On the #fediverse, we need to work/think about the need to cross-link the subject instance.
As, the idea of as instance as a community is lightly built into the code of mastodon. So individuals and groups need to push this into existence, then add issues to the #ygithub mastodon tracker to try and get this into the code (hard job due to #feudalism as governance in #FOSS).
As a first step, we need to build flows between subject instances by individually fallowing people cross subject instance, to leak the content into timelines. Then encourage people to look at the global and local timelines, not just their personal timeline, which is likely pretty empty.
Nurturing community’s – the tech is not going to do this for us, is my thinking. This is a problem as community’s have the power for social change/challenge we need to get out of this mess.
I am asking people to try working round the poor “community” side of the hard coded ideas of community in mastodon.
Feudalism is not a good model of governance, yes I understand this is the norm for #opensource and #freesoftware, but we do need to update to something more relevant at some point.
The #fediverse is a good opertunerty to try democracy, maybe?
We get into the details, of the #OMN you would get Boleyn tag changes on import, so you can auto translate guardian issued tags and add your own tags with both rules and manually.
These tags would flow out of your instances and could flow back to the guardian if you trusted each other.
The idea is to turn news stories/videos into “commons” objects with rich flowing metadata… done in a #KISS way based on trust/moderated link/flows
RSS bring in the legacy objects #activitypub is the main transport protocol.
It’s the news part of the #fediverse, our first implementation of this would be #indmediaback
The idea is to decenter the server, the data is in a soup that flows… #activertypub is two-way this is need to build the horizontal network, so the soup does not ONLY flow one way.
Nobody is in charge, no slaves, no masters. Only trusted or moderated flows. It needs to be two-way, though you are right people being human meany will be one way. BUT we are not building it that way 🙂
RSS brings the legacy in, and it’s a simple display format for embeds and passive news feeds etc.
I think people find the “nobody is in charge” bit a very hard thing to understand, even though we have built meany networks/social groups on this idea, and still do.
In the realm of tech, I call this #blocking the #geekproblem and to get anywhere we need to take the “problem” outa “geek” or we are left with the mess (in a bad way)
We need to start from a simple but often-missed point – different starting assumptions lead to different processes – and those lead to very different outcomes. This is the lesson that gets lost when radical #openweb projects are treated like just another app, or reduced to a polished #NGO common sense path.
The #OMN doesn’t come from that place. It grows out of a different worldview, rooted in the lived traditions of the commons, the early internet, and grassroots organising. This isn’t abstract theory; it’s a body of practice that has already worked in many different forms.
We’ve seen it before in the early #indymedia network giving global voice to decentralised movements in the #wikis and early blogospheres building shared knowledge in public and more recently, the #Fediverse (for example Mastodon) showing that federated systems can scale without (yet) falling under corporate control.
These are not utopian ideas, they are working proofs that transparent, decentralised, trust-based systems can function and sustain real communities. Yes, they have limits. But those limits are not simply weaknesses, they are part of what keeps them healthy. They enforce diversity, autonomy, and accountability at a human scale, rather than collapsing everything into a single, extractive system like the #dotcons.
Where things go wrong, the current problem is a loss of context. Many people entering tech and activism today don’t have access to this lineage, or only see half of it. Developers who understand federation but not community process often build technically elegant systems that don’t sustain real social use. You end up with silos that work, but don’t live. Activists who understand horizontal organising but not open standards end up relying on closed tools – Facebook groups, Google Docs, Slack – rebuilding their movements inside systems that ultimately undermine them.
In both cases, something essential is missing. Without a grounding in the subcultures that shaped civil rights movements, free software, and the commons, people default to what feels like “common sense” – but is really just #mainstreaming logic.
That tends to look like discomfort with open governance (“too messy”), preference for control and clarity over participation and suspicion of openness when it challenges institutional norms. The result is familiar: well-intentioned projects that centralise, burn out, and quietly disappear when funding cycles end.
The #OMN is an attempt to break that cycle, it’s not a single platform or product, it’s better understood as shared infrastructure – both social and technical – that helps reconnect what has been fragmented. Think of it as soil, not a finished structure. The aim is to reconnect grassroots practice with open technical standards, compost the backlog of half-built projects and abandoned ideas and create conditions where new work can actually take root and grow.
On the technical side, the building blocks already exist – protocols like ActivityPub and RSS. On the social side, we have long-standing practices of trust, transparency, and collective governance. What’s missing isn’t only the tools, it’s cultural memory, continuity of practice and the confidence to build differently.
If we’re serious about the #openweb, the shift is less about innovation and more about orientation from products → to processes, from platforms → to ecosystems, from control → to trust and from presentation → to practice.
This isn’t about rejecting institutions or funding outright. It’s about recognising that if everything is filtered through those to often blinded lenses, we lose the qualities that make the #openweb viable in the first place.
The challenge – and the opportunity – is to reconnect the layers of narrative with practice, funding with real needs and technology with lived community. Because without that, we don’t get growth, we just get better storytelling about stagnation.
#fediverse is an accidental#openweb reboot – largely driven by the #fashionistas. Which means – it’s like herding cats – hard to move, hard to align, not a bad thing, not a good thing – just the reality.
If we want to move beyond the mess, one path is #OGB – grassroots, #DIY, producer-led governance.
If not, then we live (and die) with the chaos. And do what we can to stop people bowing down to the #deathcult. Because even holding that line matters, if we want to keep the #openweb alive.
Q. #nlnet – The problem we face with funding http://hamishcampbell.com/2022/06/06/the-problem-we-face-with-funding/
A. KiCAD, some warrant canary and Armbian aren’t “open internet” projects by any stretch of imagination, but the ones relating to routers and mesh networks are. They’re “open internet” at the infrastructure level – like Guifinet or Freifunk.
Q. yep and are useful for a tiny number of people so worth supporting. BUT the call-out for the funding is for a much wider social affect in the #openweb, so the is an obvious #geekproblem can you see this?
A. Whatever funding they put into the applications layer will be cautious because they probably don’t want to be dealing with Twitter-like problems. Infrastructure is more narrowly technical, and so it’s hard for that to blow up into a scandal, which could happen if they were more directly funding social networks.
Q. yep… but the #openweb needs better USER-FACING code not more backend, the backend is not helping to address the social problems we face where it is being digested by the #dotcons and then adding more mess to compost. How to communicate this problem to the geeks?
A. Really it’s the backend – the plumbing – which needs more funding, because when you peel off the layer of ultra-trendy ActivityPub apps underneath you will find tools and systems which have been neglected for years if not decades. The application layer is currently a house built on sand. Or quicksand if you include Javascript.
Q. We do see the #geekproblem here you are right, and at the same time the view is irrelevant when you step back to look at the problem.
An example, #activertypub would have been still born without the outreach social UX of #mastodon. We have the #fediverse due to the social side of the mastodon project.
Adding more backend is feeding the #dotcons not the #openweb because we need BOTH, and we need to fund both. Yes, we can play “safe” and build tools to feed the future #dotcons, or we can do both and live life with the possibility of social change challenge…
UPDATE
Talking about the problem:
Q. Am thinking the #fedivers is in a bad way, so being angry and annoyed is understandable. The #openweb momentum we had is stumbling, the people sellingout growing as funding shifts… the problems grow, am interested in ideas to mediate these? The fedivers is a CULTURE first and a standard second… ideas?
A. I agree with your observation on the state of the fediverse. And on the cultural aspect too. I envision a Peopleverse (social) that is enabled / supported by the Fediverse (technical). And much more diverse social activity taking place here, that goes well beyond microblogging. And the funding should shift accordingly. You can fund as many innovation projects as you wish, but if the adoption of the technology grinds to a halt, then there’s a high risk this money is wasted.
It’s encouraging that more people are questioning whether we really need another new tech project. The truth is that most new projects are unnecessary. They solve imaginary problems, reinvent existing tools, or add to the growing pile of #techshit.
Before building anything, do a #4opens review. Ask simple questions: Is it open? Does it strengthen the commons? Does it distribute power? Does it solve a real social problem? Then publish that review. Let’s build a culture where communities evaluate technology together instead of chasing novelty. We need to do better.
The last decade of #techchurn has buried us under mountains of abandoned apps, duplicated projects and half-finished platforms. This isn’t just a technical problem; it’s a social one. Years of #mainstreaming have stripped away social purpose, while endless reinvention has consumed the time and energy that could have gone into maintaining and improving what already worked.
Some of this mess needs to be composted, not everything should be saved. The useful ideas, working code and lived experience should be recovered and reused. The rest can decompose into fertile ground for building something more humane.
From a grassroots perspective, one of our biggest problems is that many of the alternatives we once had have been hollowed out. Community media, social centres, cooperative technology and radical organising didn’t disappear because they failed completely. Many were absorbed, professionalised or defunded by the #NGO world, turned into projects for #fashernistas, or simply worn down by forty years of #deathcult thinking disguised as “common sense”.
That history matters. Many people wonder why motivation feels so low today. Part of the answer is that previous generations experienced real alternatives. Imperfect, often messy, but real. Anarchist projects, ecological movements, cooperative media, community technology and socialist experiments created spaces where people could participate rather than simply consume.
Most of those spaces have been dismantled, enclosed or forgotten. So let’s stop pretending we have to invent everything from scratch. Let’s recover what worked. Let’s learn from what failed. Let’s reboot the best of those traditions using federated, #4opens infrastructure like the #Fediverse and #OMN. Not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as the foundation for new experiments rooted in today’s reality.
Innovation isn’t about endless novelty, it’s about carrying forward what has lasting value. That’s the path beyond #techchurn.
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…
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
Q. I quoted the “malice” rule, but what I meant is that you seemed (to me) to assume that somebody had done that to you on purpose, but you updated to a new version of some software and did not test what it would look like to somebody who was not logged in before you posted a link that you saw from your logged in account.
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…
A. The changes am interested in I likely put an issue on the #peertube issues tracker a year or two before covering the use case, a discuern happens. They get round to “implement” the feature, it’s not in a way I would have, rather they recreate the #geekproblem each time. It’s as if they can’t do anything else but do this.That’s why I asked, I think they have a use case, am cureuas.
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
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 🙂
When working in alt/grassroots all #mainstreaming (funding) agender have shit outcomes, it’s normal.Though all #mainstreaming gets its life from the very grassroots, it shits apon. Thus the composting metaphor, hope that makes sense 🙂
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.
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 🙂
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.
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” 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.
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.
