Today there are a lot of dishonest people – it’s become the default. Finding someone who is actually truthful is rare. So with this in mind, let’s stop being polite about this, what we’re living inside online right now isn’t “social media.” It’s a managed enclosure – a system designed to extract value, shape behaviour, and concentrate power. It’s what I have been saying for the last 20 years. Call it what it is – digital #feudalism – The Lords, the Serfs, and the Server.
When everyone is pushed onto one big virtual server, you don’t get community, you get hierarchy. Platform owners become landlords. Users become tenants. Visibility becomes rent. This is not accidental, it’s the business model and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The lie of “Ease of Use”. People say these #closedweb systems are “easy.” They’re not, they hide the cost, what looks simple is just complexity moved out of sight. Advertising Is the rot, a business model moral hazard, when profit depends on attention truth becomes optional and outrage becomes profitable leading to manipulation as the new normal. You don’t get healthy communities from this, you get addiction loops and behavioural engineering. And yes, the inevitable result is screen clutter, noise, and a slow degradation of any meaningful communication, communities are managed, not grown.
So who is going to do the #DIY work? Real moderation works when it’s embedded in the community itself. Algorithmic control is anti-social, the algorithmic timeline is one of the worst ideas we’ve normalised. It drives distraction, by showing you more of what you’ve already seen, it tries to control your desires by interfering with human communication. Over time, this destroys trust, when people stop knowing if they’re being heard, they stop knowing what is real, stop trusting the space. That’s not a bug, it’s the outcome.
The celebrity illusion is how centralised platforms manufacture “importance” for brands and influencers. These only function inside controlled visibility systems, outside of that? They’re often just paper tigers. In a real network – a messy, distributed, human one – influence has to be earned, not bought or algorithmically inflated.
The commodification of human life leads to inevitable decay. Left alone, centralised platforms drift towards monopoly, manipulation and towards the amplification of the worst actors as these actors game the system best. Without constant control from above, the system degrades, with repression, it becomes what we see today, authoritarian. That’s the trap, a community you can buy your way into is not a community, it’s a marketplace.
So what’s the alternative? We don’t fix this by tweaking features. We fix it by changing the ground or tech grows from. This new growth has been seeded by the #Fediverse, It’s where the #OMN comes in, not as another platform, but as a shift back to distributed networks instead of central servers, commons-based paths instead of enclosure, social moderation instead of outsourced control, open protocols instead of locked interfaces. And yes, that means less “slick”, less uniform, more messy. But also more real, accountable and human.
A final point (That should be obvious). The problem is not that the current #dotcons systems are broken, the problem is that they are working exactly as designed. If we want something better, we don’t patch the system, we compost it to grow the #openweb back – this time with the native cultural roots intact.
Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, decentralisation, and horizontal collaboration. Through writing, workshops, and practical projects, he argues that the future of the Fediverse depends as much on culture, governance, and shared infrastructure as it does on code.
Purpose is to open conversation that many people feel but rarely articulate: the tension between grassroots culture and institutional capture. Start with your simple distinction:
Bad #mainstreaming → corporate/NGO structures reshaping the Fediverse
Then ask: “Which direction are we currently moving?”
Discussion topics – funding and governance, foundations and institutional capture, developer vs user power, infrastructure vs platforms. How to avoid repeating Web 2.0
Activity is to ask participants to map layers: Grassroots – NGO / institutional – Corporate. To discuss where power currently sits and what healthy balance might look like.
Outcome is people leave with language to understand the tensions they are experiencing in the Fediverse.
Workshop 02
Maybe a second one on why #makeinghistory is needed? Translating #OMN from “activist infrastructure” into “missing public digital infrastructure.” That language is what this event is trying to figure out. The Open Media Network (#OMN) proposes a model where grassroots publishing, community moderation, and institutional participation are balanced. Participants can discuss how institutions support shared infrastructure rather than just deploying isolated platforms.
Many institutions are experimenting with the Fediverse as an alternative to #dotcons corporate social media. However, simply running institutional servers risks reproducing the same platform dynamics in a federated form. We need workshops that explore the broader ecosystem of public-interest media infrastructure.
“What happens after institutions join the Fediverse?” The #KISS answer is they need to support the commons infrastructure that makes it socially viable. Running Mastodon is not enough, institutions need to support the wider open media ecosystem.
Talking about #openweb culture in a constructive way is tricky because most #FOSS and Fediverse conversations default to technical framing: code quality, scalability, moderation tooling, and #UX. These things matter, but they are not the foundation that determines whether a network lives or dies.
Maybe a useful way to open the conversation is to shift the starting point. Instead of saying “culture is important too”, say something stronger but practical: The success or failure of open systems is primarily a cultural question, not a technical one. The code only expresses the culture behind it.
Start with a simple historical observation. Many technically strong systems failed because the social layer was weak, while some technically rough systems succeeded because the community culture worked.
Examples from the open web – early open source projects that thrived because communities shared norms of collaboration. Grassroots networks like Indymedia worked socially even when the software was messy. Corporate platforms that succeeded not because they were technically better, but because they built powerful social gravity.
The pattern is clear, that technology enables networks, but culture sustains them. This is the missing step in most Fediverse conversations. Right now to meany discussions focus on: scaling servers, moderation tools, interface design and onboarding. These are all necessary but insufficient.
What way to often goes missing is the deeper questions – What culture are we actually trying to grow? Without answering that, the system tends to drift toward the dominant internet culture, which today is shaped by the #dotcon platform model of engagement optimisation, algorithmic attention markets, influencer dynamics and centralised power. When that culture seeps into the Fediverse, the result is a federated copy of the same problems.
So why is culture harder than code? Code can be written by a few developers, culture requires shared understanding across thousands of people. To grow this we need native governance norms, trust networks, moderation values and expectations about ownership and participation to hold to native paths for how conflict is handled. These things cannot simply be implemented in software, they must be grown socially, fail to address this is why many technically strong projects fail, they assume the social layer will somehow emerge automatically. It rarely does.
To make this constructive, it helps to clearly describe what we mean by #openweb culture. Some core values historically included public-first communication rather than platform ownership, decentralised responsibility instead of central moderation authority, commons thinking rather than product thinking to nurture horizontal participation rather than audience/influencer hierarchies, this need clear #4opens processes rather than opaque decision-making.
These values were never perfect, but they created a different social environment from today’s corporate social media. If we do not actively cultivate these values, the surrounding internet culture will slowly overwrite them. If the Fediverse continues to grow without addressing culture as it currently is, the most likely outcome is large institutional instances dominate, smaller community spaces struggle leading to more moderation being centralised. This all shifts user expectations toward platform-style experiences.
At that point, the system may still be technically federated, but the culture will have drifted back toward Web 2.0. The code will be open, but the social dynamics will not be.
So the “extra step” is simply, we must talk about culture as deliberately as we talk about software architecture. That means asking questions like: What social norms should Fediverse communities encourage? What governance models support open participation? How do we keep the ecosystem diverse rather than dominated by large actors? What responsibilities come with running infrastructure in a commons network?
These conversations are sometimes uncomfortable, because they move beyond engineering into politics, sociology, and ethics. But avoiding them does not make them disappear, it simply means the culture will be shaped by default forces instead of conscious choices.
A simple way to frame this – A phrase that often works well in discussion is – “Code builds the network, but culture decides what the network becomes.” If we want the #openweb to remain something different from the #closedweb platform internet, we need to invest as much thought into the culture as we do into the code and #UX. Otherwise, the technology may succeed technically, but the social project behind it will quietly fail.
Public Money, Public Communication, Public Infrastructure
Public institutions are funded by taxpayers. Their role is to serve the public. So it should be obvious that their communication systems are open, accessible, and accountable to everyone -without requiring people to sign up to proprietary, for-profit platforms.
Yet this is not the world we live in. Today, much of public communication is effectively outsourced to the #dotcons. If you want to follow government updates, participate in consultations, or even access timely public information, you are often expected to create an account on a closed platform – designed for profit, data extraction, and behavioural manipulation. That alone should raise serious questions.
This contradiction is especially stark in Europe as they regularly speak about digital sovereignty, data protection and public accountability. And yet, at the same time, they rely on U.S.-based corporate platforms to communicate with their own citizens. It’s a strange situation:
Public institutions, funded by European taxpayers, using foreign, proprietary infrastructure to mediate public communication.
Not only does this create dependency, it also places public discourse inside systems that are not governed by public interest.
It’s not just ironic. It’s structurally broken, we should think about prosicuting the people who have made this happen.
The access problem, useing closed platforms to access public communication creates real barriers: Not everyone wants to create or maintain dotcons social media accounts. Some people are excluded for ethical, political, or practical reasons. Algorithms decide what is seen and what is not. Public information becomes entangled with advertising and engagement metrics. This undermines a basic democratic principle that public communication should be universally accessible, without conditions.
We already have an alternative to this curupt mess, the #DIY#OpenWeb comes from europe, it offers a different path. Instead of #closedweb platform dependency, it builds on open standards, interoperable systems with multiple access points, no user lock-in. This is not a new path, it is how the web was originally created to work in the EU.
An example project that contines this native mission and supports this is the #OMN whitch creates spaces where public institutions and public communities can meet on equal terms, without one dominating the other, and without relying on closed corporate systems. If institutions instead invest in and support the wider #OMN ecosystem, they help build something fundamentally different, a public communication infrastructure that is open by default, accessible to all, resilient and distributed and aligned with democratic values.
A simple principle, if it is funded by the public, it should be accessible to the public – without restriction. No accounts required, no platform dependency and no hidden gatekeepers.
We need to organise a call to act. Public institutions need to move beyond simply using the #Fediverse. They need to help build and sustain the commons that makes open communication possible. That means, supporting open infrastructure projects, funding shared ecosystems like the #OMN and building real, not facke PR commitment to public-first communication practices.
This is not just a technical shift, it is a political and cultural choice.
A simple #KISS way forward is to shift public social communication onto the #Fediverse. This is already a significant improvement on current platform dependency. However, I want to raise a point that may sound controversial at first, but is actually quite practical: public institutions should not rely exclusively on the existing codebases.
Most current Fediverse platforms have done vital groundwork – particularly in establishing shared protocols, interoperability, and a working culture of federation. That contribution is important and should be recognised. However, many of these tools evolved shaped by the same assumptions as #dotcons and constrained by #NGO project models. As a result, they can be complex, difficult to maintain, and not always well aligned with the long-term needs of public institutions or commons-based infrastructure.
A constructive path forward would be to fund the development of a small number of new, purpose-built codebases focused on commons publishing. Not one, but three parallel implementations.
Why three? Because diversity reduces risk. In practice, not every project will succeed – this is normal and expected. Funding multiple approaches ensures resilience, encourages innovation, and avoids over-reliance on a single solution. The cost of doing this would be minimal relative to existing public digital budgets, yet the potential long-term value is significant.
Importantly, this is not about replacing the existing ecosystem. Because the Fediverse is built on shared protocols, any new tools would remain fully interoperable with current platforms. This means users of existing services can still interact seamlessly, while the overall ecosystem becomes stronger, more diverse, and better aligned with public service values.
In short: build on what exists, but don’t be constrained by it. By investing modestly in new, commons-oriented infrastructure alongside the current tools, public institutions can shape a more robust, sustainable, and genuinely public digital communication space.
Outreach to @newsmast interesting to see the #NGO view of the real alt path we need to take https://hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of-workshops-to-run-at-nodes-on-a-web-noaw-unconference/ you guys might be interested in working on the 3ed workshop outline. The 3 codebase need to be 1) mainstreaming, 2) radical #NGO and 3) native messy grassroots. You guys could be the second codebase. We do need diversity, best not to keep blindly messing up this path in the current globe mess.
Stopped going to in-person general tech conferences around 15 years ago – they’d become beyond pointless. Since then, I’ve stuck to more focused online events.
Now heading back to an in-person one. Curious what I’ll actually find.
I have a feeling it’ll be about 75% pointless, 20% narrow geek, academic and #NGO-focused (slightly useful), and maybe 5% – probably less – actually useful.
One of the biggest barriers to building projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) is not technical – it is structural – how resources are distributed in our society. Under capitalism, the driving force behind what gets built and what counts as “innovation” is profit. Investment flows toward projects that promise financial returns. Venture capital, grants, and corporate funding all operate under this logic: if a project can generate profit, scale, or market dominance, it is considered worthy of investment. If it cannot do those things, it does not get funded.
This creates a deep distortion in what kinds of technology and social infrastructure actually get built. Projects that could save lives, strengthen communities, or benefit wider society struggle to find any resources simply because they do not generate profit. We can see this clearly in the digital world. Billions flow into speculative technologies, advertising systems, surveillance platforms, and financial schemes. Meanwhile, the basic tools people need for public communication, community coordination, and independent media remain fragile and under-resourced.
The result is the landscape we now call the #dotcons: platforms that monetize our attention, harvest our data, and shape public conversation for the benefit of a handful of corporations and shareholders.
A different motivation? The native Fediverse and projects like the #OMN are built from a completely different starting point. Not designed to extract profit or built encloser. And not driven by the logic of venture capital. Instead, at best they grow from a humanist motivation: the desire to build social meaning and meet simple human needs. The goal is to improve the quality of life in general by supporting open publishing, shared media infrastructure, and grassroots communication. These are the kinds of tools we need to help communities tell their own stories, organise collectively, and respond to crises.
In this sense, the #OMN sits firmly in the tradition of the #openweb and projects like #indymedia. The technology exists, the cultural knowledge exists, what is missing is not possibility, but resources. Because the #OMN does not promise financial returns, it sits outside the normal funding pipelines. Venture capital has no interest, corporate sponsors want control, institutional funding comes with strings attached that reshape projects into something “safer” and less disruptive.
Over the past decades we have also seen how #NGO funding models neutralize grassroots initiatives, the original goals become softened, the governance shifts upward, and projects become professionalized to the point where they lose the communities they were meant to serve. So the challenge becomes very simple, but very real how do we resource projects that are built for social value rather than profit? This is the core difficulty in building the #OMN.
It is not that people disagree with the idea, in fact, many people recognise the need for open, public-first media infrastructure. The difficulty lies in finding ways to support that work outside the normal profit-driven economy.
Growing from seeds – the good news is that the #OMN does not need to start big. Many of the most important pieces of the #openweb have always grown from small seeds: communities, volunteer effort, shared infrastructure, and trust networks. The #Fediverse itself is proof that distributed systems can grow organically when people care enough to build and maintain them.
The aim is not to replace the existing system overnight. It is to grow an alternative ecosystem alongside it, rooted in openness, collaboration, and public benefit. This means building slowly, sharing knowledge, and keeping the processes transparent and simple. The #4opens principles remain a useful guide: open data, open source, open standards, and open process.
What you can do – if the #OMN is going to exist – it will exist because people decide it should. There are a few practical ways to help make that happen:
Contribute skills and development. Developers, designers, writers, organisers, and testers are all needed to grow the network.
Use and experiment with the tools. Real projects and real communities are what give infrastructure meaning.
Share the ideas. Talk about the need for public-first media systems and the problems with the current #dotcons landscape.
Help build the culture. Technology alone is not enough. The #OMN depends on the social culture of the #openweb: cooperation, trust, and collective responsibility.
This is a #KISS path to building the world we need. The current system directs enormous resources toward technologies that extract value rather than create it. That is not inevitable, it is simply how our economic structures currently allocate attention and funding.
The #OMN represents a small but practical step to build something different, not a platform empire, or another startup. Just a shared piece of public media infrastructure, grown from the grassroots, and built to serve the people who use it. If that sounds like a world worth building, you can help make it real: https://opencollective.com/open-media-network
For a long time the focus has been on solving two linked problems – both of which are actually #nothingnew. The first is grassroots publishing and organising. The second is network coordination between communities. Neither of these problems started with the internet, and they certainly didn’t start with Silicon Valley.
Projects like #Indymedia and community organising networks solved these problems culturally long before modern platforms existed. They worked through shared practice, trust networks, affinity groups, and rough consensus. Importantly, they worked in non-federated ways – loose collaboration across independent nodes. This model likely stretches back a century or more in activist and cooperative cultures.
What the last five years of #ActivityPub rollout has given us is something new to add to that history: technical federation. So we now have two complementary paths that both grow naturally from the #openweb:
Grassroots #DIY culture – social federation built on trust, practice and community.
Technical federation – protocols like ActivityPub enabling networks of independent servers to interoperate.
Both are native to the open web. From the #OMN perspective this leads to practical projects:
#indymediaback – rebuilding grassroots publishing and organising infrastructure based on the lessons of the original Indymedia movement, but updated with openweb tools.
#OGB – a parallel path emerging through EU outreach and institutional engagement.
The key point is that these paths do not depend on the dominant platform ecosystem, the #dotcons. In fact, if we step back historically, we can see a fork in the road that happened twenty years ago. Instead of building open infrastructure, most movements ended up relying on corporate platforms. It was easier, faster, and seemed practical at the time. But that path turned out to be a trap.
The current tech landscape – platforms, algorithms, venture capital ecosystems, and the ideology surrounding them – is largely #techshit. Not because technology itself is bad, but because the dominant model is built to extract value and control attention rather than support communities. The solution isn’t simply to reject technology, it’s to compost it. Take what works, discard what doesn’t, and grow something healthier from the remains. That’s the thinking behind #OMN projects.
The projects start from a social understanding: technology alone doesn’t create networks. Culture, trust, and shared practice do. The tools should support those relationships, not capture or replace them. So the historical loop closes. Grassroots culture + open protocols – #DIY practice + federation. If we had taken that path twenty years ago, the web might look very different today.
The task now is simple, go back to that fork and take the other path.
Something that’s worth saying out loud: many of the people currently talking for the #Fediverse had very little to do with the generation that seeded this version. That doesn’t automatically make what they say wrong. But it does mean we should be careful about building strategy around their narratives.
A lot of the early Fediverse energy came from the older #openweb traditions of hacker and #FOSS culture, experiments in federated infrastructure and grassroots publishing networks. The long history of things like RSS feeds, blogging, and projects like #indymedia
The #Fediverse didn’t appear out of nowhere, it grew from decades of experimentation with open protocols, decentralised communication, and commons-based infrastructure. Some of the current commentators arrived after the current seeds had already been planted. That’s normal, every movement eventually attracts interpreters, professionalisers, and institutions. But it does mean there is a risk that the story gets rewritten in ways that lose the original lessons.
One of those lessons is simplicity, the systems that spread tend to follow a basic rule: #KISS – Keep It Simple: Simple protocols. Simple tools. Simple ways for people to publish and connect. When infrastructure becomes complicated – governance layers, funding structures, branding strategies, endless, #NGO mediated theoretical debates – the distance between the actual people and the invisible elitism occupying the space, talking the loudest, grows larger.
The Fediverse itself only exists because a handful of people quietly built working code and released it under #4opens licences. Communities adopted it because it worked, not because it was well marketed, not because institutions endorsed it and not because a conference panel explained its importance.
For projects growing the #openweb, the lesson is straightforward: Don’t get too distracted by who is currently speaking for the ecosystem. Look at flows, what is being built, at what people have used and at what follows the basic principles of the commons. And keep things simple. #KISS is still the best guides we have.
Stepping around the recurring #NGO voices in #openweb debates. To do this the problem we need to compost is our lack of balance, meany of the people talking for us have done the same thing for each generation of the open web and bluntly there “common sense” has always failed as it is not native to the #openweb. These people have no idea that they keep circling this mess, so please try and step around them. Because they talk loudly and consistently, newcomers often assume they represent the ecosystem, they don’t. The practical lesson is simple:
Notice them.
Learn from the patterns of past generations.
Step around them.
Our task is to grow native, functioning, living networks, not to repeat old mainstreaming debates that have consistently led nowhere. In other words: don’t argue with the noise, build around it. Keep the focus on grassroots projects, real communities, and real trust-based infrastructure.
For progressive and radical people, one of the central political questions of our time is simple to ask but hard to answer – Why is it so difficult to rebuild the institutions that were destroyed in our #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s? And more importantly why does the impossibility of rebuilding them make it so hard to change the needed balance of power in society? These question matters for working on the future of the society and most importantly the grassroots part of this: #openweb, grassroots media, and projects like #OMN.
The hollowing out of institutions, in the 20th century, politics used to be deeply institutional. People didn’t just express opinions, they joined organisations. If you marched in a protest, we usually marched as a member of something: a trade union, a political party, a civil rights organisation or community association. These organisations formed the infrastructure of democracy, connecting everyday anger and hope to real power.
But beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, much of this infrastructure was deliberately dismantled. Union power was broken, mass political parties were hollowed out, and community organisations lost resources and influence. The result is the political landscape we inherit, a society with political anger but without any working political structures.
Today we live in what #fashionistas and academics call #hyperpolitics or what I call #stupidindividualism in the hashtag story. Yes, some people are more politically engaged than they were in the 1990s or early 2000s: More fluffy protests, #dotcons online political discussion. But this engagement is almost all unstructured in the old sense.
Millions may join a protest or share a political message in the #dotcons, yet very little, if any lasting organisation emerges from this. This surface engagement creates a strange paradox of huge drifting mobilisations leading to very little structural change. We can have the largest protests in history – yet the underlying power structures remain completely untouched.
Closed #dotcons social media lowered the cost of expression, but algorithmically shaped it into smoke and mirrors. Let’s take a moment to lift the lid on this #tecsit mess. The role of media in this is complex, on the positive side, #closedweb platforms drastically reduced the cost of political expression.
Forty years ago, if you wanted to express a political opinion publicly you needed a newspaper, radio station, a public meeting or to stand in a square shouting. Now you can reach thousands of people instantly. But there is a downside that #dotcons smoke and mirror online engagement replaces the slow work of institution-building. Posting, sharing, and reacting can feel like participation, but it has very little role in building the durable structures needed for any long-term change.
So why do the current hard right succeed without institutions? There is an uncomfortable asymmetry between left and right. The right can carry out its agenda without building mass organisations, because it relys on: existing elitist power structures, wealthy donors, state institutions and traditional corporate media.
The left cannot rely on these, historically the left needed mass organisations because its power came from collective action – workers, communities, movements. Without those structures, left politics becomes, mess, fragmented and reactive. This is why protest waves can be enormous but still fail to shift any real policy.
The #undeadleft problem is where vertical left respond to this crisis with nostalgia, there imagination stops at rebuilding the mass political parties and institutions of the 20th century. But this is to often like trying to animate a corpse, even if you could recreate it, the environment has changed so much that it wouldn’t survive.
At the same time, the opposite response – abandoning institutions entirely to relying purely on digital networks – also fails. Purely online movements often dissolve as quickly as they form. We need a #DIY hybrid path based on federated #4opens institutions like the tools we are building and rebooting with the #OMN projects.
Not rigid old institutions, not purely online networks, But something that seeds the in between. The goal is not to create another platform, it is to expand #federated#p2p infrastructure for collective media and collective politics. The original #openweb worked because it supported networks of communities, independent publishers and grassroots movements. The corporate #dotcons replaced this with extractive platforms designed for profit and control.
KISS rebuilding the commons means rebuilding the social infrastructure of media, not just tools, but institutions and practices that persist to allow collective voices to organise and persist.
The simple truth, if we want real political change, we cannot rely on viral posts, temporary movements or algorithmic attention. We need structures that last, connect people, that can turn energy into horizontal power. That work is slow, messy, and unfashionable, but like digging compost for a garden, it’s the only way anything grows.
A path to start to compost this #techshit is growing horizontal tools from the Fediverse for real change (#OMN).
If the problem of our time is political energy without institutions, then the opportunity is clear: build new institutions native to the #openweb. Not simply recreate the rigid organisations of the 20th century, and not fall into the hollow performative politics of the #dotcons. Instead, we grow native horizontal digital tools to help people organise, coordinate, and act collectively. This is where the Fediverse and projects like #OMN matter.
The #Fediverse already proves that distributed infrastructure works. But right now it is mostly used for conversation. If we want meaningful change and challenge, we need to extend it into practical coordination and collective action. by build tools for organising, not just talking
Current social media tools are built for attention and engagement, not organisation. What we need to add to the mix is simple #4opens tools that help people form groups, coordinate action, share resources, document activity and most importantly maintain continuity over time (#makinghistory). The Fediverse already has #fashionista and #geekproblem pieces of this:
Mastodon / Pleroma → conversation
Mobilizon → events and gatherings
PeerTube → video publishing
PixelFed → visual storytelling
Lemmy / Kbin → community forums
These existing pieces can become seeds to be woven together into workflows for collective action. On this path we need to remember the goal is not more platforms, it’s practical ecosystems. For this to work a first step is rebuilding commons-based media. A core idea behind #OMN is returning to something like the #Indymedia publishing model, but rebuilt using modern federated tools. Instead of a single website, imagine distributed publishing nodes where local groups post reports, media is shared across networks, discussions happen across servers and archives remain accessible and most importantly meaningful.
This builds collective memory, something the algorithmic feeds of the #dotcons constantly destroy. Movements need memory to learn.
#makinghistory is the same code-base as this grassroots media project
One reason mass organisations collapsed is that participation became too heavy, people don’t want to “join a church” politically any more. So tools should allow different levels of engagement: casual participation, occasional contribution, active organising with core stewardship. The Fediverse naturally supports this because it allows loose affiliation rather than rigid membership. You don’t need permission from a central authority to participate.
Focus on infrastructure, not branding. A common #NGO trap in activist tech is building new branded platforms that compete with existing networks. That approach usually fails. The better path is infrastructure building based on protocols instead of platforms for #4opens interoperability instead of silos, tools that connect existing communities. This was the original power of the #openweb, protocols scale. Platforms capture.
Keep the tech simple (#KISS), as the biggest barrier to grassroots technology is complexity. Many promising projects fail because they become too technical for real communities to use. So the rule should always be KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Tools should be installable easily, understandable by non-geeks and maintainable by small communities to grow resilience without large funding. If only developers can run the system, it will never become a movement infrastructure.
Compost the failures (#techshit). Another key idea is recognising that the tech world constantly churns useful waste. Old tools, failed platforms, abandoned code, all of this is #techshit that can be composted instead of chasing fashionable new tech, we reuse working ideas, simplify existing tools to combine proven approaches. The #openweb already solved many of these problems decades ago. Sometimes progress means going back to what worked.
Build trust networks, as the most important layer isn’t technical – it’s social. Horizontal networks only function when there is trust and shared culture. The Fediverse works because communities can federate with trusted peers, block hostile actors, build local norms. This allows networks to remain open but resilient. The challenge is nurturing communities of practice around the tools.
Grow slowly and organically, movements that scale too quickly often collapse. The better model is ecological growth with small nodes → connected networks → resilient ecosystems. Just like compost turning into soil. The goal is not explosive growth, its sustainable infrastructure for collective action.
The real challenge is the biggest obstacle isn’t technology, it’s the #geekproblem – the gap between technical culture and social reality. Too many tech projects assume that better tools automatically produce social change, but tools only matter when they are embedded in real communities and struggles. The work of projects like #OMN is bridging that gap.
Shovels, not silver bullets, we don’t need magic platforms, we need shovels, tools that help people dig, build, connect, and organise together on the native #openweb. If we can do that, the Fediverse becomes more than an alternative social network, it becomes infrastructure for democratic power.
Meany people see the world degrading, enclosure accelerating. They see climate, politics, media all bending toward extraction. And even when they can see the trajectory, they feel powerless, so they cope by optimise their careers. They scroll. They argue. They consume. They retreat into irony. From birth, we’re trained into one core assumption: There Is No Alternative (#TINA).
Not because it’s true, but because every dominant institution reinforces it:
Schools train compliance.
Media normalises enclosure.
Platforms reward performance over substance.
Workplaces absorb our creative energy into extractive systems.
The message is subtle but constant:
“You can’t change anything.”
“Radicals just break things.”
“Be reasonable. Fit in.”
For builders, this message hits differently, because we know alternatives are possible, we’ve already built them. This is the #FOSS Paradox, as free and open source software proves collaboration without enclosure works, commons-based production works, open standards work and distributed governance can work. Yet somehow, the infrastructure we helped build keeps being enclosed.
The #openweb became the #dotcons, protocols became platforms and communities became markets. Not because we failed technically, but because we underestimated scale, incentives, and capture. And too often, we built tools without building parallel social power. The real trap isn’t rebellion – It’s drift – The #mainstreaming system doesn’t survive by crushing everyone loudly. It survives by absorbing alternatives, funding safe versions of dissent, steering energy into manageable channels and exhausting people with maintenance and precarity
Gatekeeping doesn’t always look like repression, more it looks like grants, partnerships, “best practices,” and institutional legitimacy. The result is that talented builders end up reinforcing the systems they once set out to replace. Not out of malice more from survival.
This Is where #OMN and #4opens come In, it isn’t only ranting about what’s broken, it’s about rebuilding missing layers:
Trust
Shared infrastructure
Media flows outside algorithmic capture
Governance rooted in actual participants
The #4opens are not branding, they are structural safeguards:
Open data
Open source
Open standards
Open process
Without all four, enclosure can creep back in, slowly, politely and inevitably.
This Is not about individual heroics, the myth of the lone hacker is part of the problem. What we need for the new “common sense” is that #stupidindividualism is a dead end. Few people escape extractive systems alone, no one builds durable alternatives alone. Collective infrastructure helps build counterweight to centralised power.
That’s what the #Fediverse gestures toward, what the #openweb once promised, and what needs strengthening now. A first step is to stop pretending we’re powerless. If you’re in #FOSS, you already have:
skills
networks
literacy in decentralised systems
experience with commons governance
What’s missing isn’t capability, it’s coordination and shared direction. The first step isn’t dramatic, it’s simple, reject the #NGO path to:
Find your people.
Support projects aligned with the #4opens.
Build flows, not just features.
Connect tools to real communities.
Refuse quite capture.
Do something – anything – that strengthens commons infrastructure instead of platform enclosure. The biggest lie Is that there’s no choice, when we keep repeating “this is just how things are,” eventually it becomes self-fulfilling. But history says otherwise, every dominant system looks permanent, until it isn’t.
The real outsiders aren’t the loudest rebels, they’re the ones who quietly stop reinforcing broken systems and start building viable alternatives. That’s what this moment asks of the #FOSS community is not #blocking outrage, not purity and not only collapse fantasies.
So, please stop waiting for permission, build systems that align with human autonomy and biophysical reality by strengthening commons before they’re erased. Because alternatives don’t appear, they’re built, and if we don’t build them, enclosure wins by default.
Human behaviour does not stay the same as groups grow. The instincts that helped small tribes survive – loyalty, signalling belonging, defending boundaries, competing for status, consolidating influence – functioned well within natural limits. In small groups, feedback was immediate. Consequences were visible. Power was constrained by proximity and material reality.
But when those same instincts operate at contemporary social scale – inside complex technological societies, or even something like the current #NGO-fediverse – they stop stabilising systems and begin to destabilise them.
What once supported survival can amplify fragmentation. What once built cohesion can produce polarisation. What once protected the group can spiral into extraction and enclosure.
This isn’t a moral failure of the human species. It’s a predictable outcome of scale.
We now live inside systems where old social instincts interact with global networks, algorithmic amplification, financial abstraction, and industrial metabolism. The more-than-human crisis – #climatechaos, biodiversity collapse, geopolitical fracture – isn’t a collection of isolated problems. These are symptoms.
Beneath them are recurring systemic patterns. Beneath those patterns are society-scale incentives. And beneath those incentives are deep assumptions about growth, control, competition, and scarcity.
We are not outside these layers. We are embedded within them. So the questions become:
What does responsibility look like in a world where structural incentives shape collective outcomes?
Where do social thresholds appear when scale removes the natural limits that once kept us in balance?
How do we avoid treating symptoms while reinforcing the deeper forces producing them?
And if our instincts helped seed the early #Fediverse – when we for a time glimpsed a system that worked with human nature while balancing against #dotcons reality – how do we stay true to that path?
Because the tensions we see in the #fediverse today are not just about #blocking or governance disagreements. They are a microcosm of the larger scale problem of how human coordination patterns behave when they move from small, trust-based communities into larger networked infrastructures. The fediverse is not separate from this dynamic. It is one of the places where we should be actively trying to work it out.
To begin that work, we need to understand how the last #openweb reboot was enclosed. We can start by naming the #dotcons.
The #dotcons aren’t just “big tech companies.” They are a structural class of platforms that follow a repeatable pattern:
Present themselves as open, liberating, participatory spaces.
Attract huge numbers of people through network effects and free access.
Gradually enclose that activity.
Monetise attention by shaping reach, visibility, and behaviour.
The “con” isn’t that they charge money, it is the bait-and-switch:
First: open participation, organic reach, community.
You can swap leadership, branding, or tone, but if the core model is:
capture network → centralise control → monetise attention
… then it sits in the same class.
Naming them #dotcons isn’t moral outrage, it’s structural clarity. If we don’t name enclosure as a pattern, we end up debating personalities and features instead of structure. And this matters for the fediverse as if we don’t consciously build flows, commons, and #4opens practices into infrastructure and culture, the same enclosure dynamics will re-emerge, just more politely. The difference isn’t tone, it’s structure.
The real tension in the Fediverse is more about the idea and direction are broadly right:
But the institutional reality is hollow, not enough resources go into the “native,” messy, grassroots work that actually keeps things alive. People like Evan and others stepping into organisational roles are, from their perspective, trying to:
stabilise infrastructure
secure institutional funding
reduce fragmentation
make the ecosystem legible to funders and regulators.
From that side, the fear is clear that without coordination and institutional structure, the fediverse remains marginal or collapses under maintenance debt.
From the native grassroots perspective, however, that institutionalisation risks repeating Web 2.0 capture in softer form – NGO-isation, depoliticisation, mainstream drift, and soft #blocking control. Can be framed as:
stability vs autonomy
funding vs independence
coordination vs organic growth
But it’s more accurate to call it what it is, a resource bottleneck. “ZERO resources for what we actually need” is widely felt as funding currently flows to:
In short, technical sustainability gets funded, where social sustainability struggles, this is why the friction persists. Funding bodies – including ones like #NLnet – operate within a narrow philosophy:
But grassroots media and social organising don’t fit clean grant deliverables. Long-term community building is messy and hard to quantify. Native or openly political framing scares institutional funders. So money exists, but flows on balance toward the wrong layers for movement-building. #Blocking systems like this rarely change because people ask, they change when parallel practice makes the gap obvious. History shows this:
Indymedia didn’t wait for permission.
Early blogs didn’t wait for foundation approval.
Mastodon grew outside institutional planning.
The fediverse reboot itself began as parallel infrastructure.
How do we shift direction to balance resources to:
finding seed funding and affinity groups
building alternatives that demonstrate missing layers
experimenting with governance rooted in users/admins (#OGB)
reframing the fediverse as one implementation of a broader #openweb ecology.
Institutions may shift, they may not. They likely believe they are solving the resource problem – just at a different layer (protocol legitimacy, policy access). So the conflict isn’t simply “they are wrong.” It’s that they are solving a different problem than native actors see as urgent.
The real power map is that formal governance in the fediverse is weak. Influence networks are strong. Power =
maintainers (code gravity)
large instance admins (network gravity)
narrative shapers (discourse gravity)
funding flows (resource gravity)
UX defaults (silent governance)
momentum and path dependency.
Most people assume power = foundations. It doesn’t, and this mismatch creates frustration. Grassroots actors see norms solidifying without transparent process. Institutional actors see chaos and feel pressure to stabilise. Both misidentify where power actually sits. The deepest divide is not ideological. It’s psychological. People are defending different survival strategies inherited from earlier internet generations. Until that’s recognised, discussions loop.
This is a much shorter version of the last post worth reading that as well. What do you think – when you step back and look at it this way?
We need to look at counter common sense. Peter Kropotkin “In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil.” Cuts straight into the #Fediverse tension, because the pattern is scale reflex: Problem appears → create rule → assume order emerges. It’s not stupidity, it’s institutional instinct, in spaces, when instability appears, the reflex is legislate, regulate, formalise and centralise. Law becomes the default instrument of repair.
Kropotkin’s critique is that law treats symptoms while leaving underlying social relations intact. It stabilises the surface while preserving the structure that produced the harm. Mapped onto #NGO governance frameworks, we see as this as the cure for cultural conflict, moderation rules as cure for social breakdown, foundation structures as cure for coordination failure, compliance processes as cure for scale instability. The risk isn’t only law itself, it is in mistaking rule-production for structural transformation.
When scale increases, institutions reach for formalisation, as trust erodes, systems reach for control. That instinct once helped small groups survive, but at scale, it reinforces the dynamics causing instability. #openweb networked infrastructure like the Fediverse, this equivalent of “fresh law” is played out as new governance bodies, new codes of conduct, compliance layers, blocking norms and new funding gatekeeping mechanisms. While each framed as remedy instead they are increasing enclosure.
Kropotkin isn’t arguing for mess, he’s pointing toward something harder – If problems emerge from structural incentives and social relations, then layering rules on top of those incentives won’t solve them, it will entrench them.
That’s the deeper tension, do we solve #Fediverse instability by adding structure? Or by changing flows, commons, and material relations underneath? That question is the uncomfortable one for people who still common sense worship the #deathcult.
Treating the Fediverse as #stupidindividualism is a kind of blindness, yes, individuals matter, but the #Fediverse only works because of shared culture, shared norms, and collective responsibility. Without this social layer, federation becomes fragmentation – lots of voices, but little shared direction to hold together.
Since the #twittermigration of a few years ago, many of us are feeling the signal-to-noise shift. New people bring energy, creativity, and different expectations – but also habits shaped by algorithmic platforms. The result is a changing “tribal” self-image in Fediverse spaces. This change is not automatically bad. But it does mean we need to actively strengthen #openweb culture if we want the transition to be two-way rather than simply importing #dotcons habits into decentralised spaces.
Remember the people lived through this so will be traumatized, so be kind if you can.
Some conversations frame this as individualism vs collectivism, that’s too simple. Healthy networks hold both, individuals with autonomy, creativity and communities with shared norms and mutual responsibility.
Too much individualism → fragmentation and noise.
Too much collectivism → rigidity and exclusion.
The Fediverse works when it behaves more like a murmuration – many independent actors moving with shared awareness.
The “village vs city” problem. When we started on this path, as Mastodon and other Fediverse instances grow, the experience shifted from small instances feeling like villages, to the wider network feeling like a city. What the huge influx of mainstreaming “common sense” did not bring with them, is that tiny or very large instances alone cannot solve signal-to-noise at scale.
Social structures must evolve alongside technical federation. We are now out of balance on this path, and we need to actively find our way back. Some practical paths are to this balance is by creating and boosting thematic tag cultures (#openweb, #4opens, etc.) as social filters, like watering a garden to help it grow.
The old strategies are still good, though now largely blocked on the #dotcons. Publish from independent platforms first, then syndicate outward (self-hosting as roots, social networks as branches). Encourage open, transparent filtering tools – not hidden algorithms but user-visible choices. Curated flows (human moderation, thematic feeds, affinity groups) instead of purely chronological chaos as networks grow.
Back to the risk of importing “closed” habits. One danger of rapid migration is the unconscious push toward familiar “closed” solutions of hidden moderation logic, opaque ranking systems and defensive blocking cultures replacing mediation. Common sense from closed platforms often fails in open environments.
Open systems are harder, they require active participation, shared stewardship, and cultural literacy. If we don’t defend these values, the #openweb reboot risks recreating the same problems we tried to escape.
Judge by the #4opens as a simple compass to use to evaluate projects before boosting them. Not as purity tests, but as practical signals for long-term resilience. The goal isn’t gatekeeping, to grow a living ecosystem where openness survives scaling.
Please boost this #openweb culture content, not as nostalgia, but as active infrastructure. Remember, individual vs collective is false opposition, so please don’t be a prat on this subject, thanks.
If we want meaningful change rather than internal noise, it helps to talk less about individual personalities and more about roles, structures, and class. Individuals come and go, but the patterns they operate within repeat. Shifting focus this way isn’t about avoiding accountability, it’s about understanding the dynamics that shape behaviour across projects and communities.
When we centre individuals, discussions drift into blame or hero narratives, which generates more temporary heat than permanent light. When we look more at structural incentives, cultural habits, and class dynamics, we start to see why the same problems reappear across different spaces – from grassroots projects to NGOs to #FOSS communities.
This is a signal-to-noise issue. A native #KISS path helps keep analysis simple, structural, and grounded in shared experience. By reducing personalisation and increasing systemic understanding, we create more room for collaboration, learning, and mediation, which is important when building sustainable paths like the #openweb and #OMN.
What we then need to compost. It’s a normal mainstreaming augment that systems built primarily on trust will inevitably rot, decay, and collapse. That concern is understandable. Many people’s lived experience tells them that without strong control structures, things fall apart. And honestly – sometimes they do.
But the story is more complicated than that. First, there are long-term examples of trust-based or grassroots systems working, though they rarely look neat or institutional enough to be recognised as “successful” by mainstream standards. The difficulty is that these systems are best understood through participation rather than observation. They are lived processes, not static models. I document some of this history on this site, but reading alone rarely communicates the full reality, experience does.
Second, yes, grassroots projects can be damaged by well-meaning people. That isn’t paranoia; it’s everyday reality. Social dynamics, unconscious habits from institutional culture, and imported control patterns all create friction. The #OMN approach accepts this and builds mediation strategies directly into projects. These strategies are imperfect, we often get things wrong, but acknowledging the problem openly is part of making the work sustainable.
And to the harder question: if good intentions can cause disruption, what happens when bad actors show up? The answer is that no system is immune. Control-heavy systems fail too – sometimes more dramatically because their rigidity hides problems until they become catastrophic. The goal isn’t to create a perfect system (the classic #geekproblem), but to build a more humane messy system that can adapt, respond, and recover.
All functioning social systems are messy. Trying to eliminate that mess usually creates more fragility, not less. Instead, the path forward is to embrace smaller, resilient units that federate horizontally, many small experiments linked together rather than one central structure trying to manage everything. This is where the #fediverse and projects like #OMN become interesting: we now have technologies that allow small-scale trust networks to interconnect without collapsing into centralized control.
Will people try to take control or undermine these spaces? Of course. That’s part of reality. The work is to build cultures and processes that mediate this continuously, rather than pretending it can be eliminated.
What we maybe need to convince sceptical engineers is not ideology but demonstrated failure modes and working counter-patterns. Trust-based systems are not naive if they are designed with clear threat models, transparent processes, and layered social/technical safeguards. The question is not “can grassroots projects fail?” – all systems fail – but whether they fail visibly, recover ably, and without capture.
Long-lived commons like Wikipedia moderation structures, Debian governance, early Apache development, and parts of the Fediverse show that in tech messy, trust-anchored collaboration can operate for decades when legitimacy is distributed and process is open.
#OMN is not proposing blind trust; it proposes observable trust – where actions, history, and reputation are legible through open process (#4opens), allowing engineers to audit the social layer much like they audit code.
The real engineering challenge is not eliminating messiness (a classic #geekproblem trap), but designing systems where messiness becomes resilient rather than brittle. Nobody said it would be easy, but difficulty doesn’t mean impossibility. It means the work is social as much as technical.
None of this new – as Bakunin put it, “The peoples’ revolution will arrange its revolutionary organization from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.” Whether or not we use the language of revolution, the underlying insight is practical rather than ideological: durable systems grow from lived participation outward, not from abstract design imposed from above.
In #openweb and #OMN thinking, this means building structures that enable agency at the edges while allowing coordination to emerge through federation and shared practice. The goal isn’t purity or perfection, but resilient networks where trust, mediation, and collective responsibility evolve through use – messy, iterative, and grounded in real communities rather than centralized control.
Everywhere we look – what we see, touch, and use – we are living inside systems shaped by decades of economic and technological assumptions. This isn’t only something happening “out there”. It has been normalised and internalised over the last forty years.
The dominance of #stupidindividualism, combined with rigid economic dogma, influenced how we design technology, how we organise communities, and how we imagine progress itself. The outcomes are now starkly visible: #climatechaos, social fragmentation, and a weakening of collective sense-making.
The internet reflects this reality. Online and offline are no longer separate spaces; they feed back and reinforce each other. Recognising this isn’t only about blame, it’s more importantly about understanding the terrain we’re all navigating. These are the technology limits of the current path and why we continue to repeat familiar patterns. New platforms emerge, new interfaces are launched, yet the underlying values remain unchanged. The result does feel like endless churn to people who notice, innovation that rearranges surfaces while leaving deeper structures intact.
This isn’t simply the fault of individuals or communities. Many developers, especially within #FOSS and the #fediverse, are actively trying to build alternatives. But the broader ecosystem still pushes toward centralisation, scaling, and extraction because those are the dominant incentives of the wider paths.
So recognising our #geekproblem isn’t about rejecting technical culture – it’s about expanding it. Technical excellence alone cannot solve social problems without grounding in alt collective needs and lived social realities. This is what the #openweb means, it’s more than #blinded nostalgia for the early internet. It represents a shared direction many communities are already moving toward.
The #openweb is an internet where #4opens information is accessible regardless of platform or location, content can be shared, linked, and reused, participation is not gated by proprietary control. It’s basic: open data, open source, open standards, and open processes.
The growth of the Fediverse demonstrates that alternatives like these are possible. Decentralised social networks, community-run servers, and cooperative governance models show glimpses of a healthier digital ecosystem. Yet within these paths, tensions remain between “native” grassroots values and pressures toward #NGO#mainstreaming and power politics institutionalisation.
For this space to grow, we need to keep moving beyond false choices. On institutional paths, many proposed solutions focus solely on regulation or institutional reform, imagining that better rules will fix systemic problems. While governance matters, relying exclusively on top-down solutions risks becoming another form of dependency to add to the mess.
Another path exists alongside institutional change: horizontal, grassroots approaches rooted in #DIY practice, #4opens shared infrastructure. This path is imperfect and often messy, but it keeps agency within communities rather than outsourcing change to distant structures.
The goal is not purity, it is balance, the #OMN approach grows from this perspective. Grassroots, #DIY, non-corporate, human-scale, not disruption for its own sake, not scaling driven by venture logic. Instead, building social technology that serve collective needs while respecting individual agency. Many people within #FOSS and the Fediverse are already working toward these goals, even if they use different languages. The opportunity now is to deepen collaboration, connect projects that share values, and strengthen the social foundations alongside the technical ones.
So the path we need is about finding each other, it’s the path we made work for a while then failed on socialhub, so I need to repeat, the question isn’t whether alternatives exist, they do. The challenge is finding alignment among people who are already trying to move in similar directions, but feel isolated or fragmented.
Who recognises that technology must serve communities rather than extract from them. If you see value in grassroots, cooperative approaches to technology – if you believe the #openweb is still worth building – then the invitation is simple. Stop churning, start building. Who is ready to move beyond endless reinvention toward shared infrastructure and shared purpose?
Seeds, Safety, and the Chicken-and-Egg Problem – A Q&A on Practical Building vs Intellectual #Blocking. This explores a recurring tension in grassroots technology projects: the gap between practical historical paths and fresh “intellectual” critique, it reflects on a broader patterns seen in #openweb, #FOSS, and #DIY spaces.
Q: What is the “shared path” and why describe it as a seed?
A: The shared path is a practical response to repeated historical failure. It is not a finished solution, a moral demand, or a complete alternative system. It begins as a seed, something small, imperfect, and grounded. If you judge a seed by whether it is already a tree, nothing will ever grow. The idea is to start building despite uncertainty and allow structure to emerge rooted organically through practice.
Q: What is the main critique of this “seed” approach?
A: Critics argue that metaphors like seeds and growth avoid addressing concrete mechanisms. They focus on first-step effects: What signals are being sent? Who carries risk or unpaid labour? What moral pressures are created? What happens when survivability is deferred? From this perspective, issues must be addressed at the beginning rather than grown from the seed.
Q: Why does this debate often become circular?
A: Because both sides are asking different questions. Practical builders ask: Where do the resources come from to implement safety before anything exists? Critics ask: How do we prevent harm if we begin without safeguards? Without answering the resource question, discussions loop endlessly between ethics and feasibility.
Q: What is the “chicken-and-egg” problem here?
A: Many grassroots projects face a structural paradox: You need resources, tools, and commitment to build sustainable alternatives. But those resources only appear after something exists and demonstrates use value, agenst mainstreaming pushback Waiting for perfect conditions prevents starting; starting without resources has risks, but it’s the only thing that can grow change and challenge.
Q: What work is actually happening in practice?
A: Practical work often remains messy, distributed, and unpaid. Examples include: Supporting student journalists in rebooting grassroots media projects like Oxford #Indymedia. Motivating unfunded technical communities to collaborate on shared codebases such as #indymediaback. Maintaining ongoing organisational and community infrastructure through long-term volunteer labour. These efforts are naturally invisible and impossible to summarise because they work organically rather than following formal project structures.
Q: Why is documentation itself a source of conflict?
A: Critics ask for clear summaries or structured documentation of ongoing work. Builders simply see this as additional unpaid labour imposed on already stretched contributors. External demands that assume others should organise information for them, creates friction between expectations of accessibility and the working realities of #4opens and #DIY grassroots work.
A: In #DIY culture, participation is active rather than observational. If someone believes something needs improvement – documentation, tools, funding guides – the expectation is that they step in and contribute rather than stand outside only pointing critique. Critique without participation is too often lazy negative pressure rather than constructive help on “native” DIY paths.
Q: Is this simply a disagreement about ethics?
A: Not entirely. Both sides often share ethical concerns. The deeper disagreement is about sequence: Should, impossible and irrelevant in a practical sense, safety and compensation frameworks exist before building begins? Or can these frameworks emerge better through #DIY messy real-world working practice?
Q: What is the takeaway?
A: Grassroots building requires balancing, ethical awareness and practical starting points. Intellectual critique can help identify risks, but when detached from material constraints it too often unintentionally blocks action at best or turn into trolling at worst. Likewise, practical work can benefit from reflection, but cannot wait for perfect theoretical clarity.
The challenge is to compost both approaches into something that moves forward.
The individual, their freedom, and their capacity for reason are products of social relationships, not independent origins. Society is not built from isolated individuals; individuals arise from shared culture, history, and collective life. As society grows richer and more humane, individuals gain the conditions needed for deeper development and freedom emerges from this shared foundation.
What’s really at stake is power. The shift has to be away from private ownership and toward the commons – not just in licensing, but in governance, culture, and decision-making. The whole #OMN project is grounded in this understanding. It’s about building shared infrastructure that people can actually use, shape, and grow trust.
One of the great ironies of many “alternative” spaces is that people believe they’re resisting power, yet by locking everything down – secret decisions, closed processes, gatekeeping – they end up recreating the systems they claim to oppose. The result is stasis, nothing moves or grows, everything fragments.
Paranoia is one of the biggest blocking forces in alt-tech and radical spaces. It breeds mistrust, isolation, and internal sabotage, making collective action almost impossible. Some caution is necessary, we’re not naïve, but when paranoia becomes the default posture, it hardens into control. At that point, it stops being defensive and starts being corrupting.
The #4opens is a direct antidote to this. Transparency punctures paranoia. When decisions, processes, and networks are open, there’s less space for suspicion to fester. Trust isn’t built through secrecy or technical cleverness; it’s built through visible, accountable practice over time. Open process beats “good intentions” every time.
This is also why letting technical people make final product decisions is a mistake, overemphasizing technology then underplaying the social problems we’re actually trying to solve. We end up designing better mousetraps without ever asking whether we’re even trying to catch mice. Tech becomes the point, rather than a tool.
This is where the #fashernista problem kicks in, being seen to hold the correct stance replaces doing the work. But staying “right” while nothing changes is another form of failure. If we want alternatives that function, we have to move past paranoia, reopen flows, and accept that trust is something you build, not something you secure with walls.
The uncomfortable truth is that it’s easy to be “right” in theory. It’s much harder to take part in the compromises that building anything real requires. Most people prefer the comfort of ideological purity over the messiness of collective practice, especially when dealing with complex social truths. That’s the trap.
#OMN is often critiqued as if it were a finished system, a moral framework, or an alternative economy. It is none of those things. We need to be clear about scope, sequence, and intent if discussion is going to move forward instead of circling the same ground.
#OMN is a commons-first, tool-building project. It exists to create shared infrastructure, processes, and cultural practices that can grow non-extractive media and communication. It prioritizes shared ownership, open process (#4opens), and reducing capture in order to build the needed public-first infrastructure. It’s about creating conditions, not declaring outcomes.
It’s an early-phase project, an affinity-building space to create tools and governance to reconnect fragmented activist and media histories. It is not claiming to already provide economic survivability, stable long-term livelihoods, or a full replacement for existing systems. Confusing the step with the destination is the root of most disagreement.
It’s grounded in lived historical practice. #OMN grows out of more than 30 years of real projects – Indymedia, grassroots media, squatting and DIY cultures, trust-based networks – and a clear view of where #NGO-driven paths have failed. This history matters. The path is not speculative theory, it’s an attempt to compost what worked, acknowledge what failed, and try again with better tools.
That’s based on a simple historical reality, society does not pay people to challenge itself. Early change is driven by passion, not wages, and support structures emerge after commons exist, not before. This isn’t a moral claim, it’s an observation drawn from experience. #OMN is also a space where tone is a process tool. Friction is used to slow things down, open space for challenge, and form affinity where none yet exists. This is messy by design, not a finished social contract.
We don’t set out to solve how everyone is paid, how risk is evenly distributed, or how long-term security is guaranteed. These are unsolved problems, not denied ones. #OMN exists because these tools do not yet exist, so expecting it to already provide them misunderstands its scope and phase. Participation is voluntary, alignment is practical, not moral. Funding may be used tactically, but OMN is not structured around chasing it.
This is not a safe, smooth, or finished space. The path is unfinished, uneven, and sometimes uncomfortable. If a project has to be safe, stable, and fully funded before it can exist, it will never challenge anything.
The core misunderstanding is that the #OMN is judged for failing to deliver something it has never claimed to already be. What we are doing is building the tools that make survivability possible later, without reproducing the failures that keep repeating. That work is slow, messy, and incomplete – because it has to be.
The shared path is a practical response to repeated historical failure. It is not a promise, a moral demand, or a finished alternative. If you judge a seed by whether it is already a tree, you will never grow anything.
Why groups matter, in our “common sense” we like to pretend society is made up of strong, independent individuals who freely choose everything about their lives. That story is comforting, but it’s also mostly false, humans are group creatures first. People don’t start as individuals. We are born into families, cultures, languages, histories. Our values, assumptions, and sense of what’s “normal” are learned socially long before we ever get a chance to reflect on them. Groups aren’t an add-on to human life – they’re the foundation.
Individual identity is hard work, as modern culture tells us we must be ourselves, define our own path, build a unique identity. But doing that alone is exhausting, being an “individual” means constant self-definition, self-presentation, self-justification. You’re never finished as you’re always proving who you are, to employers, platforms, institutions, and peers.
That permanent uncertainty is what people mean when they talk about burnout, anxiety, and imposter syndrome. Groups reduce that pressure, as belonging to a group shares the load, with values, purpose, norms, responsibility. You don’t have to invent everything from scratch, you’re part of something that existed before you and will continue after you. This isn’t about conformity, it’s about being human, support and continuity.
The current #deathcult myth of pure individual freedom, where individuals are fully free and self-made #KISS serves power. When people are isolated, all problems look personal instead of structural, failure feels like a moral flaw and collective solutions disappear. You can’t organise if everyone thinks and acts as if they’re alone.
Healthy groups vs. toxic groups, yep, groups aren’t automatically good. Some are rigid, exclusionary and authoritarian. Healthy groups are porous and open to change, allow disagreement, are based on trust, not fear and exist to serve their members, not control them. The solution to bad groups isn’t no groups – it’s better ones.
Why this matters for media and the web? The #openweb wasn’t built by isolated individuals chasing personal brands. It grew out of horizontal’ish communities, shared tools, and mutual aid. What broke it, was pushing of individual status, platforms replacing communities then metrics replacing relationships. Projects like #OMN are about rebuilding group-based publishing, shared infrastructure, and collective voice, not amplifying lone influencers.
In short, (stupid) Individualism puts people in a permanent liminal state – alone, unstable, competing. Groups give people grounding, belonging, continuity, and the ability to act together. If we want social change, resilient media, and a future beyond the current mess, we on balance don’t need better individuals, we need better groups.
I proposed a long time ago that #openweb is a less tribal, more expansive framing than #fediverse socially and technically. It’s also #nothingnew, which is honestly a breath of fresh air. We can (and should) use both terms, but if we want meaningful change and challenge to the #mainstreaming mess, we need to foreground the more generic one.
Predictably, this gets pushback from two directions: the non-political #FOSS crowd, and the mainstreaming crew. And yes, when you bring #NGO behaviour into the #fediverse, there’s going to be friction. Try being #openweb-native on this, please.
People are going to keep doing self- and socially-destructive things. That’s a human problem, not a branding one. But the language we choose does shape how we respond to it.
One of the reasons we use a #4opens process is to balance the reality that people often arrive with strong opinions before understanding the history, context, or existing work. The process isn’t there to exclude anyone, it’s there to slow things down just enough so people can orient themselves before trying to reshape what already exists.
At the moment this only works partially, because some people still interpret being asked to explore existing materials as dismissal. For example “You have sent me on a ride through Mastodon posts and two repos while not providing direct answers.”
What may feel like dismissal is actually part of a #DIY open process. The intention is to encourage people to engage with the work already done so conversations can move forward from shared context rather than restarting the same debates repeatedly.
Similarly: “Why assume blog archaeology is the right approach instead of presenting everything in a more processed way?” In grassroots projects, documentation is often messy, organic, and evolving rather than packaged into clean summaries. Exploring this material isn’t busywork, it’s a way to understand the social and historical layers that shape the project. Without that grounding, discussions can unintentionally repeat old loops to propose changes that have already been explored.
And when people say: “Most people don’t have time or energy for this.” That’s a real constraint, but it also highlights the core challenge. Open, collective projects rely on participants investing some effort to understand shared context. Without that, the burden shifts onto existing contributors to repeatedly re-explain the basics, which keeps stalling progress.
The aim here is not gatekeeping or dismissal. It’s #KISS: keep the process simple, open, and grounded in shared effort. If something needs improving – documentation, summaries, onboarding – the most constructive path in a #DIY culture is to step in and help build that improvement together.
