What should be closed? And what should never be?

A conversation about ideology, sociology, and the #openweb. Let’s start with a basic liberal framework: “Most social interactions should happen in the open. Some personal interactions should remain private.” Seems reasonable, right? That’s the position many of us think we agree on. Yet when we look at how our technology, and by extension, our society, is being built, that balance is totally out of whack. Today, more and more of life is CLOSED:

Closed apps.

Closed data.

Closed social groups.

Closed algorithms.

Closed hardware.

Closed governance.

And on the flip side, the things that should be protected, our intimate conversations, our location, our health data, are often wide open to surveillance capitalism and state control. What the current “common sense” dogma gets wrong? What is missing is the idea that mainstream tech culture, privacy absolutists, and many crypto/anarchist types:

Almost all good social power comes from OPEN.
Most social evils take root in CLOSED spaces.

When people organize together in the open, they create commons, accountability, and momentum. They make movements. When decisions are made behind closed doors, they breed conspiracy, hierarchy, abuse, and alienation.

It’s not just about what is open or closed, it’s about who controls the boundary, and what happens on each side. If we close everything… If we follow the logic of total lockdown, of defaulting to encryption, of mistrust-by-design… then what we’re left with is only the closed. This leads to a brutal truth, the powers that dominate in closed systems are rarely the good ones.
Secrecy benefits the powerful far more than the powerless. Always has.

So when we let the #openweb collapse and treat it as naive, we’re not protecting ourselves. We’re giving up the last space where power might be accountable, where ideas might circulate freely, where we might build something together.

Examples: When openness was lost. Let’s talk about a real-world case of #Diaspora vs. #RSS. 15 years ago, Diaspora emerged with crypto-anarchist hype as the alternative to Facebook. It was secure, decentralized, and… mostly closed. It emphasized encryption and privacy, but lacked network effects, openness, and simple flows of information.

In the same era, we already had #RSS, a beautifully open, decentralized protocol. It powered blogs, podcasts, news aggregators, without permission or centralized control. But the “Young #fashionistas ” of the scene shouted down RSS as old, irrelevant, and too “open.” They wanted to start fresh, with new protocols, new silos, new power. They abandoned the working #openweb to build “secure” ghost towns.

Fast-forward a decade, and now we’re rebuilding in the Fediverse with RSS+ as #ActivityPub. The same functionality. The same ideals, just more code and more complexity. That 10-year gap is the damage caused by the #geekproblem, the failure to build with the past, and for real people.

So what is the #geekproblem? At root, it’s a worldview issue. A failure to think about human beings in real social contexts. Geeks (broadly speaking) assume:

People are adversaries or threats (thus: encrypt everything),
Centralization is evil, but decentralization is always pure (thus: build silos of one),
Social complexity can be reduced to elegant protocols (thus: design first, use later).
But technology isn’t neutral. It reflects ideologies. And if we don’t name those ideologies, they drive the project blindly.

A place to start is to map your ideology, want to understand how you think about openness vs. closedness? Start by reflecting on where you sit ideologically, not in labels, but in instincts. A quick sketch:

Conservatism: Assumes order, tradition, and authority are necessary. Values stability, hierarchy, and often privacy.

Liberalism: Believes in open society, individual freedom, transparency, and market-based solutions.

Anarchism: Rejects imposed authority, promotes mutual aid, horizontal structures, and often radical openness.

None of these are “right,” but understanding where you lean helps clarify why you walk, build or support certain tools. If you’re building tools for the #openweb, these questions matter:

Do you default to closed and secure, or open and messy?

Who do you trust with knowledge—individuals or communities?

Do you believe good things come from control, or emergence?

These are sociological questions, not just technical ones, maybe start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies. Where do we go from here? Let’s bring this back to the openweb and the projects we’re trying to build, like:

#OMN (Open Media Network)

#MakingHistory

#indymediaback

#Fediverse

#P2P tools (DAT, Nostr, SSB, etc.)

All of these projects struggle with the tension between openness and privacy, between usability and purity, between federation and anarchy. But if we start with clear values, and an honest reflection on the world we want to create, we can avoid the worst traps. Let’s say it plainly:

Not everything should be open. But if we close everything, we lose what’s worth protecting.

Let’s talk: What do you think should be closed? What must be kept open at all costs? What’s your ideological instinct, and how does it shape your view of the #openweb?

Capitalism is a hostage situation -Not an economy

Our current #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t life, it’s a trap, we need a way out. In our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t own,
Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,
Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,
Pay to breathe, because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over (inspired by). That’s not a functioning economy, it’s not freedom, it’s a hostage situation, where every basic human need is held behind a transactional barrier, and the meter is always running.

This #deathcult is late capitalism: an endless stack of paywalls enclosing what used to be public, shared, and free. It isn’t just about money, it’s about control, dependency, and isolation. It’s a system that engineers artificial scarcity, so a #nastyfew can profit while the many just try to survive.

But it wasn’t always like this, for most of human history, people lived within commons-based paths, where land was collectively stewarded, food was grown and shared within communities, tools and knowledge were passed down, not patented and governance was often local and participatory.

The last 200 years of “common sense” capitalism is an enclosure of these commons, first the physical ones (land, water, food), and now the digital and social ones (communication, culture, identity). The #openweb, like the open land before it, is being fenced off. Platform by platform. App by app. Cookie banner by paywall.

This enclosure now defines much of our tech infrastructure, every scroll, click, and share is now mediated by profit-driven platforms. Even activism – once vibrant and messy – is being swallowed by slick interfaces and the same throttled feeds. Resistance is filtered, shadowbanned, deboosted, and pushed to monetize. And “our” #NGOs fighting platform power… are doing so on those same platforms.

It’s an absurdity, and worse: it’s a trap. We need alternatives, real ones. We’re not going to “ethics workshop” our way out of this. We need to rebuild the tools of everyday life – economically, digitally, socially – from the grassroots up.

Commons-based systems, let’s turn some “common sense” on it head, instead of private ownership: stewardship. Instead of scarcity: abundance through sharing. This is where projects, like The Open Media Network (#OMN) come in as a practical framework for grassroots media infrastructure:

Built on the #4opens: open data, source, standards, and governance.

Designed to decentralize publishing, and return control to local communities.

Uses both client-server and P2P bridges for accessibility and resilience.

Encourages trust-based networks over extractive platforms.

OMN is not just theory, it’s active code, messy dev, and practical tools for people to tell their own stories, host their own content, and build alternative knowledge systems outside corporate media. These technologies make community hosting the default – not the exception. They reduce reliance on fragile or compromised #dotcons infrastructure. They’re imperfect, but they’re a step out of the enclosure.

The point isn’t just tech, It’s power, capitalism doesn’t just gate resources. It enforces relationships of power. That’s why rebuilding tech without addressing governance, ownership, and access won’t get us far. The #geekproblem is real: tech that nobody can use isn’t liberation, it’s just another dead-end.

The alternative? Keep it #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), prioritize social usability over technical elegance, build bridges, not silos, return to shared ownership and open processes. Capitalism is a hostage situation, but we can walk out the door – if we build the exit together.

You’re not powerless, and this isn’t about purity or escape. It’s about building real infrastructure for real life, so when the capitalist system keeps crumbling (as it will), we’re not left scrambling. We’ll already be living differently.

#OMN #MakingHistory #4opens #openweb #p2p #indymediaback #geekproblem #commons #decentralize #cooperative #foss #degrowth #resilience

UPDATE the seed of this post was from a toot, but can’t find the original to link to due to the #UX of mastodon updating and no functioning search on my instance to find history, sorry, add in comments if you find the original. Updated

Real world tackling the #geekproblem

With rebooting the #openweb we run headfirst into the #geekproblem, a recurring pattern where: Technically brilliant people build powerful tools …but those tools remain socially unusable …or solve only geek problems, not the needs of actual communities. It’s not malice, often it’s idealism, but it creates a dead-end culture of endless prototypes, abandoned standards, and empty tech demos. Meanwhile, the real-world crisis deepens.

The work we need is bridges building, let’s try this ere “P2P news app” built on #dat Hypercore/Hyperswarm is exciting. Yes, it’s similar to Nostr in structure: distributed relays, client-side aggregation, unstoppable flow. But as with Nostr tech isn’t enough. We are social creatures. A usable system needs:

Clear use cases rooted in human relationships – not just tech possibilities.
User-facing front-ends that invite participation, not gate it.
Interoperability with existing protocols (ActivityPub, ATProto, etc.) to avoid siloing.
Bridges between architectures – e.g. client-server ↔ P2P – so that real-world adoption is gradual and survivable.

The good news, the wider #OMN project is already a sane path forward, with a #KISS hybrid path. The plan is in bridging #P2P and client-server as a way out of this. Something like:

A lightweight server bridge that serves data to client-server users (ActivityPub, fediverse, legacy web),

While simultaneously feeding a P2P mesh, with each peer storing and distributing redundant objects,

So that over time, client-server becomes the bootstrapping layer, and #P2P becomes the long-term archive + resistance layer.

“Data is just object flows – how the user gets the object is irrelevant technically.”

This is the kind of thinking that gets us out of the traps, by moving from protocols to people. This isn’t just about code, it’s about culture. The #geekproblem won’t be solved by more architecture diagrams, it needs movements that embrace imperfection and prioritizes social use, visible, working front-ends people can contribute to and understand, documentation and tooling that builds capacity in others, not silos around the brilliant few.

What next? For the devs:

Can the p2p-news-app codebase be modularized to plug into #OMN projects as a data backend, even in a basic way?

Can we bridge shared data objects across protocols (e.g. post metadata flows from P2P → ActivityPub), even if janky at first?

Can we prototype a simple but cross protocol usable frontend, the examples is the work on #makeinghistory and #indymediaback, that lets non-geeks see and touch the network they’re part of?

Yes, for the movement, keep things messy but moving. Avoid dead ends by always asking:

"How does this empower non-technical users to organize, document, and publish together?"

Keep the tech grounded in the social fabric, the activists, journalists, organisers, and rebels this is all meant to serve. If you’re reading this and thinking, “I can help,” please step forward. There’s space in wider tech/social #OMN and #MakingHistory for everyone, coders, writers, designers, testers and storytellers.

Let’s build bridges, not silos, let’s build tools people can use, not just tools geeks can admire, let’s do this together.

Actors, Power, and Collective Publishing: Rethinking Fediverse Architecture for Grassroots Media

We recently had an extended and thoughtful discussion on signal between collaborators working on #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory, a key issue emerged: how should we structure “actors” (ActivityPub identities) in a network where the focus is collective action, not individual performance? This question isn’t just technical. It’s political, and central to the success or failure of rebooting radical grassroots media within the #Fediverse.

The tension is about balancing the individual and the collective. In most current Fediverse platforms (like Mastodon or PeerTube), each user is an “actor” with their own inbox/outbox, mirroring the logic of the mainstream #socialweb where identity and expression are deeply individual. But for platforms rooted in collective publishing, such as a revived #Indymedia, this doesn’t map neatly.

“We are trying to balance individualism with collectivism. People already have all the individualism they can take, we need a structure to support the collective.”

That means maybe moving away from assuming every account needs to be a visible, subscribable actor. Working model: Per-instance actors first, a consensus is emerging around per-instance actors – e.g., the Newswire and Features flows of a local Indymedia site act as the primary publishable entities in the Fediverse. These represent the editorial collective’s curated output – not just anyone shouting into the void.

External trusted contributors (like info@hamishcampbell) would publish content from their own Fediverse accounts using hashtags like #oxfordindymedia, which the local Indymedia instance detects, vets, and republishes.

This brings three key benefits:

Curation over chaos – Stories don’t just flood in via hashtags; they’re filtered through trust relationships.
Permissioned federation – Only trusted flows (or untrusted but manually reviewed ones) are accepted. Hashtag spam is naturally blocked.
Maintaining editorial identity – Subscribing to an Indymedia instance means subscribing to its judgement, not just raw firehose feeds.

Do we need per-user actors? Here’s where things get messy, and interesting. Three models were debated:

Classic Fediverse model: Each user has their own actor. This supports full transparency and traceability of actions, but risks returning to individualist norms and opens the door to abuse or platform drift.
Invisible user accounts: Users exist internally for moderation or curation roles, but aren’t visible in the Fediverse as actors.
Controlled per-user actors: Users do have actors, but these are only used to publish activity logs, not posts. Think: “Editor X approved story Y”, useful for building transparency and trust within an open process.

Option 3 sits nicely with the principles of the #4opens, particularly open process and open governance. It provides a transparent audit trail without pushing users into the spotlight.

UX vs backend architecture, what becomes clear is that the user experience should foreground collective flows – Features, Newswire, Tags – while any per-user mechanics operate in the background, supporting moderation, traceability, or edge-case publishing. Whether those background accounts are AP actors or not might depend on implementation details.

“It’s not about the actors per se — it’s about what shows up in the front-end UX, and how we build trust in the process.”

Final considerations, networks like #IndymediaBack default to collective-first publishing, with user actor functionality off unless needed. #MakingHistory, by contrast, might enable user actor publishing to support mass collaborative storytelling. Both platforms rely on whitelist federation, meaning only trusted instances and users can feed directly into the editorial stream. Abuse prevention comes not just from code, but from the politics of moderation, curation, and shared norms.

We probably need per-user actors, but used sparingly and carefully.
We definitely need per-instance actors for trusted collective outputs.
Hashtags are a start, but the flow must be curated and accountable.
UX should put collectives front and centre, with user identity in the background.
This is a political choice, not just a technical one, and that’s a good thing.

For more on how this fits into the broader reboot of radical media infrastructure, see:
Rebooting Radical Media (YouTube)
Programming: Open Media Network

Dev test work for Makinghistory application

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

The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil

We need to keep highlighting an old but still urgent tension: the intersection of technology and social change. In this too often unspoken divide, one side leans heavily on practical, technical problem-solving. They want working code, functioning systems, and tangible results, not abstract debates. To them, critiques about capitalism shaping code sound like distractions from the “real work.” The other side insists that technical problems are social problems. They argue that all code is written by people, shaped by culture, power, and history. Ignoring the social dynamics behind technology guarantees we repeat the same failures.

This divide plays out constantly in movements trying to bridge the worlds of #AltTech and social transformation. You see it in tensions between the tech-focused “geek” communities and broader #mainstreaming society. And both sides have blind spots.

The geek camp often falls into the #geekproblem: over-prioritizing tech innovation while ignoring the human and social context. Meanwhile, the #mainstreaming crowd tends to embrace vague social ideals while underestimating the soft power – and necessity – of building real technical infrastructure to support those ideals. Neither side alone can solve anything meaningful, especially not something as vast as rebooting the #openweb or to even start to touch on #climatechaos.

We need bridges, that’s what projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB, #IndymediaBack, and #MakingHistory are about: building trust-based, grounded, people-powered platforms that can span the divide between tech and society.

But let’s be honest, there’s a lot of very bad behaviour on all sides of the #openweb reboot. Blocking progress, gatekeeping, aggression, virtue signalling… it’s all too common. Let’s try not to become prats, it’s easy to start, and hard to stop. Mess breeds more mess, prat-ish behaviour comes in waves. It aligns with waves of #mainstreaming and the reactive “alt” backlash, these tides bring a lot of flotsam, it’s up to us to shovel and compost what we can.

Our biggest block right now? The culture war postmodernist fog that has drifted through radical spaces over the past decades. It’s slippery, full of “common sense” that doesn’t hold up, but hard to challenge because it feels right. Composting this will be difficult, but necessary.

The #Fediverse is built on people-to-people relationships. Trust, not just tech, is the foundation. That’s why there’s a healthy pushback against “tech fixes” that try to replace social trust, a path that is much more common in places like #Nostr and #Bluesky, where algorithms and cryptography are too often seen as the solution to everything.

Yes, in reality, we need a balance of both. The debate is fluffy in places, spiky in others. But if we build tech-bridges to span this messy social terrain, we might actually get somewhere. This brings us to the hard green question: how do you scale local, eco-conscious solutions to a disinterested – and sometimes hostile – global population? Green progressives often promote small-scale, ethical living. That’s great for the 1% who can afford to live that way. But what about the other 99%?

Let’s be blunt: some people will die from #climatechaos. Maybe 9%, maybe more. But 90% will still be here, and they will need different kinds of solutions. Right now, the options on the table look like this: A rebooted, green-infused social democracy (the old Corbyn project was an example). A slide into eco-fascism and top-down “solutions” (the Trump path). Or doing nothing, and let #climatechaos run wild (the current #mainstreaming).

One thing is likely, a wartime economy is coming within 20 years, where there’s will be little room for the last 40 years of #neoliberalism, and “soft” liberalism will likely play a secondary role at best, the political landscape is shifting fast. The new #mainstreaming question is which side will you be on?

Because we need more than clean branding and good vibes – we need bold, practical, radical action rooted in both tech and human trust. We don’t just need freedom from the state and the #dotcons – We need freedom from our own dogmas.

The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil where openness can grow, thrive, and renew. We need compost, and not just as a metaphor.

Dev test work for Makinghistory application

The #makinghistory project is a decentralized, open-source archiving and storytelling network designed to preserve and amplify grassroots histories. It’s founded on the idea that history isn’t written by the winners – it’s made by those who resist, build, and care. Using digitized collections like the CampbellFamily archive as a seed, the project invites communities to reclaim their narratives through shared, federated networks. This isn’t just another data repository – it’s a living, breathing ecosystem where collective memory is gathered, enriched, and kept accessible for future generations and movements.

The application functions as a community-installable tool that allows anyone to host their own archive node. These nodes, whether local or remote, connect into a wider peer-to-peer network of storytellers, archivists, and activists. Core features include uploading and organizing digital files, enriching metadata flows, and linking material to broader narratives using human-created tags and annotations. The platform follows a participation-first path, encouraging affinity groups to contribute not just data, but context, weaving a rich web of interlinked histories.

But #makinghistory goes further than archiving. It’s a space for collaborative storytelling, publishing, and public exhibition. Its narrative layer draws from the archive to trace connections between people, places, and events, transforming scattered fragments into stories of solidarity, resistance, and change. These outputs feed both digital commons and real-world installations like the Resistance Exhibition, where history is brought to life in public, participatory spaces. This is the infrastructure for radical memory work, a composting system for movement knowledge. Developers are not just needed to build features, they’re invited to help shape the very flows and protocols that keep history in the hands of those who live it.

Developer Roadmap: #makeinghistory – Testing & Prototyping

Phase 1: Core Object Listing
- Implement a single-column interface that lists objects (text, image, link).
- Set up two test instances that can post and sync objects between them.
- Default view lists objects by most recent. Super simple.
Phase 2: Hashtag Columns
- Add support for hashtag-based columns (inspired by Mastodon’s Tweetdeck interface).
- Reuse and adapt existing open-source implementations where possible.
Phase 3: Story Objects
- Introduce a new “Story” object that composes and links existing media objects, with added narrative context.
- These stories are published through collective/community accounts (discussion needed on access/trust models).
Phase 4: Federation & Flows
- Begin mapping and testing how edits, hashtags, comments, and objects flow across federated instances.
- Align this with the #OMN trust model and the work from the #indymediaback reboot (estimated 90% overlap).
User Interfaces
- Desktop: Use a Tweetdeck-style interface, similar to Mastodon’s current layout.
- Mobile: Build a simplified UI with a single-column scroll. Objects open fullscreen with sideways swiping (like Tusky for Mastodon).
Every Object
- Has edit capabilities (if user has login/auth).
- Editable hashtags.
- Comment threads.
- All changes sync across instances via federation/trust flows (option 4).

The current test interface and images will need refreshing, as they’re based on early-stage mockups. But the concept remains: keep the interface minimal, usable, and focused on narrative composting. This project is both infrastructure and imagination, grounded in the old but reaching toward the new.

These images need an update as they were based on the dev work from back in the day. This is the very basic interface for testing. The mobile user facing interface is a flick sideways basic interface.

The logic and workflow are all based on the OMN project and have likely a 90% overlap with the indymediaback project

DEV of the #OMN projects

At the core of the #makinghistory infrastructure lies the Open Media Network (#OMN) – a trust-based, human-moderated, #4opens project that offers a decentralized, federated database shared across peers. What makes the OMN unique isn’t just what it does – but what it refuses to do. Rather than chasing complexity or abstract “AI-powered” solutions, the OMN focuses on simplicity and social cohesion, using technology to support and grow human networks. Its structure is purposefully minimal, with only five essential functions:

These core functions are: Publish (to share a story as an object into a stream); Subscribe (to people, pages, groups, or subjects); Moderate (to express trust or disapproval by pushing or pulling content); Rollback (to remove content from your stream based on trust flows); and Edit (to collaboratively change metadata across federated nodes where you’re authenticated). This framework serves as the back-end engine for building a grassroots, DIY semantic web. The front-end can take many forms: city-based or subject-specific sites like a modern reboot of Indymedia, regional storytelling platforms, or thematic archives like #makinghistory. Protocols like ActivityPub form the connective tissue of this system, the plumbing.

In practice, this means people can build meaningful media spaces that reflect local struggles and solidarities without being dependent on corporate platforms or NGO gatekeeping. The data cauldron of the OMN stores the shared knowledge, and every community holds a golden ladle – a way to draw out, remix, and republish what matters to them. If you’re interested in supporting this effort financially, you can do so via Open Collective. And if you’re ready to dive deeper, we need to make this #KISS project work. Let’s build tools for memory, not marketing, infrastructure for resistance, not careerism. Let’s be #makeinghistory together, not sit bord looking at a screen.

This #OMN path is “native” built on a simple, powerful truth: “This is the Internet”:

GET
PUT
POST
DELETE
–MERGE–

These basic actions — close to the core HTTP verbs every website uses — are all you need to create, share, remix, and grow.
(From RFC 7231 and RFC 5789.)

Then you have the #4opens which are about reclaiming the grassroots social power of the web:

Open data

Open source

Open process

Open standards

No gatekeepers. No #dotcons middlemen. No closed silos. Just people, building together. This is what #openweb reboot looks like.

Actors, Power, and Collective Publishing: Rethinking Fediverse Architecture for Grassroots Media

A letter from the margins of the #openweb

All the #OMN projects I’ve worked on over the years, from #OGB to #indymediaback, are not directly about social change. They are about creating the possibility of social change. A subtle, but critical difference.

We don’t claim to have the answers. What we do offer are tools, networks, and processes that make it easier for people to imagine that the world can be different, and then help them to take the first step.

Yet still, here’s the mess that keeps being pushed over us. We are told this work is “too high up the stack,” “too fuzzy,” or “too political.” But in reality, the same topics and themes do receive #NGO funding, just safely sanitized within the logic of the #deathcult. In this, the “shadow” keeps getting funded, but the light source is ignored.

When we say “the world can be different,” we’re not talking about abstract theory. We mean literally:

Media that people control from the grassroots up
Governance that isn’t locked behind elitist gates
A web that grows through trust not platforms
Protocols that reflect values, not just efficiency

But the funding, even in the so-called ‘alternative’ spaces, is trapped in a conservative loop. People working in these orgs are either too captured by their own #geekproblem funding logic, or too afraid to support anything that might really challenge their place in the status quo, by threatening to end the funding flows they live in.

Some of the real replies to the over 20 funding applications I have put in for the last ten years: “This kind of effort is very hard to seek grants for…” “I don’t have an obvious candidate for you to go to, either.” What these polite deferrals mask is a structural failure of imagination. The fear of change is so strong that even funders tasked with enabling alternatives end up only supporting work that conforms to existing institutional logics and barely deviates in meaningful ways from the normal #mainstreaming paths.

So, where does that leave those of us pushing for a real #openweb reboot? We get silence or slow-walked rejections. We burn out or pivot to “safer” projects. Or worst of all, we get absorbed by the very forces we wanted to challenge. And look, maybe that’s the plan. Maybe co-option is the endgame for the #openweb: a slick, tamed version of rebellion, friendly enough for NGOs and palatable to #EU bureaucrats.

But that’s not our plan. Not the plan we’ve been composting all these years. The challenge:

Funders: If you want the future to be different, stop only funding imitation’s, fund the real thing, step outside the safety of compliance. Trust radical imaginations.
Builders: If you’re still holding the compost shovel, don’t drop it. The real garden will grow, but only if we stop watering the plastic plants.
Everyone else, demand more. Not just better bling, but better foundations.

We don’t need more advice, we do need courage. The #openweb is not dead, but it is at risk of becoming another façade unless we build the possibility of real change into its #rebooting core.

I am still digging #makinghistory #OMN #indymediaback #OGB

#RIPENCC #NGI #NLnet

The #OMN is not a product — It’s a path you walk

The #OMN project is a #DIY commons, that is it only works if we build it together. This isn’t a startup pitch. It’s not a platform that magically appears out of nowhere to fix everything. It’s not a product to consume, it’s a path you walk. The direction is participatory, not passive. You don’t get to sit back and clap… or boo from the sidelines. If you do, the system won’t collapse, but it sure as hell won’t grow.

Let’s be direct, there is no saviour coder, no #NGO white knight, no perfectly designed protocol that will do the real work for us. If you’re waiting for a polished solution wrapped in a branded bow, you’re already on the wrong side of history.

And if our current (stupid)individualism keeps #blocking, even if we don’t build any of this now, the work we do and document still matters. There’s deep value in memory, the rough notes, the abandoned wikis, the half-built tools, the strange and beautiful conversations scattered across the #fediverse. These are the seeds and scraps that future builders can compost. If we can’t get our act together now, the next wave might. But only if we leave something living behind.

Right now, for me, that “something” is #makinghistory, the #OMN archiving project. It’s not just nostalgia or backup, it’s a living memory layer, a scaffolding of knowledge and intention that gives us a place to stand. Without memory, we circle the same old #techshit heap, repeating mistakes, retelling the same half-lost now “common sense” stories, falling into the same social and technical traps. That’s not progress. That’s rot.

So we’re starting where we might get funding, bootstrapping the archive. It’s step one. It’s doable. And it matters. If we don’t remember soon, many of us, and the histories we’ve made, will be lost in the rising storm of #climatechaos and social #dotcoons fragmentation.

In the end, it’s simple, if we don’t build, we don’t change. If we don’t remember, we’ll never learn.
And if we don’t act, this moment becomes compost for someone else’s future.

That’s fine, but I’d rather build that future when we need it most now. Wouldn’t you?

Ah, the cockerel crows and the full moon glows, a fine moment to scratch at the compost pile.

You’re right, most are merrily skipping through walled gardens, hashtagging selfies and feeding the #dotcons. But seeds don’t need mass attention, they just do need rich compost. That’s what we need to build. Slow, damp, a bit smelly, but fertile.

The #sheeple are not my flock, they belong to the algorithmic shepherds. We’re feeding the stray goats and curious crows.

You don’t convert people by preaching. You do it by making better paths, ones they choose when the old ones crumble. We don’t sell the #openweb like snake oil — we show it, live in it, fix it when it breaks, and compost the crap. It’s #DIY, not #DRM

As for silos and skips, good compost needs oxygen, not airtight boxes. So yeah, a messy open pile — full of half-rotten ideas, posts, drama, even the occasional troll turd.

We trust in tools not gatekeepers, the #4opens are the shovels, rakes, and sieves. The people bring the scraps, and over time, it breaks down into something usable.

No army of mods, no paywalls, simple trust, process, and a lot of patience. Think rural anarchism, not startup governance.

On scaling… Ah, the eternal #techshit question, “Does it scale?” That’s the wrong frame. Nature doesn’t scale, it sprawls.

We’re not building an empire. We’re nurturing a network. Think mycelium, not megastructure.

The #OMN isn’t about numbers. It’s about resilience and agency. If it sprouts in some cracks, the monoculture breaks. And yes, nettles welcome

The #Kolektivas, the #fashernista paradoxes, the semi-anarchic infighting, it all goes in the pile. Break it down, stir it up, give it time…

And what do you get? Fluffy, fertile humus — ready for new growth. That’s the cycle. That’s the plan.

#makinghistory an example workflow

For the last 20 years, we’ve worshipped the #deathcult of #neoliberalism, blind to the collapse unfolding around us. Every institution that promised to guide and protect us has failed. The ruling classes, in every hue of politics, have abandoned us. Our media and entertainment elites distract and distort. #NGOs, once trusted, have betrayed the very causes they claimed to champion. Academia and business alike have clutched at power, dithering while the world burns.

We face #climatechaos naked and disjointed — at war with ourselves and lost in consumerism. Yet, in this wreckage, there is a choice: step away from the #mainstreaming, let go of false promises, and dive into the #undercurrents. Compost the mess. Build anew.

The #makinghistory project is a seed for this rebuilding. It offers a way to reclaim our narratives, digitizing archives like the Campbell Family collection to preserve grassroots histories of resistance and hope. I use this as an example here. This is more than data collection — it’s a living, breathing ecosystem of collective memory.

Setting up the Application: Communities install the #makinghistory app on local machines or hosted instances, creating a decentralized network of storytellers.

Uploading Digital Files: Activists and archivists upload historical files, adding metadata and context.

Building a Community: By inviting family, affinity groups, and wider activist circles, the archive grows into a collaborative space, nurturing participation.

Interacting with Data: Users engage directly with the history, categorizing, tagging, and enriching it with new insights.

Storytelling Features: The enriched data flows into narratives, connecting seemingly isolated events into cohesive stories of struggle, solidarity, and change.

Public Sharing: These stories aren’t locked away — they’re shared openly, contributing to a global commons of knowledge.

Impact: In reclaiming history, people find inspiration and strength. Grassroots stories challenge the top-down narratives, showing that change comes not from a nasty few (elites) but from those who dare to dream and act.

The ‘Resistance Exhibition’ was started to extend this vision, turning physical spaces into participatory hubs where visitors become archivists and storytellers themselves.

This is not passive consumption. It’s collective action. It’s the compost from which new movements grow. It’s #makeinghistory — not as an abstract concept, but as a living, evolving reality. Let’s step away from the wreckage and start building something real.

#NLnet #EU #NGI #NGIzero – Will we get it right this time?

With the hard shift to the right in US tech, Europe can no longer afford to sit idly by in tech development. The myth of neutrality has always been a convenient lie—if we don’t actively counterbalance this shift, we risk watching the #FOSS and #openweb movements collapse, taking with them a core pillar of our democratic and digital future. These movements aren’t just about code; they are the foundation of a fair, open, and just society. Now is the time to step up, not stand by.

For the past five years, I’ve been applying for funding for native #openweb projects—projects rooted in real, grassroots needs rather than corporate gatekeeping and academic abstraction. The problem? #NLnet and the wider #EU funding landscape lack people who can actually judge #FOSS projects in this space. The results are predictable:

Bureaucratic checklists
Conservative, incremental funding
Projects chosen based on who fills out forms best, not who builds the tech we actually need

So the real question is: has this changed? Because right now, I see the same mistakes repeating. We have proposals like:

#MakingHistory – Restoring a radical, federated approach to storytelling and digital archiving.
#IndymediaBack – Rebooting independent media with the lessons of past failures baked in.
#OGB (Open Governance Body) – A vital step toward decentralised, federated governance—something we desperately need to keep tech in the hands of communities, not corporations.

These proposals should not be niche. They should not be afterthoughts. They should be a part of the core of NGI funding strategy, the checks and balance on the bigger tech projects, if the EU is to be at all affective about counterbalancing the rightward shift in global tech.

So let’s ask again: Has #NLnet and the #EU stepped up this time? Are we funding the future, or are we just shuffling papers while the #deathcult eats our humanistic heritage and the last remains of the #openweb?

The risk, as always, is that the funding just shifts to the next well-polished pitch deck, rather than the real, messy work of change. But hey, one can but prod—because without that, nothing moves at all.

The Path Beyond #Neoliberalism

With the onrushing impact of current climate and systemic crises, it becomes realistic to see that #neoliberalism, free-market orthodoxy and the pushing of minimal state intervention, is fundamentally an inadequate path that is ill-equipped to address #climatechaos and social challenges we face. This failure means a radical shift in perspective and approach is going to happen, with this we might need to shift our “common sense” to being something like “Revolutionary Realism.”

The current #mainstreaming of false promises of #Neoliberalism over the last 40 years has pushed the fundamentalist free market path as the engine of prosperity, wealth and efficiency. However, since the 2008 financial crisis, these promises have increasingly rung hollow. The empirical evidence, rising inequality, decreasing life expectancy, and environmental degradation, exposes the limitations and failures of this economic orthodoxy.

From our turn of the century Alt globalization movement, we have Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism”, which describes the pervasive belief that capitalism is the only viable economic system. This helps us to see that the invisible dogma has fostered a sense of fatalism, particularly on the left, where a resignation to critique and protest has replaced active efforts to envision and construct alternatives. This defeatism perpetuates the status quo, as it undermines belief in the possibility of systemic change.

There is a need for revolutionary paths in the imminent collapse of capitalism, contrary to the notion that capitalism is indestructible, we are witnessing its destabilization under the weight of its inherent contradictions and the accelerating climate mess. This realization should be pushing a shift from capitalist realism to revolutionary realism, to acknowledging the inevitability of capitalism’s decline and the necessity of preparing for what comes next.

The climate crisis is a catalyst, a primary driver of this transformation, from droughts affecting global trade to natural disasters disrupting economies, the environmental impacts of #climatechaos are compounding the systemic vulnerabilities. These disruptions necessitate a move towards a different way of organizing economic systems, this could be a controlled and planned economic system or more a balance of grassroots federated democracy.

State control of the economy is one path, historically, state intervention has proven effective in times of crisis, as seen during World War II and the COVID-19 pandemic. State control of the economy does not inherently mean totalitarianism; it can involve a balanced approach, with both top-down planning and bottom-up participation.

Effective planning is a path we might need to take, for managing resources and ensuring equitable distribution. This could involve simplifying economic processes, such as reducing the variety of consumer goods and localizing production to reduce dependency on international trade. Digital #4opens technology can enhance this planning by providing real-time #opendata and facilitating more responsive governance based on metadata as the signal to guide the economic and social flows.

Democratic Participation is a path to avoid the pitfalls of authoritarianism, any new system must incorporate democratic mechanisms, such as #OGB path of building the power of citizens’ assemblies, to legitimize state actions and ensure accountability. This grassroots participatory approach mitigates the risk of corruption and foster a sense of collective responsibility.

Practical steps for transition are free basics and maybe rationing if it’s needed. A key element of a new system would be the socialization of essential services, healthcare, housing, and food production, to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met. Rationing of luxuries and non-essential goods can help to push some sustainability and equity on this mediation path.

Encouraging worker participation in decision-making using projects like the #OGB and perhaps supporting small businesses, as a social democratic path out of the current #mainstreaming, can humanize the economy and maintain a degree of market diversity to push the needed transition. This hybrid approach blends state control with “entrepreneurial” social freedom, making the path through the coming mess by balancing efficiency with innovation to shift our dogmatic illiberal common sense.

But fundamentally we need a cultural shift towards valuing sustainability, community, and collective well-being over the #stupidindividualism of hyper consumerism. This can be promoted through, empowering #DIY education, radical media (#indymediaback), and grassroots movements. There is a long history of this (#makinghistory) which we need to remind our selves about.

The transition from current #mainstreaming to a more sustainable and equitable system requires revolutionary realism, a pragmatic recognition of the imminent collapse of the current system and a proactive approach to growing its successor. This might involve embracing state control, and or fostering grassroots democratic participation, to push the cultural shift towards sustainability and collective well-being. Can we navigate the complexities of this transition to take the path to building a more resilient and just society is the most important question for our time?