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.
Who does your code actually empower? (#FOSS reality check for #openweb builders). In web application development there are broadly three groups you can empower. Every architectural decision – whether you acknowledge it or not – shifts power toward one of these groups.
Understanding which group your system empowers is probably the single most important design question in social technology. In the “fluffy thinking” the three power centres:
1) Users, people who consume, participate, and live inside the system. They care about usability, safety, autonomy, continuity and real-world outcomes. Users are rarely technical, but they are the reason the system exists. If users lack agency, your project is a toy or a control mechanism – not infrastructure.
2) Producers are people who create content, knowledge and value. Examples: writers, organisers, artists, moderators and community builders. These are the people who make platforms meaningful. Without empowered producers networks stagnate, communities collapse and content becomes algorithmic sludge.
3) Geeks (developers/admins). The builders, maintainers, infrastructure operators who care about architecture, performance, elegance, security and scalability. This group is essential – but historically, especially in #FOSS and federated spaces, it becomes the dominant power holder.
This is the #geekproblem. Most #openweb projects “accidentally” empower the third group above all others. Why? Because developers build tools primarily for themselves, #UX is treated as secondary, social dynamics are assumed to be solvable through technical controls and complexity becomes a gatekeeping mechanism.
The result is systems that might be technically impressive, but socially brittle, unusable by normal humans. The tiny group of unthinking “elitists” end up deciding what is good for everyone else, not because they are evil – but because the system structurally centres their perspective. Good #UX in social technology is extremely hard precisely because it requires humility about what engineers don’t know.
The #dotcons model works much “better”, as corporate platforms take a different path. They empower capital which then hires geeks to serve producers, extract from users and optimise engagement and surveillance.
Power structure is: Capital → Developers → Producers → Users. The users become the product, producers become dependent and developers become instruments of extraction. It’s an efficient machine – and a socially destructive one.
The missing model is basic democracy of user empowerment, an uncomfortable truth in practically all the current mess is that users are rarely genuinely empowered. Some partial attempts that worked in the past are early #Indymedia (open publishing + collective moderation. Wikipedia (community governance + editable commons), email protocols (user portability, decentralised identity) and RSS/blogosphere era (subscription over algorithm). None are perfect – but they shift power closer to participants.
What we need more of is non-extractive incentives, as good #openweb projects try to do, real grassroots projects empower users AND producers together. Not by removing structure, but by #4opens distributing power through federation, open standards, collective moderation and visible process.
These are still rare because they are harder to build. They require solving social problems, not just technical ones. It’s why we keep repeating the same failure, oscillate between two broken patterns of #geekproblem systems → technically elegant, socially inaccessible and #dotcons systems → socially addictive, structurally extractive. The problem we now need to compost is that both have produced piles of stinking manure across the tech landscape of the last 20 years.
The #OMN approach is not perfection, it is #KISS shifting the default power alignment to infrastructure that empowers users to participate without needing technical expertise. Producers retain agency over their work and context and most importantly developers build frameworks that decentralise their own authority over time.
In short, build systems where developers are gardeners, not rulers. Questions for #FOSS developers are, before writing code, ask:
Who can say “no” inside this system? Who owns the data?
Who can leave without losing their social graph?
Who defines moderation rules? Who can fork socially, not just technically?
Questions like these help reveal where power really sits.
You have a shovel, we really don’t need more abstract debate. We need people willing to compost the failures and build differently. That means accepting messiness, designing for humans, not idealised users, building structures where power flows outward rather than upward. That’s the path #OMN is trying to walk.
Throwing ideas into the air to see where they land, this is a sketch, not a blueprint – a thought experiment. As if we’re serious about using the #openweb to challenge #mainstreaming to build alternatives to failing capitalist status quo, we have to start somewhere. So let’s ask: what does a world built around the #4opens look like?
We’re talking about a soft move away from capitalism, not an apocalyptic collapse or utopian leap, but a pragmatic, grounded shift in how we live, relate, and build together in the digital era. A society governed by openness, not profit, future rooted in collaboration, not control.
The End of Money as the Primary Motivator
In a #4opens world, exchange is no longer driven by the blunt instrument of money. The logic of scarcity fades when information is abundant and freely shared. With open data and transparent process, value can be tracked, distributed, and balanced – not hoarded.
Imagine a path where you give not to accumulate, but to re-balance. Where you’re recognized and supported for what you contribute, openly. This doesn’t mean the end of value, it means the end of commodification as the only language for it. Capitalism made money sacred. The #4opens world breaks that spell in the digital paths, which can then be used as a lever to re-balance this in the more physical world.
Radical Reductions in Inequality
The current digital economy centralises control in the hands of the #nastyfew, the platform owners, the server landlords, the data hoarders. In contrast, a #4opens world puts common infrastructure – physical and digital – under #FOSS democratic stewardship. Open code, open governance, open data, open processes. These tools dismantle the gatekeeping logic of closed silos. We stop renting access to our lives and can then stop working to make the rich richer. What results is not just a redistribution of resources, but a recomposition of power. Rich and poor stop being natural categories, we start down the path of inequality becoming a historical memory.
Ecological Transformation via Digital Abundance
In this world changing, we break the toxic loop where growth = progress. As digital goods expand – freely shareable, replicable, adaptable – the material basis of economic growth shrinks. Instead of growth for its own sake, we can choose to sift focus to ecological outcomes. Energy systems localise, circular economies flourish. The planet breathes again because we’ve stopped mistaking consumerism for culture. On this post-consumption, we can meet human needs without destroying the biosphere.
Real Community, Not Algorithmic Spectacle
When your networks are open, knowable is modifiable, you stop being a metric or a data point. You become a person in a community again, who can re-build networks of care and trust. The #4opens give us tools to know each other better, to collaborate without permission, and to keep relationships alive across distance and time. We escape the isolation of the #dotcons by remembering what it means to belong, not to brands, but to people.
Reclaiming the Meaning of ‘Common Sense’
In this transition, we’ll have to rethink almost everything we take for granted. Why do we work so much? Why do we compete instead of collaborate? Why is everything a secret? Why are we trained to distrust? The capitalist world naturalised its own ideology, it taught us that exploitation was just “how the world works.” The #4opens world undoes this conditioning. We’ll discover that our “common sense” was a prison, and that open thinking makes new realities possible.
We already lost privacy, let’s be honest that the #dotcons and the surveillance state see everything. This isn’t a warning, it’s the present, there’s no going back to closed data, not legally or technically. The dream of sealed-off privacy is gone. So what can we do? We open the #metadata bag, all of it. We make the hidden flows of power visible to stop pretending that corporate surveillance is okay while peer-to-peer is dangerous. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but in a world where we’ve already been stripped naked by Google, Amazon, and the NSA, radical transparency becomes the preferd path to justice. The question isn’t “how do we hide?” but “how do we share wisely and govern openly?”
What Does a Post-Capitalist, Open Society Look Like?
It’s not utopia, it’s messy, it’s federated, full of tension and debate. But it’s also a world where:
Decisions are made in the open, not behind closed doors.
Software is built to be forked, not locked.
Platforms are governed by people and communitys, not shareholders.
Care is more valuable than control.
Collaboration is default, not an afterthought.
This is the vision of the #4opens, not a theory, but a practice. A lived, everyday politics to shift from passive consumption to active creation. It’s the beginning of something new, rooted in old #FOSS, where everything we already know works if we just trust each other enough to try. So, what does a #4opens world look like? It looks like the world we’re already building, underneath the rubble of the old one, time to pick up your shovel.
In technology development, there are many possible paths. Some of these lead to far more fertile ground for cultivating the open internet and open society approach that the #OMN is built on.
What We Reject
We clearly reject:
Pure client–server relationships
Closed security cultures
Geek-only design aesthetics and insular “vanilla” tech culture
An open security culture, with carefully limited use of closed peer-to-peer security where appropriate
A balance between technical usability and simple outreach – with the ability to switch between these modes within the same application
Geek culture that embraces and mixes with other cultures, rather than isolating itself
Open data formats and Creative Commons licensing
Approach
The #OMN is open to any project that aligns with open-source, open-data, and open-licensing principles. There are several existing tools and platforms that point in useful directions:
Liferay — Built on a strong standards-based approach, but constrained by being owned by a profit-driven company with controlling interests
RetroShare — An open-source peer-to-peer client that already covers many needs for personal security and communication
Opportunities for Integration
A key question is whether we can meaningfully combine these approaches into a more open, global platform:
Could we bridge a standards-based system (like Liferay) with a peer-to-peer network (like RetroShare) to create a federated, secure, hybrid infrastructure?
Could we build a cross-platform system that combines APIs, federation, and peer-to-peer trust networks?
There are also interesting experiments to consider:
Popcorn Time-style distribution – Using torrent-based streaming models
Could this be combined with open archives (e.g. Archive.org APIs) to support distributed video hosting and seeding?
A federation layer for content sharing and discovery
A bridge between distributed storage, streaming, and publishing tools
Front-End Possibilities
Finally, the growing power of HTML5 web apps – especially on smartphones – provides a flexible and accessible interface layer. This allows us to build user-friendly tools on top of complex distributed infrastructure without locking users into closed platforms.
The goal is not to build everything from scratch, but to stitch together existing open tools into a coherent, trust-based ecosystem.
UPDATE: both Liferay and Retroshare failed in this dev path, the first is the normal blocking of open core as a #FOSS path and the second simply failed due to complexity and #UX. Popcorn time we never found a crew to build the coding. Then web apps were silently blocked by the #dotcons app stores focus.What can we learn from this now?
