Tag: fediverse

Talking about the #geekproblem in relation to #peertube

A. Activist video visionon.tv/videos/local?sort= on the #Fediverse

Q. Says I need to log into an account to view the video.
A. that’s not good, was just impressed with the custom views in the updated #peertube, so maybe you need to be logged in to see them that’s bad #geekproblem maybe?
#geekproblem maybe? I don’t know how visionOntv works. Could be somebody’s choice given sets of options,, or could be default, or could be accidental combo of selections., Dec 6, 05:33 PM, bhaugen@social.coop”>

I don’t know how visionOntv works. Could be somebody’s choice given sets of options,, or could be default, or could be accidental combo of selections.
A. it’s a well moderated #peertube we updated our server so now have new filtering functions, but it looks like you have to be logged in to share links based on this, i tested in tor browser and cant see the links, likely they have resion for this or might just be #geekproblem – security first?
Q. Do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence…
A. to see malice is to miss the point github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube the #geekproblem is simple a critic of a modernist point of view, the persute of control/certainty that diminishes our ability to flourish.
You can call this incompetence if you like, I call it a problem that our “engineering” minded people need to work beyond. The #geekproblem is a good descriptive hashtag.
Can’t share custom filtered video lists URL’s without login being presented. · Issue #4611 · Chocobozzz/PeerTubeGitHub
And the people who created the feature may not have tested all the use cases either…

Or they might have done it on purpose to keep the new feature private…

Technically #peertube is good softwear, but as a social tool it’s not good and few people use it.
Q. Some programmers do not collaborate with real people who want to use their creations while they are creating them.

Did you know they intended to implement the feature you requested, and did you ask to work with them as they did so?

(P.S. if you keep calling them geeks all the time they might not feel like you would be warm and fuzzy to work with…)

A. I was talking to them from before the project was launched… though they have become more distant since they got funding – a different problem, though connected problem

Good codeing, bad social – kinda the #geekproblem

On the subject hamishcampbell.com/tag/geekpro of funding, I cover it more widely on the blog.

Basically funding alowes the geeks to be geeks when the funding comes from geeks.

If you think that’s bad, though, it’s even worst when it comes from academics 😉

Lived and worked through 30 years of this tech shit. Composting, we need some composting 🙂

End thought

The #geekprolem all ready has all the “solutions” It’s why it is has “problem” on the end of the hashtag. A problem that is going to kill millions of people and displace billions over the next hundred years #climatechaos we do need to step away and compost this shit #OMN

Note, I generally only use the “stick” after offering carrots quite a few times. Then alternate between carrot and stick with no plan for a good personal outcome.

Doing this for 20 years, in the medium/long term social change is generally visible. Yes you are right it’s a thankless task but somebody needs to do it and I live on a boat and can sail away, I half joke with the last bit.

This approach has only mediate the problems in my expirence though.

Invisible agenda on the #openweb

A. #NGIforum21 #NGI #EU It’s not “usability” its “control” – the #dotcons are built for control the #eurocrates need, the #openweb tools which work fine is for people to people.

The #openweb tools do not have the control that the #Eurocrats need to move onto our tools and be a part of our community. This is going to lead to a “invisible” fight, as they are increasingly funding development we face a crisis in the #fediverse A Sheldon crises talking the language of our crew.

Q. Yes, we should keep things people-to-people and avoid getting involved with large hierarchical organizations who will try to appear friendly but will move the development into a more centralized mode which they can then influence and have control over.

What the EU people want I think is a Silicon Valley in the EU. A digital portfolio from which they can project influence internationally and a vehicle for venture capital and new digital markets. If you read their blurb this is what they say, and I don’t have any reason to disbelieve them.

Obviously something like the fediverse doesn’t really fit with the cunning EU plan (fits like a fish riding a bicycle) and so at some point there will be an ideological parting of lovers (perhaps it has already happened, I am not following the NGI conversations).

A. The #mainstreaming funding of the #fedivers is already completely dominated by the #EU all the big projects are funded by #NGI

This is more #fuckup than conspiracy though am shore conspiracy is growing as people see the levers of power and control which comes with money agenda.

It’s an “invisible” hot war, standing aside is not an option.

Q. Maybe there should be a plan for whenever the EU launches some venture capital fediverse product. I expect it would be like what Trump is doing, but under some EU branded “incubator” and maybe with centralized moderation.

Something like that would create a tug-of-love between the revenue of projects and a centralizing agenda. I’ve been around the bloc enough times to know it’s bound to happen. These things are so formulaic.

A. I think that’s jumping ahead of were we are for the next year or two. Most of the People at #NGI pushing this agenda simple do not see the damage they do. Only a tiny number are actively “evil” currently.

We have a opening http://hamishcampbell.com the last few posts are a way to step away from this “crisis”.

Q. It’s like you can see the truck driving towards the cliff edge.

“If you go in that direction, you’ll fall off the edge”.

The driver says “Nah mate, it’s different this time”.

And you watch the truck as it reaches the precipice, and then falls off.

A. yep but need to look in the back of tuck as it’s filled with much of the #fedivers infrastructure that’s going to go over the cliff.

Actavisam is to sit down in front of the truck and refuse to move, while talking to the “press” about the issues #fluffy​

Or pour sugar into the truck fual tank in the night #spiky​

Standing and watching while shrugging shoulders is kinda #mainstreaming 🙂

Influx of EU funding into the #Fediverse – all together push through, the HARD #block crumbles

Getting a good outcome is hard… And this current influx of EU funding risks doing more damage than good to the health of the #Fediverse, if it continues along its present agenda. Yes, the #Fediverse already has its own lifestyle-driven mess, but we can try to mediate the damage driven by funding first, if we succeed there, maybe the lifestyle drift can self-mediate in time.

When aiming for a better outcome, what we’re looking for is social change and challenge with less mess. This page looks at some of the best funding we’ve found http://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens/wiki/Funding-of-openweb-projects Not an attack, but opening a conversation on an obvious issue.

We can also look at funding that is being completely wasted, but that’s likely outside our influence. Lets keeping it positive (when we can), I like to keep things positive… if possible.
But let’s be honest, a lot of people are #BLOCKING, and that’s going to cause fire and a LOT of smoke. This is what real social change/challenge looks like: murky. Focus on #KISS – keep it simple – to see through the smoke.

Transparency matters, it’s hard to imagine how you can do a left-wing project without showing your workings:

  • Open/Trust = left
  • Fear/Control = right

That’s the core framing this page is about.

#Dotcons & poisoned agenda, yep, the whole #dotcons side of the EU funding agenda is poison as it only feeds the mess, and as I’ve pointed out before, most funding ends up poured straight down the drain. Sadly, that’s the default outcome.

#IndymediaBack – Learning the right lessons, one thing to keep in mind: I think we (the #Indymedia crew) learned the wrong lesson from the repression and state raids. We pushed fear/control as the solution, and this added to the #closedweb mess. But as the #Fediverse now shows, the path should have been open/trust – That’s the #openweb path we abandoned. That split ripped Indymedia apart, and we’ve been stuck in the #dotcons mess ever since.

Simplicity as Strategy, when making judgements, keep it #KISS, simplicity is what cuts through the mess. Shovels and compost is the #OMN approach.

Trauma, repression & healing, yes, trauma is real, that’s why I lean into basic ways of looking at these things. From there, it’s up to people to build up, #DIY style, a real grassroots approach.

For a practical approaches, watch the film:

I made this for the legal support crew of a major direct action campaign. The repression was ongoing and intense – but the healing came through mass participation, like walking calmly through police stop and search zones, that likely helped to mediate a lot of growing trauma.

Final thought: #Openweb – all together push through, the HARD block crumbles. We’ve got work to do, let’s keep it grounded, open, and as clear as we can through the murk.

The is such a thing as society

“The is such a thing as society” we need to build our tools for this anti “common sense” statement.

The advantage of “governance” of the #fediverse (which it needs if it is to become a part of our #openweb based society that is essential for social change/challenge in the era of #climatechaos) is that the is non, this is a good thing.

The Fediverse comes from the “cats” of #libertarianism and to a lesser extent #anarchism without the (O)

In this, we don’t HAVE to think how it fits into current working practices and current economics. Rather, people PUSHING these “common sense” solutions to the fediverse “governance” problems are a part of the problem, not a solution that might work.

To be “native” to the fediverse we need to use code to build “society”. Organizing for SocialHub Community Empowerment has to be anti “common sense” as the fediverse itself is.

Power comes from power, It’s something you TAKE/build and in the best outcome share, it is NEVER given to you.

Private property – Wikipedia was invented in a mythical past when someone with a big club drew a line in the sand and said to the social group step over that, and I kill you.

Notice this is not the foundation of the fediverse, we are base on an open flowing social web and our lines in the sand are “blowing in the wind”. Yes, lots of people do not understand this.

Don’t unthinkingly push current “common sense” #deathcult ist thinking over #openweb projects.

Should we do something that is native to the Fediverse, and what would this look like?

The #Fediverse is #anarchism this is likely the best description of the community.
A represents the Greek anarkhia (‘without ruler/authority’), and the circle can be read as the letter O , standing for order or organization.
We currently have a Herding cats governance in the Fediverse and the projects that make it up
An idiom denoting a futile attempt to control or organize a class of entities which are inherently uncontrollable
This was very evident in the outreach to the #EU project.
We have the A but we do not have the O – we are asking what would the O look like in a online social tech project?
The #liberal #foundation model will be forced onto us if the Fediverse is taken up buy large #Burocratic orgs like the #EU and yes the will be a figleaf of “democracy” placed over the self-selecting oligarchy that will be put into place by “power politics” that this path embeds.
This path is the default outcome.
Should we do something that is native to the Fediverse, and what would this look like?

Q. how can someone “take up” the fediverse while it’s based on free software and open protocols like #activitypub, that are available to everyone and cannot be taken up by anyone?

A. Microsoft used to be very good at “taking up” open source projects. Google is VERY good at doing this… I think this is a part of the crises in #FSF foundation currently. When a big institution brings money and resources into an underfunded project it takes power and shapes the agender.

Q. Platform cooperatives, owned and run by users. Coupling this with netcommons. I am trying to launch PoC in ****

A. This is a path. My experience of this path is problematic and have repeatedly seen “process geeks” kill social movements by ossification of process, without any idea of the damage they are actually doing.

The whole tech co-op movement smells like this issue. But I don’t know anufe about this to make a judgment so kinda put the movement to one side for now.

Looking for places where it works on the ground is always a good thing. Examples please.

To understand the social/tech #hashtags

To make sense of the social/tech #hashtags I’ve been using for the last decade, you need a simple but often avoided tool: ideology. This isn’t abstract theory for academics. It’s a practical way of seeing patterns in how people organise, build, and fight over the world. The idea has been around since at least Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and runs through modern political thinking via people like Antonio Gramsci. The core point is straightforward: large groups of people don’t act randomly. They cluster around shared assumptions, about power, about trust, about how the world works. Those shared assumptions are what we call ideology.

Over time, thinkers have “distilled” these patterns into rough categories. Left/right. Socialist/capitalist. Authoritarian/libertarian. These aren’t perfect boxes, but they’re useful shorthand. They let us quickly understand where a movement sits, what it values, and – crucially – how it’s likely to behave under pressure.

Now, here’s the bit people in tech often resist, this applies just as much to coding projects and digital communities as it does to governments or political parties. Code is not neutral, every project embodies choices: Who gets to decide? Who gets to participate? What is visible, and what is hidden? What is trusted, and what is controlled? These are ideological questions, even if developers don’t frame them that way.

Take a simple example – A project built around open standards, transparent decision-making, and shared ownership sits in a very different ideological space to – platform built around central control, proprietary systems, and user extraction. You don’t need to argue about labels to see the difference. But the labels – ideology – help you map it quickly. This is where the hashtags come in. They’re not random slogans – they’re shorthand for ideological positions:

#openweb → trust, interoperability, shared commons

#closedweb → control, enclosure, extraction

→ a practical framework for keeping things accountable

#dotcons → capitalism applied to network effects and data capture

#encryptionists → a drift toward fear/control when taken to extremes

#geekproblem → the cultural blind spot where technical people ignore social context

Each tag is a compressed way of pointing at a cluster of assumptions and behaviours. Once you see them as ideological markers, the landscape becomes much clearer. So why does this matter? Without this lens, people in tech tend to fall into two traps:

  1. Naivety

They believe they’re building “neutral tools,” and are surprised when those tools reinforce existing power structures.

  1. Confusion

They see conflicts – over moderation, governance, openness – but treat them as personal disagreements instead of ideological clashes. Using ideology cuts through both problems. It lets you say “This isn’t just a disagreement about features. It’s a disagreement about how power should work.” Applying it to real projects.

  • Let’s look at something like the #Fediverse – It leans toward decentralisation, openness, and community governance → ideologically closer to left/libertarian traditions. But it still contains tensions: moderation, funding, scaling → where different ideological pulls show up.
  • Or take corporate platforms – Centralised control, data ownership, profit extraction → clearly aligned with capitalist, top-down models

These aren’t accidents. They’re outcomes of underlying ideological choices. The hashtag story is a practical tool, not a purity test. This isn’t about forcing everything into rigid categories or arguing over who is “correct.” Ideology is a tool, not a weapon. Used well, it helps you understand why projects succeed or fail, predict where conflicts will emerge to make conscious choices about how you build. Used badly, it turns into dogma and pointless infighting – which is exactly the mess we’re trying to compost.

The #OMN path is grounded in a clear ideological stance of trust over fear, openness over control and commons over extraction. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or pure. It means the direction is explicit. And that’s the real value here: clarity.

Because if you don’t understand the ideological ground you’re standing on, you end up being pushed around by forces you can’t even see. Once you do see it, the landscape changes. Suddenly, the hashtags aren’t just words – they’re a map.

outreaching ActivityPub to the EU – draft

This was an interesting process playing a role to do the document – outreaching ActivityPub to the EU https://pad.public.cat/p/ngi0-ec-activitypub-liaison-presentation-2021-04-19#/13

Good to get an outcome from this:

  1. #activertypub as a cross-platform standard for #dotcons who operate in EU
  2. funding to further this – we would need democratic structures in the #fedivers style to make this real rather than a Eurocratic/power politics dead-end structures.
  3. Is the path with a good outcome – I have been involved in a number of groups/projects that have received Eurocratic money and the outcome has always been sub optional not to say a compleat disaster. I have seen no/little thinking to mediate this outcome.

So on balance good to do this BUT we do need not to go down unrealistic paths.

Am trying to shift the focus so that the story is more “interesting” and “representative” ActivityPub in the EU sense is a movement as much as a standard – standards by themselves have little/no value. If the story comes from the standard it is easy to ignore, and it will be ignored. A movement, with a bit of jingoism (the ActivityPub speck is maybe largely a European thing?) is an easer story to tell/hear.

Good points, the #fedivers while having a good community, as individuals we do tend to act like cats.

Prepping the presentation is going to be a “herding cats” so best to concentrate on #KISS and focus on the ordnance – what do they need to hear.

The second day we can reveal the all to human delight (and worry this brings)

securaty modeal for mastodon

securaty modeal for mastodon712×478 66 KB

 

Like the focus on European as this is true – the #Fediverse mirrors the federated European dream and clearly moves away the US tech imperialism (soft power) of the #dotcons something that is a #EU agender.

My thoughts/feelings are pragmatic on a good outcome.

We have a clash of languages and assumptions for example “surveillance capitalism” and the “social dilemma” both come from inside business and Silicon Valley thinking – so they are not good examples to use for an ActivtityPub presentation which itself is COUNTER Silicon Valley thinking and has its own way of expressing these issues. Just use natural descriptive language instead of quoting the terms.

I don’t have an issue with web01 and web02 yes they are not correct, but they do communicate.

 

The first question is why – It’s a good fit both strategically, in challenging the big US tech corporations dominance and tactically, in it being simple to implement and open to innovation as it is outside of anyone group control and agendas.

But we are unready as a community if a big institution like the EU takes up ActivityPub you can see this in what happened to RSS when it was taken up by the NYT.

#activertypub like #RSS and the #www came out of grassroots movements, they bring world views with them its WHY THEY WORK. Yes the world view are in part incompatible with #mainstreaming, so the is a strong burocratic desire to hide these world views and then push them out of view/existence.

Why work with big vertical organizations like the EU – The bridges, allow our careerists and wona get statues crew a way to cross over to the mainstream to feed. By doing this they strengthen the bridge by adding mainstream value to the bridges.

Then the refuges from the mainstream shitpile have an easy path to get to alternatives gardens when the stink becomes too much to live with.

The bridge shifts out “problems” and “brings” in resources, expirence and skills to build real alternatives.

We need bridges to the mainstream to build alternatives.

Though the process will likely not go well. When dealing with power politics/vertical orgs in the end the grassroots is ALWAYS shafted – it’s the normal outcome they can’t help this behaver. So we need to keep the bridges in place no matter how bad there behaver is, keep calm and carry on – their behaver is shit to shovel for compost to plant seeds to grow a better world.

Am thinking we need more structears “from chaos comes order” rather than “order over chaos” its trust or control.

In the internal process. It’s interesting that people coming into non #mainstreaming projects and spaces then push “common sense” #mainstreaming ways of working and outcomes can’t see that they are creating a problem.

You then inevitably get Clouds of smoke to cover up the mess. When it clears everyone is covered in soot. it’s not a good look for anyone.

We need ideas on how to mediate this without going down the #mainstreaming paths.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/webinar-with-the-european-commission-and-ap-community/1507/179

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/meeting-notes-for-prep-call-ec-webinar-19-april/1567

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/outreaching-activitypub-to-the-eu-are-we-ready/1589/11

 

The Fediverse – We need to now not fight like we always do

The problem isn’t that the #Fediverse has politics – it’s that people keep pretending it doesn’t, and then acting them out anyway in messy, unconscious ways. The Fediverse didn’t appear from nowhere, like all tech, it’s built on assumptions about power, trust, ownership, and human behaviour, and right now, those assumptions are colliding.

At its roots, the Fediverse grows out of we could call “stupid anarchism” – meaning not a deep, grounded anarchist practice, but a default instinct: no central authority, let people self-organise, trust will emerge. You can see this clearly in protocols like #ActivityPub – federation instead of central control, local autonomy over global rules. That’s the good part, the messy part is that this instinct often stops there, without the hard work of building sustainable trust, governance, or conflict mediation.

On top of this, you’ve got a layer of people trying to push toward cooperative or commons-based socialism. They’re asking real questions about shared ownership, moderation as collective care, and how to build infrastructure that isn’t captured by capital. But this layer is still thin. It exists more in intention and small experiments than in strong, lived structures.

Then pressing in from the outside – and increasingly from the inside – is #mainstreaming capitalism. Not the obvious corporate takeover (though that’s always lurking), but the softer version of growth metrics, influencer culture, branding, monetisation logic. You are seeing code-bases acting like platforms, admins acting like CEOs, and social capital turning into attention economies. It’s subtle, but it bends things.

And yes, there’s always an authoritarian shadow, not fully formed, not dominant, but present in tendencies with calls for tighter control “for safety” and central blocklists becoming de facto authority resulting in pressure for standardisation that removes local autonomy. This isn’t new. It’s just history repeating in a new technical wrapper.

If you want a clear historical parallel, look at Spanish Civil War, not because the scale is the same, but because the dynamics are familiar: anarchists, socialists, liberals, and authoritarians all operating in the same space, sometimes cooperating, often undermining each other, while larger power structures move in to shape the outcome. The tragedy there wasn’t just external force – it was internal fragmentation and failure to build shared process. That’s the uncomfortable mirror, back in the Fediverse, what do we actually have?

  • Anarchist roots – decentralisation, autonomy, federation
  • Proto-feudal remnants – big instances, influential admins, emerging “princes” of attention
  • Weak socialist layer – some cooperative thinking, but little durable structure
  • Encroaching capitalist logic – attention economies, soft monetisation, branding
  • Background authoritarian impulses – control creeping in through safety and scaling pressures

And sitting awkwardly across all this is the Social Web Foundation and similar efforts – trying to stabilise things, but often pulling toward NGO-style mediation and #mainstreaming rather than any native grounded, messy governance. So yes, we keep making horrible mistakes, not because people are stupid, but because we refuse to name the politics we’re already enacting. We default to blinded ideology without admitting it, then fight over symptoms instead of causes.

The result is predictable endless meta arguments, fragile communities that fracture under pressure, governance that either collapses or ossifies and energy burned on internal conflict instead of building. What’s missing isn’t more blinded ideology, it’s conscious mediation between them. This is where process work matters, if the #Fediverse is going to grow into something more real, it needs to stop replaying these patterns blindly and start building with open eyes:

  • accept the anarchist base – but add real trust structures
  • grow socialist practice – not as slogans, but as working governance
  • resist capitalist drift – especially the subtle, “friendly” versions
  • keep authoritarian tendencies in check – without pretending they don’t exist

And most importantly – stop trying to “win” the ideological argument, and start building processes where these tensions can exist without tearing everything apart. That’s the shift from repeating history to learning from it, because without process, all you have is ideology colliding with itself, and ideology alone doesn’t build anything that lasts.

If we don’t get this right, the likely outcome is simple – The Fediverse becomes either a nicer version of the platforms it was meant to replace or a fragmented landscape that never scales beyond small niches. If we do get it right, it becomes something rarer, a living, federated commons that can actually hold difference without collapsing. But that only happens if we stop pretending the politics aren’t there – and start designing for them.

Bluesky thinking of a “governance” body of the fedivers

“A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory”

What exists already?

The is a pretty sorted #ActivityPub crew, then some organizing sites/forums, the yearly conference. MOST importantly some “kings”, “princes” a bit of a tech/influencer aristocracy who currently hold much of the “power”.

Where do we go from here?

On online “governing body” to be a VOICE for the #Fediverse – all done in social code:

For background on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

We have a yearly voting/consensus (online) body made up of “stakeholders”

Who are the bulk stakeholders-representatives:

  • One voice one instance – if you run an instance you get a vote – put the URL in as long as it’s online last year your vote counts.
  • The is then an equal/matching number of votes based on a “user” lottery – have to opt in by adding your account name. This is refreshed every year.

Then we have other more “affiliate” stakeholders that have to be “ratified” through the body

  • Codebases – could be factored by installed based on instance registered above. Over a basic threshold and the body agrees.
  • fedivers events – any group that regularly runs events gets a “stakeholder” vote based on them doing it last year. If the body agrees to this.
  • fedivers support organizations get a vote if the body agrees to this.
  • activitypub standards crew – get votes through all the rest and can have a vote as a  founding fedivers org.

Groups and individuals could get more than one vote – which is fine.

This would give us

A representative “stakeholder” body that could accept proposals and make decisions.

How would the body work?

#techshit all ready has way to much LOOK at ME look AT me. I don’t like competitive elections as the shit float to the top

Let’s do a LOTTERY- from these “voters” that makes up the body a lottery decides 3-5 as #spokespeople then leave um to get on with it. There is a tick box to opt out of being in the “spokespeople” lottery, so you have too wont to do the extra work if you don’t want to, its opt out rather than opt in – this is important.

They have the power to speak for the body and thus the #fedivers and can make policy decisions on consensus minus one process. Or put policy directly to the body to be voted (majority vote) on by the stakeholders.  (of course they would be subject to recall/impeachment if they fuckup too much, say proposal and 2/3 vote of the body)

Levels of “voice” anyone with an #activertpub account can put in a public proposal to be voted on by the stakeholders – if it jumps that hoop then it can be edited/pushed by an open group of stakeholders though a semiformal online process to jump to an agreement. Agreements are acted on by the “spokespeople” up to them to take these ideas forward? If non are interested better luck next year with your agender and new spokes people.

Q. what dose digital online Community “democracy” look like

If it does not have elephants running around throwing paper planes it’s likely the wrong structure.

NOTE: of course these alt-ideas have been tried in the offline world, and they generally DO NOT work. But this is no reason to go down the dead end of “liberal” foundation governances that also does not work. People are trying these ideas in Citizens’ assemblies so no issue not to try them online.

Lotteries take the “power” out of power politics… likely worth an experiment.

Compost and shovels are needed.

The power of the voice

  1. User proposals are excepted by anyone who has an activertypub account- just an idea – this can become a group.
  2. User groups – a part of the process, these come from ideas getting a level of support of the stakeholders.
  3. User agreements come out of groups these can then be enacted by the spokes people if they are interested.
  4. Spokes people can start groups to reach agreements and can enact agreements.
  5. Consensus of spokes people (-1) makes agreements body wide.

What are the risks:

* need basic security and checks – to see if an instance still exists and is real. If a member account is actively posting or a pulpit – all of this can be done with flagging some of them by code some by people – flags stuff goes to the “security group”

* Groups can be captured by agenders – being open to all stakeholder members mediates this – we solve swamping by having a dynamic short non-voting time based on the number of new members in the group.

* Bad group of spokes people, it’s a lottery, it’s up to the groups to influence and as a last resort “impeach” if one goes a new one is chosen by lottery.

* The actual number of spokes people are dynamic depending on the number of stakeholders but between 3-5 is likely a good number.

UPDATE

  • The body is made up of stakeholder one for each instance – you wont a voice you run an instance and register it. This is clearly the voice of the #Fediverse as they are the people running it.
  • This is then balanced dynamically by the same number of “users” who are interested in the process, they are chosen by lottery from the registered accounts. Your choice to register or not your account as a possable stakeholder.

On registration the is a box you can untick if you do NOT do this then you are in the lottery to get “governing positions” Sortition – Wikipedia for a background on why this path.

Only people who want to be part of the governing body AND play an active role are enrolled in the lottery.

You second point “common voice” comes from the working groups, agen are made up of ONLY people who are interested in playing a role.

“serving the humans trying to communicate.” we get out of the way and let the humans work it out – we provide structer for the groups, we don’t define the groups.

SocialHub though an interesting tool has strong tech aristocracy which is not surprising as this is how almost all open source project run – the Fediverse is something different which is why we do so badly at governance. Let’s continue to use the SocialHub for #ActivityPub organizing and possibly governance though it has no tools that I have found for the governance.

The money is a subject up for discusern, am just using https://opencollective.com as example.

Help would be needed to do the proposal and #UX

UPDATE

The work flow would be:

Sign up for the site, then don’t untick the box for “do work” if you become a “stakeholder” every time a position opens the lottery picks a stakeholder to fill it if it is you and you would like to do the job – get to it. If you do not wont the job then resign and the lottery will pick a new person.

If you are not picked by the lottery for a job opening the is still a meany things you can do as a stakeholder in the groups. If you are not picked as a stakeholder you can still put ideas for the stakeholders to make into group decisions.

The outcome is something much more representative of the #Fediverse than we can currently think about let alone implement.

The is #nothingnew in this idea or implementation, some examples from Wikipedia

Examples

  • Law court juries are formed through sortition in some countries, such as the United States and United Kingdom.
  • Citizens’ assemblies have been used to provide input to policy makers. In 2004, a randomly selected group of citizens in British Columbia convened to propose a new electoral system. This Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform was repeated three years later in Ontario’s citizens’ assembly. However, neither assembly’s recommendations reached the required thresholds for implementation in subsequent referendums.
  • MASS LBP, a Canadian company inspired by the work of the Citizens’ Assemblies on Electoral Reform, has pioneered the use of Citizens’ Reference Panels for addressing a range of policy issues for public sector clients. The Reference Panels use civic lotteries, a modern form of sortition, to randomly select citizen-representatives from the general public.
  • Democracy In Practice, an international organization dedicated to democratic innovation, experimentation and capacity-building, has implemented sortition in schools in Bolivia, replacing student government elections with lotteries.[23]
  • Danish Consensus conferences give ordinary citizens a chance to make their voices heard in debates on public policy. The selection of citizens is not perfectly random, but still aims to be representative.
  • The South Australian Constitutional Convention was a deliberative opinion poll created to consider changes to the state constitution.
  • Private organizations can also use sortition. For example, the Samaritan Ministries health plan sometimes uses a panel of 13 randomly selected members to resolve disputes, which sometimes leads to policy changes.[24]
  • The Amish use sortition applied to a slate of nominees when they select their community leaders. In their process, formal members of the community each register a single private nomination, and candidates with a minimum threshold of nominations then stand for the random selection that follows.[25]
  • Citizens’ Initiative Review at Healthy Democracy uses a sortition based panel of citizen voters to review and comment on ballot initiative measures in the United States. The selection process utilizes random and stratified sampling techniques to create a representative 24-person panel which deliberates in order to evaluate the measure in question.[26]
  • The environmental group Extinction Rebellion has as one of its goals the introduction of a Citizens’ assembly that is given legislative power to make decisions about climate and ecological justice.[1]
  • Following the 1978 Meghalaya Legislative Assembly election, due to disagreements amongst the parties of the governing coalition, the Chief Minister’s position was chosen by drawing lots.[27]

“blue sky thinking”

UPDATE

Some stats

population ~ 4.152.753 accounts

active users ~ 1.192.023people

servers > 6.828 instances

Let’s be optimistic and say half the instances signed up that would be over 3000 instances stakeholders and thus 3000 user stakeholders for a total of 6000 and a number from affiliate groups. This number is likely too much, so we can put a limit to 100 chosen by lottery from the stakeholders instances, this is then matched by 100 from the user stakeholders for 200 stakeholders + 5-10 affiliates it’s up to the admin group to choice the right number to build a working community, if you don’t have enough good workers open the pool up if the is to much dicushern close the pool down, try different approaches.

UPDATE

Looking at this in conversation it becomes clear it is a 3 way split of stakolder groups: instances/users/builders&supporters with the last group in big groups could be the size of the others so just to higlight they would be treted in exactly the same way if they are over the number of the body then they would be chosen by lottery just like the others.

External discuern

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/organizing-for-socialhub-community-empowerment/1529

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/what-would-a-fediverse-governance-body-look-like/1497/2

UPDATE

https://gnu.tools

Now that is serendipity timeing.

This looks like a tech/process based attempt at grassroots governance. Must say straight out, in my expirence, I have seen many process lead models like this, and they have NEVER worked.

Though it is always a good thing to try iteration. And good to contrast this to the humane/serendipity based aproch that we have been working on at the #omn

I like it.

Churning of pointless tech projects

Too much built in alt-radical tech ends up feeding pointless #fashernista churn. New platforms, new protocols, new branding, new codebases tend to be endless motion with very little grounding in actual social need. People mistake novelty for progress, and the result is a constant cycle of abandoned projects, burnt-out developers, and fragmented communities.

That’s one of the reasons why #indymediaback matters. It is not another pointless radical tech project chasing fashion. It grows from the #nothingnew path, building around things that already worked socially, culturally, and politically before the current mess swallowed the #openweb.

The point of #nothingnew is not nostalgia, it’s mediation. Instead of endlessly reinventing tools and social structures, we look at existing working practices and compost the failures while keeping the value that already exists, we build from continuity rather than disruption.

For the first 5 years of the #fediverse, this often means creating #openweb replacements for existing #dotcons platforms. That has value, people need usable alternatives to corporate systems, but simply copying the logic of the #dotcons into federated code has real limits.

Code is never neutral, all code carries embedded assumptions, social relations, and ideology. When we directly replicate #dotcons platforms, we import the values of the #deathcult along with the interface design. Metrics, branding, influence economies, performative identities, engagement addiction, soft/hard hierarchies – all this gets reproduced inside supposedly “alternative” spaces.

This is where the problem needs mediating rather than denying. The path of #indymediaback is different because it starts from an existing radical social process, not from abstract tech blindness. #indymedia already had working publishing flows, distributed trust networks, collective moderation practices, and real-world activist communities. The technology existed to support those social relations, not replace them.

That means the real value of #indymediaback is not primarily the tech stack, even though the tech matters. The value is in rebuilding the social continuity that made the original project meaningful. Without that grounding, you likely just produce another empty platform that disappears into the pile of forgotten radical tech experiments.

Food for thought: the #geekproblem is often not actually interested in the #openweb as a human value network. Instead, parts of geek culture feed parasitically off the current mess – thriving on fragmentation, novelty churn, status games, and technical abstraction disconnected from lived social reality.

Feeding off the collapse of the #openweb while calling it innovation is still bowing down to the #deathcult. Seen this way, the need for change becomes clearer, that we need active mediation, not passive drift. Both carrot and stick. Support grounded projects that grow from real communities, and challenge the pointless churn that keeps draining energy away from building durable alternatives.

The #OMN is one attempt at this – a shovel for composting the inhuman mess, so something living can grow from it.

The #openweb is a space for both progressives and reactionary groups

One uncomfortable thing we need to address, calmly and constructively, is this: for the last decade, the right has been better at cooperating around #openweb media than the left.

This isn’t because the right has better politics. It’s because they’ve been more pragmatic about infrastructure. While much of the left argued endlessly about identity, fashion, theory, tone, and purity, right-wing and reactionary groups quietly built linking ecosystems: shared blogs, cross-posting networks, video hubs, newsletters, forums, and self-hosted media that reinforced each other. They understood, often instinctively, that control of distribution matters more than rhetorical perfection.

By contrast, the left has been worse than useless on some of the basics. Something as simple as linking between radical media projects has often failed. Projects compete for attention, split over minor differences, or collapse into internal conflict. Even when the politics align, cooperation doesn’t follow. The result? Fragmentation without any resilience.

Ironically, the few left-wing media projects that have succeeded at scale largely did so by abandoning alternative tech altogether. They built their audiences and careers inside the #dotcons – Twitter/X, YouTube, Facebook, Substack – accepting algorithmic dependency as the cost of survival. That choice brought reach, but at the price of autonomy, long-term stability, solidarity and real political leverage.

This isn’t a moral judgement – it’s a structural observation. Platforms reward individual brands, they block collective ecosystems. Once inside that logic, cooperation becomes optional and is often discouraged.

Where progressives have quietly seceded is not primarily in party politics or campaigning, but in lifestyle and cultural subcultures. This is where the #fediverse, #Mastodon, and other #openweb tools first took root. These spaces were driven by values – privacy, autonomy, care, consent – rather than reach or growth.

For a long time, that made them feel “apolitical” in the narrow sense. But in reality, they were deeply political, just not aligned with electoral or media spectacle cycles. They were building infrastructure for different kinds of social relations, not greed feed messaging machines.

Alongside this, we’re seeing tools being used more explicitly for radical and progressive agendas. Projects like #VisionOnTV and #IndymediaBack are reconnecting media with movement. Spaces like #Kolektiva bring an explicitly #fashionista anarchist politics into federated infrastructure. And frameworks like #OMN (Open Media Network) focus on shared process, trust, and governance rather than branding or growth.

This is important because as #mainstreaming accelerates and trust in the #dotcons continues to erode, both progressive and reactionary groups move further into the #openweb. The question is not whether this will happen, it’s how we shape the culture and norms of these spaces.

The right tends to treat tech instrumentally: as a tool for mobilisation, influence, and power accumulation. That can make them effective in the short term, but it often leads to centralisation, cults of personality, and brittle structures that fracture under pressure.

The left, when it’s at its best, treats tech as part of a broader social ecology: something that should support care, plurality, mutual aid, and collective agency. But when the left fails, it fails by refusing to build — mistaking critique for action, and purity for strategy.

The #openweb doesn’t automatically belong to anyone. It’s a terrain of struggle. If progressives don’t show up, cooperate, and do the boring work of linking, hosting, moderating, and sustaining infrastructure, others will fill that vacuum. This is why now is the time to make your space in this network and be heard.

Not by abandoning existing networks overnight, but by practicing a #stepback: one foot in, one foot out. Staying connected where people are, while actively building and strengthening open alternatives. Helping others take that step, rather than shaming them for not already being there.

If we could build #dotcons social media, we can build #openweb social infrastructure. If we could centralise power, we can federate it. The #openweb path is not a retreat, it’s a return to shared ownership, shared memory, and shared responsibility. And it’s long past time the left took it seriously again.

More here: https://activism.openworlds.info (this link is now offline due to lack of support)

Outreaching the openweb

With the current #openweb reboot going on there’s a lot of default thinking that is bad, and we do need to learn to judge between the good and bad paths if it’s to live up to its potential. Let’s start to give examples:

* Promoting silos vs promoting networks – as our current thinking is based on closed/silo thinking then when we promote #openweb projects we continue to use this thinking and promote silo/closed thinking rather than harder to understand open/network thinking.

– Protocols rather than platforms, balance talk about #Fediverse/#ActivityPub and #mastodon or branded projects. Our brand thinking is a failure of networking and contains strong unseen #deathcult thinking.

– Always outreach a wide selection of instances rather than a single one, the strength is in the network and not in the silo. Networks scale downwards, more/balanced, with stability is better than one “solution”. Be weary of sites that push themselves as the “place”.
– Networks are based on trust, in this look for groups/families of projects to support. Lose is always good, do not support “we are THE solution” closed siloed thinking. Write articles about a spread of views is better outreach as this is actually the project.
– be weary of projects that promise digital security/privacy first – these projects are always lying and thus dangerous and unhealthy for trust based networks. This is a hard-to-understand open/closed issue, we all need to have real conversations about this.
More to come…