Tag: mainstreaming

A path we need for the #openweb

The #NGO crew can be poison, not because they’re bad people, but because of how social structures and agendas shape behaviour. For the social health of the #openweb, we need to be mindful of what we take in. Just like in nature, some things are toxic in large doses. “Nice” doesn’t always mean “good.” There’s no contradiction here.

“Don’t drink from the #mainstreaming.”

But remember, shit makes good compost! Instead of just being cynical, let’s grow something better from this mess. A healthy #openweb world is still possible.

The Real Problem, is that too many people have been stuck in the #dotcons feedback loop for too long, lazy consumption feeding corporate control, which in turn dulls critical thinking, making people even more dependent. The illusion of #mainstreaming “ethical” alternatives all reinforce this cycle.

This post isn’t aimed at anyone in particular, but if you feel called out… well, maybe think about why.

Q: Why does this matter?

Because right now, #fashernistas (trend-chasers) and their projects are flooding into the #openweb space. Some of these projects are good, but many are just recreating the #geekproblem, building things that look different on the surface but are more #techshit repeating the same mistakes.

We use the #4opens as a litmus test for these projects:

  • Open Data – Who controls it?
  • Open Source – Can it be independently verified and improved?
  • Open Process – Who gets to decide?
  • Open Standards – Can it be freely networked and flows built upon?

If we don’t actively promote and support real alternatives, people will just step to more of the next “ethically marketed” #dotcons. If we don’t do #PR, they will, and they have far bigger budgets.

Q: What’s the deal with #hashtags, they empower people to break out of controlled algorithms.

  • Click a hashtag → See real conversations outside your curated bubble.
  • Follow a hashtag → Keep up with a movement, not just what a platform wants you to see.
  • Use hashtags → Help build DIY, horizontal networks that weaken centralized control.

Example: Try clicking on #boatingeurope

Simple truth: Hashtags can be used to give you more power, and take power away from the algorithmic walls of the #geekproblem and #dotcons. They help connect ideas, people, and actions outside #mainstreaming corporate control.

Not using them? That’s fine, but why actively reject something that makes change easier? Social transformation isn’t painless, but it’s doable. A simple first step is to just start using shared social hashtags, and when you get pushback, stick with it.

Nobody said social change was easy.

The #mainstreaming progressive are finally moving to what I have been saying in the hashtag story. They are talking about the #blocking of left paths by our #fashionisters, we do need to work at shovelling this mess to grow the seeds we need for change and challenge.

There are piles of shit from this mess.

Biography

I’ve been part of the #Fediverse since its earliest days, helping to build it from the ground up. The #OMN ran five instances for the first four years, supporting communities as they explored decentralized social spaces. I’ve organized events, facilitated discussions, and continuously worked to nurture the Fediverse’s growth as a living example of what the #openweb can be. You can explore more about this journey here.

My involvement in grassroots media and open technology stretches back to the birth of the web itself. I was part of the early internet experiments that challenged #mainstreaming narratives and built alternative channels for expression and connection. Projects like Undercurrents, the UK’s radical video collective, pushed past and back against corporate media control, documenting grassroots struggles and amplifying unheard voices for change and challenge.

From there, we launched #Ruffcuts, distributing activist films on copyleft free to distribute CD-R’s long before YouTube or streaming platforms existed. Soon after, #Indymedia emerged as a global decentralized federated media network, proving that open publishing and collective moderation could empower movements worldwide. This work eventually evolved into #visionOntv, an early attempt to build a peer-to-peer video distribution network, harnessing the power of collective storytelling to counter the corporate narratives.

After campaigning agonist climate change for 20 years I bought a lifeboat (an apt metaphor) to sail through Europe with #Boatingeurope, I connected with diverse communities, sharing media tools and spreading the message of #DIY media. These projects were all part of the same thread, a continuous push to create #DIY spaces where people can connect, collaborate, and tell their own stories without #mainstreaming gatekeepers.

The history of the Fediverse carries valuable lessons from these past experiments: the tension between decentralization and fragmentation, the struggle to balance grassroots governance against the creeping influence of #mainstreaming commercialization, and the ongoing need to keep human connection and community at the centre of technology.

By learning from the past, we cultivate a more resilient, cooperative, and truly #openweb path, one that resists the extractive logic of the #dotcons and embraces collective action and care. The path ahead isn’t easy, but the roots we’ve already planted run deep. Let’s keep growing, composting the mess, and building the future we need. 🌱

What am I doing now?

These aren’t pointless projects

#mainstreaming #liberalism has lost its way. For the past 20 years, many self-described liberals have spewed out bilge water disguised as “common sense.” But when pressure mounts, they reveal themselves as dogmatic and intolerant, almost as if they aren’t truly liberal at all.

How did we end up in this mess? The #deathcult, #stupidindividualism, and the rise of #dotcons shaped the dominant version of “common sense,” warping it away from collective care and into something narrow and self-destructive. It’s worth reflecting on this if we want to reclaim a liberal liberalism, rooted in genuine openness and social good.

In practice, we can compost this mess by focusing on #nothingnew paths. Two longstanding cultural projects already embody this, working in non-federated ways for over a century. Now, we can add technical federation to the mix, building on 5+ years of #ActivityPub rollout.

This gives us two powerful, #openweb-native paths forward:

  • Grassroots #DIY culture — Local, self-organized, and messy, but thriving outside corporate control.
  • Technical federation — Interconnected systems designed to distribute power and ownership.

Both of these paths lead somewhere meaningful:

These aren’t pointless projects, they’re a chance to break free from the suffocating grip of the #deathcult and build something resilient, human, and actually free.

Shall we pick up the shovels and start composting? 🌱

Social Media Monitoring, data scraping

In a #4opens project like the #Fediverse, this article’s framing makes no sense as a native view of the #openweb. The data exists in a commons — and while you could apply a #CC licence and try to enforce it. In the end, #4opens is just that, #opendata. But as the article highlights, there are real issues in understanding how open systems intersect with state and corporate surveillance.

Fediverse & Mass Surveillance — A research article breaks down how the Fediverse presents both challenges and opportunities for state surveillance.
🔗 Read the research

"Non-centralized social media appears to be undergoing a 'Killer Hype Cycle,' where users dissatisfied with centralized platforms flock to alternatives like Mastodon. But with this influx comes an increase in publicly available data for researchers, corporations, and state agents alike."

The reality is the normal #mainstreaming #dotcons issues that:

Corporations mine federated media for profit.
State agencies catalog user data for tracking and control.

This is a reminder that you are doing anything #spiky political it’s much better to organise off the internet as government analysts easily search and map connections between people across the #openweb as much as they already do more directly through the #dotcons

This isn’t a #ecryptionist call to lock down the #Fediverse, that would be beyond stupid, but a reminder that openness requires awareness and collective defence. A truly #openweb using the #4opens needs to face these threats head-on, with social solutions and federated resilience at the core of its path and design.

Security and trust are a part of the fluffy/spiky debate in activism

Conversations on this subject

A. It sounds like you’ve got a detailed plan — good luck in your work!

Q. As I outline in my posts, our work isn’t going anywhere because the grassroots have been hollowed out. My focus now is to build bridges to the #mainstreaming in an effort to make compost to refill the grassroots soil. What I argue for, in a practical sense, is that we’ve already spent 20 years working in alternative paths, and this approach likely still works.

We have a rare opportunity with the current bridging of the #openweb back to mainstream through #ActivityPub. This moment is crucial, and it would be a disaster to squander it, especially in an era defined by #climatechaos and the global hard shift to the right. Please keep this in mind when organizing events for the #SocialWebFoundation (#SWF). The bridges we build now shape the future.

Q. If our worlds keep getting smaller, we risk losing the very alternatives that could save us. Do you think some of them understood what I just said?

A. Absolutely they do. They just don’t give a rat’s patootie. They ran the numbers. A human extinction event is unlikely. Forecasts indicate that the remaining resources will support them and their progeny at their existing levels of luxury in perpetuity. The rest of us can just go take a flying leap at a rolling doughnut.

I don’t have the focus or energy any more to push these projects into being so the next step is to abstract them into the ideas and flows then put them out there for the next generation, I am happy to mentor, have an expedition boat to convert #boatingeurope thinking about writing a book to sum up the content of this site, and the 40 years of history, process, and development that has shaped it.

How #mainstreaming can meaningfully fund grassroots movements, they get the value from

One of the biggest tensions in the fight to build an alternative, sustainable future is the relationship between mainstream resources and grassroots projects. The reality is STARK: grassroots movements need resources to survive and thrive, yet the very act of receiving funding, if they can access it at all, drags them into the suffocating grip of #mainstreaming culture, where the radical edges that make them valuable are dulled and destroyed. So, how can conscious mainstream actors support grassroots movements without killing the radical energy that creates the value in the first place.

The answer lies in sharing resources in non-mainstreaming ways, a difficult leap for many, but an essential one. The only people who can truly be useful in sustaining #openweb paths are those willing to break free from the entrenched habits of top-down control, endless bureaucracy, and the need to polish everything into marketable, bite-sized pieces.

What does non-mainstreaming support look like?

  • Unconditional Funding: Grassroots projects need funding without strings attached. Too often, funding comes with requirements that reshape the project itself, turning radical experimentation into pointless palatable, measurable outputs. True support means trusting grassroots communities to know what they need and allowing them to allocate resources nimbly. #TRUST #opencollective
  • Trust-Based Relationships: A “native” healthier approach is to build long-term relationships with grassroots groups, listening to their needs and responding in an organic, flexible way. #TRUST #OMN
  • Decentralized Decision-Making: Bottom-up governance models. Funding should flow to collectives, not charismatic individuals or figureheads building careers #KISS #OGB
  • Infrastructure, Not Ownership: A path that might work, rather than buying influence, mainstream actors can provide infrastructure, hosting, bandwidth, servers, physical spaces, without attempting to control the projects using them. Think of it as building bridges, not fences. #Fediverse instances
  • Amplify, Don’t Absorb: Mainstream platforms and institutions need to amplify grassroots voices without assimilating them. This means using their reach to highlight native radical projects but stepping back to let those projects speak for themselves. No need to repackage the message, people can handle raw, messy reality. #indymediaback

Why this bridge building matters, the current mainstream is crumbling under the weight of its contradictions. As #climatechaos accelerates, as #neoliberalism fails to deliver anything but more suffering, people will look for alternatives. But if those alternatives are already swallowed and sanitized by the current mainstream, hope dims. Grassroots movements are the seedbeds of real change, they hold the living knowledge of how to build differently.

Keeping the bridge in place isn’t an act of charity; it’s a #KISS survival strategy. The future will grow from the compost of the old world, and those willing to step off the conveyor belt of #mainstreaming and into the rich, chaotic soil of grassroots experimentation will be the ones who help plant the seeds.

#fediversehouse

Why the Fediverse Needs a Connection Between Mainstreaming and Grassroots

This is a key point that often gets misunderstood. #Mainstreaming isn’t inherently good or bad—it depends on who is influencing whom.

Good #mainstreaming = Bringing #openweb values into the mainstream (transparency, decentralization, cooperation).

Bad #mainstreaming = The mainstream (corporate control, surveillance capitalism, hierarchy) infusing itself into the #openweb and reshaping it in its own image.

In the current context, mainstreaming is mostly bad because it tends to dilute radical alternatives into market-friendly compromises. The #deathcult (neoliberalism) doesn’t absorb things in good faith—it co-opts and neutralizes them.

That’s why we need mediation, pushback, and a clear understanding of context when talking about #mainstreaming. Sometimes it’s the right move, but right now, the priority is defending and growing the roots of the #openweb before our # #fashionistas can sell it off as a brand.

One of the best things about the Fediverse is that real people and community’s get to choose what kind of digital paths they want to take. Don’t want #Meta snooping around? Join or host an instance that blocks them out. Prefer not to have people search your content? Lock it down in your settings. Want to mediate the strong #blinded flow of “normies”? Close the doors via your instance settings. It’s a “nativist” system that offers a radical degree of agency compared to the #dotcons.

But what happens when people start demanding that their version of the #Fediverse become the default for everyone else? That’s where things get tricky, and where we risk losing the most valuable aspect of this messy, decentralized network: the bridges between worlds. The danger of closed loops, it’s understandable that people want their corners of the #Fediverse to feel safe, sustainable, coherent, and aligned with shared values.

The problem is that when we focus on tools so that every group can retreat into its own echo chamber, we recreate the failures of the wider #dotcons web: fragmented bubbles where ideas stagnate, and meaningful conversations can’t happen. This is what I mean when I talked about #mainstreaming echo chambers, the tendency for people to isolate themselves in what feels comfortable, which ultimately makes everything smaller.

The irony is that this impulse to close off is, in a way, the same as the desire to keep the Fediverse open. Both are reactions to the failures of centralized tech platforms. People who want to mediate #mainstreaming influences are trying to nurture the fragile seedlings of the grassroots culture they’ve built, while those advocating for broader adoption hope to prevent the network from collapsing into irrelevance. Both impulses come from wanting the Fediverse to survive, they just express that desire in too often opposite #blocking ways.

The failed bridge of #FediverseHouse is a normal path. This tension came to a head with projects like #FediverseHouse and #Fediforum, which aimed to be a gathering space but ultimately failed to build lasting bridges. It wasn’t because people didn’t care, it was because there wasn’t enough understanding of how to hold that tension between the grassroots and the mainstream without one swallowing the other. The projects lack the simplicity of #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and got tangled in the same old dynamics of control and fragmentation.

Keeping the bridge in place has a lot to do which sharing resources, in non #mainstreaming ways, yes, we understand, this is a hard leap for meany people but only people who can make this step can acturly be useful in the end to the “native” #openweb paths. The solution isn’t to pick a side, but to intentionally hold the bridge. In a smaller, view, that might look like running accounts across multiple instances and boosting content between different ideological spaces to keep ideas flowing. It might mean advocating for #4opens values even in mainstream-leaning spaces, or gently nudging the more isolated pockets of the Fediverse to stay curious about what lies outside their walls.

The Fediverse doesn’t need to be one thing, that’s its strength. But if we let the bridges decay, we lose the possibility of cross-pollination, of radical ideas seeping into #mainstreaming consciousness, or of everyday people stumbling into a space that makes them question the status quo. Instead of fighting, as we so often do, to make one version of the #Fediverse dominant, maybe the real work is in keeping the network alive, messy, imperfect, but always connected. Because it’s in those connections that real alternatives grow.

Bridging the Divide: Using Imperfect Tech for Real Paths

I have an #ActivityPub account on a #fashernista anarchist server and another on a liberal #mainstreaming instance. I deliberately boost posts between them, not as an act of personal amplification but as a small, intentional intervention to bypass the “common sense” blocking that happens on both instances.

This isn’t about ME< ME< ME. It’s about building bridges in the messy, imperfect flows of social tech. People often don’t see how tightly they’re locked into ideological bubbles, where the “obvious” truths of their side become invisible walls. By bridging content between these spaces, the goal is to reintroduce doubt, curiosity, and a flicker of understanding that wouldn’t otherwise cross the divide.

It’s a #KISS path to bridge-building. Not perfect, but practical. The tech might be flawed, and people might misinterpret the intent, but that’s part of the struggle. The point is to gently challenge the cycle of people only hearing what reinforces their paths, to remind them that the story is always bigger, more complex, more interesting and worth exploring.

If this sounds confusing, or if your first reaction is suspicion or dismissal, maybe that’s the signal to pause and reread. The site linked here, hamishcampbell.com, dives deeper into these ideas. It’s not about personal validation; it’s about understanding the compost we’re standing in and figuring out how to grow something real together in this space.

#KISS

UPDATE: if you have a “rat thought” and wont to pick this #4opens post up and hit me with it, note none of the posts convene the conduct of either instance, this is not about getting round useful #blocks it is about getting round the unthought through result of some “common sense”. So please put that stick down and share the post, thanks.

Fear, hope, and #climatechaos

The path we are on, climate change, mainstream politics, and fear reveals a troubling pattern: in times of crisis, like #climatechaos, mainstream politics instinctively shifts to the right. It’s essential to understand the underlying role of fear in pushing this drift.

Fear is a powerful political motivator. Right-wing ideologies thrive on it, whether the fear stems from economic instability, cultural change, or national security threats. In the current path of accelerating climate breakdown, fears of environmental collapse, mass migration, and resource scarcity intensify are creating fertile ground for reactionary politics to grow.

Yet, an intriguing shift to a counter path is underway: the fading fear of socialism among the western bourgeoisie. For decades, socialism was the boogeyman used to justify capitalism’s worst excesses. But as socialist ideas gain legitimacy, especially among younger generations, that fear diminishes. This shift cracks open space to challenge and thus change the right’s dominance and revive radical real alternatives.

This opening offers a brief flowering of hope. By balancing collective, community-driven projects and advocating for systemic change, we can push back against the politics of fear. Movements like #OMN, #OGB, and #indymediaback are seeds of this potential, growing resilience, equity, and sustainability outside the #mainstreaming mess driving spectacle.

However, hope can be a dwindling resource. Every moment lost to inaction feeds the cycle of despair, reinforcing the right’s grip on public imagination. The urgency of #climatechaos means we can’t afford to waste time or the pointless distractions that #mainstreaming common sense pushes over us.

This struggle is a balance between fear and hope. Fear is the tool of the #deathcult, but hope lives in grassroots action. The future depends on whether we push fear to suffocate change or seize this fleeting opening to build something real — from the compost of what’s been lost all ready.

Best not to one of the prats, who #block this path, thanks.

Feeding on the Roots: How Mainstreaming Devours Radical Movements

We’ve had 40 years of head-down worship of the #deathcult, and now very few people dare to lift their heads to look around at the mess we live and die in. It is really hard to communicate to #mainstreaming people inside the #dotcons that today, way too much mainstreaming is simply parasitic. That the balance is out with them feeding, draining the life from grassroots #DIY creativity, to consumes it, and then discards the husk. This is in part why our liberal society and wider ecology are in crisis. We let “them” devour and discarded the very cultures that regenerates our lives.

Punk emerged as a raw, anti-establishment eruption of energy: people building their own venues, pressing their own records, and living outside the system. Within a decade, the mainstream chewed it up, spat out mall-punk aesthetics, and sold rebellion back to kids as a fashion statement. The original #DIY culture that sustained community withered, while corporations wore its preserved skin to sell the same cultural emptiness punk rose to resist.

Or take the light green movement. Grassroots dark green eco-activism in the ’70s and ’80s was fierce and uncompromising, with people physically blocking bulldozers, building tree-sits, and creating autonomous zones. Today, the “green” label is a marketing gimmick, plastered on disposable products and corporate ad campaigns. The radical core of systemic change has been devoured, leaving a husk of performative (stupid)individual actions like buying metal straws.

Even the internet itself — once an open tool of ideas, built by native #DIY culture and hackers who wanted to share knowledge freely — was, after a ten-year fight, enclosed by the #dotcons. They bought the creativity, built walled gardens, and replaced collective digital commons with algorithmic echo chambers. What was once a chaotic, messy, generative space became a polished, ad-riddled shopping mall.

This cycle repeats because people don’t see the consumption happening in real time. They’re taught to see success as visibility, and visibility as validation. But by the time a radical idea becomes visible to the mainstream, it’s usually already being gutted from the inside. The #mainstreaming only lets radical ideas and actions in when they’ve been defanged, made safe, and rendered useful to perpetuate the status quo.

The result is today’s society running on empty, haunted by the hollowed-out shells of the movements that imagined another way of being. And because we’ve been taught to equate progress with endless consumption, of ideas, identities, cultures, few people realize they’re living in a landscape of corpses.

The question is: how do we shovel this mess to change this cycle? How do we protect the roots while letting the flowers bloom? And how do we get people to lift their heads, shake off the #mainstreaming trance, and see the compost we’re standing in, the fertile ground where real alternatives do grow? How do we change and challenge what is mainstreaming?

Note: This is a #fluffy attempt at communicating to the #mainstreaming. In reality, this post is about #activertpub and the #Fediverse. I’ve already written extensively on this, but I don’t think those pieces break through to the #mainstreaming. So, I used other examples to illustrate the issue.

#fediversehouse

Radical movements are too often their own worst enemies

Radical movements are too often their own worst enemies. The push/pull between the desire for real change and the gravitational pull of #mainstreaming feed the #stupidindividualism that keeps people locked into conservative, performative loops. These loops are not accidental, they are the result of movements that to often shift focus to prioritize (invisible) ideological purity, insular “safety” subcultures, and a morbid reverence for past failures over the messy, unpredictable work of building living alternatives.

It’s easier to mimic revolution than to risk anything for it. People cosplay as radicals, reenacting historic struggles, as if performing the gestures of revolt is enough to topple ongoing systems of oppression. The rituals of protest, the left pamphleteering, and the echo chambers of online discourse imposed as safe spaces to play at rebellion without any actual danger of dismantling and rebuilding the world as it is.

The #mainstreaming path is insidious. It draws radical energy into a cycle of visibility and co-option, the movements become symbolic representation not material transformation. Meanwhile, #stupidindividualism fractures collective power, as people mistake dogma for meaningful action. The result? A self-policing culture where standing out, innovating, or questioning sacred paths is treated as betrayal not (rev)evolution.

It’s very basic history that radical breakthroughs happen when people break these loops. An example I keep bringing up is the early #Indymedia, an example of when people embraced uncertainty and acted as if the world could be different, not just talked about it. These moments weren’t perfect, and most collapse under internal contradictions, but they proved that stepping beyond lifestyle/ideological safety nets is possible.

This is where the #OMN come I as a real path, that, by creating decentralized, native #4opens networks for storytelling and organizing, we build infrastructures that resist the gravitational pull of mainstream capture. Instead of reinforcing ideological bubbles, we make space for radical plurality, a compost heap where competing ideas decay and fertilize new growth. The goal isn’t another subculture; it’s a living, breathing movement capable of evolving while still linking and bridging to the wider world.

#KISS

Anarchism, the mess we make

Keeping Conversation’s useful, with the Fluffy-Spiky Debate

In activist spaces and grassroots communities, the tension between #fluffy and #spiky approaches is a well-worn. Fluffy represents a gentler, consensus-driven path, centred on kindness, inclusion, and collective care. Spiky, on the other hand, is sharp-edged, direct, and confrontational, willing to disrupt and break things to push for change. Both paths have their place, but the trouble arises when fluffy turns dogmatic, morphing into a hard passive-aggressive policing #blocking that silences dissent.

Dogmatic fluffy presents itself as kindness, but when it becomes rigid, it is just as destructive as unchecked aggression. People get shamed for stepping out of line, challenging dominant group norms, and advocating for more assertive tactics. This isn’t only a theoretical issue, it actively fractures movements, creating echo chambers where only approved, safe opinions are allowed to circulate. It’s activism dressed in softness but wielding the same #mainstreaming blunt force as actual systems we set out to dismantle.

The danger lies in the #blocking of paths to meaningful discussion. When conversations are shut down in the name of maintaining harmony, we lose the ability to take difficult paths. The fluffy-spiky debate needs to be dynamic, a living exploration of what tactics are effective in different contexts. Sometimes, gentle community building is the answer. Other times, the situation calls for confrontation and disruption. But when any side forcibly silences the other, we stop evolving.

It’s good to remember #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Complexity is necessary, but so is cutting through the noise. If our movements become bogged down in internal purity tests, we soon lose sight of the actual struggle. With, people stepping away from the #dotcons and looking for alternatives. We need to offer spaces where messy, honest, and sometimes uncomfortable conversations can happen, not sterilized bubbles where dissent is treated as betrayal. In this, people who push only the personal over the political are not helping.

Real movements thrive in the tension between fluffy and spiky. They feed off the flexibility, to let people navigate those paths without turning them into dead-ends. Fluffy doesn’t need to fear spiky, and spiky doesn’t need to dismiss fluffy. They’re both tools, both necessary. And if we can hold space for that complexity, we might just build movements resilient enough to withstand whatever the #deathcult throws our way.

What do you think? Should we lean into the discomfort and keep the debate alive?

UPDATE: it needs to be said that #blinded dogmatic #fluffy people can become nasty #fuckwits without a clue, in this they are blinded #spiky, what do you think we can do with this mess?