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.
