The Fediverse is opening, but there is a cost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climatechaos and the hard right is a cycle of collapse

The entanglement of hard-right politics and accelerating climate breakdown represents the most dangerous feedback loop in the coming century. Each crisis fuels the other, creating a devastating cycle of social upheaval and environmental destruction. As the climate crisis displaces millions, soon to be billions, of people from their homes, the far right exploits their suffering to consolidate political power. In turn, that power is wielded to block and reverse the long needed climate action, further degrading ecosystems, destabilizing societies, and setting the stage for even greater human displacement.

The problem in this crisis is the shrinking of what scientists call the “human climate niche”, the range of environmental conditions in which human societies can flourish. As global temperatures rise, vast swaths of the Earth become uninhabitable. Hundreds of millions are already trapped in areas plagued by deadly heat, water scarcity, failing crops, and collapsing health systems. Without urgent intervention, billions more will face similar conditions by 2030. Heat-related deaths will rise. Extreme weather events, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, will ravage entire regions. Entire communities will be forced to move, or die.

Despite this clear trajectory, wealthy nations – those most capable of mitigating climate impacts-have spent the last four decades systematically undermining efforts to curb environmental destruction. Climate policies have been diluted and blocked, not out of ignorance, but because they threaten the profits and power of entrenched elitists. Culture war narratives, pushed by billionaires and corporate interests, portray even the smallest, least affective environmental regulations as attacks on “freedom” or “national identity.” Climate denialism has returned in force, repackaged and rebranded, while scientists and activists face harassment, misinformation campaigns, and strong state repression.

As the crisis deepens, displaced people inevitably seek safety across borders, particularly in the global North. Instead of sanctuary, they are met with xenophobia, violence, and militarized borders. The far right seizes on these moments to fuel fear, spreading the lie that migration, not climate inaction, is the true threat. They weaponize suffering to advance nativist agendas, dismantle civil liberties, and double down on fossil-fueled growth. The result is a nightmare loop: climate devastation drives displacement, displacement drives reactionary politics, and reactionary politics fuel further climate devastation.

The evidence is stark in Europe. Refugees fleeing war, drought, and collapse are vilified, turned into political scapegoats by far-right parties who rise to power on the back of manufactured hatred. Their platforms universally involve gutting climate legislation, slashing social programs, and retreating into nationalist fantasies. What emerges is a fascist politics of abandonment, one that condemns the vulnerable to death while protecting elitist interests at all costs.

To pretend that the fight for climate justice is separate from the fight against fascism is a dangerous illusion. These struggles are intertwined, and neither can be won in isolation. Preventing the collapse of Earth’s life-support systems requires more than technological solutions or market tweaks, it demands a cultural and political transformation grounded in solidarity, justice, and collective power.

This transformation won’t come from above. It must be built from the ground up: through grassroots organizing, mutual aid, and global alliances committed to resisting authoritarianism and building alternative futures. We need to challenge the systems – economic, political, and ideological – that sustain both planetary destruction and far-right resurgence.

Without this kind of deep resistance and renewal, the trajectory is clear: an increasingly unlivable planet ruled by increasingly violent regimes. But another path remains possible, if we have the courage to take it. Have people who fixated on #mainstreaming noticed that they are useless? We might get some change challenge done when they do… so please tell them thanks.

The wall of funding silence

In the sprouting landscape of #openweb infrastructure, it’s not just code that gets ignored, it’s the possibility of change itself. Projects like #makeinghistory, part of the wider Open Media Network (#OMN), aren’t asking for much. They’re not flashy. They’re not political in the mainstream sense. They just quietly build the back-end tools that allow people to document their histories, publish from the grassroots, and hold space for the memory of struggle that shape our progressive liberalism. But that seems to be too much.

The wall of funding silence – We’ve submitted funding proposals – dozens over the years, to every channel supposedly set up to fund the non-mainstream side of tech. From #NLnet to #NGI, from “open futures” to the latest EU moonshots. Most of the time, the response is a polite no, a vague shrug, or silence.

Sometimes, we get honesty – “This kind of effort is very hard to seek grants for” or “I don’t have an obvious candidate for you.” What they don’t say is what’s really going on: The system does fund this kind of work, look at the bonfire fresco as an example, but only when it’s a shadow of the status quo.

There’s a path through this, if we’re honest about the rules of the game. One such route is the #makeinghistory project, a non-threatening, archive-based approach that doesn’t scream radical, but quietly lays the groundwork for deeper change. What funders may not realize (or perhaps they do) is that by supporting it, they also enable development on #indymediaback and the metadata “soup” back-ends of the OMN, the very infrastructure needed to reboot truly grassroots media.

It’s a shadow funding path. And yes, that might feel cynical. But if you’re unwilling to fund change directly, maybe you’ll fund the shadows of change. Sometimes the only way to sneak truth past the gatekeepers is through the side door.

We do need to get past this broken balance, the hard part is that many of these funders do think they’re doing good. And to be fair, they are, a little. But the balance is broken. That imbalance is invisible to most, especially those inside the comfort of stable institutions. When we push back, it looks like we’re hitting “good” people with little sticks. It’s messy, and it’s easy for them to just turn away. We get told to be grateful. To celebrate, the seedling being planted in the foreground, while bulldozers level the rest of the forest behind it.

Stick or Carrot? So what do we do? We talk about sticks and carrots. The truth is, our sticks are tiny, dwarfed by corporate lobbying, government inertia, and internal conservatism. The peaceful, hippy route changes nothing long-term, but conflict isn’t working either. We’re stuck in between, too radical for the boardroom, too polite for the barricades.

But here’s a thought: maybe it’s not about the size of the stick, but where we aim it. We’re not here to fight good people. We’re here to point out that a little good is not enough, not when the stakes are this high. If we don’t build space for change, it won’t happen. And if funders like #NLnet want to be the change they speak of, then they need to fund the infrastructure that makes it possible, even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if it’s messy. Even if it’s indirect…

What Now? We’ll give it a month. Then maybe we nudge a bit harder. But no shame, no blame. Just a call for balance, for trust, for a shift in what “doing good” really means.

The pushing of doomed projects

#OMN #makeinghistory #indymediaback #NGI #NLnet #NGIzero #openweb #4opens #deathcult #mainstreaming #funding #changechallenge

Governance, the mess of AI tech-fix paths

Seminar Reflection: Philosophy, AI, and Innovation – Week 6
Topic: AI Deliberation at Scale
Speakers: Chris Summerfield (Oxford & AI Safety Institute), MH Tessler (Google DeepMind)
Key texts: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (excerpt) and Summerfield et al., “AI Can Help Humans Find Common Ground in Democratic Deliberation”

This seminar focus is on scaling democratic deliberation via AI. The example proposal is the #HabermasMachine a test projects to facilitate large-scale consensus using #LLMs (Large Language Models). The framing, unsurprisingly, is drawn from the elitist tech sector – Google DeepMind and Oxford – with a focus on “safety” and “moderation” over human messiness and agency.

The problem we face is that this #techshit path might work, but for who is the question, what kind of “public sphere” is this #AI recreating, and who holds the power to shape it? These are strongly top-down, technocratic proposals, rooted in a narrow utilitarian logic. The underlying assumption is that human decision-making is flawed and must be mediated, and ultimately managed, by algorithmic systems. Consensus is determined not through lived human to human dialogue or, as I like to say – mess, but through an AI that quietly nudges discussions to centrist consensuses.

There is no meaningful eye-to-eye group interaction in this project, no room for DIY, #bottom up agency. Participants become data points in a system that claims to “listen,” but acts through elitist mediation. It is consensus without community, and safety without solidarity. What’s missing is the power of mess, the presenter ignores this central question: Can we build messy, human-scale deliberation that doesn’t rely on top-down interventions?

Projects like this are not grassroots governance, rather it’s governance-by-black-box, mainstreaming by design, the incentive model is telling: ideas that align with the status quo or dominant narratives are rewarded with more money. Consensus is guided not by grassroots engagement or dissenting voices, but by what the algorithm (and its funders) consider “productive.” This is the quiet suffocating hand of #mainstreaming, cloaked in neutral code.

#TechFixes paths like this are about stability at all costs, yet we live in a time when stability is the problem, with #ClimateChaos threatening billions, the demand is for transformation, not moderation.

This is AI as intermediary, not a facilitator of the commons paths we need. Transparency? Not here, no one knows how the #AI reaches consensus. The models are proprietary, the tweaks are political, and the outcomes are mediated by those already in power. The system becomes an unaccountable broker, not of truth, but of what power is willing to hear.

We need to be wary of any system that claims to represent us without us being meaningfully involved. This is a curated spectacle of consensus, delivered by machines, funded by corporations, and mediated by invisible hands. What we need is human to human projects like the #OGB, not tech managed consensus. This #mainstreaming path isn’t compost. It’s simply more #techshit to be composted, mess is a feature, not a bug.

In the #OMN (Open Media Network), we explore paths rooted in trust, openness, and peer-to-peer process. Not asking for power to listen, but taking space to act. We compost the mess; we don’t pretend it can be sanitized by top-down coding.

#Oxford #AI #techshit #dotcons

The story: power, truth, and walking the fun path

Our powerlessness feeds our desire to hate. This is not a personal failing – it’s a social design flaw. A path built on alienation and distraction will always funnel frustration into polarisation. That’s why the controversy-driven algorithms of the #dotcons (corporate social media platforms) are not just annoying, but actively harmful. They feed on our despair, and we, often unknowingly, feed on the drama they serve back to us.

It’s a closed loop of spectacle and spite, profitable to the #nastyfew but corrosive to us, the meany. An extractive business model built on social breakdown. And yet, many of us know this. So why do we stay? Because stepping away from this mess is hard. It takes more than wishful thinking. It takes movement. Not only that, but it takes organising. It takes the kind of networked activism and lived alternatives the Open Media Network (#OMN) has been building and trying to seed for the last ten years

Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us.

Truth isn’t declared, it’s built. #Postmodernism taught us that truth is slippery. That’s fine, but in the hands of #mainstreaming culture, that slipperiness has become a tool of endless distraction and decay. People say things like they are true because they feel true. They build tech platforms because they believe in them. They sell movements as brands because it looks like change. But let’s be honest: wishing something into truth does not make it true.

What makes things true is collective struggle, shared purpose, and concrete acts of solidarity. A load of social work, grounded activism, and careful trust-building make something true. This is the hard path, but it’s also the only one worth walking, and when we do it together with joy it’s the happy path.

Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.

The #geekproblem, again, is too often a part of this mess. Writing code is seen as a kind of truth declaration. “Look, it runs! So it must be real!” But a thing that compiles is not the same as a thing that lives. Tech without community is a corpse. For anything to matter, you need people. And to keep people, you need some rough-and-ready PR. You need actual engagement. You need trust, time, and probably a bit of music and food too. We can’t engineer our way out of this crisis. We have to organise our way out.

The #Lifecult vs. the #Deathcult. What we’re up against isn’t just bad ideas, it’s a worship of stability, spectacle, and control, the illusion of movement through aesthetic alone, no real challenge to the dominant system. It feels warm. It promises safety. But it leaves no room for difference, contradiction, or rebellion, this is inside both “cult”.

It requires less mental effort to condemn than to think

This is why we don’t need worship, we need practical action. Change and challenge are not side effects of our projects – they are the sharp point. We don’t do this work to be liked, we do it because there is no other way to make things true. And if we do this together, it becomes fun and meaningful – we create social “truth”.

Working with the #Eurocrats (and other impossible people). Let’s talk about the institutions. The #EU. Local governments. #NGOs. Big tech “allies.” They are hopelessly incompetent when it comes to grassroots tech and progressive social change. But here’s the thing, they will not go away on their own. If we don’t push, the right-wing will step in and push harder. That’s mess is already happening.

Revolution is but thought carried into action.

So we take the harder path, we show up, try to guide. We keep the door open even when it slams in our face. And yes, it’s exhausting. We’ve tried to work with #mainstreaming people. Many are unbelievably vile, and worst of all, they have no idea they’re behaving badly. They don’t see their role in the decay. They don’t see the crisis, because the spectacle of control makes everything look fine.

But we see it, and we are not powerless, refusing the mess is about rebuilding the commons. Yes, the current #mainstreaming is a mess. A deep, systemic, soul-grinding mess. But we should not put up with it. That’s what #OMN is for. That’s what projects like #indymediaback, #OGB (Open Governance Body), and the broader #openweb movement are trying to hold space for.

We don’t need more hype. We need slow, messy, grounded work:

Listen more than we preach.
Read each other’s code, politics, and history before rewriting.
Talk about our failures honestly.
Grow media and networks that are native to community, not layered on top like #dotcons digital colonialism.
Build up our own cultures of care and collaboration in the #openweb to replace the dying ones.

This is fun, not a strategy of purity or perfection, it’s a strategy of survival, and even joy.
Ideas? Responses? This is not a closed story, it’s a beginning. If you’re reading this and feeling the weight of it, good. That’s where we start from. But let’s not stop there. Come build, talk, and argue. Come plant seeds, come help make the mess into compost.

All the quotes are from Emma Goldman

Collaborative futures “Go Outside”

A brief literary diversion to get back to our coding and #UX design. In the book News from Nowhere, William Morris invites us to dream, but more than that, he asks us to build. Written in 1890, this visionary novel imagines a world beyond capitalism: no money, no bosses, no state, just people living together in beauty and cooperation, with practical labour, shared resources, and a deep reverence for the land.

For the Open Media Network (#OMN), Morris’s imagined future is not a quaint artifact of socialist utopianism. It offers living lessons, tools, for those of us rebuilding the balance of collective systems of media, communication, and trust from the ground up.

But these lessons come with a challenge, theory is easy, communication is hard. Morris wasn’t naïve about the criticisms he’d face. In News from Nowhere, he playfully mocks the kind of rigid, #mainstreaming or book-bound political thinking that critiques from a distance. In one scene, a bookish character is told off:

“You have so muddled your head with mathematics, and with grubbing into those idiotic books about political economy (he he!), that you scarcely know how to behave… It is about time for you to take some open-air work, so that you may clear away the cobwebs from your brain.”

This is more than a literary joke. It’s a call to stop abstracting and start relating, to the world, to each other, to the work in front of us.

Let’s get back to focusing on coding in grassroots tech and media paths where we are trying to move beyond the current #mainstreaming, we face a similar issue: we to often fall back on rewriting. If a project doesn’t make sense, or if it feels messy or “badly coded,” we’re tempted to scrap it and start over. It’s always easier to build something from scratch than to understand and contribute to a shared vision.

But that instinct, while human, is deadly to collaboration. Reading code is like reading a community, you’re presented with a program someone else wrote, and for whatever reason, you need to understand it, whether to fix something or build something bigger, it will likely be painful. Their choices, habits, or style might seem opaque or even “wrong” to you. But if you rewrite instead of understand, you lose something deeper than code: you lose continuity, you lose trust, you lose the opportunity to actually work together.

This problem isn’t just about software, it’s cultural, it runs through all grassroots movements, including the #OMN. We don’t need another polished platform or a perfect protocol. What we need is the maturity and humility to read each other’s work – whether it’s code, writing, media, or mutual aid projects – and find ways to extend it, rather than erase it.

Morris never intended News from Nowhere to be a literal map of the future. It was always a provocation, a reminder that theory must live in the real world, among people with needs, desires, and contradictions. His “utopia” isn’t managed by frameworks or protocols. It’s governed by relationships. Trust and care are its foundation, not abstract “rules.”

This is crucial for how we approach governance in the #openweb and the society it needs to shape. Rather than getting stuck in ideological loops or trying to design the “perfect” horizontal system, we need to stay grounded. We must treat organising like reading someone else’s program: with patience, attention, and empathy. Don’t rewrite from scratch, build on what’s already alive, collaborative maturity is radical.

The #OMN isn’t about shiny apps or new stacks. It’s about a culture of maintenance and shared ownership, of federated messiness. To get there, we have to often let go of (stupid) individual ego, the idea that our code, our writing, our instance is the one that will “win.” Instead, we aspire to be the kind of people who can join a network not by dominating it, but by understanding it. By reading what came before, by contributing to a path that strengthens the whole.

As in Morris’s world, the future doesn’t arrive through force. It grows in the commons. It thrives when people take the time to learn each other’s language, even if that language is clumsy, half-broken, or unfamiliar. This is the path from utopia to everyday practice, what News from Nowhere offers the #OMN and any grassroots horizontal movement today:

Understand before rewriting. Your time is better spent in solidarity than in solitude.
Theory without practice is noise. Go outside. Apply ideas in real communities.
Culture matters more than code. Values, trust, and shared rituals hold systems together.
Slow is not bad. Messy is not failure. These are signs of life, not dysfunction.

Let’s be very clear, building any shared future isn’t easy. But if we can move past the reflex to rewrite, and instead read, listen, and extend, then we’re not just writing better code or building better media, we’re building the kind of world past thinkers like Morris dreamed of. One worth the hard, meaningful work that is at the centre of the value streams in the book. This can be fun.

Telegram messaging app is dieing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The false continuity

What we have now is context collapse and the false continuity of liberalism. Academic and policy discussions assume that the current liberal framework will somehow persist, that the road ahead is bumpy but ultimately paved. But climate science, geopolitics, and resource decline say otherwise. That the liberal “centre” cannot hold under these pressures. Equatorial regions, facing escalating #climatecollapse, are the canary in the coal mine, they are slipping into post-political spaces where governance becomes a matter of force and survival, not policy and debate. Think Mad Max, not Davos. And this future isn’t “far away” – it’s already visible in countries facing water wars, crop failures, and climate migration.

Politics is moving from fantasy to fracture. We need real discussion about the actual future political paths, not the illusion of stability. And those futures will likely be led, or torn apart, by two poles: The hard right, using fear, control, and militarized borders. The progressive left, if it can organize around collective care, resilience, and radical democracy. This tension will define the coming decades.

The Tragedy of the Commons is a poplar right wing story where context matters, Yes, Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” is ideologically flawed. He was wrong in assuming people can’t manage shared resources. But, and this is crucial, he is right within the logic of capitalism. That’s the tragic part. In a system built on extraction and competition, the commons are often destroyed, not by individuals acting rationally, but by structures rewarding private accumulation and punishing restraint. So in the context of our current #mainstreaming society, the “tragedy” metaphor is useful, not as a universal truth, but as a diagnosis of system failure. Use it carefully. Use it critically. But use it.

One path out of this mess is not to react to #mainstreaming – redirect It – when we react to #mainstreaming with outrage or purity, we feed the spectacle. Instead, we should build and walk our own paths. An alternative path, rooted in care, diversity, and solidarity, slowly force the mainstream to shift, not because we begged it to, but because we created a viable, compelling, and active outside. Think Fediverse vs Twitter. Mastodon didn’t shout at Elon. It just existed, and now journalists and their #mainstreaming assumptions are paying attention.

This leads on to monsters, Fluff, and Spikes, a note on social repression. In any radical space, when you scratch the fluff, spikes come out. This is not a personal failure, it’s a universal human problem, repression, both internal and external. The goal is not to eliminate conflict, but to mediate it through shared values. Respect for diversity, and the desire to debate with respect, is not a weakness. It’s how we build bridges across difference. Radical change without respect just breeds new hierarchies. Real strength is soft-spiked, compassionate, but uncompromising.

Then the next step is “Use and abuse” is a good strategy for dealing with the #dotcons while they continue to dominate our digital and social infrastructure. Why? Because refusing to engage with these platforms outright is the equivalent of shouting into the void – or living in a cave. And caves, while romantic to a certain type of purist, are never effective social solutions.

The truth is this #dotcons are still where the #mainstreaming people live, and mainstream attention is power, even if borrowed. As radicals or progressives, using their platforms to push counter-narratives, while simultaneously undermining their legitimacy and building our own independent infrastructure, is both necessary and strategic. Think of it as exiting from within by using their reach to grow the seeds of your use alt-path.

KISS: Keep It Simple (and Strategic). We don’t need more complexity. We need clarity and cohesion. Use the tools at hand (yes, even the dirty ones). Build better ones. Mediate conflict. Focus on real outcomes. And remember: purity politics is a luxury. Survival and solidarity are not.

A few steps, to become real challenge and challenge, not just a #fashionista wanker (this is a metaphor for non-productive). phhwww… best not to become a prat about this.

Maybe we don’t then get the guillotine out…

Because current #mainstreaming, centrism, comfy pointless political “maturity” worked out so well, the last time we had a hard shift to the far right in the 1930s. Those “well-meaning” liberals at the time were patted on the back for their reasoned takes and rewarded for their civility right before it ended in a world war. That’s the dirty compost of history we’re all standing in today.

Fast-forward 100 years and today’s centrist are pretending not to smell the rot, their “middle path” has been disintegrating for the last 40 years. The old #mainstreaming legacy parties are crumbling into irrelevance, the dried leaves of the 40 years of #neoliberal wind. In the US, the corporate Democrats are led by animated corpses propped up by PR necromancy, while the #MAGA right eats their roting corpses, dresses in their cloth and steals their path, and without a blink of “common sense” gets away with calling it a revolution.

Meanwhile, people, the compost for real change, are screaming about inequality, rent, inflation, broken healthcare, unusable digital #dotcons infrastructure, and corporate theft of public services. But centrists hear all this and mutter: “Hmm, interesting. Now what could the problem be?” Western centrists stare into the rising far-right tide and scratch their heads, “shocked” that a decade of ignoring propaganda and letting fascists organize on #dotcons led to… #fascism. A real surprise outcome… Who knew that letting lies shout louder than truth in the “free market of ideas” might be a real problem?

Into that empty vacuum steps the hard right, waving ethnic nationalism and promising a future soaked in nostalgia and fear. What we need to say clearly is this is just another side of the same #nastyfew elitists hoarding wealth while selling fascism to the angry and disillusioned.

The only serious force that still tries to push back? The #fashernista fragmented, much-smeared left. In Germany, in France, even in the UK (before being gutted by #NGO centrists). What do our liberal centrists do? They blow smoke and mirrors, equating the left with the right: “One wants to redistribute wealth and build homes; the other wants to criminalize poor people and deport anyone not white. Clearly, both are equally extreme.” This is simply more mess to compost

So what’s the current centrist path? Steal the far right’s policies – but do it “sensibly.” In the UK, Starmer’s “Labour” has become Farage’s reform UK in a red tie. Deportations, austerity, privatisation, all served with a smug banal centrist grin. The outcome, voters, seeing no real alternative, just go for the real fascists instead of the fake centrist “liberal” remix. More mess to compost.

Macron did the same in France by burned his own coalition to stop any shift to the left, claiming they’re just as bad as Le Pen’s mess. Why? Because one side wants public housing and the other wants a racial purge. Yes the same.

So, why won’t centrists move left? The answer is simple, billionaires fund the centre. The left wants to tax them, so the rich choose death – not their own, of course, but ours. A sacrifice the 1% #nastyfew are happy to make from both the right and the “centre”. This is more than mess to compost, the old solution was a guillotine, do we have a different path this time?

Another alt centrist path? Imagine if grassroots parties dared to compost the past instead of embalming it. Imagine if they moved left, rebuilt public services, reversed neoliberal theft, and honoured the postwar social contract, you work, you live with dignity. This is in part what the #OMN is about: composting the #deathcult, seeding native projects with #4opens, growing radical alternatives in the cracks.

What everyone can now see is that the old centre is collapsing. What comes next? People urgently need to see is that we don’t need to move right with the claps of the centre, what we do need is to dig down, get messy, and grow something new – rooted, trust-based, and open. Because we’re not choosing between liberal decay and fascist fire. We’re making compost. And from compost, the future grows.

Maybe we don’t then get the guillotine out…

The Mess – If You Don’t Value Things, You Destroy Them

We live inside and meany of us under a system for 200 years, global capitalism, where value is determined not by care, connection, or any collective well-being, but by market logic. If something is not valued in that narrow logic, it is treated as waste. This means that if you don’t actively value the alternatives – you will “accidentally” destroy them. This applies to tech, culture, nature, and community.

In this, tech, has a problem of misplaced value, people still keep using #mainstreaming tools – the platforms and apps of the #dotcons – because they’re easy, because everyone else does, or simply out of habit. But this actively erodes the alternatives we’ve built: It disempowers projects like #visionontv, #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback. It centralizes control, disconnects us from human-scale governance, and reinforces #stupidindividualism.

This highlights the balance of social change vs. technological change. We must be clear: social change without tech will stall, and tech change without social grounding will fail or harm. With the #OMN projects, the #OGB is designed to bridge this divide. It’s not dogmatic, so no rigid ideology fully owns it. But it’s balanced, so many groups can come to accept it, if we can just get it implemented by a committed few.

But this implementation is hard, because we’re all facing BLOCKING, #BLOCKING and the #deathcult. We all BLOCK, we all turn away from truths that feel uncomfortable: Liberals block radical alternatives. Dogmatists block flexible, balanced ones. Most people just block anything that complicates their worldview.

And after 40 years of #neoliberalism, this #deathcult logic is deep inside us all, a vicious cycle of #stupidindividualism. Without community ownership, without collective vision, our tools fail: Projects decay into power politics and people retreat into passivity or purity spirals. And the worship of “personal freedom” just becomes fuel for the fire. We’re trapped in a feedback loop of: Individualism → Disconnection → Destruction → Fear → More individualism.

Change is messy, it’s supposed to be, that’s why we need to give/take ownership of our #openweb infrastructure. We need democratic instincts, not clean #PR. We need value-driven mess, not market-driven clarity. We need to embrace the #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) path – precisely because it’s the hardest thing for people to do in this world of shiny distractions.

Final point is you are part of this, a lot of people are passive, lazy, even stupid – but not because they’re bad, more because the system makes them this way, because it rewards disinterest. And many of them – many of you – can’t even see the problem, because you’re so deep inside it. That’s the trap, the invisible BLOCK we must face. That’s what the #OMN and #OGB try to push through. So yes – I’m probably pointing the finger at YOU. But also inviting you to build, to grow, to compost the myths and grow something more real, more humanistic.

#KISS

Looking at building #OMN projects

An overview of projects

#Indymedia Classic

Most of the data is a common. Core flows:

Newswire (public, chronological): Anyone can post – and it will appear if they are trusted. It goes to moderation if they are not. This is mostly populated by editorial collective chosen trusted flows into the instance
Features (curated): Promoted stories written by the editorial collective from the newswire resources.
Hidden (private): Moderated view, not visible publicly unless let through by collective to newswire.

View Structure: Mostly fixed: Three flows, with some tag-based navigation as optional/secondary, so can think of this as a “fixed” news landing page with flows. A button to consume and create tag flows, the #makinghistory #UX

Editorial model: Collective moderation, through affinity group consensus.

Metaphor: Like a river (Newswire) feeding into a reservoir (Features), with a dam (Hidden) filtering out toxic waste.

#MakingHistory

Most of the data is a common. Core Structure:

Media object (any format) fragments?

Stories: Everything starts as a crafted piece (linked original fragments).
Tag-based flows: Rich tagging creates multiple dynamic timelines/streams of stories and fragments?
Moderation (private): Curators can review, prioritise, or archive
Interface: Inspired by Tweet Deck-style dashboards: multiple parallel tag/stream views.

Emphasis: Encourages narrative threading, historical context, and thematic clustering over time.

Metaphor: A garden of stories with paths (tags) between plots – some bloom, others get composted behind the scenes.

Shared DNA (and how #OMN fits)

Both: Are people-powered publishing systems. Use a public/private split for moderation and trust-building. Emphasize non-corporate, grassroots communication.

The #OMN acts as a bridge: letting projects like Indymedia and MakingHistory interoperate, share flows, and build trust networks across platforms – all within the ethos of the #4opens.

To be thought about:

The codebase/ActivityPub/OMN all have assumptions that likely need bridging.

Do we use groups to implement collective data – commons – we give admin rights over data by group membership? Then we keep legacy admin roles, but try and push them into the background and plan for them to fade away in the end.

Trusted/untrusted is this based on groups/instances/individuals/tag flow from source or general?

We need to add metadata to objects…

We need every object to be a wiki… This includes the articles – we end up with the Wikipedia of news based on organic trust groups and grassroots street news views rebuilding what it is to be #mainstreaming

Stop chasing tech cults and start growing rooted alternatives

#Musk is a useful example of the #nastyfew: wealthy technocrats wrapping themselves in the cloak of progress while undermining the foundations of any, let alone a just future. These stories and narratives about innovation are a high-tech rebrand of green capitalism, a slick façade masking the same old decaying systems of extraction, inequality, and authoritarianism.

The problem they push is that instead of confronting the #KISS causes of our social and planetary crises, these people offer us distraction: electric cars for the elitists, fantasies of Mars colonies, and #AI overlords dressed up as saviours. This isn’t transformation – it’s #deathcult worshiping continuity in crisis.

People like Musk are useful to the #deathcult because they peddle a seductive, market-friendly myth: that we don’t need to change our behaviour, our economics, or our power structures, we just need to upgrade our tech. Comforting, isn’t it? For those who benefit from the status quo, it’s the perfect nasty con.

He personally embodies the worst of the #geekproblem: the cult of the engineer, disconnected from social reality, obsessed with “fixing” the world through code and hardware while ignoring the human systems that create the problems in the first place. This is dead libertarian ideology dressed in the shrowed of innovation.

We urgently need to compost these myths. Not just resist them, actively decompose them, mix them with grounded knowledge, and grow something better from this soil.

That’s where projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) come in – a project seeded in the messy, composted soil of decades of grassroots media and digital commons. Unlike the sleek towers of technocratic illusion, #OMN is rooted in public-first values: transparency, participation, autonomy, and trust. It’s not about building new silos or chasing the next unicorn, it’s about connecting the islands of resistance, amplifying local grassroots voices to rebuild public infrastructure for storytelling, organising, and governance.

The #OMN isn’t anti-tech – it’s pro-human. It’s a network built with people, for people – not for investors or ego-driven billionaires. It draws from the radical legacy of projects like #indymediaback, and threads in tools like #OGB to bring coherence and shared narrative to the fractured #openweb reboot. So please stop chasing tech cults and start growing rooted alternatives.

“Use and abuse” is a good strategy for dealing with the #dotcons while they continue to dominate our digital and social infrastructure. Why? Because refusing to engage with these platforms outright is the equivalent of shouting into the void – or living in a cave. And caves, while romantic to a certain type of purist, are never effective social solutions.