The Mess We Make (Again… and again)

Ten years ago, I remember being told, often condescendingly, with smug certainty, that hosting in the cloud was the future, and that what I was working on, #DIY grassroots, self and community hosted tech was the dinosaur, a dead end, old obsolete thinking, out of touch. Despite spending years pointing out the obvious flaws in this thinking, I got only that my “native” path was irrelevant, for Luddites, they said. Legacy thinking, dead tech walking.

Well, here we are, a decade later. And guess what the cloud: It was expensive, less performant, less secure, and a gateway to increasingly exploitative pricing models. This isn’t hindsight bias, the warning signs were always there. But many #fahernista and #geekproblem people get caught up in the glossy surface and tech hype mess, repeating the same mistake we’ve made across generations of #geekproblem tech, believing scale and #PR buzzwords were synonymous with any progress at all.

Let’s now be clear on what actually happened.

We handed over infrastructure to a handful of giant platforms that lock us in and bleed us dry.
We lost resilience, any sovereignty, and basic control over our own data.
We normalized rent-seeking as a business model.
We pushed decentralization off a cliff and called it “abstraction.”

Meanwhile, local compute got cheaper, storage exploded in affordability, bandwidth costs continued to fall, #dotcons threats increased. And guess what? Running things locally started making sense again, just like it always does when the #PR smoke and mirrors clears.

The lesson, which we need to now bring to #crypto and #AI, just because something is fashionable doesn’t make it in any way real or sustainable. That tech #PR hype cycles aren’t innovation, it’s marketing. And when you stop looking at the core trends (cost, control, resilience) and just ride the buzz, you’ll end up where we are now, mess, bloated budgets, shrinking trust, and a growing #techshit pile to clean up.

As ever we need to re-learn the value of #KISS grounded thinking, to remember that local, #4opens, transparent, and interoperable #openweb systems aren’t retro, they’re essential. This isn’t about nostalgia for the old paths, It’s about having power over our basic infrastructure again. The cloud, at the time and in looking over our shoulders, was smoke and mirrors, a detour, it’s now past time to get back on the real progressive #Fediverse path.

History has a lot to say on the peasant revolt vs. liberal half-measures

Can bureaucracies join the #Fediverse? Yes – with WordPress + ActivityPub

Let’s stop pretending every institution has to “go social” by building new habits, communities, and platforms from scratch. We already have a solid, simple tool that can bridge them from the #dotcons into the #Fediverse: WordPress + the ActivityPub plugin.

Institutions want control – That’s OK. Bureaucratic institutions, local councils, unions, media orgs, #NGOs, aren’t designed for fast, messy social interaction. They won’t control over moderation, messaging, and timelines. That’s how they work, the good news is that they don’t have to surrender that control to leave the exploitative corporate platforms.

There is a path to step sideways into the #openweb by using tools they already trust, #WordPress, plugging into the #Fediverse with a few small adjustments. Here is how this works:

Use WordPress as a public publishing hub, it already supports articles, media, comments, and user permissions. It’s familiar to thousands of comms and IT staff.
Install the ActivityPub plugin. This lets every post become a Fediverse-native object. Readers on Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica etc. can follow and share the content.
Keep moderation tight. Comments from the Fediverse can be held for review by default. Content inflows are closed, moderated, or opened based on trust levels.
Build distribution without chasing followers. The content flows outward. Others can quote, reply, remix – but the source stays under local control.

The alternative? Indie News, if not WordPress, the more adventures could host a dedicated Fediverse news instance (like a rebooted #IndymediaBack) or even set up a microblogging server using software like WriteFreely or Plume. These would support long-form or short-form posts, stay focused on the institution’s goals, avoid chasing engagement metrics from #dotcons. And again, comments and responses could be moderated or disabled, depending on needs. No spam tsunami. No culture wars. Just distribution and visibility – on native #openweb terms.

Why this matters, many public institutions want to move away from Facebook and Twitter, but feel locked in. They know those platforms are toxic, yet all the people are there. But what if we stopped treating the #Fediverse like a chaotic free-for-all and started showing how it can also work for structured, “responsible” publishing? WordPress already has millions of users. The ActivityPub plugin is mature, maintained, and already working. All it takes is will, and a little guidance.

Benefits at a glance:

Maintain editorial control
Publish to a growing #openweb ecosystem
Avoid vendor lock-in and algorithmic censorship
Build real, direct relationships with communities
Help decentralize digital infrastructure for the public good

If an institution can run a blog, it can join the Fediverse. If it can post on Facebook, it can do better. Let’s stop waiting for perfect platforms and start using the tools we already have, WordPress is an underrated bridge from the bureaucratic world into a better, fairer, and more resilient #openweb path.

Why Doesn’t Every City Have a Fediverse Server?

Why Doesn’t Every City Have a Fediverse Server?

A reflection on #Oxford, the web, and the invisible gap we’re not naming. It’s a simple question, but one that says a lot about where we’re at with the #Fediverse and the broader #openweb reboot: Why doesn’t every city have its own Fediverse server?

I’ve been looking – specifically for my city: Oxford, UK. And the answer seems to be… Nope. Nothing. Not a single clearly local Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed or similar instance. This might seem trivial, but it’s actually a big red flag about where we are failing to root the #Fediverse in the real world.

Wait – Why should cities have their own servers? Because servers are more than just infrastructure, they’re community spaces. They are places where shared context matters. In a healthy #openweb ecology, you’d expect to see:

A Mastodon instance for Oxford academics and students
A Lemmy server for Oxfordshire campaigners sharing local issues
A Mobilizon instance for local events, climate actions, social meetups
A PeerTube or Castopod space archiving local talks, indie music, alt-news

These are the digital town halls we should be building. But we’re not. Why? Oxford isn’t just any city. It is where the World Wide Web first found public ground in the UK. I used the first web browser in a room set aside for “the internet” here almost 30 years ago, it was a wonder. It’s a place that is full of geeky students, hackers and programmers. With a deep history of academic freedom and radical thought, that has long served as a symbolic cradle for digital culture. If we can’t see clear Fediverse infrastructure here, something’s broken, and not just in Oxford.

What’s holding us back? Possibilities, the myth of spontaneity? We assume that because the Fediverse is “open,” it will naturally emerge everywhere. It won’t. Like any commons, it needs cultivation, volunteers, funding, attention.

Invisible technical barriers, running a Fediverse server isn’t hard, but it’s also not beginner-friendly. And even “geeky” students are under immense pressure, rents, loans, side gigs. Who’s got time to run infra?

Cultural disconnection, we have a user class and a developer class, and they rarely mix. No one’s stepping up to build for their community, because the tech feels distant, or worse, owned by someone else.

#NGO capture & misplaced focus, a lot of #FOSS energy gets eaten up by grant-funded projects that serve other bureaucratic ends. Meanwhile, grassroots needs, like “a city-based server for sharing local stuff”, get overlooked or dismissed as unscalable.

What do we do? Let’s flip the question around. Why NOT have a Fediverse server in every city? If we started treating servers like digital community gardens, then:

Local campaigns could run Lemmy or Mastodon spaces
Libraries could host Pixelfed galleries of community art
Climate groups could run Mobilizon for mutual aid and action
Neighbours could share events and info, outside of corporate silos

Oxford needs a server, so does your city. This is a callout – and a call-in, if you’re a sysadmin, activist, student, tinkerer, or just someone who cares about your city and the #openweb, start asking: where’s our server? Let’s build it. Let’s map it. Let’s make the Fediverse a place of places, not just a cloud of abstract URLs. We need to get the #Fediverse out of “nerd island” and into the towns and cities we actually live in.

On the history of the web and Oxford (BBC). Want to help start a #MastodonOxford or similar? Let’s talk. We have the tools. We just need the will.

Programming Mission: Let’s Fix the Fediverse Discovery Gap

UPDATE: On this needed path, let’s try and focus on diversity of codebases. As the is currently too much focus on vertical, #Mastodon is locked into its own trajectory, a closed loop of PR, hierarchy, and “favourites over merit”, so trying to wrestle it into something else is a waste of energy.

The smart path is to let it drift into its own #mainstreaming Fediverse while we work on the #openweb reboot without importing it mess path. The wider challenge is making sure our reboot isn’t just “not Mastodon” but actually functional, grounded, and healthy, with native governance, trust-based collaboration, and the #4opens at the core.

If we’re talking plan, I’d frame it as:

Draw the line – Publicly define what’s “native” openweb culture and what’s toxic carry-over from #geekproblem and #NGOcapture.

Build in public – Open docs, open processes, open code, open governance (#4opens), so trust compounds over time.

Seed alternative centres of gravity – Forge small, working nodes that can federate and interoperate without depending on a single code-base and Dev crew.

Culture over code – Prioritize conviviality, generosity, and horizontal decision-making before feature creep.

Pull people sideways – Attract users and devs who are frustrated with the PR-walled gardens, not by attacking mainstreaming Mastodon but by showing something that feels better to use and be part of.

Programming Mission: Let’s Fix the Fediverse Discovery Gap

Here’s a small but powerful challenge for #openweb builders – and a perfect #DIY project if you’re fed up with the current #geekproblem. I’ve been trying to find #Fediverse instances that actually cover my town, Oxford, UK, so I can help promote and grow them locally. You’d think this would be simple, right? But… nope.

Tried the standard “instance pickers”? Dead ends. Tried generic web searches? Useless #SEO sludge. Tried maps like this one, a good start https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/fediverse-near-me_828094#7/52.076/-1.714, but nothing covering Oxford.

Why is this happening? Because our current tools focus only on technical facts (server specs, software used, uptime, etc.) and ignore the uncontrolled (dangerous) metadata that actually makes discovery meaningful:

What’s the instance for?
Who does it serve?
What community does it represent?
Where is it rooted geographically or socially?

This is the #geekproblem in action: great code, but no way to find things people actually want to use. What’s the fix? Someone (maybe you?) could create a community-focused discovery tool that:

Encourages instance admins to tag with location, community, topics, etc.
Provides search/filter UI that works for real people, not sysadmins
Uses the Fediverse’s open standards (#ActivityPub + #microformats) to pull this info in
Maybe even integrates with OpenStreetMap or a simple opt-in geo-tagged registry
Outputs something friendly – like “Find your Fediverse community in your town”

This is not a hard project, it’s a weekend hack for someone who cares, but it has real social value as it helps bridge infrastructure to lived communities. That’s the core of the #openweb reboot.

So for people who can’t see why this matter. If we want the Fediverse to grow beyond techies and Twitter refugees, we need to help people find their people. Local discovery is key. Place-based communities are still powerful, especially when rebuilding trust, mutual aid, and shared media in a collapsing world.

So, want a simple mission? Build a tool that helps people find #Fediverse instances by town, city, or region. Start with Oxford, but make it global. Make it open. Make it federated. And when you do? I’ll be the first to push it out.

#Fediverse #OMN #openweb #4opens #FediverseDiscovery #programmingchallenge #Geekproblem #MutualAid #CodeForGood #FOSS #localweb #trustnotcontrol #KISS

Update: my suggestion of path, a simple UX:

A few dropdowns over the map,

Region (countries are regions, anti-nationalistic)
City/area (a county or city)
local (village, area in city)
Them maybe latter hyper local (but not for now)

Then we have subject – it would be normal to have a multi subject hashtag map, that updates on each click – adding the clicks to a list on the side – with “new button” to jump back to start.

Then you have advanced for the normal tech stuff… which currently is the front end on most pickers. This would also be displayed on the info box for each instance on the map, so still central, just not AT THE FRONT.

UPDATE: can just pull all the existing data out of the current sites like https://instances.social/list#lang=en&allowed=&prohibited=&min-users=&max-users= as these are all #4opens. So the projected site could be up and running with full data in little time. Yes, you would have to ask people to tag their installs to geolocate their instances. This could be done a hard way or a simple #KISS way like any admin in the instance adding a #hashtag with a geolocation hashtag after it. Then periodically go through the instance list and spider all admins on each instance if you find the hashtag – add the next hashtag as a geolocation or something as simple as this.

Ideas in comments, please.

UPDATE: this is this one https://fediverse.observer/map works better still nothing in Oxford – it seems to be pretty random with little relevance to subject and area, is it by IP address, that would be #geekproblem

Why Doesn’t Every City Have a Fediverse Server?

This is a story of power, plain and simple

Over the last few years, we’ve been watching a familiar story unfold, we’ve seen repeat itself in radical spaces, tech movements, and grassroots networks for decades. It starts in the grassroots with “progressive” #fashernistas (yes, them) pushing themselves into the front to speak for “us.” They talk the talk of decentralisation, care, community, and #FOSS ethics. They wear all the right hashtags: #opensocialmedia, #Fediverse, #commons, #techforgood. But when you look at how power is actually exercised behind the scenes, it’s something else entirely. This is a story of power, plain and simple. Not in the dramatic “revolutionary” sense. But in the subtle creep of careerism, institutional capture, and “safe” social capital games that flatten the radical and uplifts the “palatable”.

Let’s take a few examples from the #activertypub world, first with the #SocialHub stagnation, this open space was originally created by the grassroots crew to shape the standards of the decentralised web, It was originally a commons, protocol-building and governance exploration space. So, what happened? The people now “leading” came from lifestyle #fashionista activism and wannabe NGO circuits, who in the end were all trying to be embedded in the institutional funding environments, or visiting from the safe academic bubble. And thus they brought with them the dogmas of safe spaces, of “emotional consensus,” “hidden affinity group governance,” and “(ex)inclusive dialogue”… that JUST SO happened to exclude the radical and messy paths that are actually native to the #openweb, the bad mess they then made, ended up only pushing the dogma of the #geekprolem as it was the ONLY path they could imagine controlling in a way that would not threaten the thin connection to the institutions they were feeding from. This behaviour so often slips into forms of parasitism, which is not a good thing at all.

Then we have the current #Fediverse outreach infrastructure capture, where we’ve seen the same class of actors attach themselves to the most visible projects – like Mastodon, ActivityPub standards, and now “Fediverse governance.” They secure seats on boards. They host conferences with glossy branding and friendly logos. They use these controlled spaces to then push out “code of conduct” documents and “safe space” branding… while closing and excluding the very messy native infrastructure of discussion and direction that is both native and needed.

Examples? #Mastodon’s GitHub, issue tracking, and moderation are all tightly controlled by a small clique around the project founder. Community voices are kinda tolerated at best, discarded at worst. The project is moving onto the #NGO path, no bad thing in its self, but with its years of pushing its own branding as THE Fediverse, it becomes a bad thing. In this, there is a very real debt of damage they need to pay back – as a part of a functioning gift economy – saying sorry and admitting mistakes would be a good first step.

Then we have the example of the #FediForum events, pushing into the space blindly, with zero historical context or any actual knowledge, to represent the #activertypub ecosystem. The problem is they paywalled, which lead “naturally” to increasingly gate keeping with #NGO commercial interests being pushed to the front to represent “us”. When the radical and experienced grassroots voices obviously don’t get involved, as they simply refuse to step over the paywall. This is an ongoing mess, that we do need to compost and not only with #fashionista outrage but with real working paths, we used to do this, but we can’t any more – why?

Over the last few years we have had proposals for genuine horizontal governance, that could have been used to shift this mess making and to actually shifts power outward – but these were labelled “too messy,” “too political,” or “not the right time.” This is not accidental, it is liberalism functioning as control – with a smile. So… what can we do? Let’s be clear: This is a power issue. It’s not about bad intentions. It’s about how power is used, and then abused, even in the so-called “horizontal” paths.

The first thing we have to do is recognise the smell of #NGO-style liberalism that so easily hides itself in good intentions, grants, DEI language, and “process.” But it then ends up:

Disempowering community autonomy
Replacing radical potential with “professionalism”
Marginalising away activists and messy real-world projects
Recreating the same vertical hierarchies, just with better “open” branding

Composting this mess is needed to break the cycle:

Build and back native projects. The only way to push back against capture is to grow infrastructure from within our communities, like: #OMN (Open Media Network) #OGB (Open Governance Body). These must be trust-based, not credential-based. That means supporting those doing the work without demanding they translate it into pointless and most importantly powerless NGO-speak to be taken seriously.
Use the #4opens as a filter, this simple social retelling of #FOSS is designed precisely to push out the 95% of #techshit and focus energy on projects with: Open source Open data Open standards Open governance. Apply these consistently, and the parasite class will struggle to keep and find a foothold.
Push for messy, lived governance, stop waiting for perfect systems. We need to prototype imperfect, transparent, accountable governance now. It should be: Based on trust, not rules-lawyering Driven by use, not representation Grounded in solidarity, not status
Refuse the “leader class”, just because someone has a title, a grant, or a #dotcons following, doesn’t mean they speak for us. Call out the unaccountable influence. Politely or not. Let’s not let careerists write our futures.:

The Fediverse path could be the most important #openweb reboot of the commons of this decade. But it will only be that if we keep it rooted in social power, not polished #PR and #NGO mess. We don’t need new kings. We need more gardeners, to work together to compost the piles of #techshit and keep the space open and safe.

I think when our #fahernistas say to us “what have we done, please be nice to us, you’re not welcoming.” We need to reply: Am happy to be nice #KISS, just stop being a prat in this space please.

It’s really simple, please stop being (an often nasty) prat.

The Mess We Make (Again… and again)

NGIFORUM2025 is timidly touching sense

It’s good to see events like #NGIFORUM2025 as it’s trying to be on the path of the #Fediverse and the wider #openweb reboot which are real forces for social good, messy, hopeful, and grounded in decades of grassroots digital culture, which we do need to support. BUT we also need to speak honestly, as these spaces are not healthy by default.

Too often, they are co-opted by #NGO and institutional actors who bring with them a dangerous kind of “common sense”, what I’ve long described as the parasite class. We see this clearly at #NGIFORUM and similar #NGO events. Despite the energy and good intentions, the dominant framing is stuck in a narrow, #neoliberal logic:

More funding for shiny #techfixes.
Token gestures to social issues.
Endless discussion about scalability, compliance, branding, and “the market.”
Panels where “on-topic” needs reality-checking and “off-topic” is often the path to sense.

This is not the #openweb native path, and what we need is more shovels and composting, to grow the real grassroots native paths, with open projects from the messy soil of lived social experience. Not more polished “innovation theatre.” And crucially: we need to bring activism back into these spaces – not as token #fashernista crap, but as lived, rooted practice. We need to embed activist tech into the core of these events, not leave it in the hallway as is the current norm.

Because let’s be honest, too much of what’s being showcased is just more #techshit to compost. Take the role of NGI funding (Next Generation Internet): It could be a powerful tool to fund the future of a people-powered web. But right now? It’s structured to reward isolated hard tech with narrow deliverables, and punish anything messy, social, or disruptive. That’s upside-down.

The development side of open-source should be anti-commercial – in its process, not necessarily in its usage. That means public funding should support the huge social layer that keeps FOSS and #openweb projects alive:

Community organising.
UX design from lived needs, not compliance charts.
Onboarding and trust-building.
Accessibility work.
Documenting process for reuse and remix.

But currently these parts are entirely unfunded, and that is pushing us into the arms of the parasite class’s of all types. We are walking backward into the future, again, projects without people, users, and support are dead projects. No matter how elegant the codebase is.

One thing that the event brings up is that we need to shift policy, national governments and #EU to actively intervene in the monopolies running the current internet. Both mobile and fixed-line networks need to be opened up to allow for grassroots, peer-to-peer, and local hosting paths to flourish. The current centralised infrastructure is a block to the native #openweb, and we can’t “build better” on broken foundations.

The also needs to be a cultural shift, to unblock the #geekproblem. This is not a call-out – it’s a call-in. The feedback is there, i’ve personally been working on this issue for over a decade, what we’ve seen is a cycle: Working in a small way… failing in a big way… repeating.

It’s not personal, it is structural. And we can do better, if we compost the fear of doing things differently. A practical example, we need more points that are currently deemed “off-topic.”
Because what’s “on-topic” in these spaces is just branding and polite theatre. And that’s exactly how the #dotcons rose to dominance in the first place.

We are at risk of simply recreating their culture in softer tones. Let’s not do that. Let’s take a breath and reflect on what we’re actually building, it’s not a rhetorical question. This is not abstract.

Because if we keep defaulting to #neoliberal “common sense,” if we ignore the reality of climate collapse, digital authoritarianism, and infrastructure lock-in, then we’re just dancing around the edges of a very real #deathcult.

Let’s do the real work, let’s dig, plant, compost, and build trust. Let’s reclaim the tools and shape the #openweb around care, not control. Because anything less? It is just another empty panel on a sinking ship.

“All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.”
— Oscar Wilde

#Fediverse #OMN #4opens #commonsnotplatforms #mutualaid #socialroots #trustnotcontrol #KISS #NGIFORUM2025 #NGIforum #nlnet

It’s becoming a problem

It’s becoming a problem. When people start asking, “Is @_elena the first genuine superstar of the Fediverse?” – we should all pause. This isn’t idle praise, it’s the reproduction of celebrity culture, liberal imperialism, and vertical hierarchy in a space that explicitly set out to reject those structures.

Have you ever thought – just for a moment – that this might be the completely WRONG path for a horizontal network like the #Fediverse? Yes, we need mess. Yes, we need experimentation. But this? This is #mainstreaming in its most seductive form, a soft power grab, hiding behind friendly faces and growing marketing gloss.

Both #pubconf2025 and #fediforum, and the people who attend them, are becoming a showroom for this liberal capture, promoting star-making and platforming over community process and open governance. It’s an “open” mirror of the conference-industrial complex, repackaged for the #dotcons-weary.

We’ve seen this before: #NGOs turned movements into funding funnels. Influencers replaced organizers. Polite panels replaced fourm-level solidarity. It’s been happening here the last few years. But we do need to remember, the Fediverse isn’t a playground for fame, it’s a commons, to distribute power – not concentrate it. We don’t need to unthinkingly push people down the superstars’ path. We need peers, comrades, care, conflict resolution, and actual shared infrastructure.

So let’s be honest, if you’re pushing “the first superstar of the Fediverse,” you’re not pushing decentralization, you’re pushing brand culture, mainstreaming logic, and attention economies repackaged for liberal feels. That’s not radical. That’s not native, it’s not what we came here to build.

Let’s compost this celebrity logic before it roots too deep. Let’s stay messy, collaborative, and resist the temptation to crown anyone. Because if we don’t? We’re just rebuilding the same old pyramids – with slightly alt avatars.

Maybe we need to look agen at the more #mainstreaming #dotcons path. The not-so-subtle message we need to remember on social media: Dictators hate to be ignored. Especially on their “special days” – birthdays, elections, court appearances, or orchestrated spectacles. These moments are designed to dominate the media cycle and, by extension, the social media algorithms.

They thrive on attention, and whether that attention is praise or outrage, it fuels their visibility and power. Here’s the social tech they exploit:

When you doomscroll their face, the algorithm sees interest.
When you post disgust, the algorithm sees engagement.
When you argue with trolls, you’re boosting the signal of the original post.
When you call them names, it still centres them.

That’s the #dotcons feedback loop, engagement is king, and dictators know how to play that game. Let’s break this circle, on these days, do something different:

Share stories of local mutual aid.
Link to historical context that exposes the long game of these power grabs.
Boost voices that decentralize attention, not concentrate it.
Post about books, direct action, food sovereignty, climate organizing, and tools for collective autonomy.
Highlight grassroots projects like #OMN, which are building sustainable, decentralized alternatives.

This is how we take the air out of #mainstreaming fires. Starve the algorithm and feed the resistance. Focus on things that actually matter, remember: not engaging is a strategy. Ignore the circus. Build the commons.

#KISS

Why does any of this matter?

Because power matters, and power is never given – it’s taken, built, and at its best, shared. That’s why we care. That’s why the #Fediverse matters.

Let’s rewind: Private property wasn’t born from reason or consensus. It came from someone with a club drawing a line in the sand and saying:

“Cross this, and I’ll kill you.”

That’s the origin of power in the current #mainstreaming paths – violence, enclosure, and exclusion. This is not the foundation of the #Fediverse.

The Fediverse flows from a different source, built in open, social webs, where the lines we draw are “blowing in the wind.” Yes, a lot of people don’t get this. That’s why they try to jam it back into old models: branding, control, platforms, “governance,” and “best practices.” They want order. They want power they can hold.

But here’s the thing, There is such a thing as society, and we need to build tools that reflect this, not deny it. The beauty, and challenge, of the #Fediverse is that there is no central governance.
And that’s a good thing. Because it means we aren’t trapped by legacy systems of control. We don’t have to fit into the broken economies and top-down paths that dominate the “real” outside world.

The Fediverse was born from the “cats” of libertarianism and anarchism (without the [O]). And in this space, we have the radical opportunity to build different, native paths, based in trust, mutual aid, and the #4opens. But to keep building this, we have to compost the mess pushing: People pushing “common sense” corporate-style governance are part of the problem, they want to tame the wild, they want hierarchy where there should be networks, they want control where we need flow.

To be native to the Fediverse, we have to stop importing “common sense” control systems. Instead, we must use code – and culture – to build native #openweb society. Tools that empower. Processes that are messy, open, federated, and yes, hard to define. Organizing for community empowerment need to embed anti “common sense” in the same way the Fediverse is anti-enclosure. Because if we forget this… We don’t build a better web, we just recreate the old one with new colours. Let’s not just repeat history, let’s not draw new hard lines in the sand with the same threat of old clubs. A step away from this is to build bridges, not borders.

In the current global mess, it would be helpful to talk about the #PR industrial-scale air freshener being sprayed to mask the stench of collapse. An example, while Gaza burns and genocide unfolds in real time, too many on the soft left are busy sniffing their own ideological asses.

“Oh, but they used a plane once…”

“Oh, that project isn’t perfect, so let’s not support it at all…”

“Oh, their anti-Nazi message is just a header image. That’s clearly useless propaganda…”

This is troll logic. This is #psyop brainrot, it’s weaponized idealism used to undermine action.

“Sure, they’re doing good - but not perfect. So discredit, disengage, demoralize.”

It’s the tactic troll farms use on the #dotcons to feed manipulative, because it appeals to insecure egos and a culture soaked in #stupidindividualism, where the look of moral “purity” is more important than building power, solidarity, or impact.

And too many fall for it, because they don’t see it for what it is: A feedback loop that leads nowhere. A stalling tactic. A demobilizer. It’s not accidental, it’s designed to stop us acting.
It’s strategic passivity masquerading as moral high ground.

“Don’t link to that, it’s not flawless.”
“Don’t share that resource, the font is ugly.”
“Don’t support that campaign, they once took a selfie on a plane.”

Are you serious? While people are being murdered by states, you’re sniffing out aesthetic imperfections? Here’s #KISS:

Nobody wins by demanding perfection.

Nobody builds movements by tearing down every action.

Nobody helps anyone by blocking solidarity and smearing efforts.

We need to focus attention, not fragment it. We need to act in coalitions, not purity circles, we need to smell the rot, not cover it with ideological air freshener. Because this isn’t a game, it is about #powerpolatics, and how it’s wielded or lost. And while you troll your own side for imaginary infractions, the fascists are laughing – and organizing.

Please, please try and STOP being a prat, thanks.

When we block thinking, it’s pratish #dotcons behaviour

Anyone still building their career only in the #dotcons is either an idiot or a parasite. Because when you tie yourself to platforms owned by the #deathcult, you’re feeding the very machine that eats your freedom, your data, your culture. The #openweb is the commons. It’s messy, imperfect, but it’s ours. Stop polishing the cage. Start building the garden.

We’re living through a cultural shift. The #Fediverse, the #openweb, and grassroots tech projects like #OMN were born to challenge the values of the corporate web, not to reproduce them.
But what are we doing instead? We’re seeing people attacked simply for linking to context and history. Linking is native to the #openweb. Attacking people for linking? That’s native to #dotcons. Take this example: When we post links to hamishcampbell.com, a site with over 20 years of radical media history, no tracking, no ads, no monetization, some people respond with hostility, instead of engaging, they block, slur, and accuse.

Why? Sometimes It’s because the link was shared on a #dotcons platform? Because it challenges their gatekeeping norms? It’s absurd. The truth is simple: #KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid.
This site is part of a long history of grassroots movements. No one is selling anything. No one is farming clicks. Yet bitter, shrinking cliques still push to block it. That kind of behaviour? It’s at best compost – something to shovel through as we grow better soil.

If you don’t get why this matters, start here: Why linking on the open web matters. Not linking is a dangerous cultural regression. The act of linking is a kind of mutual aid: it’s memory, solidarity, and a way to keep the commons visible. When you attack people for linking, you’re actively damaging the infrastructure we need to resist the #deathcult of #neoliberal capitalism, doing this is the problem, in no way any solution.

Here’s another angle worth reading: CrimethInc on mutual aid vs. charity. Mutual aid is not charity. Linking is not self-promotion. These are fundamental ideas. The #Fediverse is built on these values, it thrives when people share freely. But when we import #blocking behaviour and #dotcons paranoia, we replace trust with fear. We end up with closed circles, bad vibes, and petty gatekeeping.

The act of linking is how we build shared infrastructure. This is how we win. So please: Let’s stop slurring people for sharing knowledge. Let’s stop policing links with fear. Let’s link more, think more, and rebuild grassroots, networked culture rooted in trust, rather than control. Because without this? We’re just another branded platform, with nicer avatars and the same old decay underneath.

The Fediverse is opening, but there is a cost

With the #Fediverse gaining increasing #mainstreaming attention, we’re entering a familiar cycle, an influx of well-funded #NGO-branded projects trying to “fix” the #openweb by reshaping it in their own narrowing and to often blinded paths.

Take this year’s #chatteringclass event, #FediForum. Alongside breathless praise, last year, for #Threads joining the #opensocialweb space, we’re seeing the launch of shiny new tools: #BonfireSocial, #Channelorg, #Bounce. That promise innovation and ecosystem growth, but look closer, and you’ll see the #NGO pattern: branding over substance, silos in disguise, and a creeping return of the mini #dotcons under new, friendlier wrappers.

Let’s take Channel.org, On the surface, it looks like a #mainstreaming version of the #OMN project #indymediaback – community news channels, a grassroots publishing model, maybe even respectful federation. But scratch that surface and the cracks show quickly:

The default feeds are anaemic #NGO fodder
The orgs list reads like a who’s who of liberal foundations, with the usual hidden gatekeeping logic behind the scenes.
And it’s yet another “pay or pray” model: either be a professional #NGO or get nudged out.

In short, it’s likely just more #techshit to compost. A well-polished box built to contain, not empower. A place where “participation” is narrow and boring. This isn’t to say there’s zero value. There will be overlap with what we’re doing in the #OMN and #indymediaback spaces. But experience tells us, these projects rarely cooperate. They prefer to rebuild from scratch, with branding and compliance hardcoded. They see networks as products to manage, not native cultures to nurture. In the end they sell out, it happens.

And the result? A growing layer of parasites attaching themselves to the living Fediverse. That familiar smell of funding cycles, strategy decks, and locked-down roadmaps. We’ve seen this before. We know where it leads. The real question isn’t what’s new? It’s what’s native?

We don’t need a branded reboot of the same paths, what we do need is more funded and sustainable grounded, messy, radically open alternatives. Ones with deep roots in social movement history, not just nice UX. Ones that resist capture, and refuse in the end to turn community into product.

That’s the path we’re on, if the NGO track wants to build parallel paths, fine. Just don’t expect us to be polite about this mess making, we’ve already walked that road too many times. Live and let live, compost #techshit and build real alternatives #KISS

You know your getting big when parasites like this start to attach… salt and branding irons come to mind.

Telegram messaging app is dieing

Telegram partnering with Elon’s #AI to distribute #Grok inside chats is a clear line crossed. This matters because private data ≠ training fodder, bringing Grok (or any #LLM) into messaging apps opens the door to pervasive data harvesting and normalization of surveillance.

This is an example of platform drift: Telegram was always sketchy (proprietary, central control, opaque funding), but this is active betrayal of its user base, especially those in repressive regions who relied on it.

Any #LLM like Grok in chats = always-on observer: Even if “optional,” it becomes a trojan horse for ambient monitoring and a normalization vector for AI-injected communication.

“Would be better if we had not spent 20 years building our lives and societies around them first.”

That’s the #openweb lesson in a sentence, that the #dotcons will kill themselves. This is what we mean by “use and abuse” of these platforms which have been driven by centralization, adtech, and data extraction, that they inevitably destroy the trust that made them popular. It’s entropy baked into their #DNA. As Doctorow calls this #enshitification, the tragedy is how much time, emotion, and culture we invested in them – only to have to scramble for alternatives once they inevitably betray us.

What to do now, first step, remove data from your account then delete telegram app, not just for principle, but for your own safety. Move to alternatives – #Signal for encrypted, centralized messaging (trusted but closed server). There are other more #geekproblem options in the #FOSS world but like #XMPP, #RetroShare, or good old email+GPG can work too, but they can be isolating, so stick to #signal if you’re at all #mainstreaming.

Then the second step, build parallel #4opens paths by supporting and develop alt infrastructure like the #Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.), #OMN (Open Media Network – decentralized media), XMPP and #p2p-first protocols, #DAT/#Hypercore, #IPFS, or #Nostr etc.

Yeah, things will get worse before they get better, what we’re seeing now is the terminal phase of the #dotcons era. These companies are devouring themselves and will eventually collapse under the weight of their contradictions. The question is, will we have built anything to replace them?

If not, authoritarian tech (like Elon’s empire) fills the void. That’s why we rebuild the “native” #openweb, even if it’s slow, messy, and underground. That’s why projects like #OMN and #Fediverse matter. If you’re reading this, you’re early to the rebuild, welcome, let’s do better this time.

The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil

We need to keep highlighting an old but still urgent tension: the intersection of technology and social change. In this too often unspoken divide, one side leans heavily on practical, technical problem-solving. They want working code, functioning systems, and tangible results, not abstract debates. To them, critiques about capitalism shaping code sound like distractions from the “real work.” The other side insists that technical problems are social problems. They argue that all code is written by people, shaped by culture, power, and history. Ignoring the social dynamics behind technology guarantees we repeat the same failures.

This divide plays out constantly in movements trying to bridge the worlds of #AltTech and social transformation. You see it in tensions between the tech-focused “geek” communities and broader #mainstreaming society. And both sides have blind spots.

The geek camp often falls into the #geekproblem: over-prioritizing tech innovation while ignoring the human and social context. Meanwhile, the #mainstreaming crowd tends to embrace vague social ideals while underestimating the soft power – and necessity – of building real technical infrastructure to support those ideals. Neither side alone can solve anything meaningful, especially not something as vast as rebooting the #openweb or to even start to touch on #climatechaos.

We need bridges, that’s what projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB, #IndymediaBack, and #MakingHistory are about: building trust-based, grounded, people-powered platforms that can span the divide between tech and society.

But let’s be honest, there’s a lot of very bad behaviour on all sides of the #openweb reboot. Blocking progress, gatekeeping, aggression, virtue signalling… it’s all too common. Let’s try not to become prats, it’s easy to start, and hard to stop. Mess breeds more mess, prat-ish behaviour comes in waves. It aligns with waves of #mainstreaming and the reactive “alt” backlash, these tides bring a lot of flotsam, it’s up to us to shovel and compost what we can.

Our biggest block right now? The culture war postmodernist fog that has drifted through radical spaces over the past decades. It’s slippery, full of “common sense” that doesn’t hold up, but is hard to challenge because it feels “right”. Composting this will be difficult, but necessary.

The #Fediverse is built on people-to-people relationships. Trust, not just tech, is the foundation. That’s why there’s a healthy pushback against “tech fixes” that try to replace social trust, a path that is much more common in places like #Nostr and #Bluesky, where algorithms and cryptography are too often seen as the solution to everything.

Yes, in reality, we need a balance of both. The debate is fluffy in places, spiky in others. But if we build tech-bridges to span this messy social terrain, we might actually get somewhere. This brings us to the hard green question: how do you scale local, eco-conscious solutions to a disinterested – and sometimes hostile – global population? Green progressives often promote small-scale, ethical living. That’s great for the 1% who can afford to live that way. But what about the other 99%?

Let’s be blunt: some people will die from #climatechaos. Maybe 9%, maybe more. But 90% will still be here, and they will need different kinds of solutions. Right now, the options on the table look like this: A rebooted, green-infused social democracy (the old Corbyn project was an example). A slide into eco-fascism and top-down “solutions” (the Trump path). Or doing nothing, and let #climatechaos run wild (the current #mainstreaming).

One thing is likely, a wartime economy is coming within 20 years, where there’s will be little room for the last 40 years of #neoliberalism, and “soft” liberalism will likely play a secondary role at best, the political landscape is shifting fast. The new #mainstreaming question is which side will you be on?

Because we need more than clean branding and good vibes – we need bold, practical, radical action rooted in both tech and human trust. We don’t just need freedom from the state and the #dotcons – We need freedom from our own dogmas.

The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil where openness can grow, thrive, and renew. We need compost, and not just as a metaphor.