Adapting to #climatechaos in a post-1.5°C world

The climate crisis is no longer tomorrow’s problem, it’s reshaping our world now. As we pass the 1.5°C threshold, the impacts are rippling through every layer of society. One group who will increasingly highlight this is the insurance industry.

We already see the growing unease inside the insurance world as companies begin quietly pulling out of risky areas. From Florida’s hurricane-prone coast to California’s fire-ravaged interior, entire regions are being labelled uninsurable. This isn’t theory, it’s happening, and fast.

This shift marks more than a market shakeup. It signals a deep, systemic risk to our current #mainstreaming economic and social systems. Homes without insurance can’t get mortgages. No mortgages, no property value. No value, no tax base for local services. This cascade affects schools, hospitals, fire departments, our whole civic infrastructure.

One likely scenario is what insiders are calling the great abandonment. Here, insurers prioritize short-term solvency and withdraw en masse from high-risk areas. State regulators, under pressure, fail to act fast enough, and governments are left shoring up the mess.

This leads to a dangerous spiral: Massive property devaluation. Financial collapse of public insurers. Taxpayer bailouts of private-sector failures. The end of viable futures in increasingly large zones of abandonment. In short: privatized profits, socialized losses.

At best the path is triage, a slightly better path: insurers embrace adaptive survival strategies, pushing public-private partnerships and local resilience programs. This includes “ruggedized” zones where new building standards and infrastructure investments make life tenable. Still, inaction from governments on decarbonisation means triage is uneven and fragile. Many communities remain exposed and will be left behind.

The best scenario, and the hardest to reach, is where insurers become active agents of change. By pushing bold reforms, they catalyse decarbonisation, resilient infrastructure, and ecosystem restoration. In this “fantasy future”, we manage retreat with dignity. We reshape cities as climate havens. We develop insurance that doesn’t simple assess risk, but reduces it. And we align capital with survival.

How do we make this path happen? If we don’t do the needed fundamental change, then we will need to adapt. On the current #mainstreaming, this means a stronger state, to rethink not just how we build, but where and why we build.

Stronger zoning laws to prevent high-risk development.
New building codes for hurricane, fire, and flood resilience.
Water cycle restoration through urban “Sponge City” design.
Conditional rebuilds that move people to safer areas or enforce resilient construction.
Long-term planning for climate haven cities that will face new migration pressures.
Mooring rings on the second story of all low lighing buildings for us boaters to moor to.

Where we are now, elements of the mess of the great abandonment are already here. But signs of triage and breakthroughs exist too. Whether we collapse into chaos or adapt with creativity depends on the choices we make now, as community, individually, locally, and structurally.

Because in the now obverses to all 1.5°C+ world, the cost of inaction is growing to be too high for us all.

“Climate Realism”

Finding a path is messy

Let’s get this out of the way, most new tech projects are pointless. That’s not an insult, it’s a cultural symptom. People are pushing things not because they’re useful, but because they can. And when every shovel is used to dig holes in sand, we’re not building anything, we’re flailing.

From this experience, let’s build culture, not just code, because here’s the hard truth, we’re losing the reboot of the #openweb by failing to nurture it. Yes, #mainstreaming people are walking back in after the #dotcons burned their fingers, but our “welcome mat” is a mess, no clarity, no cultural grounding, no visible shovels. So it’s 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, exhausting, but better than nothing, but only in the end if we compost the shit to a healthy path.

There is an avalanche coming. A flood of scared, angry, confused people. And without grounded trust and process, we’ll get washed out by the noise. Let’s be real:

The left is built on hope and trust-based cooperation.
The right is built on fear and control.

We live in a world so muddied that it’s hard to tell the difference. That’s why we must be clear, transparent, and intentional. Without that, people can’t tell what’s real.

To the people parroting style and the mess in our community, I’ve been talking with these people for years. Some I know in person. Some in code, threads, chats, some in intention. And yeah, you could say I’ve also been “talking at” them at times, when you’re trying to talk from under a pile of #techshit, your voice gets garbled.

Can we talk usefully about these groups? If we can’t, then we’re not doing community, we’re doing individualism, which is what the #deathcult feeds on. So here’s the invitation: Start discussing structure, stop silencing style and start composting confusion. Let’s bring the shovels, the mess is real, but so is the soil we can grow from.

“Climate Realism”

It’s pastime more people raised their heads, the Council on Foreign Relations (#CFR), the think tank of the U.S. political establishment, just published a new statement calling for what they call “Climate Realism.”

1.5°C Is Dead – And they admit it, to their credit, CFR doesn’t sugarcoat the situation. They finally acknowledge that the international climate target of limiting warming to 1.5°C is officially dead. The new “realistic” trajectory? 3°C or higher by the end of this century, if not sooner. This isn’t just academic: 3°C means crop failures, mass displacement, geopolitical chaos, collapsing ecosystems, and runaway feedback loops. It’s climate breakdown, not “climate change.”

The #geekproblem tech fix of geoengineering is Plan A to the looming catastrophe, not degrowth, not ending fossil fuel subsidies, not climate justice or ecological transition. They want massive investment in geoengineering, particularly solar radiation management (SRM), basically spraying particles into the stratosphere to dim the sun. Yes, they’re proposing that we hack the planet to protect global capitalism. All while keeping the mess of extraction and inequality running at full speed.

They don’t say anything about system change, their “realism” is not anything to do with reducing global consumption, transitioning away from endless economic growth, or tackling the structural roots of climate collapse.

On this “common sense” #mainstreaming path we are rushing down, the is no interest in real solutions, because real solutions threaten the economic order they live in. They don’t touch on basic climate justice because justice is incompatible with on going imperial hegemony. They don’t mention degrowth because that would shake the foundations of capitalistic economics.
No mention of capitalism, it’s invisible to them, because they are capitalism, thus they are #blind to this.

This is the new fascist #mainstreaming – A doctrine of U.S. climate power, the statement frames climate breakdown as a national security issue, a geopolitical weapon to be wielded by the U.S. state. Let’s be very clear, this isn’t about saving the planet. It’s about maintaining U.S. dominance in a rapidly destabilizing world.

What they do is debunk four liberal “climate fallacies”:

Global targets are achievable – Not any more.
China and the Global South are the key battlegrounds.
Climate risks are manageable – They admit this is fantasy.
Clean energy is a win-win for the U.S. – Nope. China leads. The U.S. is lagging behind.

Instead, they push a doctrine of planning for collapse with adaptation, disaster readiness, and securing “fiscal room” for emergency responses. Investing in competitive clean tech, not for domestic transition, but to outcompete China in global markets. Leading catastrophic risk mitigation, geoengineering is their “break glass in case of emergency” option. They even float the idea of using economic and military pressure to force other nations to cut emissions.

Climate deterrence is going to be the New Cold War. #CFR now sees climate as a deterrence issue, like nuclear weapons, only with carbon. That’s their vision: a future where the U.S. uses its technological and military edge to impose climate stability through force. This is climate realism in the mess making logic of empire, don’t change course, double down on control.

We are on a path straight to hell, with eyes wide open. This should come as no surprise, ofter the last 20 years of mess building, CFR’s plan is in no way surprising. It’s the logical next step for a system that can’t imagine anything beyond growth, extraction, and domination. In their world, collapse is a management problem, not a moral one.

We should be clear, this is a death march. It’s not “realism”, it’s resignation dressed up as pragmatism. And if we follow them, we’ll arrive exactly where they’re headed, hell, but orderly. We have worshipped this #deathcult for too long.

Adapting to #climatechaos in a post-1.5°C world

The new right’s obsession with Greenland and Canada’s north isn’t some fringe fantasy, it’s real estate logic, twisted through a lens of empire and extraction. When you zoom out and frame it through the lens of #climatechaos, it’s chillingly obvious, the Arctic is melting, and they see land, not crisis.

That AlphaGeo link paints the picture, climate-driven migration, shifting growing zones, and emerging “climate havens” aren’t theoretical, they’re data-driven land grabs in progress. And the political ambition to dominate those spaces? That’s the should now be more obvious to us all.

It’s a gold rush for the apocalypse, a final frontier for the capitalist imagination. They aren’t trying to save anything; they’re re-positioning to rule what’s left. And yes, it’s a children-who-want-to-be-kings fantasy: Trump-esque thinking where climate collapse becomes opportunity, borders become walls, and “winning” means inheriting a lifeboat while others drown.

This isn’t climate denial anymore, it’s climate opportunism. That’s why adaptation can’t just be technical, it has to be political. If we don’t shape the future, they are carving it up in plain sight.

On being a prat in tech and social spaces (Yes, this might be about you 😘)

From where I’m standing, a lot of people are being absolute prats when it comes to social and technological issues. That should be obvious… but clearly, it’s not. We’ve got two basic paths here:

#Block everything you don’t like. Predictably, this just creates more prat-ish behaviour and pushes us all deeper into toxic bubbles.
Ask questions. Grow. Listen. Respond. This reduces prat-ish behaviour – over time, maybe even composts it into something useful.

Now, in the era of #stupidindividualism, which path do you think most people are taking? Yeah. That one. If you’re blocking conversations that challenge you, you’re still kneeling at the altar of the #deathcult. Look up. You’re making a mess of social technology.

“Get off your knees” comes to mind, stop worshipping the #deathcult of neoliberalism, salted with postmodernism. These ideologies have poisoned our communities by turning freedom into isolation and choice into greed. I’m all for freedom, yes, you can choose to be a prat. But I reserve the freedom to call that behaviour toxic and self-destructive. What you do with that communication is up to you, just don’t pretend that #blocking it is some kind of moral high ground.

As Thalia Campbell rightly says, sometimes the best path is just to kindly correct, share info, or talk things through face-to-face. Most of this online prat-ness wouldn’t survive a real conversation, it’s bloated on anonymity, context collapse, and dopamine-fuelled feedback loops.

Yes, what meany people do now is a mess, but mess makes good compost, compost builds soil, soil feeds the common good. And talking about “common sense” is just a way of stirring that compost.

But here’s the mess makeing: we keep repeating the same shit, and instead of composting, we leave it to fester. Capitalism, rooted in self-interested greed, claims to serve the common good. But on the fundamentalist path we have been on for 40 years, it’s clearly failing. War. Growing economic divides. Visible #climatechaos. Poisoned ecosystems and communities.

We can’t survive, or flourish, in a society based on greed. That’s just a simple #KISS message. And neoliberalism, still much of our #mainstreming “common sense”, is nothing but extreme capitalism. It’s the purest form of the #deathcult. It’s eating us alive. Please talk about this.

The #dotcons we have been building our lives in for the last 20 years are undiluted deathcult, surveillance capitalism wrapped in shiny UX. The #openweb? Often like herding cats. And scratch the surface, and yes, sometimes you find the #deathcult there too. But we can’t keep going down this path. We need to stop pushing #mainstreaming agendas that lead us back into the same poisoned mess. That path is BAD. It’s ending in ruin.

We’ve got to try, seriously try, to make things better. Not perfect. Not flashy. Just better.

And that means less prat-ing about. More compost. More care. More common good.

Can people engage with the #4opens process?

The #4opens is a completely obverse social restating of the #FOSS development model — but with a critical edition: The return of #openprocess, something we’ve lost over the last 10 years due to the shift from public email archives to our reliance on encrypted chat.

With this in mind, what is still #blocking the #openweb reboot? One thing I’ve learned from the last five years of this reboot is this: The #geekproblem is inadequate for the scale of change and challenge we face. Currently, the #geekproblem is HARD #blocking, obstructing both, funding, and tech direction. Think: #NLNet, #NGIZero, #SummerOfProtocols, #InvestInOpen — they say the right words, have potential, but are actually #blindly caught in a loop of the same limiting #blocking patterns.

This is why we need activism, this can be #spiky, sometimes all it takes Is a rock or a stick. Think of Greek shepherd dogs in the mountains — they come at you like wolves. But just bending down to pick up a rock or stick? They back off. No violence. Just clarity and intention. Think of the #4opens like this when facing #mainstreaming, suddenly, it starts to make sense.

Nuts and nutters, Yes — you’re right, this can sound like blinded ideology. But remember: Humans are meaning-creating creatures. One word for that is ideology — there are others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synonym

If we can compost this mess, that’s a big if, will the #OMN Work? Simple answer: Yes.
Complex answer: No. My answer to that riddle? We find the complex by implementing the simple. That’s the #KISS principle in action. Walk the simple path, we discover our way through the complex path by implementing and walking the simple one #KISS.

#Mainstreaming = #Deathcult Worship

Most mainstream agendas are pointless. Why? Because they’re built on “common sense” — Which today often just means #deathcult worship. Something to keep in mind… whenever you’re doing anything that matters. Hope this slight poetry piece helps. One thing I keep saying, please don’t be a prat, thanks.

This is what the #OGB is aiming for

The leadership model of the #Fediverse has long mirrored the “aristocracy” of many open-source projects. At the centre stands the developer “king”, a benevolent dictator model that, while functional to a point, is fundamentally limited. Now, we see a shift towards the #NGO-style of governance, and ironically, this may be an even worse model.

Let’s be honest: the day-to-day of the Fediverse is more like elephants stampeding while people throw paper planes at each other. It’s messy, chaotic, but truthfully native to what the Fediverse is. And that’s the point.

Democracy is always messy. Bureaucracy, on the other hand, is tidy—but dead. The problem is that what people wish for—neat structures, clear hierarchies, clean governance—is often exactly what kills the real vitality of alternative spaces. When you introduce money and institutional status into a grassroots organization, power politics follow. Every time. If you want to avoid this, you need some form of lived, messy democracy, rooted in shared trust and open process.

The real question is: how do we build structures that are native to the Fediverse? Ones that reflect its radical difference rather than force it back into broken moulds? I’ve watched hundreds of projects fail over the last 20 years by doing just that—reverting to what’s familiar, what seems “common sense.” But this “common sense” is the enemy of growing grassroots movements. Especially when you’re trying to build something outside the gravitational pull of the #mainstreaming machine.

The Fediverse works because it’s radically different. That difference is fragile, and we need to protect and deepen it, not dilute it with NGO logic or replicate Silicon Valley’s pyramid schemes. What we need is trust, messiness, and actual grassroots process. This is what the #OGB is aiming for. Let’s not throw that away for a seat at the wrong table.

Where this came from Open Governance Body

News, the signal-to-noise mess

Almost all our posting in the #openweb and in the #dotcons in response to #mainstreaming news is noise. It’s reactive, fragmented, performative. We scroll, we rage, we boost, we dunk, but we don’t build. Sometimes, someone posts something thoughtful, something deep, meaningful. But it vanishes in the churn. The system is designed this way.

Even on our #openweb, where we have more autonomy, we are mirroring this spectacle path, feeding it attention, reposting its narratives, amplifying its framing. In the mess of this world, our timelines become echo chambers of secondhand despair and outrage. In short, we’re still speaking their language, on their terms, with our tools.

Why? Because we haven’t (re)built a place for real signal yet. The #OMN (Open Media Network), is a push to shift this dynamic. It’s not about broadcasting noise slightly more ethically. It’s about creating new spaces entirely, where the roots of stories matter more than the spin, where the focus is on shared compost rather than hot takes, where people and community are producers, and where signal isn’t just a flash, but an ongoing process.

The current state of the web, especially under the domination of the #dotcons, is colonized communication. It rewards (stupid)individualism, immediacy, virality. It buries context, nuance, history. The structure #blocks liberation because it’s built to sell alienation back to us, one like or scroll, one click at a time.

Even the current #openweb reboot, for all its potential, reproduces these patterns, because we carry them with us. We don’t just need alternatives in name, we need alternative cultures, processes, and values. We need to compost the mess, the #techshit, and grow new paths from the decay. That’s what the #OMN is seeded to do.

But let’s be honest, we’re not there yet. And we won’t get there unless we start collectively focusing on building signal, not just yelling about the noise. The tools need to be #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), the governance needs to be transparent, trust-based, and the tech has to get out of the way, not be the centre. This requires stepping away from the #geekproblem, the cult of control, complexity, and abstraction, and towards living, messy, grassroots cultures that prioritize access, action, and accountability.

The mainstream is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. That collapse is not the revolution. What grows next is.

#OMN #OGB #4opens #openweb #geekproblem #deathcult #nothingnew #buildalternatives #grassroots #trustbasedgovernance

Take media coverage of protests as an example. It’s always framed through the lens of disruption and spectacle, “violent clashes,” “unrest,” “inconvenience to commuters” rather than the systemic injustices that birthed the protest in the first place. The message from the #mainstreaming is clear: “Why can’t you express your anger in a way that’s easier for us to ignore?” This is not journalism, it’s narrative policing. It flattens struggle into caricature and erases the causes: the exploitation, the dispossession, the broken promises. This is normal when we have media infrastructure of our own. Without projects like #indymediaback to hold space for grounded, first-voice storytelling, all we get is the echo of power describing its own reflection.

Regime change in the West

There’s a “normal” dangerous illusion still clinging to liberal democracies: that we’re in a time of political turbulence, but the foundations remain intact. That, somehow, we’ll “course correct.” But this needs to be seen as blinded thinking.

What is obvious is that we’re actually experiencing regime change, not in some distant land, but right here in the West. And it’s not coming from tanks or coups, but through the ballot box, boardrooms, social media algorithms, and #NGO “common sense”. It’s a sometimes hard sometimes soft, systemic shift rightward, authoritarian, nationalistic, and wrapped in the aesthetics of democracy.

From the U.S. to the UK, the EU to Australia, this right-on-right push is becoming the new normal. Neoliberal “centrism” no longer holds the centre, it’s morphing, accommodating and enabling hard-right politics, law-and-order, border control, national identity, anti-progress, pro-surveillance, anti-labour, the #deathcult is adapting to survive.

The #mainstreaming left is either co-opted, defanged, or fragmented. The radical left, where it exists, is distracted, performative, and lost in a fog of internal squabbles. Meanwhile, the far-right is disciplined, funded, and in motion. They’re winning not just in elections, but in narrative, shaping what is possible, what is sayable, and what is unthinkable.

The mainstream was never a neutral space, it’s a battleground, and we are losing it. Every time we dismiss a new policy as “just politics,” or think this is just another swing of the pendulum, we miss the simple truth that a new regime is consolidating, one that sees basic rights, justice, and truth as obstacles, not goals.

We need to name this clearly. We need to organize outside the institutions, because those institutions were never neutral. The work is not just advocacy or lobbying, it’s resistance and reconstruction. We need to rebuild from the bottom up. Projects like the #OGB, the #OMN, and a rebooted #Indymedia are small seeds. But they matter. Because if we don’t grow our own ecosystems, we’ll be forced to live under theirs.

This is not alarmism. It’s the world as it is. Let’s not wait for the full lock-in before we act, please.

#regimechange #rightshift #geekproblem #openweb #deathcult #grassroots #buildalternatives #OGB #OMN

For a radical liberal view, https://www.theindex.media/america-the-isolated of this same issue.

Mainstreaming: Building Grassroots Balance

Our history of involvement in #EU digital outreach and policy meetings has made one thing starkly clear, our #openweb is deeply entangled in the process of #mainstreaming, a messy, often co-optive dynamic where grassroots voices are softened, diluted, and redirected into bureaucracy, then in the end they are simply #blocked. Yes, while there is value in taking part, it’s also a wake-up call.

The push to shape digital paths from above is strong. But without active grassroots alternatives, there will be no balance that is needed. The building of a so-called “commons” is reshaped to fit into #NGO boxes, filled with #dotcons-friendly language, and stripped of any radical potential. This is why our #openweb projects now matter more than ever.

At the heart of this approach must be #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) in both technology and user experience. We don’t need more convoluted tools or platforms weighed down by geek prestige. We need simple, effective frameworks and networks that allow users-as-producers to build the social complexity on their own terms. Complexity should come from people, not code.

And this brings us to the elephant in the room, the #geekproblem. Our own grassroots digital spaces are still shaped by a narrow, deterministic culture that lacks wider social understanding. In the path we need to be on, we cannot code our way to liberation if the ideology behind the code is warped, and currently, it is. As we often say: all code is ideology solidified, and it has real social effects.

Right now, way too much of that ideology stems from the #deathcult, hidden behind kind words, progressive branding, and empty buzzwords. This disconnect between stated values and real-world outcomes is dangerous, and disturbingly common.

This is why we’re pushing the #OGB, an online Open Governance Body for the #fediverse and beyond. Built around the #4opens and grounded in social paths, the OGB is designed to be a real voice for grassroots communities. It’s an open project, a no-permissions outreach tool, use it if you find value in it.

We’re currently looking for funding support and collaborators, particularly developers who are attracted to this vision. If you have links, networks, or skills to offer, get in touch.

The time is urgent. The mainstreaming machine is rolling forward. Let’s compost the #techshit, reclaim our spaces, and grow better from the bottom up.

A sharp take, systems are visibly broken

We are living through a deep crisis, not just of environment, economy, or governance, but of imagination and the will to live. The old systems are visibly broken, the #IPCC reports confirm what many already feel, we are trapped inside a #deathcult, and #mainstreaming culture offers only distraction, careerism, and status games for isolated individuals. There is no hope there.

But hope is not some fluffy optimism, it’s a social force. And in every grassroot, federated, #DIY tech project, the solution is always the same, more people. Not more gatekeepers. Not more hierarchy. Just more people. This is the core truth of the #OMN (Open Media Network). It’s not a product, it’s a process. It’s not a startup pitch, it’s a compost heap where good things grow, if we turn it, feed it, and invite others to join in.

We already know how the far right wins, they appeal to real feelings of injustice, then twist those feelings into #stupidindividualism that serves their own #nastyfew class interests. It’s reactionary ideology, and it’s spreading fast. What do we do? Step away from their game. Get involved in building something different. The #4opens is a simple, powerful tool to judge who’s building towards the commons and who’s just repackaging and pushing the same poison.

This needed “common sense” path, this break, we can start to use shovels to turn over the ground we grow from. When we do this, one thing that is fertile is that in the end, all social action happens through generalized talk, categories, metaphors, shorthand. That’s how language works. But we live in a cultural amnesia where this is forgotten, mistaken for “common sense.”

This is why the very different tech projects of the #OMN actually embraces this messy, human space, while the more mainstreaming #geekproblem seeks rigid machine-like CONTROL. This is a question of balance, yes, they’re often technically right, but socially intolerant. We, by contrast, are often technically wrong, but humanly right. What we need is a bridge between these approaches, or we’ll just keep circling.

The #OMN project use some control; the #geekproblem needs a lot of humanity. The current hard blocking is that they don’t see this, and so they keep #BLOCKING. For example, take the common pattern where someone says, “why don’t you just develop it?” That line unconsciously dumps all responsibility on narrow “geeks” while ignoring the role of social imagination, UI/UX design, and the deeper process we’re trying to solve together. That’s the #geekproblem: not the code, but the refusal to look at the problem outside the code. So here we are again – rinse, repeat. Let’s not. Let’s build the bridge.

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens

The Failure of #Mainstreaming – What Comes Next?

It should be painfully obvious by now that all the current #mainstreaming paths have failed. Whether we look at politics, technology, media, or activism, the same patterns emerge, co-option, stagnation, and eventual collapse under their own mess and self-destructive contradictions.

The valid question isn’t whether mainstreaming has failed, it has. The real question is – What do we do about it? This applies just as much to our efforts to reboot the #openweb as it does to broader struggles in the “real world”.

The failure of mainstreaming in the #openweb, the openweb, in its original form, was about freedom, transparency, and grassroots empowerment. But as it became “mainstreamed,” it was gradually stripped of its radical paths and potentials. We’ve seen co-option by corporate interests, with Big Tech adopting the language of openness while building walled gardens. #NGO bureaucracy, with funding models turning radical ideas into managed, defanged projects that no longer challenge power. Gatekeeping by the #geekproblem with overcomplicated, insular development processes alienate the people the #openweb was meant to be for.

This leads to fragmentation and infighting, instead of building a strong, collective movement, energy is wasted on internal disputes and purity tests. What is the alternative? This is simple, if we don’t want to repeat the same old failures, we need to do things differently. For an #openweb reboot to work, it needs to balance:

Rejecting the mainstreaming path, this means resisting corporate and #NGO capture while keeping the web decentralized and grassroots-driven.
Building real alternatives, not only endless discussion, but practical, working tools that people can actually use.
Embrace the organic intellectual, knowledge should come from real-world experience, not echo chamber theory and academic bubbles.
Find a balance between structure and openness to avoiding bureaucracy, which doesn’t mean avoiding organization. We need cooperative governance models like #OGB to navigate this.

This isn’t only about tech, it’s about power. If we keep letting traditional power structures dictate how things develop, we will always end up back in the same mess. The mainstream has failed. It’s time to build something that works. Read more: hamishcampbell.com

#DIYculture #4opens #nothingnew #OMN #OGB #openweb

A guest post – The Mess of the Current #OpenWeb Path: A User’s Experience

Setting up a #Mastodon account to move away from supremacist platforms like #Twitter, #Threads, #Bluesky, and #LinkedIn felt like the right step. But almost immediately, I ran into one of the core failures of the so-called #openweb—drastic post length limits, artificial restrictions, and a general lack of usability. At first glance, Mastodon appears no different from the mainstream platforms it’s supposed to replace. With the post lengths, why are we still replicating big tech models?

But that’s only partially true. Some Mastodon instances do allow longer posts, and the broader #Fediverse is full of different options, many of which are free from the limits imposed by inherited #mainstreaming culture. The issue isn’t Mastodon itself, but how fragmented and confusing the experience still is. The #Geekproblem strikes again, a quick dive into the openweb landscape reveals the same story:

Messy, inconsistent user experiences
Endless debate over technical details while real users struggle
A lack of funding or structured support for meaningful improvements
This fragmentation preventing mass adoption

All the noise about “fixing” this is just noise. Yes, the #openweb path exists and works, but it’s underfunded, unsupported, and often overshadowed by corporate-backed alternatives. A Familiar Failure that is both frustrating and predictable, this is a view of these struggles from an outside perspective. We still have a chaotic landscape where even well-intentioned users find themselves frustrated and giving up. The open web won’t succeed just by existing, it needs to work. Right now, for too many people, it doesn’t.

The #4opens vs. liberal tokenism in #openweb tech