These people are a problem, the group of people who took over running the #Fediverse from us first wave crew. The problem is that they are liars – not out of malice, but in a blinded, dogmatic way. They arrived in this native #openweb movement already carrying this mindset, and it’s only deepened since. That doesn’t make them personally nasty, but it does make them dangerously incompetent. Why? Because they generate serious signal-to-noise problems, misallocate resources, misplace competency, and shift focus away from what actually matters.
The problem with https://www.blog-pat.ch/moving-sideways-paths-to-growth/ isn’t that it’s wrong – it’s that it emerges from a closed loop of “truthy” ideas that feel insightful but don’t engage with #openweb material reality. That’s where the blind, dogmatic lying comes in, not malicious, but structurally embedded. It recycles a familiar narrative, classic signal-to-noise inflation, where old ideas are dressed up as insight.
This group of people abstracts away power and material constraints. “Growth” is framed as an individual mindset or path choice, when in reality sideways movement is shaped by structural limits – the very things the #OMN project is addressing: lack of upward mobility, organisational bottlenecks, precarity, stagnation, and misallocation of labour. That’s the “blind lie”: turning systemic limitation into a personal growth narrative. Not evil, but deeply misleading.
What we see is the individualist path (#stupidindividualism), centres on the individual journey – your path, your growth, your mindset – with no sense of collective structures, shared infrastructure, governance, or power relations. This is the failure mode we should be composting, instead, the current mess drags “open” thinking back into #neoliberal self-optimisation culture. Rather than asking how we build systems that enable meaningful growth, it asks how you reinterpret your path as growth, that’s a dead end.
It also contributes to resource and focus drift. This kind of thinking has real consequences for projects like #openweb and #OMN as it encourages endless reframing instead of building – validates drift that weakens focus on the native outcomes and infrastructure we actually need. In practice, it leads to misplaced competency, misallocated effort, and degraded signal. That’s the “dangerously incompetent” part – not personal failure, but systemic impact.
The deeper issue is that these aren’t bad people, it’s that they are aligned – unthinkingly – with #deathcult thinking by individualising systemic issues and amplifying noise in already fragile spaces. They arrived with this mindset, and the environments they shape reinforce it.
A grounded approach would ask harder questions: how do we build collective structures that make sideways movement meaningful? Without that, this is just narrative smoothing, smoke and mirrors.
So to sum up: the post linked above isn’t wrong, it’s worse than that, it’s harmless-sounding, blinded ideology that recycles known ideas, strips out material context, reinforces individualist framing, and adds noise where clarity is needed. In a healthy ecosystem, this would be background chatter, in a struggling one – like the current open social web space – it becomes actively damaging.
“I headed up to Oxford to a Marmalade Festival event: The World Works on WhatsApp.”
I’m in Oxford, and I saw that event listed. My reaction was: I can’t stomach that. Still, I probably should have gone, it would have been useful to have that conversation in person.
The problem we now face is these people will #gatekeep… if the is no way in or out without there agreement we are going to fail, there is a long history of this mess making. I have seen the same problem people destroy numerous grassroots movements over the 40 years I have been working in this path.
#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies – not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn
The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective well-being – a behaviour normalised by forty years of #neoliberalism, where people work against their own community and ecological survival while believing they are exercising “freedom”. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=stupidindividualism
In the #OMN hashtag story, #spiky is the confrontational, direct, and uncompromising tendency within radical movements – the willingness to push back against power, name uncomfortable truths, and refuse to sand down political edges for mainstream comfort. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=spiky
#RSS is the unglamorous but democratic backbone of the #openweb – a simple, open standard that allows content to flow without the gatekeeping, algorithmic manipulation, and the data hoarding of the #dotcons.
#postmodernism is the cultural current that dissolved shared truth into competing narratives, undermines the foundations needed for collective action – leaving people fragmented, cynical, and unable to build solidarity. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=postmodern
In the #OMN hashtag story, #PGA (Peoples’ Global Action) represents horizontal, grassroots, anti-capitalist organising – a prefiguration of the #openweb, built on direct action and solidarity rather than #NGO bureaucracy or #mainstreaming compromise. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=PGA
In the #OMN path, #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer – real human relationships and trust as the foundation that decentralised tech should serve, not replace. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=p2p
The #openweb is internet infrastructure built on open standards, open-source code, and community control – where users share power – as opposed to the #dotcons, with the #closedweb which enclose and monetise the commons. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openweb
In the #OMN path, #open means building on the #4opens – open code, data, standards, and process as a foundation for technology that serves people, not profit. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=open
#OMN (Open Media Network) is a grassroots project to build human-centred, trust-based digital infrastructure on the #openweb, grounded in the #4opens and focused on community control over technology. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN
The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is a framework for transparent, inclusive decision-making – replacing hidden power structures with accountable, federated, messy collective governance. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OGB
In the #OMN story, #NGO refers to professionalised activism that defuses radical politics – replacing grassroots power with managed, funder-friendly “dissent”. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=NGO
In the #OMN path, a hashtag is not just a label – it’s a node in a shared political vocabulary, building a map of meaning and direction. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=hashtag
In the #OMN story, #DIY means reclaiming the ability to build and organise outside institutional control – grounding politics in practice. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY
#dotcons are the corporate platforms – Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube and their kin – whose business model is built on harvesting user data, manufacturing engagement, and converting human attention and community into profit, while presenting themselves as neutral public spaces.
In the #OMN hashtag story, #DIY means reclaiming the practical capacity to build, organise, and maintain tools and communities outside of corporate and state control – not as a lifestyle choice, but as a political act of grounding radical change in real skills, real trust, and real human relationships rather than outsourcing power to institutions that don’t serve you.
The #deathcult is the #OMN metaphor for the self-destructive logic of forty years of #neoliberalism – an ideology so committed to short-term profit, individualism, and economic growth that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations that human life depends on.
In the #OMN hashtag story, #compost means taking the failures, mistakes, and accumulated mess of past movements and tech projects – rather than discarding or ignoring them – and breaking them down into something that can feed new growth, treating dysfunction and #blocking dead ends as raw material for building better rather than as waste to be hidden.
In #OMN language, #closedweb refers to the controlled digital infrastructure – platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter – built on proprietary code, extractive business models, and centralised power, where people have no meaningful control over their data, their communities, or the rules that govern them.
The #deathcult of #neoliberalism has driven us past the point where “climate change” – with its implication of manageable, orderly shifts – remains any honest description of what we face now. What we actually have is #climatechaos: cascading, systemic breakdown of the ecosystems, weather patterns, and social structures that human civilisation depends on, accelerating faster than institutions built on forty years of market logic are capable of, or willing to, address.
#classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism – the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes – and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit. A conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.
#capitalism is the current common sense – the water we swim in – the economic system that systematically converts collective goods, human relationships, and the natural world into private profit, enforcing this logic through every institution and platform we touch, while presenting itself as the only possible reality.
In the #OMN hashtag story, #block refers to the reflexive, unconscious tendency of individuals and communities to shut down unfamiliar and challenging ideas, people, and processes – a defensive gesture rooted in #stupidindividualism and #postmodernism that prevents the trust-building and messy collective work needed for real #openweb organising.
#blinded refers to being so captured by #mainstreaming tech orthodoxy and ideological “common sense” – particularly #neoliberalism and #dotcons culture – that you no longer see, or refuse to see, the harms those systems cause or any alternative paths that exist outside them.
#fashernista describes a person in progressive or radical spaces who prioritises the appearance and aesthetic of activism – the right look, language, and social positioning – over the unglamorous, difficult work of actually building lasting structural change.
If you want, the next step is to cluster these into a clean “chapter flow” (roots → mess → behaviours → solutions) so this stops being just a glossary and becomes a narrative tool.
These are the foundation tags – the ones everything else grows out of – the overall project: grassroots, trust-based, human-centred media infrastructure
#openweb – the political/technical terrain we’re trying to reclam
#4opens – the non-negotiable baseline (open code, data, standards, process)\openprocess – visible, participatory decision-making as default
#grassroots – bottom-up power, not institutional mediation
This cluster is about legitimacy, if it’s not grounded in these, it drifts into #NGO capture or #dotcons logic quickly. This is the “native soil” everything else either grows from or gets rejected by.
The Problem Space (what we’re composting), these tags describe the mess we’re in – the stuff we don’t ignore, but break down.
#deathcult (neoliberalism as destructive common sense)
#neoliberalism – 40 years of market logic shaping behaviour
#mainstreaming – dilution and co-option of radical ideas
#NGO – managed dissent and professionalised politics
#classwar – underlying structural conflict
This is the compost heap, you don’t fix this directly, you don’t “win” against it head-on. You break it down, reuse what’s useful, and grow alternatives around and through it.
The #geekproblem Layer (tech distortions) is where things go wrong in implementation.
#geekproblem – replacing social trust with technical control
#techchurn – endless pointless rebuilding
#encryptionists – over-prioritising technical purity over social reality
#KISS – counterbalance: keep things simple and usable.
This cluster is why good ideas fail, not because the ideas are wrong, but because the tools and culture get shaped by people who don’t understand social process. This is where most #openweb projects die.
Cultural/Behavioural Patterns (how people act). The human layer – messy, unavoidable, and central.
#stupidindividualism – learned self-interest over collective good
#postmodernism – fragmentation of shared meaning
#fluffy – avoidance of conflict, feel-good paralysis
#spiky – necessary confrontation and edge
#block – reflex rejection of challenge
#blinded – inability to see outside dominant narratives
#fashernista – prioritising appearance over substance
This is the real battlefield, not tech, not policy – behaviour. If you don’t mediate this layer, everything collapses back into dysfunction, no matter how good your structure is.
The Alternative Infrastructure (what we build), are the actual tools and practices that make change possible.
#fediverse – decentralised network as a base layer
#activitypub – the protocol glue
#RSS – simple, open distribution backbone
#p2p – people-to-people first, tech second
#FOSS / #opensource – shared ownership of tools
#opendata – accessible, non-extractive information
These only work if rooted in the first cluster, otherwise they get captured and turned into another layer of the #closedweb.
Governance & Process (how we hold it together). Where most projects fail – or succeed.
#OGB – structured, open governance
#openprocess – again, because it’s that important
#DIY – practical ownership and responsibility
Without this, informal power takes over. You end up with hidden hierarchies, gatekeeping, and eventual burnout. With it, you get messy but functional collective control.
Practice & Direction (how we move).
#reboot – reset and rebuild from working patterns
#indymediaback – learning from past grassroots media
#makinghistory – documenting and owning our narratives
#nothingnew – grounding in historical cycles
This cluster stops you repeating mistakes, without it, every new wave thinks it’s inventing something new and walks straight into the same traps.
Grounding Example Layer
#Oxford – real-world test bed of contradictions
#PGA – historical example of horizontal organising
Without grounding, this all drifts into theory, these are example tags anchoring it in lived practice, where things break, and where they can actually work.
The Meta Layer (how to use this)
#compost – break down failure into growth
This is the key to the whole thing – Don’t try to “fix” the mess. Don’t try to “win” cleanly, you compost:
bad behaviour → learning
failed projects → patterns
conflict → structure
Final point (this matters) is the mistake people make is trying to tidy this into a neat theory, reduce it to messaging, turn it into a fixed ideology. That kills it, this clustering is not about control – it’s about navigation.
The mess stays messy, but now people can walk through it without getting lost.If you don’t cluster this stuff, it turns into a wall of noise. The mess is useful.
In every activist space, grassroots project, every loose collective, you get people who bring mess in the wrong way – sniping, backbiting, constant undermining. Call it ego, trauma, status games, burnout… it doesn’t matter. What matters is, this friction is normal, it’s part of the #mess we can’t avoid. The mistake is thinking we can eliminate it. You can’t, but you can design for it. That’s where the #OMN path is useful: don’t try to “fix the people,” build processes that compost the behaviour instead of letting it rot the group.
In the big picture, what we need to actively compost is that anything that starts as a real idea – community, freedom, or independence – gets picked up, processed, and turned into something hollow. Not just by “the other side,” but by the entire modern media and tech machine. Good ideas go in, slogans come out, you’ve seen it: “freedom” becomes branding, “community” becomes marketing and recently “sovereignty” becomes a funding pitch.
This is the trap, when ideas get flattened into talking points, they stop doing anything real. They become easy to repeat, to weaponise and impossible to build with. And once that happens, it doesn’t matter who started the idea, it’s no longer useful. So the question isn’t only left vs right. It’s how do you keep ideas grounded so they can’t be hijacked and sold back to us?
One answer is structure, the #4opens approach is simple, a way to stop things being quietly twisted behind closed doors. If you can see how something works, it’s harder to fake, if you can take part, it’s harder to capture. The other answer is mess (the good kind), the #OMN hashtag approach doesn’t try to clean everything up into a single strait message. It keeps things local, contextual, rough around the edges. That “mess” is protection, because systems that are too neat, too polished, too uniform… are exactly the ones that get captured, repackaged, and pushed back at you.
In plain terms if an idea can be turned into a neat slogan, it can be taken over. If it stays tied to real people, real places, and real processes, it’s much harder to fake. This is the difference between something you can live with and something that gets sold to you. Call it compost if you like – You break things down, keep what’s real, and grow from that.
As this essay is about the internet, lets look at some of the players, an example – Tactical Tech is a Berlin-based nonprofit that’s been around since the early 2000s, working on tech, activism, media, and education. Their core thing is:
building digital literacy + critical thinking tools
producing toolkits, exhibitions, and guides (like The Glass Room, Data Detox Kit)
working with civil society orgs, journalists, activists, educators
focusing on how tech shapes power, politics, and society
They’re not grassroots infrastructure builders, they’re capacity builders and narrative shapers, working through partnership networks, funding, and “field building” – the classic #NGO patterns.
In #OMN view they sit squarely in what we call the #NGO / #mainstreaming layer of the #openweb story. In that they don’t live in the soil (infrastructure, protocols, messy grassroots tools). They build the interpretation layer (how people think about tech). They push this into narratives + toolkits that travel across institutions. That’s why they’ve lasted 20+ years – they’re adaptable mediators, not rooted projects.
So why dose it feels like “they create mess”? The friction comes from this pattern the balance of abstraction over grounding in that they translate messy realities into frameworks, exhibitions and “kits”. This flatten lived complexity into safer portable concepts – in to language production. They are part of the ecosystem that generates terms like digital literacy, resilience and sovereignty (adjacent space). These become floating signifies – useful for funding and policy, messy in practice.
They collaborate with foundations, governments and large NGOs. So their outputs are shaped to be fundable, presentable and non-threatening enough to circulate. That’s where the “compost” instinct kicks in – because this layer detaches language from practice.
But it’s not just negative, if were honest (and it’s worth being), groups like this do some real things. They’ve help millions engage “critically” with tech issues to make complex problems accessible (privacy, AI, influence systems). They might create bridges between activists, educators, and institutions. So they’re not empty, they’re just not where the roots are.
The real tension, the problem isn’t that they exist, it’s where they sit in the ecology. They are compost producers, but they mistake themselves for gardeners. Or more sharply
They circulate meaning rather than anchor it
They mediate change rather than enact it
They stabilize narratives that should sometimes stay unstable
So yes – they create “mess” …but it’s a different kind of mess than grassroots paths. Grassroots mess = fertile, emergent – #NGO mess = abstracted, packaged, drifting.
Projects like Tactical Tech can be a part of the same ecosystem we need – but they sit one layer up from where change actually happens. Their outputs duse need composting because they generalize lived practice into frameworks, turn struggle into language and then feed that language back into systems which tends to blunt its edges.
The task isn’t only to reject them, it’s to ground what they produce back into lived, messy, trust-based practice – the bit they can’t really do. Once you see this pattern, a lot of the confusion in the #openweb space makes sense.
Most confusion comes from people mixing these layers up, Here are more examples of this thinking and working:
Tactical Tech – Layer: Narrative / NGO Role: Translator of tech → society What they do (in practice) • Turn complex tech issues into stories, exhibitions, toolkits • Shape how civil society talks about tech • Build “awareness” rather than infrastructure
In #OMN terms they produce processable compost input, but often pre-packaged into neat bags. This problem pattern flattens messy reality into clean narratives to encourages passive understanding over active building. So what is there value? Good at onboarding people, opens doors into the conversation. But risk is people stop at understanding instead of doing.
Mozilla Foundation – Layer: Narrative + Funding + Soft Infrastructure Role: Bridge between grassroots + institutions What they do is fund projects to run advocacy campaigns (AI, privacy, etc.) that maintains a symbolic connection to the #openweb. In #OMN terms they gate keep legitimacy to define what is “acceptable open”. This is a problem pattern because of NGO gravity → safe, fundable ideas win, radical edges softened into “trustworthy AI” and “ethical tech”. So what is the value? Real money → keeps projects alive and visibility → amplifies issues. The risk is common sense #mainstreaming capture that shapes agenda toward what institutions tolerate. Makeing only more mess to compost.
Open Society Foundation – Layer: Power / Funding Role: Macro-level agenda shaping What they do is fund civil society globally to influence policy, rights frameworks, governance. In #OMN terms its a part of the liberal wing of the #deathcult. Problem being funding creates dependency, agenda alignment when movements adapt to grant logic. Value is it enables work that wouldn’t exist otherwise to support rights-based infrastructure. The risk is it turns movements into professionalised NGOs and risk-averse actors.
Sovereign Tech Agency – Layer: State / Infrastructure funding Role: Stabiliser of critical open tech What they do is fund maintenance of open-source infrastructure with a focus on “digital sovereignty” In #OMN terms they are trying to support the infrastructure layer by using state-language framing. Its a problem pattern as language like “sovereignty” pulls toward state/control logic and away from commons/trust logic. What is the value? It pays for the essential work to keeps #FOSS tools alive. But it risks reframes the #openweb as national infrastructure instead of shared commons.
NLnet Foundation – Layer: Infrastructure funding (closer to soil) Role: Rare “good compost feeder” What they do is fund small, weird, early-stage open projects with minimal interference. In #OMN terms one of the few funding bodies that, could in theory not over-shape outputs to respect messy innovation. But the are problem pattern of limited scaling and still within funding constraints, Value is they enables actual building and possibly supports non-mainstream ideas. The risk is the normal that they still are pulled into NGO gravity over time.
Electronic Frontier Foundation – Layer: Advocacy / Legal Role: Defensive shield What they do – Legal battles, policy advocacy and civil liberties protection. In #OMN terms they protects space for the #openweb to exist. But the are problem patterns, the focus on defence, not creation that only works inside existing legal frameworks. Value they are absolutely necessary to stops things getting worse. The risk is they doesn’t build alternatives = slowing decline, not transformation.
The pattern, is all these orgs sit above the soil. They translate, fund, shape, defend. But they rarely grow rooted communities of sustaining messy trust networks or live with the consequences. So why dose this create “mess”? it is because language drifts away from practice, Ideas come and go: “digital sovereignty”, “trustworthy AI” or “resilience”. These sound solid, but float free of lived reality, then incentives bend behaviour. Funding → reporting → metrics → simplification is when mess gets cleaned up too early or packaged instead of composted
Here the #geekproblem and #NGO problem merge, you get geeks wanting to tidy systems and #NGOs wanting to tidy narratives. The result is generally bad, over-simplified systems + over-simplified stories. The #OMN position is clear and grounded, we don’t reject these orgs, we place them correctly: Useful → yes, Central → no and ground truth → never.
The simple way to say this (#KISS) These organizations sometimes help explain, fund, and defend the world, but they do not remake it. If we mistake them for the source of change, we end up with only better words and worse reality. They have no real role in the next stage, a practical progression from “mapping the mess” → “building something that can survive it”.
To make anything work we need to stop confusing layers (cognitive clarity) – Before anything technical, the path we walk needs to never treat NGO / funding / advocacy layer as if it is THE system. This is the correction we need, in #OMN terms:
NGOs ≠ infrastructure
funding ≠ governance
narratives ≠ reality
protocols ≠ politics
If we can balance this, the outcome the people trying to “fix the web” by only better policy decks, better ethical frameworks, better terminology (like “digital sovereignty”) to start asking “What is actually being built, and by whom?”
How to do this? we need to build the soil layer first (not apps, not orgs) as this is where most projects fail. The soil layer is trust groups, working collectives, repeated interaction spaces and small-scale publishing + coordination. In #OMN framing #indymediaback style groups, #OGB governance spaces and local + affinity networks. If it doesn’t survive social breakdown, it isn’t infrastructure.
Define “failure as feature” systems, is one of the strongest #OMN ideas. Instead of perfect systems that must not break – We grow systems that fail into human repair. What that means in practice is moderation doesn’t escalate → it returns to people, governance doesn’t lock → it re-opens, conflicts don’t freeze → they surface into trust spaces. The path is breakage need to increase human contact, not reduce it, but this directly counters the platform logic (#dotcons), #NGO sanitisation logic and geek “perfect system” logic.
On this path we need to build mediation layers (not control layers). This is where #OGB thinking fits. Mediation layer ≠ governance authority, is translation between groups, conflict visibility, trust routing and decision recording (not decision ownership). We don’t centralise power – we route attention. This is the difference between bureaucracy (control) and federation (flow).
Define “trust as infrastructure” this is the “missing” technical core. Most systems assume identity, verification and thus control. #OMN flips this to assume partial trust, local trust, evolving trust and broken trust. So native systems must record trust signals (lightweight) to allow contradiction, allow decay and allow repair. Trust is not a certificate, it is a living social flow.
Explicitly resist “narrative capture”. This is where problem orgs like Tactical Tech / Mozilla / OSF become relevant. The patterns to avoid – messy reality emerges, #NGO translates it, funding aligns around translation and original practice disappears. #OMN counter-path is if it can be fully explained in a funding report, it is likely already dying. So we maintain ambiguity, partial documentation and lived process > polished narrative.
Build dual-stack reality (critical stage). This is essential, you always run:
Native stack (real community power)
trust networks
local groups
Fediverse-native tooling
#4opens processes
Interface stack ( individual survival layer)
NGO language when needed
funding language when needed
policy translation when needed
The path is never confuse the interface with the infrastructure. So what are composting failures about? Instead of discarding failed projects, rewriting history and blaming actors, we need to explicitly turn failure into reusable material, compost includes:
broken governance attempts
failed funding models
collapsed communities
conflict histories
Output:
patterns
lessons
reused structures
new trust layers
This is where the “mess is valuable” idea becomes operational.
Anti-capture safeguards – Every healthy #OMN system needs resistance to #NGO capture, funding capture, geek capture and ideological capture. Mechanisms:
lose roles
refuse most permanent authority
keep systems reversible
enforce transparency (#4opens)
limit scale before complexity dominates
The long game is federated commons, at scale, the goal is not a platforms, it is many overlapping, messy, partially connected commons. Not one #Fediverse or one governance model, not one truth layer. But overlapping trust regions, with shared protocols and local autonomy to weak global coupling.
The summary (#KISS version). If you compress all of this:
Stop confusing explanation with infrastructure
Build trust-first “soil systems”
Design failure that returns to people
Keep governance as mediation, not control
Treat trust as a living system
Resist narrative capture
Run dual-stack (native + interface)
Compost failure, don’t hide it
Prevent capture structurally, not morally
Scale as messy federated commons, not platforms
The shift is from “understanding the system” → to “acting in a small part of it without being captured” This means choosing a river, a locality, a topic, or a community and committing to working inside its mess without trying to abstract it into a universal model too early. #OMN path is if it doesn’t exist in a place, it doesn’t exist at all. This is where a lot of NGO / narrative layer work fails – it stays placeless.
Build “thin infrastructure”, the #OMN correction to both NGO thinking and geek thinking is that wrong instinct is to build full systems, design complete governance models, define everything upfront. #OMN instinct is to build the minimum structure that lets humans keep adjusting it together. Thin infrastructure = simple publishing tools, basic coordination spaces, visible decision trails and lightweight identity/trust signals. Nothing heavy, nothing “final”, because heavy systems attract control, thin systems attract use.
Make conflict visible, not resolved. This is where #NGO culture diverges hardest from native systems. NGO pattern is resolveing conflict, smooth disagreement and force consensus narrative. #OMN pattern is surface conflict so it can be worked with socially, why, because in real networks conflict is information, disagreement is structure and tension is direction. The compost is the rot in conflict, buried conflict always returns, festers, later as system failure.
Build “trust scaffolding”, not trust systems. This is subtle but crucial, you cannot design trust, you can only create conditions where trust can form and where it can fail safely. Trust scaffolding includes repeated interaction spaces, low-stakes collaboration, visible contribution histories and reversible decisions with clear exit paths. The path to trust is an emergent behaviour of stable mess, not a product of design. This directly opposes #mainstreaming ideas of identity systems, certification systems and #techbro reputation scoring systems.
We need to explicitly reject “clean governance” as this is where most of well-meaning systems collapse. The trap is people try to build clean voting systems, formal representation and universal rule sets. But in messy reality governance is not clean – it is negotiated, situated, and constantly patched. #OMN path, instead of clean governance, we grow layered responsibility, overlapping legitimacy with temporary authority and visible disagreement. Think of governance as weather, not architecture.
Anti-scale principles is very important as most systems fail because they assume more scale = more success The #OMN flips this with a path of scale should be resisted until coordination proves it is needed. Because scale introduces abstraction, funding dependency, narrative capture, bureaucratic drift. So instead we grow horizontally first, federate slowly and allow divergence to tolerate inconsistency.
Build “failure memory” as infrastructure, its one of the most underused ideas in this whole space. Most ecosystems forget failures, hide conflict history and rewrite past attempts. #OMN path is that failure is the most valuable dataset. So you build public failure logs, conflict histories and abandoned project archives with “why this didn’t work” notes. Not as shame, but as compost, because systems that cannot remember failure are forced to repeat it.
Soil layer (real life)
trust groups lived coordination actual practice
Infrastructure layer
tools protocols servers
Mediation layer
conflict handling coordination routing
Narrative layer
NGOs funding language public explanation
Power layer
states capital platforms
On this working group path no layer is allowed to pretend it is another layer, a core anti-confusion mechanism.
So what is the actual #OMN outcomes, when this all works, you don’t get a platform, a movement or a unified system. You get a living field of partially connected commons that can adapt without central control, yes it looks messy from outside – and that’s correct. Because coherence is not the goal, survivability and humain flourishing is. lets reduce the whole thing to operational clarity – Build small, stay local. Keep systems thin, let conflict stay visible, treat trust as emergent. Avoid clean narratives, resist scale, remember failure. Separate layers to never centralise experimentation into control.
That’s where theory finally has to become dirt-under-the-fingernails practice, where the abstraction has to survive contact with reality. Lets look at some example work flows, different angles of the same living loop.
What a real example #OMN#oxfordboaters river project looks like day-to-day. The river “communerty” is not in anyway an organisation. It’s a persistent coordination low affinity around a real place/problem/ecology (a river in this case). if we had a seed of the tech we need working, daily reality looks like this: Morning layer (signal gathering) when people notice things:
water quality change
planning notices
blocked access points
local council updates
photos from walks
stories from anglers / walkers / residents
This is not formal reporting, It’s messy input that lands in:
Fediverse posts
local group chats
simple shared logs
Mid layer (sensemaking) is when a few people (DIY, not fixed) do:
cluster reports (“this looks like sewage spike again”)
link patterns (“this happened upstream last month”)
No authority – just attention shaping (or focalising).
Action layer (light coordination) is made up of small, reversible actions:
someone emails council
someone visits site
someone talks to landowner
someone checks data source
someone posts explainer thread
Crucially no one needs permission to act, only visibility into what others are doing
Weekly rhythm (social compression) is a loose gathering (online or physical):
“what changed?”
“what patterns are forming?”
“what are we missing?”
“what broke this week?”
Light authority, rather focused on shared memory and process. The river project is not a formal group. It is a shared affinity flow. That’s why it works (when it works) – it stays situated, porous, and continuously re-formed.
Lets look at a second example, how #OGB decision flows actually operate, it is not voting or governance in the institutional sense. It is a routing system for trust, conflict, and attention.
Step 1 – Issue appears, something surfaces
conflict
proposal
blockage
uncertainty
It is posted publicly (default open).
Step 2 – Context attaches, people attach:
experience (“this happened before”)
local knowledge
technical input
historical memory
disagreement
Important – contradiction is allowed and expected
Step 3 – Clustering happens (not authority). Instead of leaders deciding clusters of alignment form naturally, disagreement clusters remain visible and minority views persist. Think weather systems, not committees
Step 4 – Decision emerges as a path, not a vote – a “decision” is a visible “common” path of action with acknowledged alternatives still open. So nothing is deleted, nothing is finalised, nothing is owned
Step 5 – Follow-through is voluntary, but visible. People act based on trust in community, reasoning based on proximity and capacity. And they report back into the same system. The native path is the #OGB doesn’t only decide things – it makes decision pressure visible.
What a Fediverse-native governance loop feels like is where it becomes felt reality rather than structure. It feels like slow public thinking, less meetings, less agendas. More like threads that evolve over days, posts that accumulate context and replies that become infrastructure
Persistent memory in the stream, nothing disappears old decisions are still linkable, conflict history is visible and prior attempts remain accessible. So governance is navigation through lived memory. Weak coordination, strong transparency as no one is forced to agree. But disagreement is visible, reasoning is public and action is observable. This produces accountability without authority to grow temporary gravity centres.
Certain threads or instances become coordination hubs, discussion anchors and action nodes. But they fade naturally – nothing, but memmery is permanent. It feels like thinking in public with other people who sometimes act on what emerges. Not bureaucracy, not formal consensus culture. More like shared situational awareness that occasionally crystallises into action.
OMN / #OGB model is: surface → act → observe → remember → re-surface, it is governance more as continuous ecological process, less a fixed control structure.
Think that is anufe for today, please ask in comments to help finish this.
People fight against or/and ignore the #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach in tech because simplicity exposes power. Complexity, jargon, and process give cover – they make control look like competence. When paths are simple and transparent, everyone can see who’s blocking, who’s hoarding, who’s acting in bad faith. Many “experts” and institutions are emotionally and professionally invested in keeping things complicated; simplicity threatens their authority, their funding, and their identity.
All the #OMN projects are not directly about social change – they’re about making social change possible. That distinction matters as people don’t step into change unless they first believe change can happen. If the world feels fixed, locked, inevitable, then nothing moves. Our role is simpler, and maybe more important, to open that door a crack, to show that different paths exist.
Think of #OMN as a helping hand, not dragging people forward, not telling them what to do – just making it easier for them to take that first step when they’re ready. But to do this, we need to think more clearly – and more fundamentally – about technology itself. As most of the current “open paths” are cosplay at best, we need a network that links them as flows for there use to be unlocked from the current limits of #stupidindividualism shaping them – to become a native part of the expanding #openweb reboot.
I’ve been working on this for over 20 years, and one thing keeps proving true: we need roughly 90% open and 10% closed, the balance matters. As the current push from the #encryptionists flips this – aiming for 90% closed and 10% open. That isn’t a solution, it’s a retreat. It breaks the social fabric that makes collective tools usable and meaningful. It fragments, isolates, and ultimately shrinks the space where shared culture can exist.
Yes, privacy matters, yes, some things should be closed, that’s the 10%. But the commons – the space where we meet, talk, organise, and build trust – has to be open. Without that, there is no network, just silos. Take a simple example: you’re reading this via #activitypub. That’s a system built on being mostly open, with just enough closure to function safely. And it works, people are here, conversations happen, networks grow.
Compare that to more closed, encryption-heavy systems like old school Diaspora. Technically interesting, sure, but socially? Empty, few people, little flow, no impact. That’s the core point: this isn’t just about functions or features, it’s about culture.
Open federated, networked systems create the possibility of shared culture, and from that, the possibility of social change. Closed systems protect individuals, but they rarely build movements. We need both – but we need to get the balance right. Right now, too many people are getting it the wrong way round.
This Isn’t New: Decentralisation Was the Point All Along
Decentralised servers – what we now call the #Fediverse – are often talked about as if they’re some new, radical innovation. They’re not, they’re a return to the original design of the network. The early internet wasn’t built to be controlled, it was built to survive. The core idea was simple: if parts of the network were destroyed – even something as extreme as a nuclear strike – the rest would keep functioning. No centre, single point of failure or “off switch.”
That’s what decentralisation actually means. And this thinking didn’t even start with the #openweb. Systems like Usenet already embodied this approach: distributed, federated, run by many, owned by none. Messy? Yes. But resilient, open, and hard to capture.
What we’ve been living through for the last 20+ years – the rise of the #dotcons – is the opposite of this. Centralised platforms with single points of control. Easy to use for control and monetise, easy to manipulate, easy to shut down. We didn’t lose the #openweb by accident, we blindly traded it away for this convenience.
What we’re seeing now with the #Fediverse, #ActivityPub, and related projects isn’t innovation in the common sense. It’s a reboot, a return to the path we were on before we derailed it. The difference is that now we’re trying to rebuild this in a world that has spent decades normalising centralisation and control. 40 years of death cult worship has changed people, institutions, social groups and our very internal selves. That’s where the friction comes from, people arrive expecting #dotcons platforms, what they find is networks. People expect control, what they get is responsibility. People expect “free” what they face is shared cost and care.
So, it was never about the tech, the mistake we keep making is ONLY thinking this is a technical shift, it’s not, it’s cultural. You can spin up a decentralised server in minutes, that’s not the hard part, the hard part is everything around it:
Who runs it
Who pays for it
How decisions are made
How conflict is handled
How trust is built and maintained
This is the work the #dotcons hide from us, they wrap control as “free services” paid for with surveillance, extraction, and control. Now that we’re back on the #openweb path, that work becomes visible again, and yes – it’s harder.
Why this matters (Again). Resilience isn’t an abstract idea anymore as we’re living through cascading crises: political instability, #climatechaos, infrastructure fragility. A centralised network fails catastrophically were a decentralised network degrades – but keeps going. That’s the difference between a system you depend on and a system you can trust.
We don’t need to overcomplicate this – Keep It Simple (#KISS)
One builds commons, the other extracts value, everything else is detail. And yes nobody thinks the Fediverse is not messy, uneven, (yet) match the polish of corporate platforms. That’s fine, mess is where growth happens – if we compost it properly.
The #OMN view, we’re not trying to invent something new. We’re trying to make what already works usable at scale for media, trust, and collective action. The infrastructure is there, the protocols exist, the history is long. What’s missing is the shared layer – the commons – where information flows in ways people can actually rely on, that’s what we’re building.
If decentralisation feels radical, it’s only because we’ve spent so long inside systems that forgot #OMN#openweb#KISS
Three years ago I was trying to explain something simple in language liberals might actually hear. They talk about “platform capitalism.” Fine. But I’ve been calling it the #dotcons for 20 years – because that’s what it is – a con.
The last 30 years of tech hasn’t just drifted into this mess. It’s been shaped, step by step, enclosure by enclosure, into systems designed to extract value from us. What we now call the internet is, in large part, a machine built to manipulate, capture, and profit.
The old #openweb got fenced in, and most people, especially polite liberal society, went along with it. So we need to talk about the return and the problem. Now we have a shift of the #mainstreaming is flowing back toward the #openweb, that should be a good thing. But there is a problem: people don’t leave the #dotcons behind when they move, they bring the culture with them.
What we’re seeing is a flood of the same patterns – extractive behaviour, ego performance, status games. Not from one “side,” but from everywhere. The habits built inside the #dotcons don’t magically disappear just because the platform changes.
So the real issue isn’t technical, it’s cultural. If we don’t actively mediate this influx, we won’t rebuild the #openweb – we’ll just recreate the same broken systems in slightly different code.
So why do I talk so much about compost, and mess not being the problem. Mess is necessary, but only if it composts – if it breaks down into something fertile. Right now, we’re mostly just piling it higher.
This is where projects like #indymediaback and #OGB matter. They’re not perfect, but they are native to the #openweb path: grounded in trust, process, and the #4opens rather than control, branding, and capture.
The question isn’t whether #mainstreaming is good or bad. The question is: how do we hold the cultural line so that what grows is something genuinely different? Because if we don’t, the #dotcons don’t need to defeat us. We’ll blindly rebuild them ourselves.
Yes, build the #openweb, but the idea that we should stop organizing inside the #dotcons right now? That’s a trap, because billions of people are still there. The conversations, the communities, the movements, they haven’t magically migrated. Walking away doesn’t free those people, it abandons them, leaving the space to be shaped entirely by the #deathcult and the forces already in control.
This is #nothingnew. The #dotcons are #closedweb infrastructure. They serve power because they were built to serve power. Expecting anything else is misunderstanding the system. The real question has never been: are these platforms good? It’s: what do we do, given that this is where people are?
The #geekproblem and the exodus fantasy, is a persistent fantasy – a classic #geekproblem – that if we just build better tools, people will come. They won’t, not on their own. A clean exodus to the #fediverse or any #openweb space doesn’t happen because we post about it. Movement-building has never worked like that, people move through relationships, trust, and shared struggle – not technical superiority.
So if you abandon the spaces where people already are, you cut those pathways. The #OMN approach has always been simple to use the #dotcons as a bridge, not a home, seed organizing where people already are while focusing energy on building the #openweb in parallel to clearly keep your foundations in the #4opens.
This isn’t about purity, it’s about effectiveness, don’t fall into #stupidindividualism, the idea that personal withdrawal is more important than collective reach. This is about infrastructure and grounding, if the #dotcons can switch you off at any moment, they cannot be your foundation.
That’s why we need:
indymediaback as publishing roots
activitypub and the #fediverse as distributed infrastructure
OMN as a bridge between cultures and spaces
This is the practical expression of the #4opens: not just open code, but open process and open trust. Don’t build your house on someone else’s land, but don’t stop talking to the people still living there either. Stay in the fight, when the #dotcons clamp down, it’s not a surprise, it’s a signal of what they are, and what they’ve always been.
The answer isn’t to run away, it’s to root ourselves somewhere that can’t be shut down, while continuing to show up where the people are.
Build the #openweb, stay in the fight, keep it simple #KISS
When thinking about supporting the #Fediverse, it’s important to understand that the current codebase leadership model is closer to an aristocracy than democracy. This isn’t unusual – most open source projects work this way. A small group of core developers, often a “benevolent dictator,” make key decisions. This model can work up to a point: it enables speed, coherence, and technical direction. But it does not scale in any way easily into a broader public infrastructure.
From the outside, the #Fediverse can look chaotic, and in many ways it is. A useful metaphor is an elephant stampede with people throwing paper planes at each other. That messiness is not a failure; it’s a reflection of a genuinely distributed system.
Democracy is inherently messy. Bureaucracy, by contrast, is tidy.
The tension between those two is at the heart of the challenge outreaching to public institutions faces. Traditional organisational models – especially those involving funding – tend to concentrate power. Once money and status enter the system, decision-making quickly becomes a focus of competition and control.
We have seen this repeatedly over the last 20 years: projects that begin open and collaborative gradually centralise, and in doing so lose the qualities that made them valuable in the first place. If the goal is to support a native Fediverse ecosystem, this pattern needs to be consciously avoided.
This raises a governance question. How are decisions made once resources, funding, and institutional recognition enter the space? Without deliberate design, the default outcome is oligarchy – small groups making decisions on behalf of many. This is not only a moral failure; it is a structural tendency of complex organisations.
The strength of the #Fediverse is that it is radically different from mainstream platforms. It is decentralised, diverse, and resistant to single points of control. The risk is that, in mainstreaming paths trying to support it, we unintentionally reshape it into something more familiar, and less effective. “Common sense” approaches, based on traditional institutional models, push in this direction. If European institutions want to invest meaningfully in this space, the challenge is not simply technical. It is cultural and organisational:
How to support infrastructure without centralising control
How to enable coordination without enforcing uniformity
How to fund development without creating capture points for power
The opportunity is significant, but it requires seeing and recognising that the #Fediverse works because it is different – and ensuring that support mechanisms strengthen that difference, rather than smoothing it away.
The internet’s public square is privatised, algorithmically controlled for “engagement” over any idea of truth, and placed under the control of a handful of American corporations with no accountability to European citizens or values. The #Fediverse is the most credible existing alternative – but it lacks the shared infrastructure to function as a native commons for news and media. #OMN builds that infrastructure: trust-based, community-controlled, transparent, reversible, and owned by nobody. At €45,000 for a proof of concept, it is one of the cheapest possible investments in the long-term health of European digital public life. If it works – and the technical and social groundwork suggests it will – it becomes the plumbing for a Fediverse that can actually be used to serve democratic societies rather than more #techshit alongside the current #dotcons platforms that undermine them.
Why this matters – because the #WWW was stolen – Designed as commons at CERN, decentralised, open, nobody in charge. What we have today is instead is five American corporations controlling the information diet of billions of people. Facebook decides what news you see. YouTube’s algorithm decides which voices get amplified. Twitter/X decides who gets banned. None of these decisions are transparent, accountable, or reversible. They are made by private entities in pursuit of control, advertising revenue and engagement metrics – not truth, not public interest, not democracy.
The #Fediverse exists as a rejection of this, it’s the largest real functioning alternative to corporate social media, with millions of people on thousands of servers, federated together, nobody owning the whole thing. It works. It’s growing. But it has a weakness: it’s kinda fragmented at the commons layer. There’s no shared infrastructure for how news and media actually flows across the network in any trustworthy and coherent way.
That’s the gap #OMN fills, but why? Most people don’t think about internet infrastructure. They think about whether they can trust what they read. Whether the news they see is real. Whether the platform they’re on is working for them or selling them. Whether they can do anything when something goes wrong.
Right now the answer to all of those is: it depends entirely on decisions made by people you’ll never meet, for reasons you’ll never know. OMN proposes something different. If your community trusts a source, a trust flow, you see it. If they don’t, you don’t. And that decision is yours, reversible, transparent, locally controlled.
For a journalist in a small country trying to get independent news out, this is the difference between having infrastructure that works for them and being at the mercy of a platform that can deplatform them overnight. For a community archive trying to keep historical memory alive and accessible, this is the difference between dependence on Google’s goodwill and owning your own distribution. For an ordinary person trying to figure out what’s true, this is the difference between an algorithm designed to maximise your outrage and a network shaped by people you actually trust.
Bureaucracies fund things slowly, in ways that often serve existing power structures rather than challenging them. But digital sovereignty is an existential European concern. The EU has spent years trying to regulate American platforms – GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act – and the platforms have responded with compliance theatre, token gestures, and armies of lawyers. Regulation of concentrated private power is a losing path. The only actual answer is to build the alternative infrastructure so that people have somewhere else to go. That’s what the NGI Commons Fund is for and what #OMN does.
The EU should not only be funding products, it needs to fund commons infrastructure – the plumbing that nobody owns and everyone can use. Like funding roads rather than funding a logistics company. The outputs are open source, meaning any European media organisation, any local community, any public institution can pick this up and use it. No lock-in. No dependency on a vendor who will be acquired or shut down.
It’s cheap, with the second stage scaling across Europe with institutional partners, building on European strengths. The Fediverse is disproportionately European. Mastodon was built by a German developer. The culture of digital commons, open standards, and public interest technology is stronger in Europe than anywhere else. This project is native to that tradition. It’s not asking Europe to compete with Silicon Valley on Silicon Valley’s terms – it’s asking Europe to build the alternative on its own terms.
The problem #OMN solves is getting worse, not better. Disinformation, algorithmic radicalisation, platform capture of public discourse – these are not abstract threats. They are actively destabilising European democracies. Funding the technical infrastructure for trustworthy, community-controlled information flows is not a nice-to-have. It is digital public health infrastructure.
Organisation: Open Media Network (unincorporated community project, fiscal hosting in Belgium via OpenCollective) Country: United Kingdom General Project Information Proposal name: Trust-Based Media Flows for the Fediverse (#OMN) Website / wiki: https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/Open-Media-Network
Abstract
Can you explain the whole project and its expected outcome(s)?
The Open Media Network (#OMN) is a protocol-driven, federated media infrastructure built on top of ActivityPub and the Emissary codebase (emissary.dev). It addresses a real gap in the current Fediverse: while platforms like Mastodon, PeerTube, and Lemmy are federated at the instance level, there is little coherent cross-platform layer for trust-based content flows, moderation, or news aggregation. Each instance operates largely as its own silo, moderation is hierarchical and per-server, and there is no shared commons model for media distribution across the ecosystem. #OMN proposes a minimal, compostable interaction model – the Five Functions (#5F): Publish, Subscribe, Moderate, Rollback, and Edit Metadata – implemented as a flow layer on top of existing Fediverse infrastructure. Content moves through the network as objects flowing through pipes and holding tanks, filtered and shaped by trust relationships between nodes rather than by opaque algorithms or centralised authority.
The central R&D question is: can trust-based moderation and distribution flows replace algorithmic amplification in a federated news ecosystem? Expected outcomes of this first-stage grant: By Month 3: A technical specification of the flow architecture; a prototype flow service routing ActivityPub objects between two instances; documentation of existing Fediverse flow patterns; early integration with one platform (likely PeerTube). By Month 6: A cross-platform prototype connecting at least two Fediverse systems; a working demonstration of trust-based moderation flows; a public code repository and documentation; and a user-facing prototype via the #makinghistory test environment (https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/MakingHistory). All outputs will be released under recognised open source licences. The project follows the #4opens framework: open data, open source, open standards, and open process.
Have you been involved with projects or organisations relevant to this project before?
Yes. The project lead, Hamish Campbell, has over 40 years of experience in grassroots media and technology, including early involvement with Indymedia – the pioneering open publishing news network – and more than 8 years working directly with the Fediverse and ActivityPub community. The #OMN conceptual framework has been developed over this time and is documented extensively in the project wiki, SocialHub, and at https://hamishcampbell.com. Developer Michael has contributed to #OMN concepts and logic for 10 years and is currently building the #makinghistory reference implementation. Ben, the core developer of Emissary, brings specific expertise in the codebase that will form the technical foundation of the project. Alex brings potential DAT/distributed storage support, and IKA will work on testing and rollout.
Requested Support Requested Amount: €45,000
Explain what the requested budget will be used for. Does the project have other funding sources, both past and present? A breakdown in the main tasks with associated effort is appreciated. Make rates explicit. The budget covers a lean, seed-stage proof of concept with no prior external funding. There are currently no other funding sources. The budget breakdown can be found in the attached PDF (funding). Roles: Hamish Campbell (project lead, coordination, documentation, community engagement) and Michael Saunders (primary development, UX, system logic). Additional contributors (Ben, Alex, IKA) are contributing on a voluntary/community basis during this seed phase. Work packages and approximate effort: WP1 Research & Specification (Months 1–2, ~25% of effort): Architecture design, gap analysis of existing Fediverse tools and flows (PeerTube, Lemmy, Mastodon), and documentation of trust-flow patterns. Output: Technical design document. WP2 Core Development (Months 2–5, ~45% of effort): Flow service implementation on top of Emissary; ActivityPub integration for the #5F model; and a trust-based moderation layer extending Emissary’s existing block/flag capabilities. Output: Working prototype codebase. WP3 UX & Prototype (Months 3–5, ~20% of effort): #makinghistory user interface; dual-layer UX (simple and advanced modes); and WCAG 2.1 accessibility compliance. Output: Testable user prototype. WP4 Testing & Documentation (Months 5–6, ~10% of effort): Community testing and iteration; public documentation and reports; and an open knowledge base of what works and what fails. Output: Public documentation, reports, and reusable design patterns. LINK PDF and wiki
Compare your own project with existing or historical efforts.
The closest existing efforts are: Mastodon’s built-in moderation tools: per-instance block lists and the Fediblock community blocklist. These are instance-level tools – they do not create cross-platform trust flows or shared content aggregation. #OMN operates at the network layer, not the instance layer. Fediseer: a trust registry allowing instances to vouch for each other. Fediseer addresses instance-level reputation but does not implement content flow logic, rollback, or metadata editing as network functions. #OMN builds a compostable flow model on top of the kind of trust signals that Fediseer represents. GNU Social / Friendica: older federated social platforms with some aggregation capability. These predate ActivityPub’s consolidation as the dominant standard and do not address the cross-platform news/media commons use case. Indymedia (1999–2010s): the historical precedent for open publishing federated media. Within the wider project, #OMN explicitly revives and modernises the Indymedia model for the ActivityPub era via the #indymediaback reference implementation, addressing the unfinished work of that tradition. The #makinghistory project grows from, and shares, this same established workflow. Bonfire networks: likely related, but unclear in scope and function. Attempts to install and use it have not clarified its approach. It may be trying to address similar problems, but this remains uncertain. The key difference of #OMN: it is not building a new platform. It is building a protocol-level flow layer that works across existing Fediverse platforms, implementing trust-based content propagation as commons infrastructure rather than as a product. See included PDFs.
What are significant technical challenges you expect to solve during the project?
Trust flow implementation: Designing and implementing a data model for trust relationships between federated nodes that is lightweight, compostable, and expressible via or alongside ActivityPub. Trust is local and subjective – the system must allow different communities to apply different trust filters to the same content flow without requiring global consensus.
Rollback across federated state: Implementing the rollback function (re-evaluating and reshaping historical content visibility) in a distributed system where content has already propagated to multiple nodes. This requires a time-aware, local re-indexing approach rather than a global delete mechanism.
Cross-platform content normalisation: Aggregating content objects from Mastodon (short-form social), PeerTube (video), and Lemmy (forum) into a common JSON-LD content model with a consistent trust trail, despite these platforms having different ActivityPub implementations and object schemas.
Search actors as push feeds: Implementing the “content finds you” model – where a defined search query becomes a persistent ActivityPub actor that pushes matching new content to subscribers – requires extending Emissary’s existing subscribable search engine capability.
Describe the ecosystem of the project, and how you will engage with relevant actors and promote the outcomes.
The primary ecosystem is the Fediverse: the network of federated, open-source social platforms running ActivityPub, including Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, Friendica, and many others. This ecosystem has grown substantially (estimated 10+ million active users across thousands of instances) but remains technically fragmented at the commons/media layer. The project builds directly on the Emissary codebase (https://emissary.dev), an existing ActivityPub-native Go application. Engagement with the Emissary community is embedded in the team through Ben’s mentoring role.
Wider ecosystem engagement:
The project will contribute design patterns and documentation back to the broader Fediverse developer community via public code repositories, the project wiki, and events. The #makinghistory test phase connects us to existing archives such as Bishupsgate, Maydyroom, the Peace Museum, and the Campbell Family Archive, providing access to extensive datasets as well as outreach to their administrators and users. The five community events included in the budget are specifically designed to recruit contributors, gather real-world feedback, and expand the network of participating nodes.
Promotion of outcomes:
Outcomes will be shared through the Fediverse itself (maintaining an active presence on ActivityPub-native platforms and legacy social media), via open-licensed documentation, and through NGI/NLnet networks and events. This first-stage grant is explicitly designed as a seed and proof-of-concept phase, with a larger second-stage proposal planned to deliver a fully production-ready system once the core architecture is validated.
Hope this helps compost some of the mess building up. It’s something we all need to do and have responsibility for.
Groups don’t usually fail because of external pressure, they fail because they turn inward and burn energy on themselves. If you want a calm, #KISS path that actually holds diversity without collapsing, we need a few simple lived – traditions and mythos – not heavy governance, not ideology battles, just grounded #KISS practice:
Keep the core action very small and clear – a shared purpose. If people can’t easily answer “what are we doing?”, drift and conflict creep in.
In twine “doing” with “talking” Most infighting comes from too much abstract discussion. Doing space – Talking space – Don’t let one swamp the other.
Protect focus like it’s fragile (because it is), the biggest risk isn’t disagreement – it’s distraction. When things start spiralling bring it back to “what are we building this week?” if it doesn’t help, park it
Default to trust, but design for friction, diversity is strength. But unbalanced diversity = chaos. So let people approach things differently, but require shared outputs – If it doesn’t produce something, it doesn’t dominate attention.
No purity tests, this is where diversity dies. People will come with different politics, paths (fluffy vs spiky) and have different priorities, that’s fine – as long as they don’t block others doing the work.
Make conflict low-energy, not zero-conflict – we won’t avoid disagreements. Trying repression = explosion later. Instead, keep arguments short, move unresolved tension into parallel paths (“try both”) and let results decide, not personalities. This is the “compost” approach we need to talk about – don’t fight the mess, process it.
Grow by doing, not convincing, you don’t need everyone to agree. You need visible, working examples. Let people see it working – that’s what grows a community of action.
What we are sketching and building is the hard middle path of not rigid control (kills growth) and not total openness (creates chaos). But a light structure that keeps things moving.
#Oxford example: Oxford boaters are sovereign, keeping the free-flowing life of the river, not bound by the old rules of the landlords.
#Fediverse example: The Fediverse is native to the #openweb path. We judge by the #4opens, and walk with power.
If we want a better web, we have to stop pretending this is just about “bad tech companies doing bad things.” Of course, they are-that’s what capitalist incentives produce. The real question is: what are we doing differently?
That means accepting some uncomfortable truths. The better path will be less convenient, at least at first. We will have to socially support things that used to look free on the #dotcons. Because the cost we didn’t want to face is simple: the #openweb was always going to be harder, someone has to:
The fantasy wasn’t that this work didn’t exist. The fantasy was that the market – advertising – would cover it without consequences.
In the current mess in tech paths, this becomes visible again. Bluesky and #ATproto keep getting lumped in with #ActivityPub under the easy label of “open protocols, yay”… but that’s just not true. Yes, they both sit in the #openweb space, but there’s a real structural problem here, and we’re seeing it play out in real time.
“Why would anyone fund an Atmosphere project if Bluesky, with $100 million in the bank, might ship a competing feature at any moment?”
That’s not an ecosystem. That’s a platform with enough gravity to crush its own edges. And people are noticing. The old pattern is back:
invite the community in
let them build the value
then absorb and replace them
Same playbook, again and again. It feels open – but the centre still holds the power. The same dynamic we saw with Twitter. The DNA is obvious.
The difference really matters. #ActivityPub was built as a commons path from the start – messy, flawed, but natively open. #ATproto is something else: a platform-first model with openness layered on top. That’s why it keeps drifting this way. It’s not a bug, it’s the design.
Too much #techshit, and everything starts to stink. Why would anyone step into the #openweb if that’s the smell? This creates a bigger problem, that it’s a mess that keeps coming back, and as usual we’ll be the ones left to compost it, underfunded, unrecorded, and unthanked.
We’ve been here before – with the #encryptionists and the #blockchain mess. Big promises, lots of noise, overlapping hype cycles. Now there’s a clear overlap with #Bluesky and #AI. The risk isn’t just that this fails. It’s that when it fails, it leaves a miasma behind, making it harder for people to trust the actually working open paths. That’s the real damage.
Neglect is not innocence, this isn’t about blaming users instead of power. Power matters. Monopolies matter. Venture capital mess matters. But still, if the #openweb mattered, why didn’t we support it?
Why do people pay for streaming, cloud, and delivery, but not support publishing tools, independent media, hosting, or open infrastructure?
Why did so many #NGO organisations that talked about openness still push people onto closed platforms the moment growth and analytics are on the table? We keep choosing short-term convenience over long-term stewardship, not just a market failure, a cultural one.
So lets look at this mess again. I’ve been trying to find a way to express my view of the people who took over outreach in the #Fediverse, and in doing so helped shape the current #openweb reboot.
DRAFT: naïve, controlling, and self-interested.
They’ve left a mess that the people they pushed aside now have to compost. It’s really useful to look at how we got here.
In the early years, outreach was organised by a genuinely diverse, native crew. It was a good time – three open conferences, and even getting the EU to adopt the standard. But that group burned out, focus splintered, self-interest crept in, driven by the need to control resources. The balance shifted, and grifters gradually outnumbered them, eventually tearing it apart. In the space left behind, a new crew stepped in – filling the vacuum with centralised power and influence. And that’s where we are today.
We don’t fix this by arguing harder. We fix it by building – and holding – open spaces that don’t follow this pattern.
It should be obvious that we need a path back to good journalism – journalism that sheds light on facts, connects the dots, and lets people trace those dots back to sources. This is what allows us to share, question, and discuss within our own trusted communities, and then spread that knowledge outward through federation, always linking back to the source.
Right now, the #mainstreaming path is broken. It’s sometimes hard for people to see this because the decline has been slow, a gradual death of journalism. Since the early days of the internet, we’ve been told the same story: “People expect news for free, so quality journalism is no longer economically viable.” There’s truth in that. Good journalism is expensive. It takes time, skill, trust, and institutional memory.
But that’s only half the story. What actually happened is this: people kept consuming familiar “news brands,” and those brands were bought, consolidated, and financialised until shareholder value replaced any sense of public value. Slowly, investigative journalists were cut and sidelined, editorial independence eroded, and content shifted toward ads, PR, and narrative management. What we now call “news” is marketing, agenda-setting, and reputation management – a distraction. Journalism, as a public good, has been hollowed out, in part through our own passive acceptance of this shift.
Today, we can see more clearly that if you do real journalism – the kind that challenges power – you have no real career path and face risks: #dotcons blocking, right-wing co-option, and at worst, isolation, exile, prison, or worse. The result is a broken landscape: corporate media that won’t tell the truth, and under-resourced independent media that carries high risk for little or no reward. In that situation, who chooses journalism as a life path?
The deeper problem is articulation and power. The world is complex, most people don’t have the time, energy, or tools to fully articulate what they see, feel, and experience. Into that gap step politicians, corporations, and #fashernista influencers. They have the resources – especially through the #dotcons – to articulate reality, but in ways that divide people, flatten complexity into conflict, and steer perception to serve power and profit. This isn’t just misinformation. It’s structured narrative control.
Why the old models won’t come back, we can’t simply “fix” legacy media. It is structurally tied to advertising, concentrated ownership, and political influence. And we can’t rely on heroic individuals either, that path is too fragile, too dangerous, and too easy to suppress. If journalism is going to survive, it won’t look like the past.
A different path: journalism as networked commons. At #OMN, we’re outlining a different approach decentralised, collective path. Think of it as a second coming of #Indymedia, but more resilient, more sustainable, and better integrated with current networks.
This is where the #openweb and the #Fediverse matter. With protocols like ActivityPub, we already have the foundations for distributed publishing, shared visibility, and cross-community discussion. But tech alone isn’t enough, the missing layer is trust and flow. To rebuild journalism, we need to focus on how information flows socially, not just how it’s published.
Metadata (tags, context, sources, warnings) travels with stories
People can trace information back through the flow
Instead of one “authoritative source,” we get many sources, with visible relationships between them, shaped through community trust and discussion. This is journalism people can actually use to follow a story back to its sources, add context and local knowledge and share and challenge it within trusted spaces.
That’s how we rebuild public understanding – not just publish articles – but from product to process. Journalism should not be a product to consume, it needs to be a process we participate in. When it’s treated as a product it’s optimised for clicks, shaped by incentives and in the end controlled by owners. When it becomes a process it becomes collective, accountable and thus resilient.
So composting the mess, we’re not starting from nothing, we have the ruins of legacy media, the lessons of projects like #Indymedia and the living infrastructure of the #Fediverse. This is compost, from it, we can grow something new – grounded in the #4opens, simple enough to understand (#KISS), and social at its core, not just technical.
The real question isn’t “How do we save journalism?” It’s: How do we rebuild the social systems that make truth-telling possible? Because without those paths, journalism doesn’t just struggle – it disappears.
YOU can’t do social change or challenge without annoying people If you think you can, you’re probably play-acting – and part of the problem – does that annoy you? If it does… maybe sit with that. 🙂 Food for thought, #4opens is a shovel for composting.
The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb. The tech – like ActivityPub – grew out of that culture. It wasn’t built by #mainstreaming interests.
Now money is flowing in, and with it comes risk of dilution of culture, capture of direction and loss of the commons. As more #mainstreaming users return to the #openweb, we need better tools and processes to handle the mess this brings.
And yes – sometimes the problem is us – when people inside our own spaces act badly, we need ways to respond, mediate, and move forward – without falling into cycles of negativity. That’s part of the work, part of #OMN.
The #Fediverse is native to #openweb thinking, it works. It will likely destroy billions of dollars of #CONTROL, and create billions in actual human value in return. But like the early #openweb, it can also be captured and pulled back into the same old control systems, this is the balance.
So the question is, are you on the side of CONTROL or TRUST?
Our obsession with control is doing real damage, it’s fed by dead-end ideology (#postmodernism), and amplified by #fashernistas pushing surface over substance. Yes – it’s messy. Yes – it’s complex, but ignoring that just makes it worse.
#stupidindividualism and the #deathcult are building an inhuman world, we can do better – but only if we’re willing to do the uncomfortable work.
In #mainstreaming and alt political cultures there’s a constant call in messy times for “strong leaders” to cut through the chaos, but this is the wrong path. What Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders actually show is something more uncomfortable and more useful that real change doesn’t come from strong individuals – it comes from movements we don’t fully control. They were signals, not saviours.
Both figures emerged on the left because something deeper was already shifting with widespread discontent, a break from #mainstreaming politics and a hunger for alternatives to 40 years of #deathcult worshipping. They didn’t create these conditions – they channelled them. “Weakness” is often misnamed, Corbyn in particular was constantly framed as weak, but what was actually happening? When people treat them as failed “leaders,” they miss the point, at best they were interfaces to movements, rather than top-down commanders. They:
Hold together fragile, diverse coalition
Refusal to impose top-down control
Emphasis on process, participation, and consensus
In a stable system, this might look slow, in a fragile system, it’s often the only thing preventing collapse. In the open vs closed battle, it’s not as simple as it looks – especially in the mess we’re in.
CLOSED → conservative / fear / control OPEN → progressive / hope / trust
We need to keep looking at the underlying path when deciding which way to push the balance.
Where the demand for “strength” usually means more control, less democracy. That path tends to deepen the mess, not fix it, as personality politics is a dead end. When media and institutions focus on personalities where movements are about issues and structures. This mismatch is fatal if your politics depends on a person you are attacked through that person – we all collapse when they falter. You never build lasting power, it is the trap both campaigns fell into, despite trying to avoid it.
Movements without structure (hard or soft) stall, is the harder truth – Horizontal energy alone isn’t enough – Electoral politics alone isn’t enough. Both Corbyn and Sanders mobilised huge grassroots energy, but institutions resisted, internal fragmentation grew – the energy wasn’t fully translated into durable paths, and they fell through the gap.
From a #OMN perspective, the takeaway is clear – Don’t look for better leaders – Don’t rely on existing institutions – Build commons-based infrastructure that movements can stand on. This means: Media we control (#indymedia paths), Governance we participate in (#OGB) and tech that reflects trust, not control (#openweb, #Fediverse)
So in messy times, don’t reach for “Strong Leaders” as this comes from fear, frustration and the desire for simple solutions, history – from left and right – shows where that road leads. In poisoned times, the work is slower, to build trust, to stay grounded in shared issues.
Corbyn and Sanders didn’t fail because they were too weak, they struggled because we don’t yet have the social, technical, and institutional commons needed to carry the kind of change they pointed toward. That’s the work, and it’s not about finding the right leader – it’s about becoming the movement that doesn’t need one.
