The#IMC project is an affinity group – so we are planing to work through consensus and diversity of strategy to move the project past where it was ripped apart by internal stresses after 10 years of running as a successfully worldwide radical grassroots media project.
Of course this can and will be updated as needed, but we have a “chicken and egg” issue that we need a working affinity group/s to reach consensus on where we go. The #indymediaback project is a way of bootstrapping this code/process in #4opens way.
To keep “diversity of strategy” in place, we are using the #OMN framework.
If you look at contemporary programming, I don’t think we have properly understood the social damage that our coding culture has already done, and is still doing. We have built enormous parts of modern life out of software, while pretending that software is somehow separate from society. It isn’t, code structures how we communicate, what we can see, who can participate, what gets remembered, what gets deleted, who gets heard and who gets ignored. And much of contemporary programming culture has a deeply contradictory relationship with this power.
In theory, the culture talks like anarchism: decentralisation, freedom, hacking, autonomy, permissionless innovation, open protocols. In practice, the resulting infrastructure feels closer to an authoritarian bureaucracy: rigid hierarchies, centralised control, surveillance, locked-down permissions, opaque decision-making and an almost obsessive belief that more control and more security will produce a safer society. This is part of the #geekproblem.
Closed systems hide power – in a #closed system, the monsters can operate without being easily seen. They can plot, manipulate, divide and control because the surrounding community cannot properly see what is happening. There is no shared social process for checking the claims being made or comparing them against what everyone else can see.
You cannot easily create social “truth” inside a closed system, you can have an official truth, corporate truth, an algorithmically manufactured truth. You can have whatever the people controlling the system want you to believe. But social truth is different, it emerges from people being able to see, question, compare, remember and challenge what is happening, that is one of the powerful things about #open. With genuinely open systems, the monster becomes more obvious. It becomes easier to see the relationships, the decisions, the contradictions and the consequences.
It becomes easier for other people to say – hang on, that’s not what happened – open systems don’t magically prevent abuse, they don’t make people good, but they make some forms of abuse harder to hide. Closed breeds monsters. Open pushes them out of the shadows where they can be seen.
The security paradox – this is where programming culture gets particularly strange. The demand for control and security is to often presented as neutral engineering. We are told that systems need permissions, authentication, central administration, surveillance and increasingly complex layers of security because the world is dangerous.
Of course some security is necessary, but when security becomes the organising principle of the whole system, something changes, the technology begins to reproduce the social assumptions of its creators. People become permissions, communities become accounts, relationships become access-control lists, trust becomes authentication and thus social problems become technical problems. Uncertainty becomes something that must be eliminated rather than something that society needs to learn to live with – this produces systems that are technically impressive but socially impoverished.
The fantasy of perfect control is a deeper problem here. We keep trying to build technology that removes mess, but human society is messy. People disagree, misunderstand each other, change their minds. Communities develop traditions as different groups have different needs. Sometimes things fail or somebody has a better idea, that isn’t necessarily a bug, it is social life. The #geekproblem treats this mess as something that technology should solve. The result, an endless attempt to build cleaner abstractions over increasingly complicated social realities. But the cleaner the technical abstraction becomes, the more human reality gets pushed outside the closeing system.
Then the system becomes brittle, and when it breaks, everyone is surprised. Code should be allowed to be messy – this doesn’t mean writing bad code. It means recognising that good social technology cannot be based on the fantasy of perfect control. We need systems that accommodate disagreement, forks, experiments, mistakes, local variation, negotiation and repair. In that sense, code should be a little bit messy, because society is messy. The goal isn’t to eliminate the mess, it is to create structures that help us live with it. That is different from the programming culture of trying to close every possible hole, define every possible behaviour and control every possible interaction.
#OPEN is a direction, not an endpoint – there is also a danger in treating #open as another purity project. Yes, the #openweb isn’t automatically good as open systems can contain abuse, misinformation, exclusion and power games. The #openweb itself contains plenty of contradictions. The #dotcons have their own versions of “openness”, often while retaining enormous concentrations of corporate power. So this isn’t a simple story of good open people versus bad closed people, more a balancing process.
#OPEN is a way to step away from #CLOSED – it creates space for transparency, plurality, experimentation and social accountability, gives communities more opportunities to see what is happening and to build alternatives. And that matters because we are currently living inside an enormous pile of inherited closed #techshit – closed platforms, closed data, closed algorithms, closed governance, closed infrastructures and assumptions about what technology is supposed to do. As a first step we need to compost a lot of this closed crap.
The mistake, we make to often today, is that we believe that we can build the perfect open system and finally end the struggle, we can’t, and we shouldn’t. There is no final technical architecture for society. There is no perfect governance model, no moment when we finally solve disagreement, power or human contradiction. Anyone promising that is either selling something, hiding something, or has fallen deeply into the #geekproblem.
The point is not to end the mess, it is to keep the mess visible, social and negotiable. We need technology that leaves room for people to challenge each other, organise, experiment, repair and move in different directions. That is why the #OMN work matters – to build practical #openweb infrastructure where media, metadata, moderation, governance and community relationships can remain visible, shared and contestable.
To make this happen we need #4opens starting points, #OGB experiments with governance, #MakingHistory to keep collective memory alive and #IndymediaBack to remember what grassroots media learned before the current wave of #dotcons.
The #OMN is about building #KISS bootem up trust based media networks for publishing and soughing content with enriched metadata flows. In the end you have a “stupidly simple semantic web of media object “cauldrons” and flows build up from a local level. What you/we do with this is up to the users/producers… this is held to radical politics by #PGA
Initial projects are media #indymediaback and archiving #makeinghistory with the resistances’ exhibition. There are likely lots of other things you can build as its just pipes and flows – the internet as a “open/trust” database of humane objects/people.
How this fits into traditional or Alt economics is not rarely up to us – but bounded by #4opens and #PGA so up for “connections” based on opendata flows – #RSS or #activertypub are good starts.
And we have chat/wikis, bots and other projects. The running cost of all This is currently just over £500 a year as we have upgraded the visionontv server to host lots more video.
Feel free to use/support the #openweb projects and get involved in running them, become a mod, its #DIY
let’s start with history. The editorial workflow of #OMN is based on #indymediaback which is based on basic grassroots journalism growing from radical anarchist traditions.
The newswire is made up of original content published to the site and aggregated flows from a trust network of #4opens sites built out of a community of interest/affinity groups.
Using the #5W and #4opens we start the step away from “post truth” by grounding this flow in a community of action bounded by physical locations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws
The “news” value of “this happened” Who, What, When, Where, Why.
From this a feature flow is built by the core affinity group to show the #5W storeys from different views as a “consensuses” centre column articles.
These articles are then aggregated to other subject/geographic instances newswires.
In this the small streams/flows build a strong river of “social truth” that feeds into seeding a more humane world.
The wider #OMN network, using the fresh newswire and aggregated features to build wider features – these “social truth” networks links the humane world from a grounded real grassroots action/communities.
We build society from the bootem up rather than the old top down of #traditionalmedia/governances.
This itself shifts and moves solutions by aggregation and drives social economics to #4opens humane agender. In the end we play/build a new more humane/ecological world.
To move this part of the project on:
We need “news” a flow of subject/geographic 5W newswire posts on the 3 test instances – then we need to cross-link these by turning the instance based flows into feature articles.
These are aggregated across to the other instances and pushed out to the #fedivers for comments and feedback which then flows back into the #indymediaback instances to the newswire. This new flow needs to be cross-linked into articles, all linking back to the source.
From this we can flesh out the training resources and start the outreach of the project properly, build the power of different voices.
It’s now hard to get an easy view of the death of #indymedia as a lot of the most shitty behaver was taken offline as a part of the ripping that tore the project apart. For the #OMN this is a problem that we strongly need to mediate when implementing “individualistic” rights/workflows. We need to keep metadata flows intact to build trust and history. This challenge raises questions on the balance between privacy and transparency.
The were internal and external forces… I tend to concentrate on the internal as it’s the area that we actually have power/responsibility to make work. The external is a harder task that we then have to fight to challenge/change.
The problem of academics covering activism, particularly within grassroots movements like #Indymedia, is the significant disconnect between academic interpretations and the realities on the ground. This gap is not a matter of perspective but represents a fundamental systematic misunderstanding of the dynamics and operational mechanisms of activist movements.
The disconnect is that academics gravitate towards more visible and vocal members of activist circles, the #fashernistas. These are, often, passionate and articulate, but are not in any way the people making the movement’s wheels turn. The core of activism, the real work, is carried out by those who are too busy to engage with academia because they are immersed in the day-to-day efforts of driving change.
The history of the Indymedia project is a case in point. Indymedia was a pioneering effort in the early 2000s to create an open publishing platform for grassroots journalists. Its story is a rich tapestry of collaboration, innovation, and relentless dedication. However, much of the academic writing on Indymedia misses the mark, focusing instead on surface-level narratives. For a deeper understanding of the Indymedia project’s history from someone who was actively involved, you can read my activism stories.
Academia push analyses that are often removed from the practical realities of activism. The theoretical frameworks and methodologies used serve more to fulfil academic desires for publication and recognition than to provide a faithful representation of activist efforts. This creates a body of work that can be described as “wish-fulfilling #fashernista wank,” offering little insight into the actual functioning of the movements they are supposed to be covering.
The consequences of this misrepresentation are significant. Historical records, influenced heavily by academic accounts, paint an inaccurate picture of how movements operated and succeeded. This not only distorts the past but also impacts future activists who look to these records for guidance and inspiration. The narratives crafted by academics sideline the contributions of the true workhorses of the movement, leading to a strongly skewed and broken understanding of what is effective in activism.
To bridge this gap, we need academics to engage more deeply with the core activists, those whose hands are dirty from the work of making change happen. This requires a shift from seeking out the most vocal and visible to those who are often unseen but indispensable. Additionally, activists themselves must recognize the importance of documenting their efforts and experiences, ensuring that future narratives reflect the true spirit and mechanics of their movements.
There is a #OMN project for this #makeinghistory, which matters as we do need more authentic dialogue between academics and activists, to build a more accurate and useful body of knowledge that actually honours and reflects the efforts of those who actually are driving change.
A Q&A on this:
Q. I wish the hacker culture connection to anarchism was more thorough and consistent. It looks a lot more like privileged fuckery and pet insurrections. It could be that the academic scene wasn’t representative of the movement as a whole
In my view, if people want the truth, a good place to start a project like this would be to look through the #indymedia email archives for an “original” anarchist workflow. I would not take much notice of the “official” history’s of indymedia as they are full of academic wank. The theoretical analysis of the time is all pushing agenders that ripped the project apart and killed it – while it is interesting to see this nasty process, but it’s much less useful as exacting history of what actually happened. The whole internal process is saved in open email lists now hosted on archive.org no other anarchist project is this well documented.
Best not to add to the activist “mannerism” in our shared history, it’s really bad all ready. That is if we are to have hope for “anarchism” fluffy and spiky playing a role in saving a humane/ecological world we need.
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.
We have a #activertypub codebase ready for testing, we have two campanes that asked for instances. We have stable hosting paid up for the next few years.
What we don’t have is any on the ground outreach/training/networking due the covide shutdown. We have limited tech dev needed to update the code from user feedback as a part of the roll out.
With this level of commitment we would be in danger of taking focus away from their current #dotcons outreach and taking up energy rather than helping with good outcomes for the campanes.
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.
If you would like to help with moving away from this current world/media mess please create an account: https://unite.openworlds.info this is the organizing space, yes this is to complex and needs to be made simpler and more #KISS but for now it’s what we have and works fine. Have a read through the issues and wikis on each #openweb project.
We have a public chat room here where you can get to know the crew and talk about the projects. Yes we know its complex, but agen it does work – here is a “easy” link for android phones https://conversations.im/j/indymediaback@conference.chat.openworlds.info or you will have to be geeky/ask for help and work it out from here: indymediaback@conference.chat.openworlds.info for other platforms.
Sorry about this it’s the #geekproblem that we are working to mediate and with your participation we CAN build useable tools.
If you feel you cannot help with tech/user side then you can support the core project with money here https://opencollective.com or if you don’t have money (we all understand) turn up and make tea at your local protest camp to talk about the #indymediaback#OMN project.
You all built the #dotcons that gave him the power… phww… please try to do better next #indymediaback
Q. The far right have mastered the internet for recruitment and disinformation, the rest of us are barely in the game, would a completely regulation free internet not benefit them and lead to fascism? If so, how should regulation work to stop them?
A. that’s a good question, that the is no easy answer too. Most liberal regulation of the internet are clearly disastrous so this is a bad direction to push. This leaves us only one option to do a better job ourselves. This is currently the only real option we have available #indymediaback#omn
Of course, we have to shovel a pile of post-modern, liberal careerist shit out the way to make room for this radical/ progressive #openweb media. I look around and mostly see “our” media adding to the stinking shit pile we need to compost. Our first step is away from our own mess #OMN
Q. Lies travel faster than the truth, the far right understand that and exploit it without conscience. Without moderation, I cannot see how to combat it
A. Pessimism travels faster than optimism, but only optimism has any hope of creating the change we need. Feed the problem or solve the problem, the is no “third way”
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