It should be obvious that we need a path back to good journalism – journalism that sheds light on facts, connects the dots, and lets people trace those dots back to sources. This is what allows us to share, question, and discuss within our own trusted communities, and then spread that knowledge outward through federation, always linking back to the source.
Right now, the #mainstreaming path is broken. It’s sometimes hard for people to see this because the decline has been slow, a gradual death of journalism. Since the early days of the internet, we’ve been told the same story: “People expect news for free, so quality journalism is no longer economically viable.” There’s truth in that. Good journalism is expensive. It takes time, skill, trust, and institutional memory.
But that’s only half the story. What actually happened is this: people kept consuming familiar “news brands,” and those brands were bought, consolidated, and financialised until shareholder value replaced any sense of public value. Slowly, investigative journalists were cut and sidelined, editorial independence eroded, and content shifted toward ads, PR, and narrative management. What we now call “news” is marketing, agenda-setting, and reputation management – a distraction. Journalism, as a public good, has been hollowed out, in part through our own passive acceptance of this shift.
Today, we can see more clearly that if you do real journalism – the kind that challenges power – you have no real career path and face risks: #dotcons blocking, right-wing co-option, and at worst, isolation, exile, prison, or worse. The result is a broken landscape: corporate media that won’t tell the truth, and under-resourced independent media that carries high risk for little or no reward. In that situation, who chooses journalism as a life path?
The deeper problem is articulation and power. The world is complex, most people don’t have the time, energy, or tools to fully articulate what they see, feel, and experience. Into that gap step politicians, corporations, and #fashernista influencers. They have the resources – especially through the #dotcons – to articulate reality, but in ways that divide people, flatten complexity into conflict, and steer perception to serve power and profit. This isn’t just misinformation. It’s structured narrative control.
Why the old models won’t come back, we can’t simply “fix” legacy media. It is structurally tied to advertising, concentrated ownership, and political influence. And we can’t rely on heroic individuals either, that path is too fragile, too dangerous, and too easy to suppress. If journalism is going to survive, it won’t look like the past.
A different path: journalism as networked commons. At #OMN, we’re outlining a different approach decentralised, collective path. Think of it as a second coming of #Indymedia, but more resilient, more sustainable, and better integrated with current networks.
This is where the #openweb and the #Fediverse matter. With protocols like ActivityPub, we already have the foundations for distributed publishing, shared visibility, and cross-community discussion. But tech alone isn’t enough, the missing layer is trust and flow. To rebuild journalism, we need to focus on how information flows socially, not just how it’s published.
Metadata (tags, context, sources, warnings) travels with stories
People can trace information back through the flow
Instead of one “authoritative source,” we get many sources, with visible relationships between them, shaped through community trust and discussion. This is journalism people can actually use to follow a story back to its sources, add context and local knowledge and share and challenge it within trusted spaces.
That’s how we rebuild public understanding – not just publish articles – but from product to process. Journalism should not be a product to consume, it needs to be a process we participate in. When it’s treated as a product it’s optimised for clicks, shaped by incentives and in the end controlled by owners. When it becomes a process it becomes collective, accountable and thus resilient.
So composting the mess, we’re not starting from nothing, we have the ruins of legacy media, the lessons of projects like #Indymedia and the living infrastructure of the #Fediverse. This is compost, from it, we can grow something new – grounded in the #4opens, simple enough to understand (#KISS), and social at its core, not just technical.
The real question isn’t “How do we save journalism?” It’s: How do we rebuild the social systems that make truth-telling possible? Because without those paths, journalism doesn’t just struggle – it disappears.
In the #geekproblem mindset, crossing a protocol flow is a gateway were in #openweb terms, it’s a bridge. That difference is not technical – it’s social – the difference between CONTROL and TRUST. A gate is something you lock, permission, authentication, enforcement were a bridge is something you cross, connection, flow, relationship. In the physical world, we don’t put gates on bridges as a default, but in software, we keep rebuilding them, and then wondering why things fragment.
RSS is a bridge.
Closed APIs are gates.
This should be obvious, but it keeps getting lost inside coding culture.
This isn’t just a #mainstreaming problem, if this critique only applied to Big Tech (#dotcons), it would be easy, but it doesn’t. From 30 years of building in alt-tech spaces – hundreds of projects, no bosses, no corporate control – the same pattern keeps reappearing. Control creeps in, what’s striking is that this cuts across both mainstreaming “professional” engineering culture and radical, horizontal, “alternative” tech spaces. That’s why it’s an overarching #geekproblem, the shared cultural bias toward CONTROL in both code and community design.
The deeper issue is social blindness, at the root of this is something uncomfortable – A lack of joined-up social thinking – when a relatively small technical minority designs systems based on limited social experience, abstract models of human behaviour and little grounding in historical or grassroots movements.
When these systems scale globally, the result is tools fail to support humane, collective use, and undermine trust instead of building it, they reproduce the same power dynamics they claim to escape. This feeds the wider #dotcons worldview – even when the intent is “alternative”. It’s not just “the spirit of the age” it’s a worldview of a narrow culture that has become infrastructural. We’re all, to some extent, still operating inside this #deathcult logic, even when we think we’re critiquing it.
So a good first step is looking at who is funding the problem, this is where foundations and FOSS funding bodies need to look closely. A lot of funding unintentionally reinforces gate-based architectures, complexity that centralises control and abstract innovation over lived social practice. We keep funding new gates, then asking why the #openweb doesn’t grow. It #KISS that if people cannot mentally model a system, they cannot govern it, if they cannot govern it, power centralises every time.
A different path is bridges and flows. Projects like #OMN and #indymediaback take this different approach of start with flows, not platforms, building bridges, not gateways. The focus is on keeping systems simple enough to understand (#KISS) to grow trust as social and visible, not hidden in code. Using the #4opens as grounding, not branding, we understand none of this is new, that’s the value of #nothingnew. As I keep pointing out it’s how RSS worked, early Indymedia worked and large parts of the existing Fediverse still work (when not over-engineered).
On #blocking and conflict – Yes, it’s sometimes necessary, but often it’s a symptom of deeper failure of rigid, internalised worldviews, lack of shared mediation tools and systems designed for exclusion rather than negotiation. It’s easy to block, it’s much harder to build bridges, so the real question is how do we design systems that reduce pointless conflict without exhausting the people inside them? Food for thought (and compost).
We’re all carrying some of this mess, it’s fine – it’s compost. But if we don’t consciously shift from gates to bridges, we’ll keep rebuilding the same broken systems, just with nicer branding. As bridges scale trust – Gates scale control, to mediate this mess, the hard question we need to ask the #mainstreaming is which one are they funding?
YOU can’t do social change or challenge without annoying people If you think you can, you’re probably play-acting – and part of the problem – does that annoy you? If it does… maybe sit with that. 🙂 Food for thought, #4opens is a shovel for composting.
The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb. The tech – like ActivityPub – grew out of that culture. It wasn’t built by #mainstreaming interests.
Now money is flowing in, and with it comes risk of dilution of culture, capture of direction and loss of the commons. As more #mainstreaming users return to the #openweb, we need better tools and processes to handle the mess this brings.
And yes – sometimes the problem is us – when people inside our own spaces act badly, we need ways to respond, mediate, and move forward – without falling into cycles of negativity. That’s part of the work, part of #OMN.
The #Fediverse is native to #openweb thinking, it works. It will likely destroy billions of dollars of #CONTROL, and create billions in actual human value in return. But like the early #openweb, it can also be captured and pulled back into the same old control systems, this is the balance.
So the question is, are you on the side of CONTROL or TRUST?
Our obsession with control is doing real damage, it’s fed by dead-end ideology (#postmodernism), and amplified by #fashernistas pushing surface over substance. Yes – it’s messy. Yes – it’s complex, but ignoring that just makes it worse.
#stupidindividualism and the #deathcult are building an inhuman world, we can do better – but only if we’re willing to do the uncomfortable work.
In #mainstreaming and alt political cultures there’s a constant call in messy times for “strong leaders” to cut through the chaos, but this is the wrong path. What Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders actually show is something more uncomfortable and more useful that real change doesn’t come from strong individuals – it comes from movements we don’t fully control. They were signals, not saviours.
Both figures emerged on the left because something deeper was already shifting with widespread discontent, a break from #mainstreaming politics and a hunger for alternatives to 40 years of #deathcult worshipping. They didn’t create these conditions – they channelled them. “Weakness” is often misnamed, Corbyn in particular was constantly framed as weak, but what was actually happening? When people treat them as failed “leaders,” they miss the point, at best they were interfaces to movements, rather than top-down commanders. They:
Hold together fragile, diverse coalition
Refusal to impose top-down control
Emphasis on process, participation, and consensus
In a stable system, this might look slow, in a fragile system, it’s often the only thing preventing collapse. In the open vs closed battle, it’s not as simple as it looks – especially in the mess we’re in.
CLOSED → conservative / fear / control OPEN → progressive / hope / trust
We need to keep looking at the underlying path when deciding which way to push the balance.
Where the demand for “strength” usually means more control, less democracy. That path tends to deepen the mess, not fix it, as personality politics is a dead end. When media and institutions focus on personalities where movements are about issues and structures. This mismatch is fatal if your politics depends on a person you are attacked through that person – we all collapse when they falter. You never build lasting power, it is the trap both campaigns fell into, despite trying to avoid it.
Movements without structure (hard or soft) stall, is the harder truth – Horizontal energy alone isn’t enough – Electoral politics alone isn’t enough. Both Corbyn and Sanders mobilised huge grassroots energy, but institutions resisted, internal fragmentation grew – the energy wasn’t fully translated into durable paths, and they fell through the gap.
From a #OMN perspective, the takeaway is clear – Don’t look for better leaders – Don’t rely on existing institutions – Build commons-based infrastructure that movements can stand on. This means: Media we control (#indymedia paths), Governance we participate in (#OGB) and tech that reflects trust, not control (#openweb, #Fediverse)
So in messy times, don’t reach for “Strong Leaders” as this comes from fear, frustration and the desire for simple solutions, history – from left and right – shows where that road leads. In poisoned times, the work is slower, to build trust, to stay grounded in shared issues.
Corbyn and Sanders didn’t fail because they were too weak, they struggled because we don’t yet have the social, technical, and institutional commons needed to carry the kind of change they pointed toward. That’s the work, and it’s not about finding the right leader – it’s about becoming the movement that doesn’t need one.
At #NOAW event I talked a lot about the digital commons so thought it might be useful to write a post grounding this. The digital commons are not a future vision, it’s something we already have. At its simplest, the digital commons are the widely used #4opens digital resources of software, knowledge, data, and culture created collectively, governed by communities, and made available for public (re)use. This is the native path of the #openweb it’s been around for a long time, it might be hard to see but just about all of our current #dotcons mess is built on top of this layer.
There is a long history of commons in wider society. But mostly today we focus on the licences that protect reuse and sharing. None of this is abstract theory, it’s making the practical, working infrastructure that underpins much of what people still find useful online. One of the roots of the current digital commons go back to the 1980s and the emergence of the free software movement, led by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. This was not just about code, it was a social and political project:
Software should be shared
Users should have control
Improvements should remain in the commons
The creation of the GNU General Public Licence was the first step, enforcing a simple rule that if you benefit from the commons, you give back to the commons. The commons isn’t one thing, it’s an ecosystem – Some #KISS examples include:
Wikis – collectively written and maintained knowledge (#Wikipedia)
Open source software – built in public, shared freely (#FOSS)
Public code repositories like GitHub used to be (name one)
Open licensing systems like Creative Commons
Federated social tools built on ActivityPub (#Mastodon)
The Path is governance by the people who use it. What makes the digital commons different from “just free stuff” is this the people building it can shape how it works, a key distinction it’s not just access – it’s agency. The commons are non-exclusive (available to others), oriented toward use and reuse and governed by its participants, this is why it matters politically.
Today, much of the internet still runs on the digital commons, but the visible layer is dominated by #dotcons platforms. This creates a split of Commons layers → open, slow, sustainable and Platform layers → closed, extractive, growth-driven. People still rely on the commons, but interact through closed systems, this contradiction is unstable.
Policy is our current-missed opportunity, as our institutions see only the surface value. The European Union’s European Commission has pushed open source strategies as part of digital sovereignty, particularly through programmes like Horizon Europe. The idea is native – Share code – Collaborate openly – Build public infrastructure. But in practice, most of this gets lost in #NGO process, bureaucracy, and capture. The money flows, but the commons don’t grow.
The “Tragedy” of the Digital Commons. Like any commons, in the mess we live in today commons can be degraded from overuse (infrastructure strain), pollution (spam, low-quality content, noise) and information overload. The result is a corrupted signal-to-noise ratio, it is a real issue – but it’s to often used as an excuse to centralise control. This is largely solved by horizontal vs virtical scaling, if people can take this real native path.
There are social gaps. The commons reflects the culture that builds it, yes gender imbalance persists, access is uneven, and geek culture is too often exclusionary (#geekproblem). But the bigger problem we face is capture and drift. We’ve already seen it happen once: Free software → “open source” (politics stripped out). Commons → #dotcons platform capture.
Now we see this happening in the #Fediverse and #openweb reboot spaces with the last few years of vertical agendas dominating to meany outreach spaces, #NGO mediation and thus diluten is pushing native grassroots agency out, this is an old cycle repeating – the cycle that we need to compost.
OK, despite all the #mainstreaming mess, the digital commons are still the most viable path we have, we need to see this path not as hypothetical – more as it just works, but is underresourced. From a #OMN perspective, the digital commons are not only infrastructure, it’s the soil. You don’t build movements on platforms, you grow them in commons, but this growth needs care:
Protection from capture
Active governance
Social grounding, not just technical process
And most importantly the commons only survives if people act as commoners. The challenge now isn’t only to explain the digital commons, it’s to defend, rebuild, and extend it. That means funding native projects, keeping governance in the hands of participants to bridge activism, development, and real-world use as a path to push back against the continuing #mainstreaming capture.
This is not about nostalgia, it’s about #KISS recognising that we already have the tools we need, then caring enough not to only exploit them. Please try and be better than the current #mainstreaming on this, thanks.
This is the open-source – split – FOSS moment for the Fediverse. We’ve seen this before. When “open source” was carved out of Free Software politics, it made the space more business-friendly – but at a cost, the movement never fully recovered from this. The result was a long-term weakening of the social and political grounding that made FOSS meaningful in the first place. We are in real danger of repeating this pattern in the Fediverse.
Vertical agendas – loud, well-funded, and institutionally backed – dominate conversations and displace the native horizontalism that defines the Fediverse and the #openweb. These agendas will ultimately fail, but not before they push out the grassroots energy that actually makes things work.
A Practical Intervention
One leverage point is funding – specifically, how funding is framed, distributed, and justified within the #mainstreaming process.
So the question is: how do we intervene effectively? It’s a simple classic path: mess – opening – implement.
Create an EU-Focused Consortium
Build a working consortium with three balanced pillars:
* Activism – holding the political line and pushing for real change
* #NGO layer – interfacing with bureaucracy and policy structures
* Grassroots #FOSS builders – creating and maintaining commons-based code
The goal is simple, to deliver real, native #openweb tools that create meaningful social change, not just online, but in the wider world.
Strategy
1. Discredit the Current Waste
Document and publicize the massive misallocation of public funds:
* Hundreds of millions wasted on blockchain projects
* The same pattern now repeating with AI funding
This isn’t just critique, it’s strategic pressure. It weakens the legitimacy of the current funding agenda.
2. Open a Gap
By exposing this waste, you temporarily sideline parts of the “blocking class”, those who dominate but do not deliver. This creates a window of opportunity.
3. Seed the Commons
Use that opening to:
* Channel small, strategic funding (“cents on the euro”) into multiple grassroots projects
* Fund at least three parallel codebases per call.
* Expect two to be captured or fail
* Ensure one remains viable and native
Because these projects are built on ActivityPub, even “failed” or captured projects can still interoperate within the Fediverse ecosystem and thus can maybe grow to become meaningful. Diversity is good.
Outcome
This approach nudges EU technology policy – maybe programs like Horizon Europe – toward:
* Practical, working tools, native research. Based on meany “#Nlnet” like federated working paths.
The #OMN already has four native commons projects that align directly with this strategy:
* Governance
* Media
* Historical memory
* Digital addiction
These are not abstract ideas, they are ready-to-grow seeds for a healthier #openweb ecosystem.
Feel free to add to this in the comments I will update the text with feedback.
UPDATE: for me the failer mode of this is the 3 groups won’t be able to stay together: Activism – holding the political line and pushing for real change. NGO layer – interfacing with bureaucracy and policy structures. Grassroots #FOSS builders – creating and maintaining commons-based code.
It’s the snip problem, people will cut off pieces of the whole for there short term survival or career building, the coalition will splinter, and then fail. I think the above strategy is good apart from this hole – how do we fill or at least mediate this?
Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, decentralisation, and horizontal collaboration. Through writing, workshops, and practical projects, he argues that the future of the Fediverse depends as much on culture, governance, and shared infrastructure as it does on code.
Purpose is to open conversation that many people feel but rarely articulate: the tension between grassroots culture and institutional capture. Start with your simple distinction:
Bad #mainstreaming → corporate/NGO structures reshaping the Fediverse
Then ask: “Which direction are we currently moving?”
Discussion topics – funding and governance, foundations and institutional capture, developer vs user power, infrastructure vs platforms. How to avoid repeating Web 2.0
Activity is to ask participants to map layers: Grassroots – NGO / institutional – Corporate. To discuss where power currently sits and what healthy balance might look like.
Outcome is people leave with language to understand the tensions they are experiencing in the Fediverse.
Workshop 02
Maybe a second one on why #makeinghistory is needed? Translating #OMN from “activist infrastructure” into “missing public digital infrastructure.” That language is what this event is trying to figure out. The Open Media Network (#OMN) proposes a model where grassroots publishing, community moderation, and institutional participation are balanced. Participants can discuss how institutions support shared infrastructure rather than just deploying isolated platforms.
Many institutions are experimenting with the Fediverse as an alternative to #dotcons corporate social media. However, simply running institutional servers risks reproducing the same platform dynamics in a federated form. We need workshops that explore the broader ecosystem of public-interest media infrastructure.
“What happens after institutions join the Fediverse?” The #KISS answer is they need to support the commons infrastructure that makes it socially viable. Running Mastodon is not enough, institutions need to support the wider open media ecosystem.
Talking about #openweb culture in a constructive way is tricky because most #FOSS and Fediverse conversations default to technical framing: code quality, scalability, moderation tooling, and #UX. These things matter, but they are not the foundation that determines whether a network lives or dies.
Maybe a useful way to open the conversation is to shift the starting point. Instead of saying “culture is important too”, say something stronger but practical: The success or failure of open systems is primarily a cultural question, not a technical one. The code only expresses the culture behind it.
Start with a simple historical observation. Many technically strong systems failed because the social layer was weak, while some technically rough systems succeeded because the community culture worked.
Examples from the open web – early open source projects that thrived because communities shared norms of collaboration. Grassroots networks like Indymedia worked socially even when the software was messy. Corporate platforms that succeeded not because they were technically better, but because they built powerful social gravity.
The pattern is clear, that technology enables networks, but culture sustains them. This is the missing step in most Fediverse conversations. Right now to meany discussions focus on: scaling servers, moderation tools, interface design and onboarding. These are all necessary but insufficient.
What way to often goes missing is the deeper questions – What culture are we actually trying to grow? Without answering that, the system tends to drift toward the dominant internet culture, which today is shaped by the #dotcon platform model of engagement optimisation, algorithmic attention markets, influencer dynamics and centralised power. When that culture seeps into the Fediverse, the result is a federated copy of the same problems.
So why is culture harder than code? Code can be written by a few developers, culture requires shared understanding across thousands of people. To grow this we need native governance norms, trust networks, moderation values and expectations about ownership and participation to hold to native paths for how conflict is handled. These things cannot simply be implemented in software, they must be grown socially, fail to address this is why many technically strong projects fail, they assume the social layer will somehow emerge automatically. It rarely does.
To make this constructive, it helps to clearly describe what we mean by #openweb culture. Some core values historically included public-first communication rather than platform ownership, decentralised responsibility instead of central moderation authority, commons thinking rather than product thinking to nurture horizontal participation rather than audience/influencer hierarchies, this need clear #4opens processes rather than opaque decision-making.
These values were never perfect, but they created a different social environment from today’s corporate social media. If we do not actively cultivate these values, the surrounding internet culture will slowly overwrite them. If the Fediverse continues to grow without addressing culture as it currently is, the most likely outcome is large institutional instances dominate, smaller community spaces struggle leading to more moderation being centralised. This all shifts user expectations toward platform-style experiences.
At that point, the system may still be technically federated, but the culture will have drifted back toward Web 2.0. The code will be open, but the social dynamics will not be.
So the “extra step” is simply, we must talk about culture as deliberately as we talk about software architecture. That means asking questions like: What social norms should Fediverse communities encourage? What governance models support open participation? How do we keep the ecosystem diverse rather than dominated by large actors? What responsibilities come with running infrastructure in a commons network?
These conversations are sometimes uncomfortable, because they move beyond engineering into politics, sociology, and ethics. But avoiding them does not make them disappear, it simply means the culture will be shaped by default forces instead of conscious choices.
A simple way to frame this – A phrase that often works well in discussion is – “Code builds the network, but culture decides what the network becomes.” If we want the #openweb to remain something different from the #closedweb platform internet, we need to invest as much thought into the culture as we do into the code and #UX. Otherwise, the technology may succeed technically, but the social project behind it will quietly fail.
Public Money, Public Communication, Public Infrastructure
Public institutions are funded by taxpayers. Their role is to serve the public. So it should be obvious that their communication systems are open, accessible, and accountable to everyone -without requiring people to sign up to proprietary, for-profit platforms.
Yet this is not the world we live in. Today, much of public communication is effectively outsourced to the #dotcons. If you want to follow government updates, participate in consultations, or even access timely public information, you are often expected to create an account on a closed platform – designed for profit, data extraction, and behavioural manipulation. That alone should raise serious questions.
This contradiction is especially stark in Europe as they regularly speak about digital sovereignty, data protection and public accountability. And yet, at the same time, they rely on U.S.-based corporate platforms to communicate with their own citizens. It’s a strange situation:
Public institutions, funded by European taxpayers, using foreign, proprietary infrastructure to mediate public communication.
Not only does this create dependency, it also places public discourse inside systems that are not governed by public interest.
It’s not just ironic. It’s structurally broken, we should think about prosicuting the people who have made this happen.
The access problem, useing closed platforms to access public communication creates real barriers: Not everyone wants to create or maintain dotcons social media accounts. Some people are excluded for ethical, political, or practical reasons. Algorithms decide what is seen and what is not. Public information becomes entangled with advertising and engagement metrics. This undermines a basic democratic principle that public communication should be universally accessible, without conditions.
We already have an alternative to this curupt mess, the #DIY#OpenWeb comes from europe, it offers a different path. Instead of #closedweb platform dependency, it builds on open standards, interoperable systems with multiple access points, no user lock-in. This is not a new path, it is how the web was originally created to work in the EU.
An example project that contines this native mission and supports this is the #OMN whitch creates spaces where public institutions and public communities can meet on equal terms, without one dominating the other, and without relying on closed corporate systems. If institutions instead invest in and support the wider #OMN ecosystem, they help build something fundamentally different, a public communication infrastructure that is open by default, accessible to all, resilient and distributed and aligned with democratic values.
A simple principle, if it is funded by the public, it should be accessible to the public – without restriction. No accounts required, no platform dependency and no hidden gatekeepers.
We need to organise a call to act. Public institutions need to move beyond simply using the #Fediverse. They need to help build and sustain the commons that makes open communication possible. That means, supporting open infrastructure projects, funding shared ecosystems like the #OMN and building real, not facke PR commitment to public-first communication practices.
This is not just a technical shift, it is a political and cultural choice.
A simple #KISS way forward is to shift public social communication onto the #Fediverse. This is already a significant improvement on current platform dependency. However, I want to raise a point that may sound controversial at first, but is actually quite practical: public institutions should not rely exclusively on the existing codebases.
Most current Fediverse platforms have done vital groundwork – particularly in establishing shared protocols, interoperability, and a working culture of federation. That contribution is important and should be recognised. However, many of these tools evolved shaped by the same assumptions as #dotcons and constrained by #NGO project models. As a result, they can be complex, difficult to maintain, and not always well aligned with the long-term needs of public institutions or commons-based infrastructure.
A constructive path forward would be to fund the development of a small number of new, purpose-built codebases focused on commons publishing. Not one, but three parallel implementations.
Why three? Because diversity reduces risk. In practice, not every project will succeed – this is normal and expected. Funding multiple approaches ensures resilience, encourages innovation, and avoids over-reliance on a single solution. The cost of doing this would be minimal relative to existing public digital budgets, yet the potential long-term value is significant.
Importantly, this is not about replacing the existing ecosystem. Because the Fediverse is built on shared protocols, any new tools would remain fully interoperable with current platforms. This means users of existing services can still interact seamlessly, while the overall ecosystem becomes stronger, more diverse, and better aligned with public service values.
In short: build on what exists, but don’t be constrained by it. By investing modestly in new, commons-oriented infrastructure alongside the current tools, public institutions can shape a more robust, sustainable, and genuinely public digital communication space.
Outreach to @newsmast interesting to see the #NGO view of the real alt path we need to take https://hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of-workshops-to-run-at-nodes-on-a-web-noaw-unconference/ you guys might be interested in working on the 3ed workshop outline. The 3 codebase need to be 1) mainstreaming, 2) radical #NGO and 3) native messy grassroots. You guys could be the second codebase. We do need diversity, best not to keep blindly messing up this path in the current globe mess.
Stopped going to in-person general tech conferences around 15 years ago – they’d become beyond pointless. Since then, I’ve stuck to more focused online events.
Now heading back to an in-person one. Curious what I’ll actually find.
I have a feeling it’ll be about 75% pointless, 20% narrow geek, academic and #NGO-focused (slightly useful), and maybe 5% – probably less – actually useful.
Let’s see how that shifts after the event.
UPDATE: The event was posative, people were looking for change.
There is a point that often gets misunderstood in conversations about the future of the #openweb and #FOSS that #mainstreaming itself is not inherently good or bad. What matters is who is influencing whom. We can think of it in two very different directions.
Good #mainstreaming is when the values of the #openweb move outward into the wider world: Transparency, decentralization, cooperation, shared infrastructure and community governance. In this case, mainstream society learns from the cultures that grew around free software and open networks. But there is another direction.
Bad #mainstreaming happens when the mainstream flows inward and reshapes the open ecosystem in its own image. The values that arrive tend to look like this: corporate control, surveillance capitalism, hierarchical governance, branding over substance leading to growth and extraction over community. In this case, the #openweb is not influencing the mainstream, the mainstream is absorbing and reshaping the openweb. And historically, that absorption rarely ends well.
This second bad option of co-option Is the default, in the current context, mainstreaming tends to dilute radical alternatives into market-friendly compromises. This is not accidental, the system many of us are working inside – what I often call the #deathcult of neoliberalism – does not absorb things in good faith, it absorbs them in order to neutralize them.
We have seen this pattern repeatedly when open communities become venture-backed platforms, cooperative tools become monetized services, grassroots networks become brands. What begins as a commons to often ends as a product. For people building or funding #FOSS infrastructure, this pattern should be familiar.
Because of this messy dynamic, we need active mediation when interacting with mainstream institutions. Not blanket rejection, but not naïve acceptance either. The question is always contextual: Is the mainstream being influenced by open values or are open communities being reshaped to fit mainstream power structures? Right now, the balance is heavily tilted toward the latter, which means the priority is not endless integration. The priority is protecting and strengthening the roots of the #openweb.
Thinking about this kinda mess making helps to highlight the problem of the #NGO Path, where the NGO layer becomes problematic. The people involved are sometimes well-meaning, many think they are genuinely trying to help. But the institutional incentives they operate under reshape projects in subtle but powerful ways.
Our #FOSS funding structures push toward professionalization, opaque centralized governance, brand management, risk avoidance that is compatibility with existing power structures. Over time, this acts like a kind of social poison inside grassroots ecosystems. That might sound harsh, but it is simply a reality of social dynamics and institutional gravity. People working within those systems carry those assumptions with them, often without realizing it.
For the health of the ecosystem, we need to mediate our intake of that poison. This is not about demonizing individuals, it is about recognizing structural effects. There is no contradiction in saying both things at once: They may be good people – Their institutional logic still damages grassroots culture. So a useful rule of thumb is simple is don’t drink too deeply from the #mainstreaming.
Visibility Matters – Another issue for #FOSS projects is much more practical – Grassroots infrastructure often stays invisible. If people don’t know a project exists, they cannot adopt it. And when that happens, the public will naturally drift toward the next “ethical” platform marketed by the very companies reproducing the #dotcons model. The difference is that those companies have huge PR budgets. If open projects do not communicate what they are building and why it matters, the narrative will be written elsewhere and it will not favour the commons.
The real value of the #OpenWeb at its simplest, the #openweb path does something very straightforward in that it empowers horizontal, DIY culture and dis-empowers vertical, closed systems. That shift alone has enormous value.
It changes who gets to publish.
It changes who controls infrastructure.
It changes who participates in shaping the network.
Yet one of the strangest things in the current moment is how many people actively reject or ignore this possibility. Part of that blindness comes from habit, part from career incentives, part from the cultural gravity of the mainstream. But the result is the same: the tools that could strengthen public digital space are sidelined in favour of systems designed primarily for profit.
So what can maintainers and funders do? If you maintain or fund #FOSS infrastructure, there are a few practical steps that can help strengthen the ecosystem:
Fund the commons, not just products. Support infrastructure that serves communities, even if it does not generate revenue.
Protect open governance. Funding models should strengthen community decision-making rather than centralizing power.
Support grassroots visibility. Help projects communicate what they are building and why it matters.
Resist quite capture. Watch for subtle shifts where open projects become shaped by market logic or branding priorities.
Invest in horizontal ecosystems. The long-term health of the web depends on many small interconnected projects, not a few dominant platforms.
The choice in front of us is the future of the #openweb will not be decided by technology alone. It will be decided by culture, governance, and resource flows. If the current trend continues, open infrastructure will increasingly be absorbed into corporate platforms, #NGO programs, and venture ecosystems.
But there is another path, slower one, messier, more grassroots one. One that keeps the web as a commons rather than a marketplace. Whether that path survives depends heavily on the choices made by #FOSS maintainers and the people who fund the work.
There is a persistent myth pushed in our culture that intelligence – high IQ, academic credentials, elitist education – leads naturally to clear thinking. My organic experience suggests the opposite, what matters is disciplined, skeptical, freethinking curiosity. Without that, intelligence simply becomes a tool for defending whatever assumptions people already hold.
This is one of the reasons many academic environments produce people who are, bluntly, credulous. Not because they lack intelligence, but because the institutional structures around them reward conformity and reputation management far more than genuine curiosity.
Over the last two years I’ve been spending time in and around the university culture in Oxford, participating in discussions, events, and academic life. The experience has been instructive, if in the end frustrating. You would expect a place associated with University of Oxford to be a centre of open intellectual challenge. In practice, it feels like something else: a system that filters, polishes, and reproduces existing assumptions.
This is not universal, some of the hard scientific disciplines still cultivate a form of disciplined skepticism, experiments fail, evidence contradicts theory, so you are expected to question results. The process encourages a narrow but very real culture of doubt, but outside those narrow areas, skepticism to often fades.
Instead, you find intellectual fashion cycles building reputational alliances that push institutional caution based on #blinded ideological signalling. The result can be a strange mix of high intelligence and low #blocking curiosity. People who are good at working inside established frameworks, but much less comfortable questioning the foundations of privilege those frameworks rest on.
This matters for the #openweb and projects like #OMN. I got nowhere here as many of the institutions that might have supported open digital infrastructure – universities, NGOs, research centres – have shifted toward the same #deathcult#mainstreaming#blocking that dominates the wider tech world. Funding cycles shape research priorities, institutional partnerships shape acceptable ideas and career incentives shape what can safely be questioned.
So even where intelligence and resources exist, the culture of disciplined curiosity that drives the needed real innovation is thin if it exists at all. The irony is that the early internet grew out of exactly the same institutions, but with opposite culture. The original World Wide Web ecosystem, the hacker and #FOSS communities, and early grassroots media projects like #indymedia were built by people who combined technical curiosity with deep skepticism about centralised control.
They didn’t wait for institutional approval, they experimented, built #DIY tools that broke things and rebuilt them. That spirit is what projects like #OMN are trying to revive. The goal is not to outcompete corporate #dotcons platforms or impress #NGO academic institutions. The goal is simpler: to build open media infrastructure that communities can use based on small nodes, trust networks and open metadata flows. Simple tools that allow people to publish, share, and connect.
This is a working #KISS approach to rebuilding grassroots media. If the last twenty years of the web have taught us anything, it’s that intelligence alone doesn’t produce healthy systems. You can have brilliant engineers building platforms that clearly undermine democratic communication, it’s the mess that shapes the current #dotcons world.
What makes the difference is curiosity combined with skepticism, the willingness to question the structures that shape our digital lives. Without that, even the smartest institutions drift into the same patterns of credulity and conformity, which is why rebuilding the #openweb is not just a technical project, it’s a cultural one.
Why does it feel like so many people have become intolerant prats? A blunt observation: it increasingly feels like many people today are intolerant prats. And worse, this behaviour has started to feel normal. You see it everywhere. Online discussions collapse quickly into hostility. Small disagreements become unthinking moral #blocking were people retreat into camps where any challenge is treated as an attack.
This isn’t just a social media problem, though the #dotcons have certainly amplified it, it’s a deeper cultural shift. For decades the dominant systems shaping our culture have encouraged competition, individualism, and personal branding. The result is what I often call #stupidindividualism – a worldview where the individual ego becomes the centre of everything. In that environment, disagreement stops being part of learning and becomes a threat to identity, so people react defensively, aggressively or dismissively. What used to be debate becomes performance.
The platform problem is when the #dotcons platforms are designed to amplify this behaviour where algorithms reward outrage, tribal loyalty and moral signalling to push conflict to drive engagement. They do not reward patience, nuance, or curiosity, in other words, they are structurally optimised to turn ordinary people into worse versions of themselves. Over time this becomes cultural habit, people start to assume that hostility is normal conversation.
Another factor is the slow collapse of collective spaces. When communities interact face-to-face, or in smaller trust networks, people have to deal with each other as human beings. Relationships create friction but also accountability. In large anonymous digital environments, those social checks weaken. People become avatars and opinions rather than neighbours, this makes it much easier, “natural” to treat each other badly.
Why this matters for the #openweb. If we are trying to rebuild grassroots media and communication infrastructure, we need to recognise that these cultural habits have already spread into many communities, including the tech and activist spaces that should be alternatives. This is one reason projects fragment so easily as small disagreements spiral, people assume bad faith and thus trust collapses.
You end up with endless internal conflict instead of collective building. This isn’t just a personality problem, it’s the legacy of systems that reward attention and conflict rather than cooperation.
A different path can be grown in projects like #OMN which is partly about rebuilding infrastructure, but they are also about rebuilding culture. The idea is simple: smaller networks, trust-based publishing, open metadata flows and simple tools people can run themselves. A #KISS approach to communication infrastructure.
But technology alone doesn’t solve the deeper issue, what actually makes communities work is something much older and simpler: tolerance and curiosity. The ability to disagree without instantly turning disagreement into war. The ability to assume that the other person might have something worth hearing. Without those habits, no infrastructure – open or closed – will function well for long.
Composting the mess – the current online culture is a mess. A lot of the behaviour we see today is the product of twenty years of #dotcons platform design. But mess is also compost, it shows us clearly what doesn’t work. The next generation of the #openweb has an opportunity to build systems that encourage something better: slower conversation, local trust networks, collective responsibility, shared media infrastructure. Less shouting, more listening.
It won’t magically make people perfect. Some people will still be intolerant prats. But at least we won’t be running the entire communication system of society on platforms designed to encourage it.
This Oxford mess is a shadow of a larger mess. We were told the story of Prometheus: fire stolen from the gods and given to humans – our first real piece of technology. The myth asks a simple question: what do we do with power once we have it?
In democratic society why do we put up gig work and side hustles, endless surveillance platforms pushing algorithmic attention traps, housing crises and climate collapse all pushed by a handful of billionaires controlling huge parts of the economy. Why do we put up with What with the mess of technocratic oligarchy – a system where technological infrastructure concentrates power instead of distributing it?
The #mainstreaming mythology of the tech founder helped this happen. The “visionary genius” narrative around people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk turned corporate executives into cultural heroes. This mess is simply #KISS oligarchy with better marketing.
Even ancient thinkers warned about this. Plato and Aristotle described how societies cycle through forms of power, and how rule by the wealthy tends to serve the wealthy above everyone else. The irony is that many of today’s tech elitists think of themselves as the new aristocracy – the “smartest people in the room” guiding humanity forward.
Yet the future they’ve built is #techshit platform #feudalism with people monitored constantly, economic life mediated by a few #dotcons platforms. Infrastructure owned by private empires and democratic institutions bought out then sidelined.
The tragedy isn’t that technology failed, it is more that we let our technological imagination be captured by oligarchs. Prometheus gave humanity fire so we could build civilization together, not so a tiny #nastyfew tech CEOs can privatise the flame and sell back the light.
The real question isn’t whether technology will shape the future, it’s who controls it.
It’s obvious to everyone paying attention that the relentless push of #mainstreaming over the last forty years has not made society healthier or more stable. Quite the opposite, the result has been accelerating social disintegration and the rapid expansion of #climatechaos.
When the current trajectory continues, the consequences are catastrophic. Over the next fifty years we are looking at millions dead and billions displaced by climate breakdown, ecological collapse, and the political instability that follows. Flooded cities, failing agriculture, collapsing states, mass migration, these are no longer speculative futures. They are already visible on the horizon.
What makes this situation so disturbing is not ignorance. For the last decade, the consequences have been very clear. Climate science, ecological data, and lived experience have converged into a single message, that the system driving this crisis cannot continue. Yet those with the power to change course continue pushing the same policies, the same economic logic, and the same institutional inertia that produced the crisis in the first place.
This is not simply failure, it is knowing failure. And that raises an uncomfortable question of when does systemic negligence become a crime? For forty years the dominant ideology has been the worship of endless growth, deregulation, privatization, and extraction – what many people now recognize as the #DeathCult of #neoliberalism. On this path, ecosystems are treated as expendable, communities are hollowed out, and public institutions are dismantled in the name of “efficiency”.
The result is the hollowing-out of social structures and the destabilization of the planet itself. This isn’t an accident, the evidence has been overwhelming for decades. From early climate warnings in the 1980s to the now constant stream of scientific reports and disasters, we have known were this path leads. And yet the machine keeps running.
At some point we have to confront the idea that what we are witnessing is not just bad policy but something closer to systemic criminality. When leaders, corporations, and institutions knowingly pursue actions that will cause mass death and displacement, we enter the territory of #CrimeAgainstHumanity. The historical analogy that needs resurfacing is Nuremberg.
After the Second World War, the world established that individuals in positions of power could be held legally responsible for crimes that harmed humanity as a whole. The principle was simple: “just following the system” is not a defence. Today we face a different kind of global crime – slower, more bureaucratic, wrapped in economic language – but far larger in scale.
If millions die and billions are displaced because decision-makers continued destructive policies long after the dangers are clear, then if social democracy survives, future generations will have every reason to enforce people as accountable? This is not about vengeance, it’s about accountability and the possibility of changing course before the worst outcomes arrive.
The tragedy is that alongside this destructive path there have always been alternatives – social, technological, and cultural. Grassroots networks, commons-based governance, cooperative systems, and the original ideals of the #openweb all point toward more resilient and humane ways of organising society. But these paths have been buried under forty years of blinded #mainstreaming, where every institution, including our own #NGO people, force alignment with this narrow economic logic.
Digging out of this mess requires more than better technology or better policy papers, it requires collective action, memory, and courage. In other words: Shovels. Hashtags. And revolutions. Because the first step in changing the future is digging up the truth about how we got here.
The lesson from the Leonid Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union is simple but brutal that stability is not strength. From the outside the system looked powerful – armies, rockets, space stations. But internally it had stopped being able to correct itself, criticism became dangerous, information was distorted, and the leadership focused on maintaining control rather than fixing problems. The result was a long, slow decay that only became obvious once collapse was already underway.
For projects like #OMN and the wider #openweb, there are some clear lessons. A system must be able to criticise itself, when criticism is blocked, systems rot quietly. In political systems this shows up as propaganda and falsified reports, in tech projects it shows up as closed decision-making, defensive leadership with performative openness, leading to communities where criticism gets socially punished.
The #4opens matter because they institutionalise self-correction: open code → people can inspect, open data → people can verify, open process → people can challenge decisions and open standards → people can fork and build alternatives. Forking is the equivalent of democratic opposition, without it, stagnation creeps in.
What we can learn is simple don’t trade dynamism for comfort. What we learn from history, a big part of the Brezhnev problem was that the leadership chose predictability over adaptation. The same thing happens in tech ecosystems when projects shift from experimentation to → brand protection, messy community → managed messaging leading to failing grassroots growth → to institutional control. You end up with stagnation.
For something like #OMN, the messy grassroots stage is not a weakness, it is the source of vitality, it’s about having a space were we can compost the institutions that tend to prioritise survival over purpose.
This is a universal pattern, over time, organisations start to exist to maintain themselves, not to achieve their original mission. You can see this in NGOs that avoid challenging power because they depend on funding, tech foundations that prioritise corporate partnerships and projects that optimise for grants rather than any usefulness. The danger for #openweb projects is #mainstreaming without accountability. When institutions become the goal, the commons become secondary.
Back to history, we find that information rot is deadly, the Soviet system increasingly relied on false reporting maintaining the illusion of success. Tech ecosystems have their own version with inflated user numbers exaggerating adoption claims, marketing replacing real development leading to blocking #NGO conferences replacing working infrastructure. Healthy ecosystems need ground truth, it’s another reason the #4opens matter, they make it harder to fake progress.
Real strength is distributed, the Soviet model concentrated authority at the top. That made correction impossible. The #openweb path is at best the opposite with distributed infrastructure, federated governance leading to multiple independent actors feeding the ability to fork and diverge. Resilience comes from diversity and redundancy, not central authority.
Collapse often looks stable until suddenly it isn’t, the lesson from the Brezhnev period is that decline can look like stability for a long time. You see signs only if you look closely at empty shelves, falsified reports, ageing leadership squatting rigid institutions.
In the current #dotcons web ecosystem the equivalents might be shrinking trust in platforms, centralised control of communication, developer burnout, communities drifting away from corporate spaces. The surface can still look powerful while the foundations are weakening.
The practical lesson for #OMN is that we need to keep focus as anti-Brezhnev systems. That means building structures that encourage criticism, experimentation, decentralisation, transparency and community power over institutional control. The goal is not stability, its living systems that can correct themselves. Because once a system loses that ability, the future is already written – it just takes a while before everyone else notices.
There’s a familiar pattern in foreign policy debates: outrage at the current regime, amnesia about how it got there. Yes, the current government of #Iran is repressive. It crushes dissent, restricts freedoms, and enforces authoritarian rule. None of that needs soft-pedalling, but if we’re at all serious about understanding the world – rather than just reacting to #fashernista headlines – we also have to look at how situation came to be.
In 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was removed in a coup orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency and MI6. The reason wasn’t hidden. Mosaddegh had nationalised Iran’s oil industry, which had been dominated by British interests. Oil, not democracy, was the priority.
The coup, coup d’état, dismantled a native government with a democratic mandate and reinstalled Mohammad Reza Pahlavi an authoritarian monarch, backed by the United States and the United Kingdom. His regime relied on repression, secret police, and heavy Western support to maintain control. That repression didn’t produce stability, it produced rage. In 1979, the backlash came in the form of the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the Shah and replaced him with a theocratic system that remains in power today.
This is the #churn, Western powers intervene blindly for strategic and economic gain. They undermine any democratic movements that natively conflict with corporate and geopolitical greed. The installed regime rules repressively, public anger builds, eventually, it explodes – often empowering forces that are more hostile, more radical, and less aligned with Western interests than the government that was overthrown. Then we act surprised and circle back to the same mess.
None of this excuses the Iranian regime’s actions, but pretending history began in 1979 is dishonest. If we want fewer authoritarian states and fewer hostile stand-offs, we need to start by acknowledging how “defending freedom” has meant undermining it. Policy churn without accountability simply produces the next crisis, and then the next one. We need to compost this mess.
In the #mainstreaming mess, international relations (#IR), energy has always been about power and security as much as economics. The modern system was built around chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, where a disruption can shake global markets overnight.
With this in mind, when we step to a different subject, the framing renewables as “unreliable” misses this wider point: oil and gas are only “reliable” so long as fragile geopolitical routes remain open and militarily secured. Wind and solar don’t sail through Hormuz; they are generated locally, distributed across grids, and not hostage to a single naval blockade. From a security perspective, decentralised renewables reduce exposure to exactly the kind of chokepoint crisis that has defined fossil-fuel geopolitics for decades.
There are meany resigns to compost this kind of mess.
