Tag: fedivers

Composting the mess, growing the alternative commons paths

Online and offline, we are living through an interconnected crisis of ecological breakdown, economic inequality, political disillusionment and social fragmentation that are not separate problems. They feed into each other, creating #mainstreaming paths that are increasingly unable to meet basic social and environmental needs.

The usual response to this now visible mess is to ask the same institutions that created these problems to keep managing the consequences. the chattering classes that run our governments promise new policies, corporations promise new technologies, and professional campaigners promise another round of reform. There people are inside the worship of the #deathcult, and their efforts are constrained by the paths they walk, endless growth, profit extraction, bureaucracy, electoral cycles and the concentration of #nastyfew power.

So this now visible mess, is not only a problem of individual greed or corruption, it is structural. That the #mainstreaming paths keep reproducing the problems because of the unthinking relationships remain unchanged. From common sense, and the #OMN perspective, this is where we need to change the conversation, to not keep relying on better management of #deathcult paths – we need to build the practical foundations of something different.

The old idea of #commons (a polite way of saying #communism) offers a grassroots path away from this spreading political frustration towards practical collective paths. This new path is based on older anarchist ideas, that are critical of the two dominant ways of organizing: the market and the state. Were we are told to buy what we need through commercial markets or campaign for governments to provide it. Yes, maybe both have their place, but neither gives communities any real much control over the resources and paths they need to grow.

So what is the idea of commons? let look at this, commons exists when people share responsibility for resources, establish collective “rules” and manage those resources for mutual benefit. This can mean land, housing, food, energy, knowledge, software, media or the infrastructure that connects communities. The point is that a Commons is not simply something owned collectively, it is something people actively maintain and govern together.

Examples, at a grassroots level, a community garden, a housing cooperative, a repair café, an open-source project and a grassroots media network can all be part of this path. They look different, but each creates space for people to become participants rather than remaining consumers, clients or spectators.

From a practical #DIY path we need to move past the #blocking of thinking of a utopian blueprint waiting for the right political moment. Commons already exist, our work is to strengthen them, learn from their successes and failures, and connect them, in the #OMN work using technology to widen political and economic alternatives.

It is about moving from spectators to participants, the most damaging consequences of our current blinded political culture is the loss of agency. People are repeatedly told that the important decisions are made elsewhere: by governments, corporations, financial markets, technical experts or professional #NGO organizations.

This path has lead to years of broken promises, so it is little surprise many withdraw. Some become cynical about politics; others retreat into, conspiracy, private life or the exhausting routines of survival in late stage capitalism. We can see this only as apathy, when it is a reasonable response to having little meaningful influence or power.

People need practical ways to take part in shaping their lives. Communing offers this through experience, people come together around a shared need, make decisions, distribute responsibilities, deal with disagreements and see the results of their work. They develop the skills and relationships that make further collective action possible.

This is political activity, even when nobody calls it politics – a community that takes control of its housing, food supply, energy or media infrastructure is not merely providing a service. It is changing who has power, who makes decisions and who benefits from the resources being created. The political shift is from asking those above us to solve everything towards building the collective capacity to solve more of it ourselves.

So yes our path is to build the new, but understand the struggle, that meeting real needs to make the old arrangements less necessary. This is a valuable corrective to a political culture that is trapped in permanent resistance, to do more than protest against enclosure, extraction and corporate power, we need to create shared resources that people can actually use.

But we should not mistake this for the idea that politics can be avoided. The existing system does not simply disappear because we build something better. Land, housing, infrastructure and productive resources are already controlled by power if #nastyfew interests and our own common sense. Communities face legal barriers, financial pressures, unequal access to time and skills, and the constant risk that successful initiatives will be absorbed, commercialized or captured by institutions.

Building the Commons is therefore both constructive and political. We create alternatives while challenging the conditions that prevent them from flourishing. The path is not to fight every battle on the opponent’s ground, more to develop enough practical capacity, shared resources and collective confidence that we have more choices about where and how to struggle.

The Commons needs protection against capture – shared ownership does not guarantee a fair or democratic path. A blinded commons might reproduce the same inequalities it set out to overcome. A closed group can accumulate informal power, technical experts become gatekeepers, and participation reduced to approving decisions made elsewhere.

This is where governance projects like the #OGB matter, communities need transparent processes, meaningful participation, accountability, accessible conflict resolution and ways to challenge people who accumulate too much control. Responsibilities shared, decisions remain open to scrutiny, and resources be protected from being quietly transferred back into private ownership.

The same principle applies to funding, yes, grants and investment help build useful infrastructure, but they can also redirect projects towards the priorities of founders. We need ways to bring resources into community control without allowing outside money to take control of the community.

The aim is to make the Commons durable without turning it into another institution that exists primarily to sustain itself. To help with this we need to move from isolated projects to a grassroots networks. A single local project can meet a local need, a connected network of projects begin to become change and change communities.

This is the idea of an wider Commons: many independent initiatives, rooted in their own places and circumstances, sharing knowledge and resources while retaining local autonomy. We do not need every community to follow the same path. Different places have different needs, histories, cultures and resources, diversity is a strength. Some experiments will fail; others will work well enough to be adapted elsewhere. What matters is that people can learn from one another instead of repeatedly starting from scratch.

Open-source #FOSS software is part of the answer, but it is not enough. We need grassroots digital infrastructure that is open in practice: open data, open source, open standards and open processes -the – combined with trust, human moderation and community responsibility.

Technical federation, like #activitypub allows this to grow without centralization were communities share tools, infrastructure, experience and political influence without handing their decisions to a distant headquarters. This is a space where grassroots organization becomes a bigger political path. Connected together, we can become the material foundations of a different social order. The process is gradual, uneven and full of conflict. But it creates something that symbolic politics alone cannot: an expanding body of people with practical experience of doing things differently.

The #OMN projects are a direct connection to grassroots media and the #openweb. Communities need to communicate, preserve their histories, share knowledge and coordinate action. Yet much of our digital public life is controlled by the #dotcons: commercial platforms that turn participation into a resource to extract, measure and sell. With our unthinking #fashionistas even supposedly alternative spaces become dependent on centralized platforms, opaque moderation and technical gate-keeping.

The #OMN is not another social media platform. It is a path towards shared grassroots infrastructure for news, archiving and, further down the road, governance. The aim is to help communities create and manage their own media resources, while connecting their work through open networks rather than surrendering control to the normal centralized platforms.

Media is part of the political infrastructure of the Commons. If communities cannot tell their own stories, preserve their own histories or communicate beyond corporate channels, their capacity to organize is weakened. A grassroots #openweb can help make local knowledge visible, allow successful experiments to be copied and give independent initiatives ways to connect. It can help turn scattered projects into a living network without requiring them to become one large organization.

From the local to the political – the commons is not a replacement for every form of politics. We still need struggles over public policy, land, housing, workers’ rights, ecological protection and the distribution of wealth. We need to challenge the power that keeps resources enclosed and decisions out of public hands. But these struggles become stronger when they are connected to practical alternatives.

A housing campaign can do more than oppose unaffordable rents if it also helps build community-owned housing. A food campaign can do more than expose an unjust supply chain if it develops cooperative ways to grow and distribute food. A media campaign can do more than criticize corporate #dotcons and #traditionalmedia platforms if it helps build shared, community-controlled infrastructure like the #fedivers.

This is how the commons becomes part of a bigger political path, not by asking everyone to agree on one path, but by connecting the practical work people are already doing around shared needs. The work provides a meeting point between people who might disagree about theory but can cooperate around tech, housing, energy, care, media or the future of their neighbourhood. Shared practice builds relationships, and those relationships support wider political action.

Over time, these connected efforts move resources out of extractive circuits and into forms of ownership and governance that serve the people who sustain them. This is a material shift in power, not just a change in language. The work starts where we are, there is no single blueprint, central plan or perfect organization that will deliver this transformation. The commons grows through people trying things, sharing what they learn and building on one another ‘s work.

That means starting with real needs, keeping projects accessible, making decisions accountable and sharing the tools and knowledge that others can reuse. It means accepting that communities are messy, that conflict is unavoidable and that trust has to be built through practice rather than demanded as a slogan.

It also means resisting the #geekproblem, the idea that the right technical system can solve social problems. Technology supports relationships and participation, not replaces them. The same applies to political organizations, structure matters, but it needs to remain accountable to the people doing the work.

We need to move beyond the choice between endlessly criticizing the existing system and retreating into disconnected #blocking. We build practical Commons while connecting them into a wider movement to challenging the mess that keeps people powerless.

The current #mainstreaming encourages us to see ourselves as isolated individuals competing for security and influence. The commons begins somewhere else, with the recognition that much of what makes life possible is already shared, and that we can organize more of it around mutual care and collective responsibility.

This is a political choice, to shifts power from extraction towards participation, from passive consumption towards communing, and from centralized control towards connected grassroots autonomy.

For #OMN, the task is to help build the media and digital infrastructure that makes this possible, on this path we do not have to wait for permission. We do have to do the work, learn from our mistakes, protect what we build and connect with others doing the same.

Build locally, share openly, govern together, connect without centralizing is how we begin to grow a different future from the ground up.

So how do we mediate this fear?

Who would have though this would sum up our needed path for the #Oxfordboaters and the #fedivers?

You would have to be an #asshole to unthinkingly disagree with what we are doing and pretty wise to thinkingly disagree with the path. Which one are you? So why are we in such a mess? Because people are acting from fear. Not always consciously, not always honestly – but fear is the driver.

  • Fear of losing control.
  • Fear of losing status.
  • Fear of uncertainty.
  • Fear of each other.

And when fear leads, people grasp for control. They close things down, centralise, gatekeep, and default to the safe, known paths of the #closedweb and institutional power. That’s how we get the current mess – top-down structures trying to manage what was meant to be lived, messy, and shared.

In #OMN terms, this isn’t a technical failure, it’s a cultural one. A failure to hold open processes in the face of discomfort. So how do we mediate this fear?

Not by pretending it isn’t there. And not by fighting it head-on – that just feeds it. We mediate fear by building trust through practice:

  • Keep things open (#4opens): transparency reduces fear of hidden agendas. When people can see what’s happening, they relax.
  • Lower the stakes: small, reversible steps instead of big, risky commitments. Let people edge in rather than jump.
  • Normalise mess: show that not everything has to be controlled to work. Messy, lived processes are not failure, they’re how real communities function.
  • Create shared doing: fear shrinks when people work together on tangible tasks. Composting, media, infrastructure – doing builds trust faster than talking.
  • Hold both fluffy and spiky: the fluffy path makes space for people to come in; the spiky path protects that space from being captured or hollowed out. You need both, visibly and honestly.
  • Refuse false clarity: the #dotcons sell certainty and simplicity. The #openweb is different, it’s about holding complexity without collapsing into control.

And maybe most importantly, stay present. Fear thrives in abstraction, it weakens in lived, grounded relationships. In the end, mediating fear isn’t about convincing people with arguments. It’s about creating environments where fear has less reason to exist.

This is the same dynamic you can see with Oxford boaters. The river culture is native, messy, negotiated, based on lived practice and mutual understanding. People want the freedom to move, to live lightly, and not be bound by rigid landlord rules. But when outside structures push in – formal control, ownership models, enforcement – they reshape that culture into something else. The tension isn’t really about rules or functions; it’s about which culture gets to define the space.

That’s the real work of #OMN: not only building tools, but growing the social soil where people feel able to act without retreating into control.

Individual fears

LIVE at c-base a #fluffy Fediverse conference

It’s been going on for the last few years, let’s look at a current example. Live at c-base is a #Fediverse event that highlights the need for composting the dogmatic #fluffy mess making to keep balance in our shared #openweb reboot. With our #fluffy crew talking about the shared reboot, on the surface it looks positive – friendly conversations, smiles, the right hashtags – but underneath it reveals a deeper problem: there is zero balance at these events. This is the third event I’ve seen with the same issue: the same small group, the same narrow framing, the same blindness. It is not healthy. It is not balanced. And it is not a good path to stay on.

What we are seeing, again and again, is a kind of #blinded #blocking. A narrow circle, reproducing itself, shutting out the very people who dug the digital soil for the seedling stage of the current #Fediverse growth. Sadly, #blindness and #blocking makes these people prats, not because they don’t care, but because they can’t see beyond their narrow bubbles.

Composting the mess, we need to be honest here. We all make messes in movement spaces, and the only way forward is to compost these messes. Composting means breaking down what is toxic, unbalanced, or self-serving and transforming it into nutrients that can grow something better. If we ignore the problem, the mess just piles up until the whole project smells. If we compost it, we can build soil, roots, and future growth.

Where’s the hope? Right now, hope is hard to see in these paths. A purely #fluffy approach – friendly, soft, smiling – is good for atmosphere, but it slides into dogmatic blindness. Fluffy alone does not challenge power. Fluffy alone does not create balance. Fluffy alone does not compost.

What we need is spiky/fluffy. We need the warmth of fluff but also the edge of spike, the courage to challenge, to draw lines, to say when things are going wrong. Without this, we share the same blindness, wrapped in smiles and funding applications. One thing that might explain this narrowness is that we are in the middle of a generation change. The original crew who put real work into growing the #Fediverse in its seedling years are no longer invited, and the real problem is that to this new fluffy crowd the last generation are mostly invisible.

Looking at the Berlin Fedi Day schedule the only person I recognise from that seedling stage, that built the current working reboot is Christine Lemmer-Webber, and they were always firmly within the #NGO-fluffy camp. Everyone else? New faces, from before, like Evan Prodromou who played no role in the atavism of the seedling stage or the people from after ??? Who to often bring the #NGO and funding paths that is at the root of current mess making.

One such event would be understandable. But three in a row? It looks less like an “accident” and more like a PRAT move, hardcoded fork of our shared project. A fork that speaks with arrogance “for all of us” while shutting out the #spiky voices of the community who helped built the current #fedivers path. Towards balance, where do we go from here?

  • Name the mess: We can’t fix what we won’t face. #blinded #blocking is real, and it needs to be called out. This is what I am doing here.
  • Compost, don’t cancel: These are not enemies, just our #NGO, #fashionista in need of wider perspective. We don’t waste energy and focus in burning them out; we compost their mess into fuel for growth, they are a part of the debate.
  • Spiky/Fluffy events: The next gathering should explicitly mix both tendencies. Spikiness to challenge, fluffiness to care. That balance is the only way to keep hope alive, let’s not be prats on this, please.
  • Reconnect with roots: We need to bring back more of the seedling stage #Fediverse builders and seedling voices, not as nostalgia but as grounding. The roots matter if the tree is to grow.
  • Expand the circle: No small group should speak for the whole. Open doors, open process, open web. . A part of this is embedded in the closed funding of these events and process.

Final thought, right now, what we’re watching is real prat behaviour, dressed up in smiles and #NGO funding. That’s a dead end. If we want the #openweb reboot to be more than another hollow fad, we need balance, humility, and compost. The fluffy mess won’t compost itself. That’s our job.

You likely need a shovel #OMN to work on composting. Or if you want to continue with this kind of mess making then clearer naming the events for the minority they invite and host would help to make less mess, a few #NGO groups have started to do this like #FediForum and the #SWF now have less imperialistic language, which is at least is a little less blinded.

#fediday #c-based

It’s Not About You

Rebalance, by shifting focus from tools to cultures

Appropriate technology in activist tech means tools built for our real contexts, not for Silicon Valley fantasies or bunker-dwelling paranoia. It’s about lightweight, repairable, understandable systems that communities can actually run, adapt, and share. Right now, the #geekproblem pushes us toward shiny, #dotcons shaped over-engineered toys that serve developer ego more than people and community need or bloated encryption stacks nobody understands, federated protocols that collapse under complexity, and endless half-finished “next big things” with no grounding in any actual social use.

We need to drag the conversation back to fit for purpose, tech that works in the messy, underfunded, real world of activism, where trust and openness are the foundation, and security is woven in without becoming a fetish that locks us away from each other.

The #fedivers #openweb reboot of the last ten years is a good first step, but it still embeds meany of the #mainstreaming issues and has the deep #geekproblems culture in its tech stacks. A second step is needed from this is, the social understanding, that security doesn’t come from code alone, it comes from the community that surrounds it, and that without a living, visible, and shared culture, the best tools are just dead weight.

The path starts with embedding our tools inside open, self-documenting, collective cultures. If you can’t see how decisions happen, you’re just replacing one opaque power structure with another. Forget the myth of the “perfect” platform. What we need are messy but resilient spaces, a diversity of nodes, loosely connected, each carrying its own part of the load.

Build commons-first infrastructure, to re-anchor our work in openness, federation, and trust-based networks baked in from the start. The baseline is – open data, open source, open standards, open process – non-negotiable.

On this path, the #OMN (Open Media Network) can be the publishing spine: a trust-based network where stories, actions, and knowledge move between activist spaces without corporate choke points and #blocking.

We must bridge into existing real-world struggles – unions, climate justice, housing fights. Tech that only talks to other techies is just another dead end.

Stop digging the same hole, we stop wasting energy on projects that make us smaller and weaker:

No more encryption fetishism. Encryption is the lock on the door, not the whole house.

No more closed, invite-only dev silos. If you can’t talk openly about the work, it’s either the wrong work or the wrong space.

No more “founder cult” projects that collapse when one person burns out or drifts off.

Security is not enough, survival is not victory, we can be safe and irrelevant – or vulnerable and changing the world by breaking corporate dependency, by building the infrastructure of a post-#dotcons world. This isn’t about perfect software, it’s about building the cultures that can use it – and win.

Short stories on this subject:
Oxford – Going with the flow
Stalls and Code

So what is it that currently blocks this needed change and challenge? #Geekproblem is about when the “solution” Is the problem. One of the most frustrating things is how often its defenders mistake their narrow fixations for universal solutions, or worse, offer them up in bad faith to derail the real conversation.

You’ll raise an issue – social, political, cultural – and instead of engaging with the messy, human, collective work needed to address it, the geek brain rushes to replace it with a neat technical patch. The tool, the workflow, the protocol. As if the complexity of human trust, governance, and solidarity can be debugged into submission.

This isn’t just misunderstanding; sometimes it’s sabotage. By framing the “solution” purely in terms of tech or procedure, they strip the problem of its social and political context. What remains is something sterile, depoliticised, and ultimately unfit for purpose.

It’s why I keep bringing this up. Because if we don’t name the #Geekproblem for what it is, we’ll keep circling in the same loops, patching over social fractures with shiny but hollow code. The answer isn’t more complexity; it’s #KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Simple in the sense of clear, human-first, and grounded in open, accessible processes.

The truth is, solving problems in the #openweb isn’t about cleverness or code alone. It’s about people, and unless the geeks can learn to work with that, rather than overwrite it, they’ll stay part of the problem, the #geekproblem

Please, please try not to keep being a prat about this.

Smiling-faced vileness: How enforced politeness becomes a weapon in grassroots paths

What software do social justice activists need?

First we need to look at the core problem for the last 20 years has been that most activists were locked into #dotcons (corporate social media silos) because open alternatives were either too difficult to use, lack network effects, or fail to meet their practical needs. With the current reboot of the #openweb with the #fedivers based on #ActivityPub we have already taken a step away from this mess.

From my experience, here’s what’s needed from a software development perspective to break out of this mess. Open & accessible publishing networks. Activists need easy ways to publish and share information outside corporate-controlled platforms. Right now, #Fediverse is a first step, tools like #Mastodon and #PeerTube exist, but they are still largely copies of centralized platforms rather than native alternatives that work for any working grassroots media.

To take the second step in alt tech we need a native decentralized, trust-based publishing network (#OMN is the example I am working on) Bridging tools to syndicate content between #dotcons and open platforms. Better “unbranded” discovery tools for surfacing trusted grassroots content (think of a federated search engine that’s not controlled by Google)

The third step of secure yet open communication, is already mostly in place. Activists do need to secure yet transparent communication tools that balance privacy with accessibility. Right now, many are stuck using encrypted corporate platforms like #WhatsApp and #Telegram, which create spy silos and exclude people who purposely don’t have the apps. Projects like #Signal and XMPP chat kinda work in this space, so this is not a strong social tech focus, but is a social issue to work on getting people to use the tools.

Finally, the type of project we do need #indymediaback, #makeinghistory, #OGB and the base #OMN coding. There is a continuing need for resilient infrastructure, hosting and sysadmin alongside sustainable funding tools for activists’ websites, blogs, and tools. Currently, these tools often get taken down due to coordinated attacks and lack of resources. On the more dev side of this path, hybrid peer-to-peer hosting solutions (so sites can stay online even under attack) could be useful to bridge current client server tools.

There’s a roadmap, but the problem is developer focus and funding. If you’re serious about helping, check out the stalled dev work on https://unite.openworlds.info and see how it can be set in motion, please. If you’re a dev who wants to make a real impact, this is a good place to look.

The issue, we need to work more on, with #FOSS tech development, the failure of many #FOSS projects, is a failure to move from theory to practice. The issue is that developers work in isolation, disconnected from grassroots needs, and get lost in perfectionism rather than delivering functional prototypes.

The #geekproblem dominates, with coders prioritize control, abstract debates, and self-contained experiments over practical, usable tools for real-world communities. This is why projects stall: they are not built with activists in mind. Meanwhile, centralized platforms continue to consolidate power, because they offer simple, accessible, and functional solutions, despite their deep and nasty flaws.

To break this cycle, we need:

  • Practical iteration, build rough, working solutions rather than endless theorizing.
  • culture, embrace open process, standards, and real collaboration.
  • Bridging solutions, tech that activists can actually use, not just developer-driven experiments.
  • Funding models beyond #NGO traps, so projects remain independent and sustainable.

The fight for the #openweb is not only about resisting #dotcons but creating alternatives people can and will use. Can we move beyond abstraction and actually make history?

Please.

The #fashionistas poisoned the well of alt-media

This has been going on for more than ten years, I have been at the heart of this movement, at many of the steps, I meet defeatism and negativity. It’s frustrating, especially now, when the mainstream is visibly stepping away from the #dotcons and looking for a place to land. We should be building that landing space, but instead, we’re tangled in the wreckage of failed ideas and cynical inertia.

Yes, stupid fashionable ideas have failed again and again, but that doesn’t mean the basics no longer work. The #openweb grew from simple, powerful principles: decentralization, collaboration, and a belief that media should be in the hands of the people, not locked behind corporate walls. It worked then, and it can work now.

The #blocking wall, the #dotcons built to dam this flow, just might be crumbling, but I don’t think people realize just how much defeatist noise we had and still have to break through:

“Old tech. Nobody uses torrents anymore.”
“That’s been tried — it failed.”
“This is better, nobody’s interested in that.”
“You should be using XYZ instead. I have a better idea...”

It’s an endless cycle of negativity, driven by a #geekproblem that values novelty over function, and a #fashernista culture that chases trends rather than tending to the messy, necessary work of composting old ideas to grow something real. The #openweb tools still work, If we use them. The core tools of the #openweb are still powerful:

#RSS feeds for simple, open distribution.
#Torrents for decentralized, resilient file sharing.
#Fedivers networks like #Peertube, #Mastodon, and #Wordpress for publishing and connection.
Mesh networks and local-first tech to break dependence on centralized infrastructure.

None of these are new, that’s the point, they work. The failure wasn’t in the tech, it was in our inability to hold space against the relentless creep of the #deathcult. Reclaiming the compost heap is a first step, we need to stop chasing the next shiny thing and start digging through the muck. The #OMN, #indymediaback, and are all rooted in the idea that we can rebuild from what we already know works, not by reinventing the wheel but by getting our hands dirty and composting the failures into fertile ground for the future.

The defeatism is loud, but it’s not unbeatable. We’ve been here before. We know the way out.

Decentralize.
Publish.
Connect.
Trust the process.

We (re)build the #openweb one small, stubborn step at a time.

Deep breath. Take a step.

Sorting the wheat from the chaff

If you currently can’t see beyond #mainstreaming then jump anywhere from the #dotcons, a little step is better than non, if you are a bit radical then please think where you are stepping to.

As the world flees from X (formerly #Twitter) to look for viable social media alternatives, platforms like #BlueSky and #Threads come into view pushed by #mainstreaming agendas. But please lift the lid to see that while these platforms appear promising, scrutiny reveals issues with ownership, funding, and community values that show they are on the same #dotcons path that people are fleeing. This compromises long-term independence and user-centricity. In contrast, the #fedivers exemplifies the principles, a truer, more sustainable #openweb alternative for social networking, it’s here and it works.

  • BlueSky’s #VC funded roots, there is a difference between what people say and what they do, this one presented itself as a beacon for decentralized social networking, advocating user control and a light-touch moderation. The project’s founding under Jack Dorsey promised a platform engineered to transcend limitations in social media governance. However, its venture-funded path tells a more conventional story. With investments from entities like Blockchain Capital LLC, co-founded by crypto magnate Brock Pierce, the concerns about centralization are unavoidable. Historically, VC backing brings pressured for profitability and pushes investor interests, at odds with maintaining decentralized, user-first ideals the project keeps talking about. This is a mess soon down the road, it’s a dead-end for people to jump to. For a tech view of this and the VC and culture side. A good tech/social write-up https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
  • Threads is native to the #dotcons and corporate agenda’s. Threads, developed by #Meta (#Facebook), promises much, but it is firmly on the Meta’s path, rooted in data monetization, algorithmic control driving ad revenue. While Threads appears more user-friendly, its development trajectory inevitably follows Meta’s historical focus: ad-heavy strategies and extensive moderation policies that prioritize corporate interests over user freedom they talk about now. And a long writeup How decentralized is Bluesky really? A post on the #dotcons out reach to the #openweb mess. Why is Meta adding fediverse interoperability to Threads?
    https://fediversereport.com/why-is-meta-adding-fediverse-interoperability-to-threads/ What is the stress? What is the game?
  • The #Fediverse and #Mastodon are the #openweb’s champions, built for people, not profit. This path is in stark contrast, firmly, on the path of the openweb. From its decentralized structure to its open-source foundation. Managed by non-profit people and communerties, funded through voluntary donations and support from like-minded organisations, not venture capital or private investment. This independence ensures that people networking is never beholden to shareholders and subjected to the profit motives that drive centralized platforms. This embodies the principle that social media should amplify what people value, not what maximizes revenue.

Choosing platforms and paths that align with #openweb values is more than just a preference; it’s a stand for a future where digital spaces are driven by transparency, user empowerment, and shared stewardship. #BlueSky’s reliance on venture funding and Threads’ adherence to Meta’s corporate motives demonstrate the limitations of profit-oriented social media. We need a path where we prioritize community, collective action and autonomy over corporate growth.

In the pursuit of genuine alternatives, platforms like the Fediverse do more than fill the void left by ; they embody the promise of a decentralized, people first internet—the very essence of the #openweb.

#Openweb: This refers to the original, decentralized ethos of the internet, built on openness, freedom, and people’s autonomy. Linking enhances knowledge sharing, amplifies lesser-known voices, and enables people to explore varied content freely.

#Closedweb: This describes platforms dominated by algorithms, corporate interests, and paywalls. On dotcons, linking is often spam and is penalized or buried, precisely because it can disrupt the curated control these platforms wield over what people see.

Don’t feed the trolls, keeps coming to mind, when looking at the influx, this is like waves washing on the shore, be the shore not the waves.

The Activist History of the Web: Lessons we can learn

Over the last few decades, the web’s evolution has been shaped by competing ideals. Early on, we witnessed the shift from the “better” #closedweb corporate controlled paths to an #openweb #DIY explosion—a time when collaborative, decentralized approaches thrived. #Mainstreaming efforts to recapture this spirit failed for years, but eventually, corporate-driven dot-coms platforms captured the majority of people. Activist voices were muffled as #dotcons pushed mainstream interests, pulling away the community-driven power the web once enabled. This phase was a bait-and-switch operation, leading to surveillance capitalism and making it harder to stand up for collective, public-first internet paths.

A key aspect here is that this decline wasn’t caused by isolated figures but by broader, recurring social forces, like #fahernistas and the #geekproblem, who fell into patterns of adopting dominant narratives by failing to recognize the alt values of “native” open tech paths. As this happened, the #NGO world came in with “nice funding,” which subtly aligned activist tech initiatives with liberal, watered-down approaches. This pushed and promoted co-option over the power of change. The result was tech stagnation, with communities gradually losing their voice and control, the mess we were in 5 years ago.

The current openweb revival is due to protocols like #ActivityPub, coinciding with the rise of #web03, which was about re-implements #closedweb paths. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity, especially as the rotting of dotcons reveals the hollowness of centralization. While this #reboot has potential, it’s often bogged down by the same forces that hindered past movements. The #fahernistas focus on transient tech trends and individualistic coding projects that ignore the power of collective working, and the #web03 uncritical push of #encryption as a solution without a broader social strategy results in mountains of #techshit.

What works? Building from simple foundations: As digital activists and #DIY tech communities try to reboot the web, it’s essential to start with simplicity: #KISS principles (Keep It Simple, Stupid) offer a practical foundation. Instead of complex, flashy approaches, this mindset prioritizes clarity, accessibility, and collective agency. Each simple, intentional step creates a more durable basis to counter #mainstreaming forces.

What do we need: Self-organization tools within community are needed to reshape the path. Hashtags, for instance, have devolved into self-branding tools (fashernista), whereas they originally provided decentralized organizing power. Reclaiming these tools for grassroots purposes helps bring DIY activism to the forefront and build cohesive networks across digital paths.

What needs balance: The #VC poison of “nice funding” and #NGO co-option, are the big challenges facing the #openweb movement. Often, well-intentioned tech initiatives accept NGO money to sustain themselves, but this financial support is not neutral. The NGO world, embedded in liberal agendas, steers projects toward safe, palatable solutions that appeal to funders rather than fostering the radical shifts needed for real change. This sugar-coated poison draws tech initiatives away from their roots and into a cycle of compromise, weakening the collective power that grassroots projects depend on.

What can we do? As we look at ways to reignite a meaningful openweb, these lessons from history are crucial. Without seeing these patterns, we are repeating the same mistakes and allowing corporate and liberal to dictate the paths we take to build our shared digital commons. How we actually make this work is not obverse, but the current #fedivers reboot is a seed that is in the ground and growing.

I use the as a tool to do this as it’s simply #foss development with #openprocess added on, a useful tool to get past what people say their projects are about. And what they are actually about https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens we need tools like this to compost the piles of #techshit people keep creating, if we are to have soil to grow tech seeds of hope, like #Activertypub

The path is simple, who is coming down it with me and meany others?

We need to think different #OGB

There are challenges to establishing a governance model for the #fedivers, which is a network of many stakeholders. The traditional open-source model of a benign king is not an option for this native path, as there is no consensus among stakeholders for this #KISS. So people who want to play these roles are assholes, weather behnine or beneficial. 

The #fedivers is currently a loose network with few strong points of power, which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, as the #fedivers continues to grow, this will inevitably change, and there is a choice to be made about whether to adopt an open or closed model of change.

I argue that the idea of a formal board structure is naive, as it is prone to power politics and corporate capture. Instead, I suggest doing something different, such as building a governance model with dancing elephants and paper planes. This is a metaphor for a more creative and collaborative approach to governance that values the contributions of all stakeholders.

#activertypub represents a new and innovative approach to governance in the #fedivers, one that values the contributions of all stakeholders and avoids the pitfalls of traditional power politics. We need to think different and have a project doing this https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody

To be song to the diggers song

The Coders Song Lyrics

 hummm the video is different version to the lyrics order, but you get the idea

click the link to play in the background then come back to look at the lyrics hummm the video ending is different version to the lyric , but you get the idea

You noble coders all stand up now, stand up now
You noble coders all stand up now
The openweb to maintain sing dotcons by name
Your codeing does maintain and persons all defame
Stand up now, stand up now

With activertpub and html and CSS stand up now, stand up now
With activertypub and html and CSS , stand up now
Your freedom to uphold sing dotcons are bold
To sack you if they could and rights from you to hold
Stand up now coders all

The lawyers they conjoin stand up now stand up now
The lawyers they conjoin stand up now
To arrest they advise, such fury they devise, the devil in them lies
And hath blinded both their eyes
Stand up now, stand up now

The media they come in stand up now, stand up now
The media they come in stand up now
The media they come in and say it is a sin
That we should now begin our freedom for to win
Stand up now coders all

The venture capitalists are all round stand up now, stand up now
The venture capitalists are all round stand up now
The venture capitalists are all round on each side the are found
Their wisdom so profound to cheat us of our internet
Stand up now stand up now

Your website they pull down stand up now, stand up now
Your website they pull down, stand up now
Your website they pull down to fright your users online
But the venture capitalist must come down, and the people shall host the code
Stand up now coders all

‘Gainst lawyers and ‘gainst media stand up now stand up now
‘Gainst lawyers and ‘gainst media stand up now
For tyrants they are both, even flat against their oath
To grant us they are loathe free networks and standards and FOSS
Stand up now coders all

On the song, feel free to treat it as a first draft, we are taking a long history of “commons” and bridging this time to today’s #openweb reboot with the #fedivers which is also a nativist “commons”.

We have a band that I can try to record the update lyrics for the song, to make this worthwhile we need some process to decide if this will be used.

“Discuss The Grassroots Fediverse organization structure” – is first step a cultural as much as a technical question, this song is about the culture, so we can make “native” technical structures.

A fresh look at #openweb history

For people who like buzzwords

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents that is accessed through the Internet. #Web01, #Web02, and #Web03 are terms that are used to refer to different generations or phases of the World Wide Web (#WWW).

#Web01 refers to the early days of the World Wide Web, when it was first introduced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During this time, the web was primarily used for academic scientific, #NGO’s hobbyists and activists purposes and less yet widely adopted by the public.

#Web02 refers to the growth and expansion of the World Wide Web during the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the web became more accessible and user-friendly, and was increasingly adopted for commercial purposes. This era saw the rise of #dotcons, characterized by the growth of social media, mobile devices, and cloud computing. The web had become increasingly interactive and interconnected, and has become a critical tool for communication, misinformation, social control and commerce.

#Web03 was a waste of space, focus and money by the #Encryptionists who in bed with the scammers produced meany still born tech children in the last 10 years.

#Web01.5 refer to an intermediate stage between Web01 and Web02, marking a transition between the early and more experimental phase of the web and its more widespread commercial adoption. Web01.5 refers to a time when the web was still growing and evolving, but had already become more accessible and user-friendly, and was being adopted for more diverse purposes. With #mastodon and the #fedivers over the last 5 years, we are rebooting this web01.5 stage.

The patriarchs of the early #openweb

A conversation on trust and tech with #OMN projects

Remember the #fedivers is built like this, no geek in their right minds would do this, yet we use it every day

All our existing code is based on #feudalism master (admin) surf (user) this is why it is defenceless vs capitalism (#dotcons)

There have been attempts to build democratic code, early #wikis, think #indymedia

#geekproblem “common sense” shifted them back into feudalism.

We have a hard #BLOCK on democratic code, if you want to change/challenge then this blocking needs to be removed.

The #OMN is a project for this, it’s an uphill battle to bring democracy into our coding.

This is the media project (text needs a update” unite.openworlds.info/Open-MedOFFLINE

Governance for horizontals to talk to “vertical power” unite.openworlds.info/Open-MedOFFLINE

And a video for you visionon.tv/w/jqTdss1qrdk4yEZi OFFLINE

We get into the details, of the #OMN you would get Boleyn tag changes on import, so you can auto translate guardian issued tags and add your own tags with both rules and manually.

These tags would flow out of your instances and could flow back to the guardian if you trusted each other.

The idea is to turn news stories/videos into “commons” objects with rich flowing metadata… done in a #KISS way based on trust/moderated link/flows

RSS bring in the legacy objects #activitypub is the main transport protocol.

It’s the news part of the #fediverse, our first implementation of this would be #indmediaback

The idea is to decenter the server, the data is in a soup that flows… #activertypub is two-way this is need to build the horizontal network, so the soup does not ONLY flow one way.

Nobody is in charge, no slaves, no masters. Only trusted or moderated flows. It needs to be two-way, though you are right people being human meany will be one way. BUT we are not building it that way 🙂

RSS brings the legacy in, and it’s a simple display format for embeds and passive news feeds etc.

I think people find the “nobody is in charge” bit a very hard thing to understand, even though we have built meany networks/social groups on this idea, and still do.

In the realm of tech, I call this #blocking the #geekproblem and to get anywhere we need to take the “problem” outa “geek” or we are left with the mess (in a bad way)

#KISS