It’s long past time to return to the #openweb, and compost this mess making

We used to run 6 #Fediverse instances as part of the #OMN project – thousands of users across them. Admin/mod work was done by volunteers, grounded in user reports, contextual judgment, and dialogue. No hard rules. Just common sense and solidarity. It worked for 4–5 years.

Then came the #Twitter liberal influx – intolerant, entitled, and completely disconnected from #mutualaid and community care. They treated our volunteer-run platforms as if they were corporate #dotcons, shouting into the void and demanding services with no reciprocity.

We tried to bridge the gap, repeatedly. It didn’t work. It drained us. After a year running at a huge loss, we had to shut them all down. Yes, it’s sad. Yes, it’s bad. But this is a normal pattern, resources are disposed of, culture gets flattened, energy gets burned out.

Alt-tech needs some resources, yes, far less than the #mainstreaming, but not zero. More importantly, it needs a culture that doesn’t throw itself under the wheels of liberal exceptionalism. We’re now working on rebooting this, with code that’s less friendly to “common sense” liberalism and more in tune with grassroots #4opens values.

Because, let’s face it, look at most tech news today and mutter with me:

Utterly pointless. Stupidly pointless. Dangerously pointless.
Naively evil. Innocently evil. Just plain evil.
…We need to do better in alt-tech.

The #dotcons built billion-dollar platforms on amplifying the worst of human nature.
It’s long past time to return to the #openweb, and compost this mess making.

Mythos and traditions are needed for revolutions to grow roots

If you want your revolution to succeed, it’s a good to push and grow from mythos and traditions, and grow from shared histories. Yes, Marxism and European #anarchism are coming back into fashion as source code of radical politics. But if we are to actually achieve anything this time round, we need to see and act, in balance, a #KISS understanding that most of what they propose already existed in indigenous and non-Western cultures. Ideas like #mutualaid, communal land, anti-hierarchy, #dialectics – these aren’t Euro inventions. They were lived reality for societies built on relationships, protocols, obligations, stories, land.

The path that we so often miss in our activism is those indigenous systems were rooted in culture, not just politics. That’s why they could survive under centuries of attack from #colonialism and #capitalism. It wasn’t theory that held them together, it was the social infrastructure of caring.

Way too often our western left tries to reassemble this through ideology alone, in a culture already stripped of land, kinship, and tradition. That’s why left projects so often keep collapsing – #theory isn’t enough. You can’t build lasting community on politics without #relationalfabric. No story, no shared values, no “spiritual” grounding, and everything becomes a power game, a purity spiral, a mess of ego and disconnection.

Even where Marxism and Anarchism succeeded for a time: #CNTFAI, the #Zapatistas, the #USSR you can see that it was growing from existing cultural roots. The political theory sprouted from culture, it didn’t grow without it. And when that cultural roots got disrupted? So do the movement.

In meany ways, Marxists have dogmatically dismiss indigenous societies as primitive, when they already lived what meany of the western radicals dreamed of. That’s the core paradox, Maximists too often wants what they ignore. They reach for communal life while scorning the few people who still kinda live it. #Anarchism tends to follow the same path, beautiful ideas, but no soil to grow in.

You want your revolution? Start with compost. The #4opens, land, kinship, accountability, shared story. Don’t fight the #deathcult with manifestos, root your tech and your politics in #livingculture. We don’t need more theory. To balance the current mess, we need to remember what we already knew.

#MutualAid posts?

Why don’t people boost #MutualAid posts? This needs a thread on trust, tools, and the current limits of our #openweb. Saw this poll recently:

“For folks on here who don’t boost mutual aid requests, why is that?”
– 0% followers don’t like
– 8% I don’t like/agree
– 63% I curate what I boost
– 29% other/see comment

One comment stood out:

“Because #mutualaid is based on trust – we don’t have very good tools for this. So it's little better than charity at the moment on this #openweb reboot.”

And that hits the nail on the head: Mutual aid vs charity. The difference flows from power. Charity is hierarchical, Mutual aid, at its root, is about solidarity, reciprocity, and shared struggle.
But online, these two often blur because we lack the context and connection to see the difference.

Trust is relational, not transactional, boosting a request isn’t just about amplifying, it’s a mini trust signal. People hesitate because they’re not sure: Is this person part of my community?
Is this a real need or a scam? Will my flows see this as noise?

The current #openweb reboot lacks trust infrastructure, the #Fediverse gives us freedom, but not yet accountability. We have few native ways to: Verify reputations (without surveillance),
build relational trust over time, track the outcomes of help given, without these tools, curation becomes caution.

Without trust, mutual aid to often becomes charity with extra steps. A request without context, without connection, becomes a broadcast into the void. People scroll past, not out of malice, but because they don’t know what they’re being asked to join. It’s hard to feel mutual aid through a hashtag and transeunt fading toot.

We need tools that make trust visible, what would help?

Federated reputation trails (based on community, not scoring)
Personal endorsements or vouch systems
Verified mutual aid circles tied to real-world organizing
Transparency without compromising safety or privacy

Mutual aid thrives in networks, not platforms, most mutual aid posts are isolated asks. But mutual aid IRL is ongoing, collective, messy, relational. To make this work better, we need: Community profiles, not just individuals, project-based accounts with visible participation, local node mapping to show where people can plug in

A final thought is that the problem isn’t people being selfish, it’s that we’ve rebuilt our social media spaces with publishing tools, not relational tools. If we want mutual aid to work online, we have to stop treating it like just another kind of content. We need to compost the charity mindset and grow networked care from trust, not likes. So for now, boost with care. Build with purpose.

Recognizing the cracks in the current path

This is an overview, the path we need to try is to focus on #commons and #cooperation for building tools and communities, then to use these tools to challenge the current structures of power. This is a very different path than the #stupidindividualism (as some people say #hyperindividualism) of the current capitalist path. The way isn’t through more fragmentation, but by connecting these fragments into a more coherent whole—something the #OMN (Open Media Network) is working towards. We need #solidarity and #mutualaid to build this tool, which can then be used to build the communities to use it.

The issues are wide, is not just the #dotcons enclosing the commons, but the way people get sucked into the #NGO and culture/control paths, which reinforces the very systems of oppression, that on the surface they claim to fight. We can’t keep putting plasters on these problems. In the media/tech world the path is actually not that hard, real change comes from #grassroots efforts that prioritize #4opens: OpenData, OpenSource, OpenProcess, and OpenStandards. These create transparency and accountability, and help us compost the #techshit that has built up over decades of bad practice.

I outline this in the OMN project, which provides a structure to link these disparate actions and paths together, creating a “native” #NetworkOfNetworks where flows of trust and information/data and metadata can be built on solid, open foundations. By strongly focusing on principles, we foster #communities that are resilient, self-sufficient, #DIY and capable of defending against the enclosures that happen by default on the #mainstreaming path we are all on.

It’s time to turn away from the (stupid)individualistic mindset that capitalism cultivates and return to a more healthy balance with #CollectiveEmpowerment. This isn’t about returning to a naive vision of the past but evolving our tactics for the present, using what’s left of the openweb to build something more robust and deeply rooted, we have started down this path with the #fediverse

The #OMN is building from this first step, a path that is usefully as it’s native to create a #reboot for the #openweb. It’s about recognizing the cracks in the current system and knowing where pressure can make the cracks grow to open up space to compost the old and nourish the fresh shoots of alternative tech and media that we need. This nurtures communities that then builds better tech, a simple circle, with likely a better outcome than the current #deathcult

Individualism isn’t the problem, the “stupid” part is the problem

There is a lot on this subject on this website

Meany people write on this change of path