Tag: Facebook

Can the #openweb reboot scale without copying the #dotcons?

There is a recurring argument about the #Fediverse that starts with a reasonable question of how can the Fediverse scale? So why, because, yes, it doesn’t yet have the same ease of use as mainstream social media. Infrastructure can be fragile. Servers can struggle when large numbers of people arrive at once. Developers need support and servers cost money. There are no universal performance guarantees, and there isn’t a single business model paying for the whole system. All of that is real.

But underneath this question is a important distinction. Are we trying to scale a platform, or are we trying to scale a network of communities? Those are not the same project, platform scale versus network scale. The #dotcons are built around platform scaling, the basic model is: one organization → one platform → millions of users → centralized infrastructure → centralized governance → monetized attention. The objective is to get as many people as possible onto the same system.

The Fediverse nativly comes from a different tradition, its #KISS path is: many communities → many servers → open protocols → federation → local autonomy → shared network. The objective isn’t necessarily to put everyone in the same place, it is to allow different places to connect. That is the central distinction that gets ignored by mainstreaming crew in discussions about “scaling the Fediverse”.

Scaling the platform is not the same as scaling the network, if we take the #dotcons model as our definition of success, then the Fediverse will always look deficient. It doesn’t have one company providing everything, have one business model funding everything, it doesn’t have one #UX controlling everyone, or one central authority making all the decisions. But these aren’t simply missing features, they are features we deliberately don’t want to reproduce.

The common sense question shouldn’t be – why isn’t the #Fediverse more like mainstream social media? The more need focus should be on – how do we make a federated network of communities sustainable at much larger scale? That is a different engineering, economic and social problem, a different idea of scale.

The problem we need to compost is then, #mainstreaming blindness asks – how do we get millions of people onto one platform? The openweb asks – how do we make thousands or millions of people able to participate in sustainable communities that can connect to each other? That is still scale, it is distributed scale rather than centralized scale. Instead of building one giant machine capable of containing everyone, we build a network of autonomous communities capable of supporting themselves while remaining interoperable. This is native to the historic logic of the #openweb.

This changes the #UX question, the cultural problem that is easy to mistake for a UX problem #mainstreaming common sense talks about. The #dotcons have spent years developing effective systems for capturing attention, infinite feeds, control algorithms, notifications, status competition, engagement metrics pushing personalized outrage. Constant “novelty”, better named as people becoming accustomed to digital drugs. So the mainstreaming “fix” is “why doesn’t this work like the platforms I’m used to?” But if the alternative simply reproduces the same addictive relationship between people and media, we haven’t built anything at all that we need, and the will still be no alternative.

Our native project we have worked so hard on for the last 50 years, is not only about changing the plumbing, its better understood as drug detox. The openweb needs working detox, what we do not need is a “better” version of the same addiction. The current reboot needs is a different relationship with media to move from passive consumption towards participation – publish → participate → moderate → organize → build. This is the reasons the #OMN is interested in the UX question.

The aim isn’t to make another platform that is easier to consume, it is to make participation easier than consumption. On this different path the #mainstreaming people still have veiled points, but the problem they still use these to push us down bad paths. Yes, distributed doesn’t mean free, but this distinction should not become an excuse for ignoring the real material problems. Servers cost money, developers need to live, systems need maintenance, communities need resources, infrastructure needs reliability.

You cannot wish these problems away, but to rebalance this we do have seed paths, platform cooperatives are one possible response. Shared ownership and cooperative funding can provide useful ways of sustaining infrastructure and development. But this needed “business model” is not the same thing as a governance model.

And this is where the argument gets more interesting, the governance problem. Once we accept that the #Fediverse is a network rather than a platform, we need governance appropriate to a network, with questions like: Who decides? Who represents whom? How do autonomous communities resolve conflicts? How are shared resources managed? How do communities negotiate with powerful external organizations? What happens when commercial interests arrive? And how do we prevent a small number of organizations from becoming permanent gatekeepers?

These aren’t abstract questions, the more successful the #openweb becomes, the more contested it will become. The #dotcons have enormous resources and existing user bases. Governments, NGOs, foundations and commercial interests will also have reasons to influence an increasingly important open network. So governance needs to be designed before concentrated power becomes embedded.

The historical disagreement, the difference between the two approaches becomes clearer. One path says – The Fediverse needs to become sustainable enough to compete with Big Tech. Build better infrastructure, develop business models, support developers and perhaps use platform cooperatives.

The other says – yes, we need sustainable infrastructure – but don’t define success as becoming another Big Tech platform. Build the economic and governance systems around federation rather than replacing federation with centralization.

These positions overlap on many practical problems, they diverge over the path of the thing being built. One starts from the platform, the other starts from the network. That distinction matters because the governance that follows will be different.

This is the gap that led to the #OGB – the Openweb Governance Body. The proposal for a native governance layer for a federated network. Using the same principles that make federation possible – autonomous communities, open protocols, distributed participation, federation between communities, local decision-making, shared standards, negotiation and mediation, accountability between participating groups.

In other words governance that follows the architecture, rather than creating one institution above the network, building ways for the communities within the network to coordinate. Governance between communities “Who should control the Fediverse?” – “How can autonomous communities govern their relationships with each other?” very different questions.

A community shouldn’t have to surrender its autonomy in order to participate, different groups should be able to connect, negotiate, delegate, challenge decisions and coordinate around shared problems. Governance becomes a network capability, rather than a permanent hierarchy sitting above the network. Institutions can still exist, foundations can still exist, cooperatives can still exist. The important thing is that they don’t become synonymous with the network itself.

#OMN is the media version of the same problem – how do we build federated media flows where communities publish, subscribe, moderate, archive and share information without handing ownership of the whole media environment to a platform? #OMN and #OGB are therefore two parts of the same larger project to build the social infrastructure needed for a federated openweb to remain federated as it grows.

The technology matters, #ActivityPub matters, federation matters, #FOSS matters. But none of these automatically produce a healthy social system, they are tools. The culture, economics and governance built around them matter just as much. Don’t scale the wrong thing, is the central lesson.

We should absolutely work on reliability, infrastructure, sustainability and usability, but we should stop treating the #dotcons platform model as the measuring stick for anything. Scaling a platform means concentrating more people and resources into one system, scaling a federated network means enabling more autonomous communities to participate and connect. Those are fundamentally different forms of scale.

What we need to compost is the mainstreaming mess of when we “forget” the historical openweb wasn’t created because people wanted a slightly nicer version of #Facebook. What these people forget is that it came from a different idea of what networked communication could be. The challenge, what we need to support, now is to preserve and develop that difference while dealing realistically with money, infrastructure, scale, governance and the arrival of powerful actors.

So please focus – the real question isn’t simply, can the Fediverse scale? It is, can a federated network scale without turning itself into a platform? And underneath that is can the openweb grow without becoming the thing it was built to replace? A basic #KISS governance problem, that is why we need to build the alternatives now, before the vacuum is filled for us.

The practical #OGB

  1. Federation, not a central organization – OGB isn’t one body governing everyone. It is a federated governance layer that communities, projects and servers can participate in.
  2. #ActivityPub native, were overnance functions are distributed through the same federation model as the #Fediverse. Groups can communicate, propose, delegate, challenge and record decisions across organizational boundaries.
  3. Permissionless participation as the is no central gatekeeper deciding who is allowed to join the governance network. Communities can connect when they meet the basic protocol/social requirements.
  4. Affinity groups rather than permanent representatives, were people organize around issues, projects or communities. Authority comes from participation and demonstrated trust, rather than simply holding an institutional position.
  5. Sortition and recall. Where representatives are needed, selection is based on sortition rather than elections or permanent appointment. Delegates remain accountable and can be recalled.
  6. Dilution of concentrated power. No person, organization or community is able to accumulate permanent control. Roles, influence and decision-making capacity are deliberately distributed.
  7. Voices rather than a single leadership. A small rotating group of 3–5 “Voices” provides coordination and a public interface without becoming a permanent ruling committee.
  8. Governance as a protocol/social practice. The important thing isn’t creating another institution, it’s creating a shared way for autonomous communities to negotiate with each other.

So in the current Fediverse the example is:

#SWF governance through an institution.
#OGB governance between federated communities.

And that fits the #openweb because the governance path follows the architecture – distributed, federated, contestable and permissionless, rather than the normal default common sense of centralized ownership. The interesting bit is that #OGB doesn’t have to replace existing institutions, it can talk to them, mediate with them, and provide a counterweight to them while the #openweb remains open.

#KISS

The #openweb is #4opens, where dues this place the current #AI path?

To understand and walk this, lets look at an example of the mess we need to compost – by lifting the lid on the current #AI noise. The problem, isn’t simply whether #AI is intelligent; it is who controls the infrastructure, what incentives drive it, and whether technology serves people or turns people into components of the machine. When can see this we might be able to see, thus act on the #OMN trajectory: technology → power → participation → open infrastructure → commons, let try and get past the #fashionista mess of whether #AI is or isn’t “really intelligent.” as this is a lot of #mainstreaming noise.

AI is going to take all our jobs.
AI is going to transform everything.
AI is going to become conscious.
AI is going to kill us.
AI is going to save us.

Some of these claims might be true, some are noise and others certainly nonsense. The more useful questions are simpler – Who controls the technology, what are they trying to achieve, and who gets to decide how it is used? This is where the #OMN view of technology starts, don’t believe the hype – but don’t ignore the technology.

One of the problems we need to mediate, is, we should be careful about criticizing AI by repeating the claims made by the #dotcons (AI companies). If a company tells us its system is basically becoming a digital human, and we respond by saying “yes, but this digital human is dangerous”, we have already accepted their framing, we are helping improve there profits and power by repeating there story.

The same thing happens with the last generation of #dotcons, #Facebook told us its algorithm understands us, #Google tells us its systems are intelligent, #AI companies tell us their models are reasoning. Most of this is smoke and mirrors that we should be ignoring if we actually wont to see anything real.

This next #dotcons #AI boom involves enormous amounts of investment in computing infrastructure, data centres, chips and energy. The companies involved are under pressure to keep growing because the financial system only rewards growth. This produces a dangerous feedback loop, a company needs to keep growing as investors expect growth, the company therefore needs a new story about future growth, the technology becomes that story. The investment creates infrastructure, the infrastructure creates pressure to find uses for it, the uses become evidence that the technology is inevitable. Then more investment follows, it isn’t only a conspiracy, it is a #KISS system of incentives.

The better approach for us is to look underneath the noise. Q. What does the system actually do? What infrastructure does it require? Who pays for it? Who owns it? Who benefits? What happens when it fails? What happens to the workers? What happens to the users? What happens to the communities around it? All are more interesting than arguing about whether a snake oil chatbot is “really thinking”.

And this is an important #OMN lesson – technology does not exist outside society – the code is one layer, underneath the code are ownership, money, labour, institutions, energy, law, culture and power, when we get distracted and ignore those lower layers we don’t understand the technology at all. When this happens the mess we constantly have to compost is that this pushing of #techchurn isn’t innovation. We’ve seen this before, #web02 was going to transform everything, then crypto, NFTs. Then the metaverse, and then whatever the next shiny thing was.

Each wave arrived with claims about revolutionary transformation, yes some of the technologies were useful, but the investment system doesn’t reward usefulness, it rewards growth stories. This produces #techchurn, endless technological change driven partly by the need to find the next thing to invest in, rather than by any clearly identified social need. This is not new, we have been pushing this kinda mess since the industrial revolution.

So, how can we compost this mainstreaming mess, one path we tried and it kinda worked in the 20 century was socialism, or in the western guise social democracy. This is a different politics from simply saying “technology bad”. That older question takes us directly into territory were there is another mythology we need to challenge – Markets don’t produce good technology, the idea that if a technology is useful, the market will automatically discover the best version of it. History doesn’t support this well, this is why the #openweb matters. A genuinely open network gives people alternative paths. Open standards reduce #dotcons lock-in. Open source makes systems modifiable. Open data makes information reusable. Open process makes power visible.

The fourth one of these is especially important, so that the social consequences of technology aren’t hidden inside the code. We can find them hidden inside the process, who funded the project? Who decided the priorities? Who was consulted? Who wasn’t? Who owns the infrastructure? Who gets to change it? Who carries the social and ecological risk? Who gets the benefit? If those questions aren’t visible, the technology is normally reproducing the same old power structures, we need to compost.

This mess is not only to be found in technological we can use the to look and judge social paths. The same thing happens with markets, with bureaucracies, algorithms. The system follows its incentives, consequences emerge from the interaction between the system and the world. This is the reason #KISS matters, don’t invent unnecessary mythology when a simpler explanation works.

Open source is a social technology, one of the strengths of #FOSS is that people can inspect the system. That doesn’t magically make it secure, but it creates a culture in which claims can be challenged, problems exposed and were people can build alternatives. The current #mainstreaming path is not this, its repeating trust us:

Trust the company.

Trust the algorithm.

Trust the secret model.

Trust the security team.

Trust the executives.

Trust the experts.

Trust the investor story.

That is the kind of technological hierarchy that the native #openweb paths needs to challenging with a shovel. Native paths, need native technologies, with community participation, not #dotcons or #geekproblem technologies of obedience. Our path is about composting the layer of abstraction between people and reality – technology can make people more capable or it can make people more manageable, this simply understanding is what makes #OMN a shovel.

The #OMN isn’t trying to build another AI-powered social media platform or creating a better algorithm, it isn’t trying to replace one technological priesthood with another, the #OMN is much more basic.

News.
Archiving.
And eventually, down the road, governance.

The idea is to build infrastructure where people participate in the flows of information rather than being only consumers. Events come into the network – People and communities add context – Stories connect and organize those events – Objects move between nodes – Metadata gets added and corrected – Different communities can see different things – Useful information can spread – Useless information is allowed to decay.

And, nobody has to maintain one giant master database containing the “correct” version of reality. This is a what we call a #datasoup, messy, living, federated information environment. And that mess isn’t weakness, it becomes the very resilience we need. Distributed systems need distributed understanding.

The #OMN path is deliberately different from the dominant AI model, were the dominant model says: collect everything → centralize it → train the model → produce the answer. The #OMN is closer to: collect from many places → connect → tag → contextualize → challenge → correct → archive → feed back into the network.

As I keep saying, this is not an attempt to create a perfect database, it is an attempt to create flows of trust. The network flows become the process of understanding. That is why federation matters, open process matters, why human moderation matters. It is why disagreement matters, and why we don’t need another central algorithm deciding what everybody should see.

In our current economics: People are inputs, workers are costs. Communities become markets. Attention becomes a resource. Knowledge becomes training data. Care becomes an inefficiency. That should reveal to you the common sense #deathcult mess we need to compost. That is the #OMN path, technology is a tool, the question that matters is who holds it, who maintains it, who benefits from it, and what kind of society it helps us to build.

Care is missing in the current mess, in a better world, a worker cares about the person using the product, a journalist cares whether the information is true, a nurse cares whether the patient gets better, a programmer cares whether the software actually works, a community cares whether its infrastructure remains useful after the funding runs out. This is difficult to understand for only automated paths because care isn’t an optimization problem, it is a social relationship.

The future doesn’t need more technological priests, it needs people able to pick up the tools, understand how they work, challenge the assumptions behind them and use them together.

That is the #openweb path, that is .

A more progressive liberal view of this same #AI mess

#OMN #openweb #FOSS #AI #automation #techchurn #techshit #dotcons #geekproblem #commons #KISS

Social value, personal value, and the chicken-and-egg problem

We still haven’t solved this. Looking back at a conversation from six years ago, what stands out isn’t disagreement – it’s how hard it is to even name the problem we keep circling.

Over the last 20 years, again and again, the discussion slips into the same dead end: personal value versus social value, framed through the language of #dotcons platforms, followers, influence, and business growth. What we need to learn from this is the confusion isn’t accidental, it is structural.

What we need is not only #socialmedia value, not engagement, not visibility. But offline value that exists between people, over time, as shared culture, trust, memory, and capacity. The chicken-and-egg problem, people ask: “What personal value do I get from this?”, “Will this help my business?”, “Can I use this without it using me?”

We need to compost, this messy common sense path. This is why the #OMN project was never about optimising personal outcomes. That #blocking framing belongs to platform logic, the idea that every action must be measurable in reach, influence, growth, or return. This is why the posts, like the one embedded above, people found “hard to understand” weren’t speaking that language at all. It were articulating what the #mainstreaming was #blocking and thus missing from our tech culture: social value.

What is hard to communicate is that social value doesn’t work like our current common sense thinks it does. You don’t extract it first and then decide whether it was worth it. Social value only emerges after people act collectively, without clear personal payoff in advance. Yes, personal value does flow from social value. Skills, relationships, meaning, resilience, opportunity. But it’s indirect, uneven, and slow. That makes it almost invisible inside systems trained to ONLY prioritise immediate, individual reward.

That’s why the conversation keeps short-circuiting, one of the early questions was whether the posts were meant to “influence followers”. That already assumes a vertical model: speaker → audience → outcome.

But #OMN thinking starts from a different place. It’s not about influencing people. It’s about creating conditions where different kinds of interaction can happen – horizontally, over time, without a central controller. That’s why the work often looks vague, unfinished, or “omelette-like”. Cultural values can’t be shipped as a product. It has to be grown, maintained, and defended collectively.

#Facebook was a comfort trap in hindsight. In the thread, several people describe using it pragmatically: staying in touch, organising events, maintaining real-world relationships. All true, and still kinda true today. But the counter-point raised then has only become clearer since: you don’t get to opt out of being used, no matter how carefully you think you’re using the system.

The lock-in effect (“everyone is on it”) was already obvious. What was less visible to meany people than was how disastrously deeply this would shape behaviour, politics, culture, and attention – and how hard it would become to imagine alternatives once that infrastructure was taken for granted.

Why this was hard to hear at the time? This conversation shows how difficult it is to talk about non-market value inside market-dominated spaces. Language itself becomes a barrier. People reach for familiar metrics because they have no shared vocabulary for anything else. So the discussion stalls. People get frustrated. It feels circular. Someone says “find out for yourself”, another hears that as dismissal. Nobody is wrong in isolation, but the frame itself is broken.

What we can learn now? Six years on, a few things are clearer: Social value is real, but it’s slow, collective, and hard to quantify. #dotcons platforms systematically erase the conditions needed for social value to emerge. Personal value derived from social value is indirect, not extractive. You can’t explain this cleanly inside systems optimised against it. This wasn’t a failure of communication. It was an early signal that we were trying to grow an open, cultural infrastructure inside environments hostile to its very existence.

Now is time to work on the unfinished path… #OMN project was – and still is – about creating space for social value to exist again: shared media, shared process, shared governance, shared memory. That was hard to see then, it’s still hard to see now. But the confusion in this old thread isn’t embarrassing. It’s instructive. It shows exactly where the fault lines are, and why the work has always been hard, messy, slow, and necessary.

Some things only make sense after you start doing them together #KISS

The impulse, it’s not wrong. What is wrong is how often that anger gets misdirected sideways, inward, and downward instead of upward, toward actual power.

A lot of people who think of themselves as “radical” aren’t being radical at all. They’re being assholes with better language. Cancel culture in 2020 played a similar role to political correctness in the 1990s: a way to signal virtue, police behaviour, and avoid confronting real power.

An example of this – done right, a code of conduct isn’t a weapon. It’s not a piece of paper you use to beat people with. It’s a declaration that you will protect the people who actually need protection – from harassment, abuse, and structural harm.

Done wrong, rules become clubs. People pick them up and hit each other with them. The wording becomes vague, moralistic, and performative. The enforcement becomes selective. And suddenly “safety” is being used to silence any disagreement rather than defend the vulnerable.

That failure creates space for bad actors, conservatives step in and pretend they’re “speaking truth to power” or “defending free speech”, when what they’re really doing is exploiting the mess to protect the normal hierarchy and privilege. They’re not wrong that something’s broken – they’re wrong about what and why.

The behaviour being criticised isn’t a tribe. It’s a mode of thinking, a widespread, unspoken #postmodernism that still dominates contemporary discourse. A style of politics where everything is relative, language replaces material reality, and moral positioning matters more than any outcomes.

This thinking eats movements alive, it fragments people, replaces strategy with signalling, and turns accountability into spectacle. Most importantly, it redirects energy away from those actually using power. This is a dangerous moment because we no longer have a shared baseline of reality. The #mainstreaming narratives are designed to divide, distract, and trigger – pulling attention away from concrete demands and real accountability.

That didn’t come from nowhere, forty years of #neoliberal economics hollowed out material security. At the same time, generations were trained in postmodern academic frameworks that are excellent at critique but terrible at building shared ground. Strip out material analysis, strip out class, strip out power – and you’re left with vibes, identity skirmishes, and endless internal conflict.

That’s what #OMN has always been pointing toward: rebuilding social truth, shared process, and horizontal power in a culture trained to fragment itself. Without that, we keep fighting each other – and the #deathcult keeps winning.

It’s how humans have always lived – together

For 200 years, capitalism, for the last 40 years #neoliberalism, taught us that we’re isolated individuals who compete to survive. But any real view of our actual history – and our biology – say the opposite: we’re interdependent, social, and ecological beings. For almost all species time before the current mess, we thrived through commons-based systems, shared forests, grazing lands, rivers, and community knowledge. Villages maintained open wells, fishermen shared tidal calendars, and guilds protected collective craft standards. Cooperation, not competition, is what allowed us to endure.

This is why now alt tech, matters, it is about rediscovering, what makes us human, the digital form of that is commoning online. Just as medieval commons were fenced off during enclosure, our early digital commons were captured by #dotcons. Rebuilding the #openweb is the act of reclaiming that shared ground, not nostalgia, but in the era of #climatechaos and hard right shift its #KISS survival.

What we need to compost is our own-shared memory. The commons are missing from today’s “common sense”. The idea that people can manage shared resources together has vanished from public imagination. Yet the commons is the older, more adaptive, and far more humane way of organizing.

In tech, the #Fediverse shows this in action, thousands of community run servers cooperating through a shared protocol, ActivityPub. Projects like #PeerTube, #Pixelfed, or #Funkwhale replace enclosure with federation, showing that open paths can scale through trust rather than control. Alt tech, built on open protocols and co-governance, is simply the digital commons rebooted, a network of networks where no one owns the whole.

We need much more resources and focus pushed into this real grassroots path of reclaiming the means of communication, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was all ready a commons: decentralized, people-driven, and impactful. Early #Indymedia collectives covered protests outside mainstream #blocking narratives. email lists and wikis built movements across borders. Then capital pushed in, WE let the #nastyfew of #Facebook, #Google etc privatize our collective infrastructure, turning participation into surveillance and creativity into content.

Alt tech projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), Mastodon, and wider #Fediverse are attempts to rebuild what we keep forgetting, this time, protected by shield to build shared governance. This path is not a nostalgic throwback, but living/acting paths for post-capitalist communication we need in the growing era of social backdown.

It’s not only “tech” – it’s social trust infrastructure. A common is not only software; it’s the culture of cooperation that surrounds it, shared values, mutual aid, and relational ethics, you can’t “code” trust into hardware, as the last decade of #blockchain and #AI mess proves. Smart contracts failed to make people honest; they just automated mistrust, it’s on going #geekproblem blindness we need to be working to compost.

What works, the resilience, comes from people, not algorithms. Through frameworks like the : open data, open code, open standards, open process. We can build transparency and accountability into the social layer of the network. Trust is a practice, not a protocol #KISS

We need a future that’s better, not just less bad. The #deathcult story – neoliberalism’s great myth – says “there is no alternative.” Alt tech is the alternative, working proof that cooperation scales, that people build shared infrastructure without extraction and less coercion. Look at LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Linux, or the #Fediverse, all imperfect, collaborative systems built on trust, not profit. They are real-world examples of how collective will outperform the normal deadened paths of corporate hierarchy.

Alt tech gives us believable hope, which is the only real antidote to despair and apathy. The ground for grassroots power is in pushing change and challenge. If the liberal state and #dotcons won’t reform, we need to be building parallel structures that work differently.
Projects like the #OGB (Open Governance Body) experiment with federated, transparent decision-making. The #OMN builds tools to connect grassroots media in trust networks, bypassing gatekeepers entirely. Together they form a scaffolding of a working commons, capable of hosting culture, not only control.

Healing the social media wound? We need to compost the lie of #dotcons which spent the last 20 years turning us into consumers and outrage machines. The shovel we need is affinity groups rebuilding social tech around self-governance, interoperability, and most importantly trust to reclaim the human side of the internet. Imagine the world different, feeds that empower communities, not advertisers, tools that nurture relationships, not metrics, platforms that amplify context, not conflict.

This is the work of making the internet human again, working together on the path of alt tech matters because it’s not about gadgets; it’s about freedom, community, and survival. It’s our path to remembering that the #openweb, like the Earth itself, belongs to everyone, or it belongs to no one. And every time we build a shared tool, or hold open a door, we remind the world that cooperation is not naïve, it’s our oldest #KISS technology.

A cross-cultural conversation on this subject

UPDATE: I haven’t touched on two other projects here, so let’s tap them at the end: #Nostr is a “me-too” project stuck in the #geekproblem loop, it won’t go anywhere until it learns to value community as a building block. #Bluesky, on the other hand, is already drifting into the hands of VC-funded #fluffy elitists who turn every commons into a brand. It’s a very likely a dead-end for real change or challenge, which is why the #mainstreaming #blocking #NGO and #fashionista crowds flock to it.

UPDATE 02: Digesting the comments. For the past 10,000 years of agriculture, 500+ years of Euro-colonialism, 200+ years of #capitalism, and 95 years of #neoliberalism (45 officially declared as such), the #nastyfew practicing control through production have dominated everyone else. Capitalism, as described in Capital, grew wherever it could. By the late 19th century, labour organised and fought back. Social democracy transformed the capitalist state so effectively that capitalist development stalled by the 1930s.

The response? A reorganisation of capital, using anti-communism as its rallying cry (WWII, NATO, Korea, Vietnam) to defeat social democracy and retake control of the state. By the 1980s, “they” felt secure enough to brand reform itself as a product: #Neoliberalism. I’m simplifying, of course – this is for the #hashtagStory outreach, so it can become a #KISS tool people can actually use. Clarifications and deeper dives you can find in the comments 🙂

Now, about this idea that “capitalism told us we’re isolated individuals competing to survive.” It’s partly true, but not in the way people think. Capitalism depends on interdependence, we work together to produce, but in a way that isolates us socially and politically. That’s the contradiction: interdependence turned into alienation. It’s the mess in our heads that recreates these bad social structures, the inner factory of control. That’s what we have to compost.

In the end, it’s not just social control, it’s social destruction. As we rush deeper into #climatechaos and the global hard-right turn, it’s clearer than ever: the ideology of separation keeps power safe and people powerless. I know this isn’t #mainstreaming liberal logic, that’s the point. We have to think differently.

And for context, I’m not speaking from the sidelines – I’ve got an MA in politics and 30 years of hands-on work in grassroots #openweb tech. Isolation is social control, see #stupidindividualism. Let’s keep this grounded and not turn it into trolling, yeah?

What is journalism in a dotcons community space?

Ten years ago, I posted photos of a police raid on a boat in Mile End Park to a local Facebook group. What followed was a storm of critique from fellow community members, particularly around privacy, ethics, and the nature of local news. That exchange came back through the memory algorithm on #failbook, it’s interesting because it sits at the heart of a question we keep coming back to. What is journalism, and where does it belong? The debate wasn’t just about a photo or a post. It was about the role of information in shared spaces, and the tensions between community care and the need for a clear, public record. Some key lessons I’ve drawn from that time:

  • Good community needs good information. Silence and rumour leave space for gossip, fear, and abuse. Visual storytelling, when done well, can be part of an antidote.
  • But journalism is not neutral. It requires ethics, context, and responsibility. Publishing a photo of someone’s home under police scrutiny, even if taken in public, isn’t just about facts, it’s about the emotional and social consequences.
  • Community groups aren’t newspapers. They’re often treated as such, but they don’t have the editorial process, protections, or purpose of basic media flows. This makes them fragile spaces, especially in conflict. They blur the line between personal and public.
  • #Dotcons social media is already a news platform. Like it or not, #Facebook become a place where people get most of their information, discuss local events, and form opinions. Pretending it isn’t is naive, but using it without thinking is dangerous.
  • There’s a memory hole problem. Local journalism, when left to #dotcons social media or more #traditionalmedia, is temporary, shallow, and hard to archive. And when community moderators remove posts under pressure, that history is lost. The next generation then repeats the same debates.

In hindsight, It is important to do basic, grassroots journalism rooted in the with transparency, open data, open process, open standards. But as you can see from the #failbook thread – without shared understanding of what journalism is and why it matters, such interventions can and do feel more like intrusion than contribution.

The challenge ahead is to build new forms of sustainable open, ethical journalism, ones that hold truth and care in tension, not in opposition. And that means creating bridges between community media and professional media, activists and residents, openness and protection. We can’t just say, “don’t post.” We have to build better ways of witnessing together.

Without discomfort, we won’t challenge the system we’re still living inside

A problem we’ve inherited from the last ten years of corporate social media, the #dotcons, is the toxic confusion of the personal and the public. Platforms like #Facebook and #Twitter blurred the lines between private conversation and public broadcasting, monetizing both as if they were the same. That mess wasn’t accidental; it was profitable.

Unfortunately, we’ve reproduced this mess on the #Fediverse without properly composting it first. What does that mean? We’ve taken this tangled, unhealthy paths and rebuilt them with new tools, many of them open-source, but we haven’t separated the core issues or composted the conceptual issue. As a result, we still see confusion around what content belongs in the public commons and what should stay private. People are still posting as if they’re in a private chat while standing on a soapbox, or trying to gate keep public news through private group dynamics.

The reality is: we already have a clear, simple solution.

  • The Fediverse is public. It is for public media, public conversation, news, projects, what we want to share with the world.
  • Encrypted chat apps (like Signal) are for private communication, what we want to keep between individuals or trusted groups.

This needs to be simple #KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid, but instead, we have well-meaning but unthinking devs and users trying to remix the worst of #dotcons culture, mushing together public and private spaces, throwing moderation at everything like it’s a catch-all fix, and muddying the waters of what these networks are actually for.

This is not innovation, it’s common crap behavior inherited from systems built to manipulate, monetize, and pacify us all. If we want more of real, trusted, meaningful media, we have to get back to basics: public news needs to be built on , and it needs to be created, distributed, and discussed in public spaces.

That’s why projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB (Open Governance Body), and the #indymediaback reboot matter. They offer paths where grassroots, trust-based publishing thrives again, outside #NGO capture and corporate control and enclosure.

With this change in mind, why the #Deathcult Hashtag?

People often ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult so much. It’s provocative, yes, but it’s not just for shock value. It’s a term that names the dominant ideology of the last 40 years: #neoliberalism. An ideology so pervasive that most people can’t even see it any more, even while it’s actively eroding the very values they claim to be upholding.

You see this when a liberal proudly buys “organic” yogurt at Safeway while supporting systems that are destroying the planet. That’s not just irony, that’s the entire logic of the deathcult. It’s the normalization of destruction wrapped in “ethical” branding. And no, it’s not just the yogurt, that’s just the joke. It’s everything: our phones, our work, our schools, our activism.

If you can’t find a part of your life untouched by the deathcult, it’s because it has touched everything. That’s why the hashtag exists: to make people uncomfortable. Because without that discomfort, we won’t challenge the roots of the system we’re all still living inside.

This movement isn’t about reinventing wheels, it’s about returning to native paths. The public internet worked before, let’s compost the #techshit by usefully separating the public from the private, and rebuild the “native” path on clear, foundations.

We can do better, we already know how, let’s stop pretending we don’t.

Rebuilding Radical, Grassroots Media

For way too long, our digital spaces have been hijacked by corporate interests, turning the internet into a surveillance-driven wasteland where control, profit, and censorship push aside community, useful creativity, and communities autonomy. As a first step to reclaim our media and communication networks, we need to step away from the #mainstreaming mess and build self-organized, decentralized alternatives that resist capture.

We can take a step towards this by creating and supporting decentralized codebase like the #OMN, in this path we have already taken the important steps on this with the #Fediverse in building a community which already exist outside the old walled gardens of the #dotcons, #Facebook and #Twitter. This is the path of encouraging protocols that allow interconnectivity without corporate gatekeepers. It’s challenging opaque decision-making by insisting on community-driven governance. Our current problem is that our tools aren’t built with openness and transparency, thus they will always be vulnerable to co-option and corporate capture.

We don’t need permission from corporations, #NGOs, or governments to organize, publish, and communicate, we need tools, tactics, and commitment. To reclaim radical politics, we need to build and experiment with our own independent media infrastructure, like the #indymediaback project. Engage in direct action rather than waiting for institutions to change from within, to encourage self-sufficiency in media production, hosting, and distribution.

Refocusing on #DIY activism, with practice over theory, on this path the grassroots movements of the past succeeded because they prioritized action over academic theorizing. Today, many “activists”, if they have not completely sold out, are trapped in performative online discourse instead of real-world engagement.

On this path, the is built in challenge to change the dominant narratives of corporate capture & liberal pacification. The #mainstreaming narrative is designed to disempower us, keeping us passive while corporate and state power consolidates control. It tells us, “You need the platforms to reach people.” (No, we build our own.) “You can change the system from within.” (No, it co-opts and neuters movements.) “Decentralization is too hard, just use what exists.” (No, that keeps us trapped.)

The #NGO-driven “activism” of today is mostly liberal pacification, where radical demands are diluted into polite requests for reform. Instead, we must amplify disruptive, independent, and autonomous voices. The paths exist, but will we walk them? We know what needs to be done, decentralize – Build networks outside corporate control. Organize – Move beyond performative social media activism. Disrupt – Challenge power instead of negotiating with it.

The tools, knowledge, and communities exist, the only question is, are we finally ready to actually act?

Open Media Network (OMN): An Overview

Comparing Decentralized #openweb Protocols

The #socialweb is shifting away from corporate-controlled paths like #Twitter and #Facebook toward decentralized, more #DIY alternatives. The idea is simple: instead of a single company having control, decentralized protocols allow different platforms to connect while giving people the power to shape and control their digital paths.

Three major decentralized protocols have emerged:

  • Fediverse (#ActivityPub) – The most established and widely used, forming a “native” backbone of the #openweb.
  • Bluesky (#AtProto) – A Twitter-funded project that claims decentralization but is still highly centralized.
  • Nostr – A relay-based, censorship-resistant protocol with interesting tech but major cultural and usability challenges.

While all three claim to support decentralization, only ActivityPub (the #Fediverse) actually delivers on this promise. An overview:

The Fediverse (ActivityPub) – The Decentralized #openweb

Background & history, the Fediverse is powered by ActivityPub, a W3C-recommended standard, since 2018. Unlike Bluesky and #Nostr, which are still evolving, ActivityPub is already a mature, widely adopted protocol. It was designed from the ground up, through a 20-year unbroken history to enable interoperability between platforms, meaning people on different apps can communicate seamlessly.

This #ActivityPub network exploded in popularity after Twitter’s collapse under Elon Musk, with Mastodon seeing millions of new users in 2022. Now there are meany popular apps & servers, it not just one platform – it’s a whole ecosystem of independent apps that mostly copy #dotcons:

  • Mastodon – The most well-known microblogging platform, often compared to Twitter.
  • PeerTube – A decentralized YouTube alternative.
  • Pixelfed – A decentralized Instagram-style photo-sharing app.
  • Pleroma / Misskey – Alternative microblogging platforms.

ActivityPub works through federation: Different servers (instances) talk to each other, creating a network of networks. How this works, you create an account on one instance, but interact with people across the entire Fediverse. Each server is independently operated, meaning no single company owns the network. There is an issue of instance Lock-In: If a server shuts down, yes, people must migrate manually, but this is a small tradeoff compared to the massive corporate control seen in more #mainstreaming paths.

Bottom Line: ActivityPub is the most decentralized and established protocol, already powering a thriving ecosystem of apps with real communities.

#Bluesky (AtProto) – Fake Decentralization, A shadow #Dotcons

Background & history, Bluesky started as a Twitter-funded project in 2019, originally backed by Jack Dorsey. It claims to be building a decentralized social network, but in reality, it’s architecture favers centralization, due to it being built to prioritise scaling. The #AtProto, allows for theoretical federation, but in practice, Bluesky is still a Twitter clone controlled by a single company.

Popular Apps & Servers

  • Bluesky – The only major client, self-hosting is possible, but current federated servers are limited to 100 users, and Bluesky can refuse to federate with them.

How AtProto works: #DID-based identities – Users can theoretically move between services, but only if Bluesky allows it. Centralized moderation – The vast majority of users rely on bsky.social, meaning Bluesky still has the power to block or censor at will. Limited self-hosting, Bluesky restricts who can run a server and limits federated instances.

Bottom Line: Bluesky is currently a trap, a con, It looks decentralized but is a #dotcons, the normal corporate-controlled path.

Nostr – Interesting Tech, but bad culture

Background & history, #Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) was created by an individual in 2020 as a censorship-resistant social protocol. Where ActivityPub and AtProto, use server-based networks to build community and distribute moderation, Nostr uses a relay-based model where users broadcast messages across multiple relays. It gained popularity in #Bitcoin circles and received funding from Jack Dorsey (again).

Popular Apps & Clients

  • Primal, Nos, Snort – Web-based clients.
  • Damus – iOS client.
  • Amethyst – Android client.

How #Nostr works, It is Relay-based, with no community focued on instances – no centralized servers, messages are published to multiple relays. Cryptographic Identity – people have opaque public/private keys instead of usernames. No true federation – people rely on relays to store and transmit data, but relays don’t communicate with each other like ActivityPub servers do. Difficult for adoption – The reliance on cryptographic keys makes it confusing, and there’s no built-in moderation system, so comminutes remain fragmented, its tech for the native #stupidindividualists paths. But still, in this, diversity is good and as it bridges it might become a useful project.

Bottom Line: Nostr is decentralized and censorship-resistant, but it’s not user-friendly or practical, its culture is a bad mix of #techbro and #geekproblem #encryptionist #shitcoiners


Which Decentralized Protocol is the Best?

ActivityPub (Fediverse) is a clear winner, it’s proven, widely adopted, and already functional with true federation across multiple apps, decentralized and people-controlled. Where #Bluesky (#AtProto) is a hidden #Dotcons which claims to be decentralized but is still controlled by Bluesky, Inc. Federation is limited, and self-hosting is discouraged thus is a Trojan horse for another corporate-controlled network. Nostr is interesting but niche, completely decentralized, but difficult to use. No federation between relays and not practical for mass adoption.

Final verdict: If you care about real decentralization, community, and people, ActivityPub (#Fediverse) is the clear choice.

What is needed next is to take the step in the Fediverse of moving beyond simply copying the #dotcons. It is time to reboot the #Openweb with a project like the #OMN. The Open Media Network is about taking control of our digital paths and building a future beyond the #dotcons. If we want a truly decentralized internet, one core message is that we need to support ActivityPub-based paths instead of getting fooled by corporate-backed “alternatives” like #Bluesky.

Join the Fediverse today: https://fediverse.observer/ It’s past time to reclaim the #openweb to build digital spaces that work for people, and the social change challenge we so urgently need.

One thing is clear, you can and need to walk away from the corporate #dotcons.

Tech princes and the #deathcult

The billionaire problem, Elon Musk, tech oligarchs, and the #deathcult of wealth as a social path.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is emblematic of a larger issue: the unchecked power of tech oligarchs. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill millionaires; they’re part of a nasty few, the class that operates above the ultra-wealthy, shaping politics, economies, and societies to their inadequacy. While the myth is pushed that billionaires are brilliant innovators who work harder than everyone else, the reality is darker. Their actions reflect a destructive #deathcult mentality, hoarding resources, manipulating public discourse, and pushing harmful ideologies for personal gain and standing.

Let’s start with Musk himself. People think of him as the “SpaceX and Tesla guy,” (this is not true, but that’s another story) his behaviour since acquiring Twitter reveals his priorities. Musk purchased the platform for $43 billion, not as a business investment, but as a tool for propaganda to consolidate power and influence politics. To platforming far-right politics, by amplify propaganda and undermine the thin remaining democratic paths. From boosting bots that inflate the appearance of support for far-right ideologies to reinstating accounts that push hate speech, these actions directly impact global politics.

This control of Twitter, and most importantly the chattering classes that stay in this #dotcons, has silenced the little dissent left. Bot-driven disinformation spreading far-right ideologies isn’t accidental; it’s strategic manipulation of public opinion to push agendas. Like supporting trump and authoritarianism, spending over $250 million on Trump’s election campaigns.

Musk isn’t alone, tech oligarchs like Bezos and Zuckerberg are equally complicit in reshaping society to benefit themselves, at the now clear expense of the public. Bezos’s quiet Influence, unlike #Musk, #Bezos operates in the shadows, Amazon spends millions lobbying US politicians to block antitrust laws and maintain monopolies to exploits workers and maximise profit. His strategy is quieter but no less harmful. #Zuckerberg’s free speech farce, with the ending of liberal fact-checking on #Facebook under the guise of “free speech.” The result? A flood of bots spreading hate speech, disinformation, and simple propaganda. By prioritising profit over public responsibility, this #dotcons becomes another breeding ground for extremism.

The #feudalistic influence of tech princes and oligarchs has consequences that go far beyond social media with political manipulation, global meddling. This is no longer just about wealth, it’s about shaping geopolitical realities. This is going to accelerate the current climate and resource chaos. So why do meany of us keep bowing? There is a persistence of the billionaire myth, the idea that they’re smarter, harder-working, and more deserving, which keeps #mainstreaming people from challenging this power. But it should be obvious these aren’t self-made geniuses, they’re nasty inadequate opportunists thriving in a broken system. This isn’t just about Musk or any of the other nasty few billionaires. It’s about rejecting the #deathcult of greed and exploitation our socialites are based on. The rise of billionaires as political actors isn’t inevitable, it’s a symptom of a path that values unrestrained profit over people.

Where is this going, they crave #control, so they assume everyone else is out to control them. They weave #conspiracies to crush their enemies, so they see a world drowning in conspiracies against them. In the final stages, a fully rotted #ideologue can’t even see threats or weaknesses; their perception is warped by their own decayed #moralcompass. At this point, outside direct, action they are beyond reach. Every word we speak will be twisted against us. Every action we take will be seen as an attack #paranoia #fascist.

The #OMN has a vision for something better, decentralised, open, and community-driven governance. A world where power is distributed, not hoarded by a handful of deranged oligarchs. The challenge is to make this vision a real path, and to turn our distaste for the status quo into action for this change and challenge.

OMN #openweb #fediverse #makehistory #deathcult #OGB #visionontv

The current mainstreaming’s greatest sin is thoughtlessness

#Mainstreaming social media: Digital drugs, not social connection

UPDATE: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/meta-researchers-privately-compared-instagram-to-addictive-drug-bombshell-court-filing-shows/

We still have not found our way out of the mess of stepping away from the #mainstreaming #dotcons. For meany people, the current #dotcons social media isn’t about genuine communication or community, it’s about delivering digital drugs. Platforms like #Facebook, #Instagram, and #TikTok thrive by exploiting addictive design patterns, keeping people and communities hooked with endless dopamine hits to fill the holes in their empty lives.

This addiction is why many people struggle to stay on native #openweb social media platforms. These alternatives, built with , lack the engineered “highs” of the #dotcons. Without the “fix” of notifications, likes, and algorithmically curated content, people feel withdrawal and gravitate back to the platforms designed to exploit learned dysfunctional impulses.

The challenge of needed real meaningful outreach on the #openweb, is to address this addiction cycle. As a first step, it’s not enough to offer better tools or ethical platforms; we need to actively incorporate digital drug detox into the user experience (#UX). This means, designing for intentional use, replacing infinite scrolling, endless notifications with features that encourage creative and mindful engagement. Rebuilding reward systems on genuine connections, creativity, and learning instead of shallow metrics like likes and shares. Educating people to recognize and break free from the addictive patterns that hold the #dotcons in place.

A detox-focused UX for the #openweb is shifting focus from passive content consumption to active participation in meaningful communities. This path is core to breaking free from digital addiction, it is no small task, but it’s needed for any sustainable future. Our outreach of the #openweb can lead to this shift, offering not just an alternative, but a detox from the digital drug cycle that defines #mainstreaming social media mess.

A detox-focused UX for the #openweb isn’t about another shiny platform. It’s about breaking addiction. The #dotcons are digital drugs: infinite scroll, dopamine loops, algorithmic junk food.

#Bsky is digital methadone – a softer addiction, but still dependency.

The #Fediverse is cold turkey – messy, uncomfortable, but the only real way out.

The shift is from passive consumption, to active participation. From being fed content, to tending relationships, building meaning, and shaping our own media environment. Detox is not easy, but it’s the only path to collective social and environmental health.

The importance of words and ideology

#dotcons fail human connection

It’s obvious to us all now, that we do need a critique of the trajectory of social media platforms like #Facebook and #Instagram, to highlight how their growing reliance on AI-generated profiles and diminishing organic engagement undermines the little trust, satisfaction, and the purpose of social connection that people have left in them.

This started with the death of organic engagement, Facebook and Instagram’s shift around 2013 to force content creators and businesses to pay for visibility, marked the end of organic engagement for the majority of people. This created a reliance on paid boosts, alienating real people and the army of small creators who pushed the platforms into prominence. Without organic engagement, people feel unseen, leading to declining satisfaction. The current shift to AI-generated profiles and bots are an attempt to simulate “engagement”, the illusion of interaction.

It should by now be simple, for meany people, to see that #dotcons fail to fulfil the human need for connection and actually alienate people and communities, even when this shift manages to build short-term engagement with profiles and “interactions” to create “likeable” fictional characters for product placement. Replace human influencers with bots is cost efficiency. Feeding artificially inflate metrics to attract advertisers. But as people become more aware of bots replacing humans, the sense of authenticity diminishes, particularly among those who value any real social connections.

As I have been arguing for 20 years there is a real need for alternatives, #DIY and grassroots movements, platforms like the #Fediverse and open-source projects demonstrate that decentralized networks prioritize human connection and transparency over profit. These alternative resist capture by corporate interests and maintain authenticity, creating #openweb ecosystems where trust and interaction thrive.

Replacing market signalling with #opendata signalling

We have a blinded dogma running our economic, social and environmental lives, The dominance of the free market, for the last 40 years personified by the #deathcult worship, has instilled in us a deep-rooted belief in the power of market-driven signals as a determinant of value and action. This belief system prioritizes capital and greed as the primary forces that drive progress and social development. However, as our world becomes increasingly digitized, it’s past time to rethink and replace these signals with something more sustainable and aligned with collective welfare: #opendata signalling based on the .

Market signalling, a core tenet of capitalism, operates on the assumption that prices, supply, and demand efficiently communicate the state of the economy. These signals guide decisions across industries, influencing everything from resource allocation to investment trends. While this system has propelled economic growth, it comes at a significant cost: environmental degradation, social inequality, and systemic exploitation of every type. In resent years, our worship of this “free market” led to an economy built on misery – a #miseryeconomy where people and communities pay to escape the hardships imposed by the very system they are part of. You see this everyday life.

The open vs. closed data dichotomy is currently largely invisible, so good to bring focus to this. When considering alternatives to market signalling, we need to explore the difference between open and closed data paths. The original #openweb was built on the principles – open source, open data, open standards, and open processes. These fostered transparency, collaboration, and equitable growth. However, the rise of the #dotcons over the past two decades introduced #closeddata silos that have stifled and blocked the native path. Closed data systems prioritize proprietary algorithms, user data and metadata hoarding, and opaque decision-making processes. This has been used to reinforcing capital-driven signals as the only path, the #closedweb is something we need to put energy into composting.

In the emerging #openweb ecosystem, there is a new model – one rooted in #opendata signalling. Unlike market signals driven for profit, opendata signalling operates on transparent and shared data inputs that inform decision-making across communities. This shift prioritizes communal benefits, sustainability, and builds trust. This path currently can only be glimpsed in the messy #fashionista driven #openweb reboot we are a part of. Consider the surge in decentralized networks such as #Mastodon, the broader #Fediverse, #BlueSky, and #Nostr. Over the past years, these have grown from a few hundred thousand users to tens of millions, highlighting an appetite for more community-driven paths. Open-source platforms like WordPress are integrating ActivityPub to support decentralization, extending open data practices to a quarter of the web. Even #dotcons corporations like #Facebook (with its #Threads initiative) are adapting to this movement, albeit with a corporate agenda.

What opendata signalling looks like? In a practical sense, #opendata signalling means that any institution or person running a Mastodon instance, for example, can access a significant portion of the Fediverse’s content as plain text in their database. This access allows communities to collaboratively analyse and act on data without any intermediaries distorting and monetizing it for control.

Imagine policymaking informed by real-time public discourse, free from the profit-driven filters. Local governments could tap into decentralized data to plan infrastructure, health initiatives, or educational reforms that reflect actual community needs. Environmental policies could be shaped by transparent data on ecological impact, rather than suppressed by industry lobbyists protecting closed capital interests.

Challenges and Considerations? Transitioning to opendata signalling isn’t without challenges. Regulation and policy will need to adapt to safeguard open data’s integrity. The fear of spam and manipulation, which critics often raise, must be addressed with intelligent design and federated community moderation. Yet, these challenges are surmountable compared to the unsustainable trajectory of a market that fails to act collectively for evern basic survivability.

Moving beyond worship, with our reverence for the “free market” as an ultimate arbiter has reached its logical and moral limit. By embracing opendata signalling and shifting away from closed, profit-driven paths, we create a foundation where collaboration, sustainability, and shared progress are at the forefront. This is not only a technological shift but a cultural one, As we continue this transition, let’s recognize that our digital choices will dictate whether we uphold the values of the #openweb or fall back into the restrictive practices of #closedweb. Let’s try to have a real conversation about this, please.