, especially in the 1930s, when fascist movements co-opted working-class grievances while pushing reactionary nationalism.

Lets looks at history #Bannon, like the Nazi Röhm long before him, plays a dangerous game by mobilizing working-class anger against neoliberal “elites” but steering it toward nationalism rather than genuine class struggle. The key difference is that Bannon, unlike the decedent Röhm, seems aware of how these power games play out, he’s studied history and applies these lessons to manipulate movements in favour of the #nastyfew being pushed into power. The economic critiques overlap with parts of the left, but his solutions (corporate nationalism, authoritarianism) are the very real danger. The question is: how do we make these distinctions clear to people trapped in the populist right-wing narratives? We need a strategy to cut through the confusion:

Recentre on Class Struggle (#KISS #classwar) by striping away the nationalist framing and refocus on economic realities: who actually benefits from policies? Who holds power? Expose how right-wing populists co-opt class anger but always serve capital in the end.
Expose the fake anti-establishment, Bannon claims to fight “globalists,” but his solution is just another form of “elite” rule, corporate fascism, not worker control. The “anti-tech bro” stance is surface-level; fascists historically seek state-corporate fusion, not any real accountability.
Build a networked radical alternative, left populism needs to be clearer, bolder, and independent of liberal NGO-driven paths and politics. We need grassroots led movements like the #OMN
Break through the media fog, #Mainstreaming and #dotcons push right-wing populism by treating it as an acceptable part of discourse rather than a threat. Use independent media (like #indymediaback) to reframe the conversation on more clear class terms.

The 21st Century Struggle is about climate, class, and collapse. This isn’t just about fighting fascism, it’s about surviving #climatechaos and social collapse. The solutions that emerge now will shape the next century. If we allow the right to set the terms, we end up in corporate #feudalism. If we organize and push a real alternative, there’s still a chance to shift to something better.

How do we sharpen this message so it cuts through the noise? What channels do you see as effective? We need working change and challenge #KISS

Trump is more Italian #fascism than German fascism

Trump and the tools of the old world order

The Fediverse is a step

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

Security is a social problem first, a tech problem second

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.

What does the #geekproblem do?

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?

A shift back to radical values and paths

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.

#KISS

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.

A path we need for the #openweb

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.

“Don’t drink from the #mainstreaming.”

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.

Example: Try clicking on #boatingeurope

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.

There are piles of shit from this mess.

Biography

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. 🌱

What am I doing now?

Open vs Closed Security: Finding a Path

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.

#openweb #4opens #security #privacy #activism #digitalresilience

These aren’t pointless projects

#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? 🌱

Social Media Monitoring, data scraping

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."

The reality is the normal #mainstreaming #dotcons issues that:

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.

Security and trust are a part of the fluffy/spiky debate in activism

Why the Fediverse Needs a Connection Between Mainstreaming and Grassroots

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.