Tag: NGO

Why good faith is a technical requirement for #FOSS

If you’ve spent years in #FOSS, you’ve likely developed a strong allergy to vague political language. You care about licenses, reproducibility, governance models, and whether something actually runs. Good. That discipline is why free software exists at all.

But here’s the uncomfortable question, what if the biggest blocker to the #openweb right now isn’t technical debt – but social debt? And what if “good faith” is not a moral nicety, but a core infrastructure requirement?

The problem is when activism meets the #geekproblem. Anyone who pushes for change – especially against #mainstreaming pressures – develops a recurring relationship with bad faith. You see this when:

  • Corporate actors adopt the language of openness while enclosing the commons.
  • Institutions celebrate “community” while centralizing control.
  • Projects technically comply with openness while culturally gatekeeping participation.

This isn’t new, but the scale is new, in the age of #dotcons, #NGO enclosure is polished, funded, and normalized. Resistance generally fragmented, exhausted, and defensive as years of platform manipulation and extractive models have left people burnt out and cynical. In that climate, good faith is fragile, yet without it, nothing decentralized works. Good faith is infrastructure, decentralized systems cannot rely on coercion at scale. They rely on:

  • Trust
  • Transparency
  • Shared norms

The assumption is that participants are not actively trying to sabotage the commons, as when bad faith dominates, decentralized governance collapses into:

  • Endless meta arguments
  • Capture by the loudest actors
  • Drift toward hierarchy “for efficiency”

Sound familiar? This is why good faith isn’t sentimental, it’s structural. If you’ve ever tried to maintain a FOSS project while navigating trolls, corporate opportunists, and purity politics, you already know this.

To help the #4opens is a practical test, not a vibe. The #4opens framework exists precisely to operationalize good faith. It asks four simple questions of any grassroots tech project:

  • Is the data open?
  • Is the source open?
  • Are the processes open?
  • Are the standards open?

This extends beyond traditional open data initiatives (often institutional, often cosmetic). It covers the entire ecosystem of a project, not just its outputs. The value is not ideological purity, it’s resilience. When data, code, process, and standards are open:

  • Capture becomes harder.
  • Forking remains possible.
  • Governance can be contested transparently.
  • Communities can leave without losing everything.

That’s not abstract politics, it’s survival architecture. Composting the current rot is why #OMN exists as a project. We are living in a digital environment thick with enclosure and manipulation. Years of bad faith, disempowerment, and algorithmic extraction have created social decay. The instinct of many geeks is to build a cleaner stack and hope people migrate. But the problem isn’t just software, it’s trust collapse.

If the #openweb is to mean anything beyond developer autonomy, it has to support collective storytelling and coordination, not just individual expression. #OMN is a shovel, not a cathedral. It’s a way to compost the mess rather than pretend it isn’t there.

The #OMN (Open Media Network) is not a shiny new protocol. It’s deliberately simple: Publish, Subscribe, Moderate, Rollback, Edit. That’s it, no engagement hacks, no growth funnels and no surveillance capitalism. It’s a #DIY, trust-based, human-moderated space. Messy, organic, built for communities, not only users.

This matters in the era of #climatechaos and social break down. As climate instability accelerates, centralized platforms will align with state and corporate power to prioritize “order” over dissent and optimize for profitability in shrinking margins.

To balance these communities will need coordination without permission, information flows that aren’t algorithmically distorted and infrastructure they can adapt locally, that’s a social demand. If #FOSS remains culturally optimized for the small minority who enjoy living inside the #geekproblem, it will not meet that demand at all.

We need to understand that the vast majority do not want to self-host, they do not want to debate licences, they do not want to live inside issue trackers. They want functioning, trustworthy spaces, if we can’t provide that, someone else will – and it won’t be #4opens.

The hard part is working with the empowered disempowered of our #fashionista class. We have a generation trained in #closed systems that reward performative critique over collective construction. On #dotcons platforms and strands of #NGO thinking, people are empowered to disempower others with common sense #blocking of call-out culture, optics over substance and branding over shared process. You get a strange anti-politics, egotistical, individualistic, allergic to long-term responsibility. A culture that critiques power while replicating it. Escaping this dynamic may be uncomfortable, it may get nasty before it stabilizes.

But here are some kinder strategies we can use:

  • Make contributions obvious and low-drama, clear process reduces ego battles.
  • Reward maintenance, not only innovation, culture follows incentives.
  • Default to transparency over suspicion, sunlight reduces paranoia looping.
  • Design for groups, not influencers, collective accounts, shared moderation, distributed ownership.
  • Keep it simple (#KISS), as complexity amplifies gatekeeping.

None of this eliminates conflict, but it shifts the terrain from personality warfare to shared work.

An invitation to the sceptics, you don’t need to buy the rhetoric, maybe ask instead does this increase forkability? Reduce capture risk? Does it lower dependence on extractive infrastructure to strengthen collective agency? If the answers are yes, they belong in the #FOSS conversation. The future of the #openweb will not be secured by better branding or cleverer stacks. It will be secured by projects that treat good faith as a design constraint and collective resilience as the goal.

This is not about purity, it’s about durability. We can keep polishing tools for the tiny minority who enjoy living inside the #geekproblem, but, we need to build infrastructure that ordinary communities can also use to navigate the storms ahead. The invitation stands, pick up a shovel, help compost the mess by build something that gives back more than it extracts.

#4opens #indymediaback #openweb #compostingthemess #KISS #makeinghistory #OMN

Yes, There Are Parasites. And Yes, There’s Shit to Shovel

Why use strong words, because there are parasites and shit to shovel. Why this is helpful? Because it gives the people who currently being default parasitic a chance not to be, and the people who are creating #techshit space to compost some of this mess making. If they do, fantastic, a kindness has been done. If they don’t, we can compost the #fuckwits ourselves to grow something better #KISS.

“Impossible” is a horizon, not a boundary, not a fantasy, it is a pattern in history – abolition was “impossible.”, Universal suffrage was “impossible.”, Worker self-organisation was “impossible.” An open, global communication network outside state control was “impossible.” Until people acted as if it weren’t.

The function of calling something impossible is too often, political, about narrowing imagination and disciplining ambition, to keep demands within the limits of what current power structures find tolerable.

But structural shifts rarely start as “reasonable proposals.” they start as overreach – commons infrastructure, resisting enclosure, pushing back on identity-gated speech, building beyond scarcity logic – If we only aim for what seems immediately feasible within existing incentives, we tend to only reinforce those incentives.

If we aim beyond them, we can change the terrain, we may not reach the “impossible” goal, but we shift what becomes possible next. That’s the wager, it’s not utopian perfection or strategic overreach, historically, it’s acturly #KISS how the boundaries move.

With this firmly in mind, it’s useful to talk in metaphors, the poetry of life balances communication with blunt truth. Let’s look at current mess making. Open spaces attract life, they also attract parasites, that’s ecology. The #openweb and #4opens spaces generate value:

  • code
  • trust
  • collaboration
  • legitimacy
  • cultural capital

Composting Is real work, when drift sets in, someone has to shovel. It’s messy, exhausting, unpaid and constant, because digital commons produce nutrients – and institutional actors are trained to harvest nutrients. If nobody composts the shit, the projects choke.

Where value accumulates, extraction follows, the “parasite class” in tech isn’t evil masterminds. They tend to come from a layer of actors – often institutional, often NGO-aligned, often career-professional – who attach themselves to commons projects and redirect energy toward grant cycles, branding positioning and compliance governance trends. They don’t build the soil, they feed on it.

One of the Infections is digital scarcity, the most common parasite logic is simple, “Everyone should pay their way.” It sounds responsible, mature, it sounds sustainable. It’s also a direct import from market ideology. Digital infrastructure is non-rivalrous. It can be shared at near-zero marginal cost. But scarcity logic is reintroduced through:

  • subscriptions
  • premium tiers
  • paywalled functionality
  • SaaS dependency
  • professional gatekeeping

That’s enclosure wearing a cardigan, not building commons, it’s rebuilding platforms with nicer vibes.

The #NGO layer brings its own metabolism of risk aversion, soferned by consensus theatre. This is about measurable outputs, depoliticised language and in the end branding as reputational management. Again, not directly evil, but structurally parasitic to native grassroots paths. Because the moment legitimacy becomes more important than usefulness, the centre of gravity shifts. You start designing for funders instead of participants. You optimise optics instead of flows. You’re protecting the brand instead of the commons.

So it’s useful to ask why this keeps happening? Because the commons produce surplus of trust, energy, attention and infrastructure. Institutional actors are trained to capture surplus. They don’t see themselves as parasites. They see themselves as stabilisers. But when their survival depends on control by managing narratives, they can’t help bending the project toward those needs. That’s structural parasitism.

The real questions, where the value is, are you building soil or feeding off soil someone else built? Are you increasing abundance or reintroducing scarcity through “sustainable” monetisation? Are you decentralising power materially or professionalising it? Be honest.

The shovel test is are you building out the commons, or are you feeding on commons energy. Commons infrastructure should reduce dependence on gatekeepers, not multiply them.

The spiky bottom line: Yes, there are parasites. Yes, there’s shit to shovel. No, pretending everything is collaborative harmony doesn’t help. The work of the #OMN and #4opens isn’t trend-chasing or NGO alignment. It’s building resilient soil, designing against digital scarcity, protecting flows from enclosure by keeping governance open and messy.

If that makes institutional actors uncomfortable, that’s fine. Composting always smells bad before it becomes fertile. The question is whether we’re willing to pick up the shovel – or whether we’d rather keep pretending the pile isn’t growing.

Stop burning out alone, the number of good people burning out right now is not accidental. It’s what happens when systemic problems are framed as personal responsibility.

Collective infrastructure is weak and crisis is constant. No one can carry that alone, and no one should try.

The solution isn’t heroic effort, it’s shared architecture. In #FOSS terms: if the system keeps crashing, stop blaming the users. Redesign the stack, that’s the composting we actually need to do.

Most people sense that something is off

Meany people see the world degrading, enclosure accelerating. They see climate, politics, media all bending toward extraction. And even when they can see the trajectory, they feel powerless, so they cope by optimise their careers. They scroll. They argue. They consume. They retreat into irony. From birth, we’re trained into one core assumption: There Is No Alternative (#TINA).

Not because it’s true, but because every dominant institution reinforces it:

  • Schools train compliance.
  • Media normalises enclosure.
  • Platforms reward performance over substance.
  • Workplaces absorb our creative energy into extractive systems.

The message is subtle but constant:

  • “You can’t change anything.”
  • “Radicals just break things.”
  • “Be reasonable. Fit in.”

For builders, this message hits differently, because we know alternatives are possible, we’ve already built them. This is the #FOSS Paradox, as free and open source software proves collaboration without enclosure works, commons-based production works, open standards work and distributed governance can work. Yet somehow, the infrastructure we helped build keeps being enclosed.

The #openweb became the #dotcons, protocols became platforms and communities became markets. Not because we failed technically, but because we underestimated scale, incentives, and capture. And too often, we built tools without building parallel social power. The real trap isn’t rebellion – It’s drift – The #mainstreaming system doesn’t survive by crushing everyone loudly. It survives by absorbing alternatives, funding safe versions of dissent, steering energy into manageable channels and exhausting people with maintenance and precarity

Gatekeeping doesn’t always look like repression, more it looks like grants, partnerships, “best practices,” and institutional legitimacy. The result is that talented builders end up reinforcing the systems they once set out to replace. Not out of malice more from survival.

This Is where #OMN and #4opens come In, it isn’t only ranting about what’s broken, it’s about rebuilding missing layers:

  • Trust
  • Shared infrastructure
  • Media flows outside algorithmic capture
  • Governance rooted in actual participants

The #4opens are not branding, they are structural safeguards:

  • Open data
  • Open source
  • Open standards
  • Open process

Without all four, enclosure can creep back in, slowly, politely and inevitably.

This Is not about individual heroics, the myth of the lone hacker is part of the problem. What we need for the new “common sense” is that #stupidindividualism is a dead end. Few people escape extractive systems alone, no one builds durable alternatives alone. Collective infrastructure helps build counterweight to centralised power.

That’s what the #Fediverse gestures toward, what the #openweb once promised, and what needs strengthening now. A first step is to stop pretending we’re powerless. If you’re in #FOSS, you already have:

  • skills
  • networks
  • literacy in decentralised systems
  • experience with commons governance

What’s missing isn’t capability, it’s coordination and shared direction. The first step isn’t dramatic, it’s simple, reject the #NGO path to:

  • Find your people.
  • Support projects aligned with the #4opens.
  • Build flows, not just features.
  • Connect tools to real communities.
  • Refuse quite capture.

Do something – anything – that strengthens commons infrastructure instead of platform enclosure. The biggest lie Is that there’s no choice, when we keep repeating “this is just how things are,” eventually it becomes self-fulfilling. But history says otherwise, every dominant system looks permanent, until it isn’t.

The real outsiders aren’t the loudest rebels, they’re the ones who quietly stop reinforcing broken systems and start building viable alternatives. That’s what this moment asks of the #FOSS community is not #blocking outrage, not purity and not only collapse fantasies.

So, please stop waiting for permission, build systems that align with human autonomy and biophysical reality by strengthening commons before they’re erased. Because alternatives don’t appear, they’re built, and if we don’t build them, enclosure wins by default.

#KISS #openweb #4opens #nothingnew #geekproblem

Scale changes everything

Scale changes everything

Human behaviour does not stay the same as groups grow. The instincts that helped small tribes survive – loyalty, signalling belonging, defending boundaries, competing for status, consolidating influence – functioned well within natural limits. In small groups, feedback was immediate. Consequences were visible. Power was constrained by proximity and material reality.

But when those same instincts operate at contemporary social scale – inside complex technological societies, or even something like the current #NGO-fediverse – they stop stabilising systems and begin to destabilise them.

What once supported survival can amplify fragmentation.
What once built cohesion can produce polarisation.
What once protected the group can spiral into extraction and enclosure.

This isn’t a moral failure of the human species. It’s a predictable outcome of scale.

We now live inside systems where old social instincts interact with global networks, algorithmic amplification, financial abstraction, and industrial metabolism. The more-than-human crisis – #climatechaos, biodiversity collapse, geopolitical fracture – isn’t a collection of isolated problems. These are symptoms.

Beneath them are recurring systemic patterns.
Beneath those patterns are society-scale incentives.
And beneath those incentives are deep assumptions about growth, control, competition, and scarcity.

We are not outside these layers. We are embedded within them. So the questions become:

  • What does responsibility look like in a world where structural incentives shape collective outcomes?
  • Where do social thresholds appear when scale removes the natural limits that once kept us in balance?
  • How do we avoid treating symptoms while reinforcing the deeper forces producing them?

And if our instincts helped seed the early #Fediverse – when we for a time glimpsed a system that worked with human nature while balancing against #dotcons reality – how do we stay true to that path?

Because the tensions we see in the #fediverse today are not just about #blocking or governance disagreements. They are a microcosm of the larger scale problem of how human coordination patterns behave when they move from small, trust-based communities into larger networked infrastructures. The fediverse is not separate from this dynamic. It is one of the places where we should be actively trying to work it out.

To begin that work, we need to understand how the last #openweb reboot was enclosed. We can start by naming the #dotcons.

The #dotcons aren’t just “big tech companies.” They are a structural class of platforms that follow a repeatable pattern:

  1. Present themselves as open, liberating, participatory spaces.
  2. Attract huge numbers of people through network effects and free access.
  3. Gradually enclose that activity.
  4. Monetise attention by shaping reach, visibility, and behaviour.

The “con” isn’t that they charge money, it is the bait-and-switch:

  • First: open participation, organic reach, community.
  • Later: algorithmic throttling, pay-to-play visibility, advertising optimisation.

The “dot” is the monetisation layer – advertising markets, behavioural profiling, engagement engineering.

Even the so-called ethical platforms often operate on the same structural logic:

  • growth first
  • enclosure second
  • monetisation through mediated reach
  • shaping discourse toward advertiser-compatible norms.

You can swap leadership, branding, or tone, but if the core model is:

capture network → centralise control → monetise attention

… then it sits in the same class.

Naming them #dotcons isn’t moral outrage, it’s structural clarity. If we don’t name enclosure as a pattern, we end up debating personalities and features instead of structure. And this matters for the fediverse as if we don’t consciously build flows, commons, and #4opens practices into infrastructure and culture, the same enclosure dynamics will re-emerge, just more politely. The difference isn’t tone, it’s structure.

The real tension in the Fediverse is more about the idea and direction are broadly right:

  • decentralised social web
  • commons infrastructure
  • alternatives to #dotcons.

But the institutional reality is hollow, not enough resources go into the “native,” messy, grassroots work that actually keeps things alive. People like Evan and others stepping into organisational roles are, from their perspective, trying to:

  • stabilise infrastructure
  • secure institutional funding
  • reduce fragmentation
  • make the ecosystem legible to funders and regulators.

From that side, the fear is clear that without coordination and institutional structure, the fediverse remains marginal or collapses under maintenance debt.

From the native grassroots perspective, however, that institutionalisation risks repeating Web 2.0 capture in softer form – NGO-isation, depoliticisation, mainstream drift, and soft #blocking control. Can be framed as:

  • stability vs autonomy
  • funding vs independence
  • coordination vs organic growth

But it’s more accurate to call it what it is, a resource bottleneck. “ZERO resources for what we actually need” is widely felt as funding currently flows to:

  • protocol development
  • interoperability standards
  • software maintenance grants
  • governance experiments legible only to funders.

Funding rarely if ever flows to:

  • non-#NGO community organising
  • onboarding and social infrastructure
  • local/regional native networks
  • alternative governance rooted in users/admins
  • public-first infrastructure like #OMN.

In short, technical sustainability gets funded, where social sustainability struggles, this is why the friction persists. Funding bodies – including ones like #NLnet – operate within a narrow philosophy:

  • fund bounded technical projects
  • avoid political positioning
  • prioritise measurable outputs (code, specs, deployments).

But grassroots media and social organising don’t fit clean grant deliverables. Long-term community building is messy and hard to quantify. Native or openly political framing scares institutional funders. So money exists, but flows on balance toward the wrong layers for movement-building. #Blocking systems like this rarely change because people ask, they change when parallel practice makes the gap obvious. History shows this:

  • Indymedia didn’t wait for permission.
  • Early blogs didn’t wait for foundation approval.
  • Mastodon grew outside institutional planning.

The fediverse reboot itself began as parallel infrastructure.

How do we shift direction to balance resources to:

  • finding seed funding and affinity groups
  • building alternatives that demonstrate missing layers
  • creating public-first media networks (#OMN)
  • experimenting with governance rooted in users/admins (#OGB)
  • reframing the fediverse as one implementation of a broader #openweb ecology.

Institutions may shift, they may not. They likely believe they are solving the resource problem – just at a different layer (protocol legitimacy, policy access). So the conflict isn’t simply “they are wrong.” It’s that they are solving a different problem than native actors see as urgent.

The real power map is that formal governance in the fediverse is weak. Influence networks are strong. Power =

  • maintainers (code gravity)
  • large instance admins (network gravity)
  • narrative shapers (discourse gravity)
  • funding flows (resource gravity)
  • UX defaults (silent governance)
  • momentum and path dependency.

Most people assume power = foundations. It doesn’t, and this mismatch creates frustration. Grassroots actors see norms solidifying without transparent process. Institutional actors see chaos and feel pressure to stabilise. Both misidentify where power actually sits. The deepest divide is not ideological. It’s psychological. People are defending different survival strategies inherited from earlier internet generations. Until that’s recognised, discussions loop.

This is a much shorter version of the last post worth reading that as well. What do you think – when you step back and look at it this way?

We need to look at counter common sense. Peter Kropotkin “In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil.” Cuts straight into the #Fediverse tension, because the pattern is scale reflex: Problem appears → create rule → assume order emerges. It’s not stupidity, it’s institutional instinct, in spaces, when instability appears, the reflex is legislate, regulate, formalise and centralise. Law becomes the default instrument of repair.

Kropotkin’s critique is that law treats symptoms while leaving underlying social relations intact. It stabilises the surface while preserving the structure that produced the harm. Mapped onto #NGO governance frameworks, we see as this as the cure for cultural conflict, moderation rules as cure for social breakdown, foundation structures as cure for coordination failure, compliance processes as cure for scale instability. The risk isn’t only law itself, it is in mistaking rule-production for structural transformation.

When scale increases, institutions reach for formalisation, as trust erodes, systems reach for control. That instinct once helped small groups survive, but at scale, it reinforces the dynamics causing instability. #openweb networked infrastructure like the Fediverse, this equivalent of “fresh law” is played out as new governance bodies, new codes of conduct, compliance layers, blocking norms and new funding gatekeeping mechanisms. While each framed as remedy instead they are increasing enclosure.

Kropotkin isn’t arguing for mess, he’s pointing toward something harder – If problems emerge from structural incentives and social relations, then layering rules on top of those incentives won’t solve them, it will entrench them.

That’s the deeper tension, do we solve #Fediverse instability by adding structure? Or by changing flows, commons, and material relations underneath? That question is the uncomfortable one for people who still common sense worship the #deathcult.

Most people sense that something is off

The tension that’s pushed back into the fediverse the last few years

DRAFT

Scale changes everything as human behaviour does not stay the same as groups scale. The instincts that helped small tribes survive – loyalty, signalling belonging, defending boundaries, competing for status, consolidating influence – functioned well within natural limits. In small groups, feedback was immediate. Consequences were visible. Power was constrained by proximity and material reality.

But when those same instincts operate at contempery social scale, inside complex technological societies, like the current #NGO fediverse, they stop stabilising systems and begin to destabilise them. What once supported survival can amplify fragmentation. What once built cohesion can produce polarisation. What once protected the group can spiral into extraction and enclosure we start to see now. This is not a moral failure of the human species, it is a predictable outcome of scale.

We now live inside systems where ancient social instincts interact with global networks, algorithmic amplification, financial abstraction, and industrial metabolism. The more-than-human crisis – climatechaos , biodiversity collapse, geopolitical fracture – is not collection of surface problems, these are symptoms.

Beneath them are recurring systemic patterns, society-scale incentives. And beneath those incentives are deep assumptions about growth, control, competition, and scarcity. We are not outside these layers, we are embedded within them. So the question becomes what does responsibility look like in a world where powerful structural incentives shape collective outcomes? Where do social thresholds appear when scale removes the natural limits that once kept us in balance? How do we avoid only treating symptoms while reinforcing the deeper forces producing them?

And if our instincts once helped seed the current fediverse, we did see for a moment what a system look like that works with human nature while balancing it against #dotcons reality. This is the path we need to get back to, to understand how the current tensions I outline, in the fediverse makes sense. Because what we are seeing there is not just a #blocking governance disagreement. It is a microcosm of the larger scale problem: how human coordination patterns behave when they move from small, trust-based communities into bigger networked infrastructures.

The fediverse is not separate from this, it is one of the places where we are actively trying to work it out. To start down this path we need to look at how the last #openweb reboot was taken from us.

The #dotcons aren’t just “big tech companies.” They’re a structural class of platforms they follow the same pattern:

  1. Present themselves as open, liberating, participatory spaces.
  2. Attract huge numbers of people with network effects and free access.
  3. Gradually enclose that activity.
  4. Monetise attention by shaping reach, visibility, and behaviour.

The “con” isn’t that they charge money, the con is the bait-and-switch:

  • First: open participation, organic reach, community.
  • Later: algorithmic throttling, pay-to-play visibility, advertising optimisation.

The “dot” is the monetisation layer – advertising markets, behavioural profiling, engagement engineering. Even the so-called ethical platforms operate on the same structural logic:

  • growth first
  • enclosure second
  • monetisation through mediated reach
  • shaping discourse toward advertiser-compatible norms.

You can swap out leadership, branding, or tone, but if the core model is:

capture network → centralise control → monetise attention

… then it sits in the same class.

Naming them 20 years ago as #dotcons isn’t about moral outrage, it’s about clarity, because if we don’t name the enclosure pattern, we end up debating personalities and features instead of structure.

Where this matters for the fediverse is simple – If we don’t consciously build flows, commons, and #4opens practices into the infrastructure and culture, the same enclosure dynamics will re-emerge – just more politely.

The difference isn’t tone, it’s structure. And being clear about what the #dotcons are helps us see what we are trying not to reproduce.

The idea and direction are broadly right (decentralised social web, commons infrastructure, alternatives to #dotcons). but the institutional reality is hollow, not enough resources going into the “native” messy grassroots work that actually keeps things alive.

People like Evan and others stepping into fediverse organisational roles are, from their perspective, trying to stabilise infrastructure, secure insitunal funding streams, reduce fragmentation and make the ecosystem legible to funders, regulators, and mainstream paths. From this side, the fear tends to be that without some coordination and institutional structure, the fediverse stays marginal or collapses under maintenance debt.

Were from the native the grassroots/activist side institutionalisation risks repeating Web 2.0 capture light – NGO-isation, depoliticisation, and slow drift toward mainstreaming and soft #blocking control.

You could see this as basically stability vs autonomy, funding vs independence, coordination vs organic growth. But better to see it for what it is a resource problem (the real bottleneck)
“ZERO resources for what we actually need” is key, and honestly widely felt. Where funding currently goes to protocol development, interoperability standards, software maintenance grants and pointless governance experiments that look credible to funders.

Where resources don’t go on balence to “native” non #NGO community organising, onboarding and social infrastructure that is not mainstreaming. Seeding and growing local/regional native networks. Alternative governance experiments outside formal org structures and most importantly public-first infrastructure (like the #OMN direction) In short technical sustainability gets funded; social sustainability struggles to grow.

#NLnet and geekproblem, #NGO dynamics tend to operate with a narrow philosophy of fund discrete, bounded technical projects that avoid any political positioning to prioritise measurable outputs (code, specs, deployments). This creates structural friction because as infrastructure projects for grassroots media and social organising doesn’t fit neat grant deliverables. Long-term community building is messy and hard to quantify. Native radical or openly political framing scares institutional funders.

So we reinforce a path where money exists, but it flows toward the wrong layers for movement-building. So when dose this balance change? This is the hard truth: systems like this rarely change because people ask, they change when people push parallel practices that make the gap obvious.

What history teaches us in the #openweb is Indymedia didn’t wait for permission, early blogs didn’t wait for foundation approval and Mastodon itself grew outside institutional planning.
Change tends to happen through parallel infrastructure, witch is how the fedivers reboot happened in the first place before our current shift to #NGO structures and people takeing over our shared direction.

So how do we get out of this mess? By finding seed funding and affinity groups to build/use alternatives that demonstrate missing pieces like public-first media networks (#OMN), social layer experiments and governance models rooted in users/admins, not foundations (#OGB). We need this narrative pressure, not just critique, re-framing “Fediverse” as one implementation of broader #openweb rather than the destination and shifting language from platform to ecology.

Resource routing from the current institutions if they are at all capable of this, or giving them a good, if polite, kicking if they are not. Not to knock them out, more to knock them aside, they are still native on balance. The uncomfortable reality we need to compost is the current institutional layer probably thinks they are solving the resource problem – just at a different level (protocol legitimacy, policy access, etc). So the conflict isn’t only “they are wrong” but they are solving a different problem than the one native actors see as urgent.

Where leverage might actually exist if our goal is shifting direction rather than just venting (which is understandable 🙂), leverage tends to come from building cross-admin alliances (server operators are a missing power bloc, framing needs in operational terms (“X infrastructure gap causes Y burnout/failure” and linking fediverse survival explicitly to native grassroots media use-cases.

To work on this it helps to see the factions currently shaping Fediverse governance., a long sometimes over lapping list

  1. The Greybeards of every genda (early web + protocol veterans) worldview The fediverse is the continuation of the original web ethos. Protocols matter more than platforms. Stability and interoperability come first. Cultural roots are early blogging, RSS, XMPP, open standards culture and the early activist web. They are guardians of continuity.
  2. Protocol Purists / Engineering Minimalists (Sometimes overlap with greybeards but culturally distinct.) Tend to dismiss governance and social design as “out of scope.” and tus risk reproducing libertarian-style “neutral infrastructure” assumptions. They protect the protocol but sometimes ignore the ecosystem.
  3. NGO Pragmatists / Institutionalizers (This is likely most of current leadership structures. Think the Fediverse needs to be legible to regulators, funders, and #mainstreaming users. There cultural roots are foundation models, EU funding ecosystems and digital rights etc. Motivationed by legitimacy, policy and funding stability (for them selves, and thus the system, with them running it). There power is they can unlock resources, build bridges outside tech circles and reduce chaos perception. But suffer from very bad bind spots that affectively block by depoliticising radical roots, (un)intentionally reproduce top-down structures and prioritise optics over native needs. They are trying to make fediverse “safe enough” for mainstream adoption.
  4. Grassroots Builders / Commons Activists (Closest to #OMN framing.) Build and support the Fediverse as a social movement, not just infrastructure with native paths. Community governance and mutual aid are core so technology must serve social transformation. Roots sprin from early Indymedia, anarchist/left activist tech, free culture and early autonomous networks. Tere mission is native to te fedives of reclaiming media infrastructure, resist #dotcons capture to rebuild collective spaces. They bring real world experience of community building, lived experimentation and resilience outside funding cycles. But have there own blind spots with resource scarcity, fragmentation and continuing mess internal ideological conflict. They carry the original radical energy but struggle with institutional power.
  5. Instance Admins (The Hidden Power Layer) are often overlooked but crucial. Thy are te fedivers, keep servers running, manage moderation chaos, with ractical solutions over ideology spiky or fluffy. Being motivated by sustainability, reducing burnout and keeping communities healthy. Tey ave the only real operational experience and work with native distributed authority. But tend to be to blind to organising as a collective political voice as there influence is diffuse. If they coordinated, they could reshape governance overnight.
  6. Commercial Entrants / Platform Builders with the #NGO paths becoming more powerful. They tend to a narrow non native view of the fediverse as infrastructure for scalable products and interoperability as competitive advantage. Examples would be venture-backed or startup-aligned platforms motivated by growth, monetisation models compatible with federation and early positioning before governance can settle. They have power and voice due to resources, UX focus and marketing reach. But being non native they lack “users”. Tey are blind to the risk of slow platform capture and are anatanistic to the tension with grassroots values. They introduce gravity toward mainstream web patterns.
  7. The Silent Majority (Users) are often ignored in governance discussions. In this #NGO push they are seen as needing usable, safe social spaces and not deeply ideological. This leads to adoption patterns shaping the ecosystem more than debates do witch deeper cultural fault lines.
  8. Large Instance Admins (network gravity), they are admins of large or historically central servers, culturally influential communities have some power with federation choices shape network topology. Blocking decisions define social boundaries. They can indirectly decide which communities thrive, what norms spread and what software gains adoption. No vote, but impact.
  9. Narrative Shapers (discourse power) mostly the more fluffy, #NO frendly bloggers, long-term fediverse personalities, visible commentators and conference speakers define what problems are “real”, what language becomes default and try and define what counts as native and reasonable. Some example might be shifting conversation from “openweb” to “socialweb”, framing decentralisation as safety vs freedom. These narratives shape funding, developer interest, and user expectations.
  10. Funders (hard coded steering) for most people this is slight and not seen as direct control, for others more strong directional influence. Examples include: grant bodies, research funding ecosystems, EU-aligned digital infrastructure programs. On balance the vast majority of this funding goes to corrupt insiders and is thus simply poured directly down the drain. But the stuff that works, like #NLnet has real power, funding doesn’t dictate outcomes, but it decides which problems get resourced to indirectly defines priorities. But if this is not balenced by social governance funding it quietly becomes invisible.
  11. Bridge Figures (social connectors) are hugely underestimated. They are people with experience across multiple factions of dev + activist hybrids, long-term organisers and translators between tech and social communities. There power is in balanceing conflict, helping which conversations cross boundaries and legitimize ideas by engagement. Without them, silos harden.
  12. Default Software UX (silent governance) The interface itself shapes behaviour were Mastodon UX norms influence culture more than policy debates, defaults create expectations. Examples: content warnings, quote-post absence/presence, moderation tools. UX becomes governance.
  13. Momentum and path dependency is possibly the biggest hidden power. Once a protocol interpretation, a moderation norm or a deployment pattern gains early momentum… it becomes hard to change, regardless of governance discussions.

These factions aren’t just political, they divide along deeper axes.

  • Infrastructure vs Movement. Protocol purists + many greybeards → infrastructure-first. Grassroots → movement-first.
  • Stability vs Experimentation. NGOs + institutional actors → stability. grassroots + indie devs → experimentation.
  • Legibility vs Autonomy. NGOs seek legibility for funding/policy. grassroots value messiness and effective autonomy.
  • Governance vs Emergence. institutionalists want hard (oftern invisable) governance frameworks. Others believe governance should emerge (visably) organically

The insight meany people miss is that the biggest conflict is NOT what they might think left vs right or tech vs social, it is people trying to make the fediverse safe for scale vs People trying to keep it open enough for transformation. Both believe they are saving it. This is where things actually make sense, because formal governance in the fediverse is weak compared to influence networks. Most frustration comes from people arguing about structures that “don’t actually hold power”, while missing the forces that shape direction.

We need a more realistic map of the unspoken power dynamics shaping the fediverse, these are not generaly official roles – they’re influence patterns. Maintainers as gatekeepers (code gravity), who are core maintainers of major projects (Mastodon, Akkoma/Pleroma forks, Pixelfed, Lemmy, PeerTube, etc.). Protocol implementers of what ships shapes reality. What doesn’t get merged doesn’t exist. without formal authority they define the roadmap simply by deciding what is worth implementing. This has a strong hidden effect that governance debates often become irrelevant if maintainers don’t prioritise them. Some example dynamics are social governance features get ignored because they’re “not technical”. UX decisions shaping culture without explicit discussion etc.

The core dynamic that is hidden is most people assume power = foundations or organisations. Where the reality is power = maintainers + large instances + narratives + funding gravity. Formal structures, and the little native governance we have mostly follow these forces, not in any way balance them in.

So were dose the stress come from and why this creates frustration. Grassroots actors often see decisions emerging without any transparent process, norms solidifying without any affective debate and institutions appearing to “take over”.

Where institutional actors see chaos without coordination and feel deep phsicological, and self serving need for pressure to stabilise. Both misidentify where decisions actually originate. The deepest unspoken divide is people are defending different emotional survival strategies, until this is recognised, discussions loop endlessly.

What do you think, if you think about this at all?

The #openweb is the soil, #OMN the seeds

We are feeling a cultural current many of us recognise but rarely name clearly. A feeling that something fundamental has gone wrong, not just politically or economically, but culturally. An experience that imagination has narrowed, participation has thinned, and people are increasingly pushed into the role of spectators rather than participants in shaping the world.

This didn’t appear overnight. It grew out of decades of #neoliberal restructuring that reshaped culture, technology, and social life. Collective institutions were hollowed out, public spaces became marketplaces, creativity became branding and community became “audience”. Instead of shared projects, we were offered platforms, instead of commons, we were given services, instead of any participation, metrics.

This cultural shift produced a generation who feel the weight of a system that seems unavoidable – a reality that presents itself as permanent even as it fails to meet human needs. People sense the limits, but struggle to imagine alternatives because the cultural language for collective agency has been systematically eroded.

This is the environment the #dotcons thrive in, where the #closedweb turns culture into extraction and participation becomes only more engagement metrics. Community, user base, conversation content streams are where cooperation is #blocked due to competition for visibility.

And over time, this reshapes what people think about organising itself. Grassroots action begins to look unrealistic, messy, and inefficient compared to polished controlled platform experiences. Then trust disappears, replaced by algorithmic mediation and institutional management.

Yet beneath this dominant culture, another current has always existed, the #openweb culture, rooted in collaboration, experimentation, shared stewardship, and imperfect but real participation. IP protocol stack built on mailing lists, wikis, federated systems, grassroots media, DIY infrastructures, spaces where people build together rather than consume.

This culture never fully disappeared, as it was needed by the mainstreaming, it was just pushed to the margins. The #OMN project grows from this undercurrent, not as a reaction against technology, as a continuation of the parts of internet culture that treated technology as commons rather than a commodity. It #KISS recognises that infrastructure shapes social behaviour, and that rebuilding a healthier culture requires rebuilding the spaces where people meet, publish, and organise.

The difference is social logic, from social platform ownership grows to shared protocols, from central moderation to community mediation, from passive users to active participants. It’s the change from scale-as-growth to scale-as-federation.

Importantly, this isn’t nostalgia or any path to purity politics. The culture that produces #OMN understands that systems are messy. Grassroots projects fail, fork, and struggle. But instead of seeing this as weakness, it treats messiness as the natural process of collective growth. Composting rather than perfection.

The mistake of both corporate platforms and #NGO approaches is trying to engineer clean solutions to fundamentally social problems. The #geekproblem looks for perfect systems; the grassroots path builds resilient ones through ongoing practice.

This is why affinity groups, federated networks, and the #4opens matter. They create structures where trust emerges from shared action rather than imposed authority. The culture behind #OMN is not defined by ideology alone, it is defined by lived practice of people who build together and communities that govern themselves, to remain open to change

In a world that tells us “there is no alternative,” the simple act of building functioning alternatives becomes quietly radical. And when enough small, federated efforts connect, what once felt impossible begins to look normal again. That is how cultural change happens, not through grand declarations, but through many small working examples growing from shared soil.

The #openweb is that soil, #OMN is the seeds.

For sceptical #FOSS engineers, this isn’t an argument for abandoning structure, security, or technical rigour, it’s the opposite. The lesson from decades of open-source development is that trust does not mean naïveté; it means building systems where failure modes are expected and mitigated through transparency, modularity, and federation. #OMN applies these same engineering principles socially: small loosely-coupled groups instead of monoliths, open protocols instead of platform lock-in, observable processes instead of hidden governance.

If “pure trust” sounds unrealistic, think instead of reproducible builds, version control, and peer review, trust emerges from verifiable processes and shared ownership. The goal isn’t utopian social engineering; it’s creating resilient sociotechnical systems where collaboration scales horizontally because no single node becomes a point of failure or control.

#KISS

An affinity group is not just “a group of people who agree”

An affinity group is not just “a group of people who agree”

A practical bridge-building approach for the #openweb / #OMN – for grassroots organisers, Fediverse communities, and sceptical #FOSS engineers.

An affinity group is not simply “a group of people who agree.” It is a functional social tool: small enough to build trust, structured enough to act, and open enough to grow.

A working path is to start with purpose, not only ideology. The biggest mistake is forming around identity or theory rather than function. Affinity groups work when they are built around shared work, not shared labels. So for #OMN, instead of saying “let’s build an affinity group for radical media,” we try something concrete like: “a small group committed to building and testing OMN publishing workflows for real users.” A clear, practical purpose lowers defensive reactions and creates common ground.

Ideal size and composition matter. Affinity groups historically work best with around 4–8 people – large enough for diversity, small enough for trust. This avoids both NGO-style bureaucracy and lone-founder burnout. Useful roles include: builder (technical), organiser (social process), storyteller or documenter, critic/tester (essential for reducing groupthink), and connector (linking to the wider network). These are roles, not hierarchy.

Trust must be built through practice. Many people distrust grassroots projects because they have seen “pure trust” models fail. So don’t rely only on ideological alignment, build procedural trust instead. Examples include small, regular deliverables (“what did we actually ship?”), rotating facilitation, transparent public logs where possible, and shared infrastructure ownership, so no single person holds control. Trust grows from repeated, visible action.

Clear boundary rules prevent both NGO capture and chaos. Without boundaries, affinity groups dissolve. Keep rules simple and aligned with #KISS: anyone can observe, participation requires contribution, decisions are made by consent or rough consensus, and there are no permanent leaders, focus more on rotating roles. Forking is allowed, following federation principles. This mirrors ActivityPub socially as well as technically.

Mediation is built into #OMN. Use soft mediation practices such as assuming good faith but verifying through actions, and asking whether behaviour supports the shared task. When conflicts cannot be resolved, allow parallel experiments rather than endless arguments. This avoids the classic problem of well-meaning people unintentionally derailing collective work.

Avoid the #NGO trap from the start. Instead of mission statements, boards, and strategic documents, focus on working notes, small experiments, and iterative prototypes. Document reality rather than intentions. NGO structures often push power upward; affinity groups keep power at the edges.

Bridge-building with #FOSS and Fediverse communities is essential for adoption. Frame #OMN affinity groups as neither anti-engineering nor anti-structure, but anti-centralised control. Messaging like “we’re applying federation principles socially, not just technically” resonates strongly with #ActivityPub builders and open-source contributors.

Growth should happen through replication, not scaling. The affinity group is not the movement – it is a seed node. New participants do not simply accumulate; instead, new affinity groups form. Groups coordinate through federation via shared protocols and culture. This approach mirrors #Indymedia nodes, the early Fediverse, and many successful activist networks.

Concrete first steps: identify 3–5 people already doing related work; define one narrow OMN goal; hold a weekly 60–90-minute working session with a public log; rotate facilitation from the beginning; and ship something small within two weeks. Momentum builds legitimacy.

Affinity groups solve three problems simultaneously: they prevent NGO-style centralisation, reduce lone-founder burnout through shared responsibility, and resist #dotcons growth-for-growth’s-sake logic. In many ways, they are the social equivalent of federation.

People need permission to stop controlling

We need to describe a real structural problem that shows up again and again in grassroots projects. Well-meaning people arrive claiming to help “community”, but operate through control patterns learned from institutions, #dotcons platforms and professional #NGO culture. They work very hard, believe they are doing good, and unintentionally damage horizontal processes they want to become a part of.

This isn’t primarily a personal problem – it’s a culture clash problem. And yes, mediation, especially embedded mediation, is what we’re building into #OMN to correct direction. Let’s break this down in to practical approaches that actually work in messy grassroots ecosystems. First we need to name the real tension clearly, the conflict is NOT good people vs bad people, activists vs NGOs and grassroots vs professionals. The real tension is: Control logic vs Trust logic

  • Control logic (learned from #dotcons / NGO structures) is about optimising for risk reduction by centralise decision-making to push standardisation. They measure success through outputs and metrics, and assume governance must prevent failure.
  • Trust logic (#DIY / grassroots / early #openweb) is about optimise for participation and learning by distributed responsibility and messy iteration. Success is measured by living community, where governance supports emergence rather than preventing mistakes.

Most people don’t consciously choose control, they import it because it’s what they know. So #OMN mediation starts by framing this as different operating paths, not moral failure. We build “translation layers” instead of confrontation, the worst outcome is ideological escalation, leading to #blocking

Instead, we try to create structures that translate between cultures. Examples: Write governance docs describing WHY things are messy, explicitly explain “social messiness is intentional design”. We to do this to frame openness as resilience, not lack of structure.

People from institutional backgrounds need permission to stop controlling. We can try and use process friction as onboarding. Maybe sending people through archaeology (reading posts, repos, etc). Might be actually GOOD – but only if framed constructively. Instead of “read this before asking questions” we could try “The project is built through shared learning – exploring this material helps you understand why we work this way.” Make friction educational, intentional, welcoming but firm. Not defensive.

One contradictory thing is that we need to recognise is the hardest workers are risk points, the worst ones work the hardest. Yes, because control-oriented people express care through effort, effort becomes legitimacy, legitimacy becomes informal authority. What’s the solution maybe to balance effort and decision power, decisions require some consensus and transparent process, not only labour contribution. We can also help by make invisible labour visible (care work, mediation, maintenance).

On this path, we need to introduce “soft boundaries” instead of hard blocking, as hard blocking only escalates conflict. Instead, we can focus on redirecting energy into specific roles or tasks, channel control impulses into infrastructure or documentation. Example: “That’s an interesting governance idea, can you prototype it in a parallel working group?”. This, preserves autonomy, avoids direct rejection and tests ideas in practice.

What works if you have the resources and patience is to teach #DIY culture implicitly, not by argument. Many problems come from lack of exposure to horizontal culture. Best not to lecture about #DIY, instead make participation experiential, let people see how trust works through doing. Design processes where newcomers experience collective decision-making, and failure is visible but safe.

Structural mediation patterns for #OMN are strengthened by regularly asking:

  • Are we slipping into control patterns?
  • Are we excluding through complexity?
  • Are we drifting too far into informal hierarchy?

Make this normal so that multiple pathways allow for experimental edges, stable core infrastructure and messy periphery. People can self-select into environments matching their comfort level.

We should always be making visible social values, not just technical #4opens. This needs to be explicit: openness to disagreement, expectation of plural narratives, composting failure, a powerful governance guidance – Compost works because decomposition is allowed, friction produces transformation, nothing is wasted, but everything changes form. Translating into policy – that conflict is expected, critique is welcomed but must produce something, few things are sacred – but everything is documented.

The deep strategic insight (important) is the goal is NOT to eliminate control-oriented people. We need them as healthy ecosystems require institutional thinkers (stability), grassroots experimenters (innovation), activists (accountability) and bridge-builders (translation). The problem occurs when one mode dominates. So mediation is about maintaining ecological balance.

#KISS #DRAFT

Funding Proposal: Open Media Network (#OMN) – Building Portable, Human-Centred Digital Commons

https://nlnet.nl/fediversity

Project Title

Open Media Network (OMN): Portable Digital Commons for a Federated Europe

Summary

The Open Media Network (#OMN) is a real grassroots initiative to build sustainable, human-centred digital infrastructure aligned with the principles of the #openweb and the #4opens. To providing easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and freedom at their core – OMN focuses on creating living social ecosystems alongside technical infrastructure.

At a time when the European Union is investing in alternatives to dominant platform monopolies (#dotcons), The OMN addresses a critical gap: ensuring that open infrastructure remains socially grounded, decentralised in governance, and accessible to grassroots communities, not only institutional actors.

This project proposes to develop practical tools, governance models, and community infrastructure to support a resilient federated ecosystem built on open standards such as #ActivityPub.

Problem Statement

The digital public sphere is currently dominated by large corporate platforms that centralise power, restrict portability, and commodify user participation.

The EU’s growing investment in digital sovereignty and open infrastructure presents a historic opportunity. However, there is a structural risk of replacing Californian platform capitalism with European platform capitalism; building technical infrastructure without sustainable social ecosystems; funding professionalised, institutional actors while excluding needed grassroots innovation.

Healthy digital ecosystems require tension and balance between institutional stability and grassroots experimentation. Without this, “commons infrastructure” risks becoming technocratic infrastructure lacking community participation – leading to failure, abandonment, and wasted investment.

Project Vision

The Open Media Network aims to develop a federated, portable digital ecosystem where: individuals and communities retain control over their data and identity; services are interoperable and portable across providers; governance is participatory and transparent; grassroots actors can build and sustain independent infrastructure.

The goal is not only technological decentralisation but social decentralisation, ensuring that federation is lived practice rather than technical abstraction.

Objectives

  1. Portable Hosted Services. Develop and deploy easy-to-use hosted services based on open standards that prioritise: service portability between providers; user-controlled data ownership; interoperability via ActivityPub and related protocols.
  2. Grassroots Governance Models. Design and test governance frameworks rooted in #4opens principles, with open data where appropriate; open process and decision-making; open standards and open participation. These models will be documented as reusable frameworks for wider adoption.
  3. Experimental Commons Infrastructure. Create an experimental environment where: grassroots communities can launch federated services; low-resource groups can participate without heavy technical barriers; experimentation is encouraged alongside stability.
  4. Historical Memory and Knowledge Transfer. One of the recurring failures of digital movements is loss of institutional memory. OMN integrates documentation and archiving into the infrastructure itself, ensuring lessons learned are preserved and accessible.

Key Activities

  • Develop and maintain ActivityPub-compatible hosted services.
  • Build onboarding pathways for non-technical users and grassroots organisations.
  • Establish pilot communities using OMN infrastructure (e.g. activist media, local networks, cooperative publishing).
  • Produce documentation and toolkits for governance and sustainability.
  • Engage with EU initiatives (e.g., NGI Commons) to bridge grassroots and institutional approaches.

Innovation

Unlike many decentralisation projects that focus primarily on technical architecture, OMN emphasises social infrastructure as core technology; governance experimentation alongside code; low-barrier participation for grassroots actors. This creates a resilient ecosystem where innovation emerges from diverse communities rather than centralised development teams.

Expected Impact

Increased adoption of federated technologies across grassroots communities to reduced dependency on proprietary platforms. Strengthened European digital commons aligned with democratic values by development of replicable governance models for decentralised ecosystems. Long-term sustainability through community ownership rather than platform lock-in.

Alignment with EU Priorities

This project supports digital sovereignty and European autonomy, open standards and interoperability, sustainable digital commons, privacy and data portability and innovation through diversity and experimentation.

Sustainability Strategy

OMN operates on a low-cost, distributed model, prioritising: community stewardship; cooperative hosting paths; modular infrastructure that can be replicated and adapted. Rather than scaling toward centralisation, sustainability emerges through federation and shared maintenance.

Consortium and Community

OMN builds upon decades of grassroots media and openweb experience, including work on Indymedia and federated social networks. The project actively collaborates with FOSS communities, federated platform developers, grassroots media networks and independent infrastructure providers.

Funding Request

We seek funding to support: development and seed infrastructure hosting, coordination and community facilitation, documentation and knowledge sharing leading to governance experimentation and research.

Closing Statement

Europe has a unique opportunity to build digital commons that avoid the failures of platform capitalism. The Open Media Network provides a grassroots pathway that complements institutional initiatives, ensuring that the future European internet remains participatory, portable, and human-centred.

Projects

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN++functions we need to add a README to the project page https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/Open-Media-Network

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/MakingHistory

https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia/indymedia-reboot

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

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody

Building #OMN projects

Need to add this for context – How can we talk about the #NGO mess as hard blocking https://hamishcampbell.com/the-ngo-mess-is-hard-blocking-2/

The #openweb reminds us that meaningful autonomy comes from shared infrastructure, collective governance, and mutual trust. Projects like #OMN are built on this understanding: individuals do not create networks alone; networks create the conditions that allow individuals to flourish. Real freedom grows from commons-based collaboration, not from isolated platforms or competitive silos.

UPDATED 02

Open Media Network (#OMN)

A Practical Infrastructure Layer for Portable, Human-Centred Digital Commons

Summary

The Open Media Network (OMN) is a pragmatic effort to improve the usability, portability, and resilience of federated digital infrastructure through incremental engineering grounded in existing open standards.

Rather than introducing new protocols or replacing existing ecosystems, OMN focuses on integrating known working components – ActivityPub, open hosting practices, and activist community traditions – into deployable, reusable infrastructure patterns.

The goal is straightforward we build a practical layer that allows grassroots communities and small organisations to deploy federated services that are portable, interoperable, and socially sustainable.

This project addresses a persistent gap between technically sound decentralised systems and real-world adoption by non-specialist users.

Problem Statement

The technical foundations of decentralised social infrastructure already exist. Protocols such as ActivityPub demonstrate interoperability and federation at scale. However, adoption barriers remain that existing solutions optimise for developers rather than communities. And institutional funding risks producing technically impressive systems that fail socially due to missing grassroots participation.

This results in a paradox, an ecosystem has functional protocols but lacks usable grassroots infrastructure patterns. The OMN addresses this gap, it’s not a new platform or protocol, more an integration and implementation project that focuses on packaging existing federated technologies into existing cultures. Creating reproducible deployment models for small-scale operators, that natively scale by federating. Supporting data flows and thus service migration between providers. And embedding governance into operational practice rather than treating governance as a theoretical layer.

The core engineering philosophy is to use existing tools.

We need to work on flows and commons they are coded into the current ActivityPub instance code but not “implemented” so barely used. The most developed might be #peertube with kinda hidden idea of flows of media objects, videos. You can see the #OMN path for this here https://hamishcampbell.com/human-tech-omn/

The Fediverse in its current form works, but in a narrowband way. The Fediverse right now is largely instance-centric and account-centric. But ActivityPub itself is object-centric and flow-capable, we barely use that layer. The protocol encodes flows of objects between actors – but most implementations collapse this into timelines and accounts. That’s not the only path available.

Take PeerTube as an example, it quietly models media as flowing objects – videos circulating across nodes, mirrored, cached, redistributed. That’s closer to a commons’ logic. The idea of flows is there – but it isn’t foregrounded in most social implementations. What you’re pointing toward with #OMN is not “radical overhaul.” It’s activating parts of the protocol that are already there. Not replacing the Fediverse, extending it, using what is latent.

The real risk isn’t experimentation. If we don’t develop shared media commons, resource flows between nodes, governance rooted in users and admins with public-first infrastructure. We risk the inrush of #NGO and commercial scale pressure, funding gravity, and the commercial entrants will define those flows for us.

The EU opportunity and danger, what grassroots projects can offer

The #openweb reminds us that meaningful autonomy comes from shared infrastructure, collective governance, and mutual trust. Projects like #OMN are built on this understanding: individuals do not create networks alone; networks create the conditions that allow individuals to flourish. Real freedom grows from commons-based collaboration, not from isolated platforms or competitive silos.

What can grassroots #openweb people actually do when the EU is building alternatives to #dotcons, but with very real risks of recreating European versions of the same problems? This is a historic moment, for the first time in decades public funding is flowing toward digital commons and infrastructure sovereignty is being taken seriously. Federated technologies like #ActivityPub are gaining traction, largely due to years of grassroots work which is leading to initiatives such as @NGICommons attempting to support open infrastructure.

But alongside this opportunity comes an obvious risk, that they replace Californian platform capitalism with European platform capitalism. The danger: is European #dotcons. Institutional “common sense” – especially when combined with bureaucracy and the #NGO class – tends to reproduce familiar patterns of projects prioritise compliance and institutions over communities. Tech governance becomes professionalised and detached from users and seed communities. Yes, open standards exist, but power centralises anyway as funding rewards scale, stability, and safety rather than needed native grassroots paths.

The result is predictable, European #dotcons. The structural problem is institutions optimise for safety when #EU funding systems are designed around risk avoidance, measurable outcomes to build controlled delivery structures. This leads to only professional actors and institutional partnerships. Grassroots projects – messy, political, horizontal – rarely fit comfortably into this narrow thinking.

So even when the intention is to “build commons,” the outcome becomes safe-looking infrastructure that lacks living social ecosystems. The commons turn into infrastructure without community, and frequently fail, leaving funding poured down the drain and more #techshit to compost.

Why grassroots counter-currents matter is that healthy technology ecosystems need tension between institutional builders for stability, grassroots radicals for innovation and activists for accountability. This balancing leads to communities and real-world grounding.

Without this tension, governance ossifies and technology becomes abstracted from users. Political imagination shrinks and becomes #blocked. Grassroots projects like #OMN represent the compost layer, the messy soil where new forms grow. Institutions rarely generate this energy themselves.

Where initiatives like #NGICommons sit is that some people inside these initiatives genuinely want openness. Much like early Google’s “don’t be evil” phase, there is still a window of possibility. This means influence is still possible and direction is not fully locked in. Individuals inside may be allies, even if institutional structures trend toward mainstreaming. The danger is not simply bad intentions, it is the structural gravity toward institutionalisation.

We need practical strategies (not just critique) to move grassroots actors to shift direction, critique alone is not enough. Practical engagement matters to frame grassroots work as ecosystem infrastructure. Don’t argue only from ideology, speak in terms institutions understand: that tech ecosystems need experimental edges as monocultures fail. We need to argue that diversity increases resilience.

Policy language travels further, when we push for small “wild funding” streams. Instead of demanding institutional transformation, push for small structural openings:

  • microgrants
  • low-bureaucracy funding
  • experimental tracks
  • funding for governance experiments, not just technical deliverables.

Small budgets can create disproportionate impact.

Promote ActivityPub + social governance together as many EU projects adopt federation technically while retaining centralised governance culturally. We need to communicate that federation without social decentralisation is fake decentralisation. This is where #OMN has strong positioning.

Build parallel legitimacy, not only opposition, as institutions might respond to working prototypes with visible communities that demonstrated outcomes. Critique alone rarely shifts funding flows. Working alternatives do.

We need to find sympathetic insiders, every institutional structure contains pragmatists, a few idealists and sometimes meany reformers. So bridge-building matters. Not everyone inside #NGICommons or EU initiatives is an opponent, some are actively trying to resist corporate capture from within.

The EU currently has three possible futures:

  • European #dotcons – platform capitalism with EU branding
  • Technocratic infrastructure without social life (#techshit to compost)
  • Living digital commons grounded in grassroots communities.

The third path requires messy activism with strong social processes (#4opens) and historical memory rooted in #openweb culture. Without pressure from the grassroots edge, institutions drift toward the first outcome by default.

The deeper insight is that grassroots movements do not need to “win” against mainstreaming. They need to remain the compost layer that keeps the ecosystem alive. That means critique combined with collaboration where possible, strong and grounded independent experimentation and most importantly refusal of capture.

Why mainstream EU tech funding needs counter-currents, why tech activism matters

Why mainstream EU tech funding needs counter-currents, why tech activism matters

Across Europe, large-scale “mainstreaming” tech projects are increasingly shaping the future of the digital commons. From infrastructure initiatives to sovereign cloud strategies and federated social technologies, the EU tech stack is becoming more organised, more funded, and more institutionalised.

On the surface, this looks like progress. But history suggests that without active counter-currents, #mainstreaming inevitably drifts toward bureaucracy, risk-aversion, and quiet capture by institutional and corporate interests. The problem is almost all current European tech funding is poured down the drain of soft painless corruption.

This is why a small but intentional flow of funding toward grassroots, activist, and counter-cultural projects within #FOSS is not a luxury, it is essential infrastructure.

  1. Innovation rarely if ever starts in the mainstream

Most genuinely transformative ideas in #FOSS and free software and #openweb did not originate from institutional programmes. They came from messy edges of volunteer collectives, activist media projects feed by autonomous spaces building #FOSS social infrastructure.

These environments allow experimentation without needing immediate legitimacy or scalability. They tolerate failure and contradiction, conditions that mainstream programmes often cannot. Without supporting these edge spaces, mainstream funding feeds an echo chamber that only produces incremental improvements, if any, to existing paradigms. Counter-currents are not only opposition; they are the ecosystem that generates future pathways.

  1. Activism keeps governance honest

Institutional projects naturally optimise for stability, compliance, and reputation. This creates blind spots where needed difficult political questions get softened and avoided, governance becomes less participatory over time leading to decisions shift toward funders and professional stakeholders. Activist communities provide necessary friction by asking uncomfortable questions about power concentration and co-option by #NGO and corporate actors.

This friction is often misinterpreted as negativity or disruption. In reality, it acts as a corrective force that keeps projects aligned with the original European values, and the values of the #openweb and #FOSS. Without activist pressure, mainstreaming tends toward the same #closedweb patterns it now claims to be resisting.

  1. Diversity of approach is a resilience strategy

A healthy ecosystem requires multiple approaches operating simultaneously, with institutional scaling projects in balance with community-led infrastructure. When funding flows only toward “safe” and easily measurable projects, the ecosystem loses adaptive capacity. Counter-currents provide alternative models and paths that become critical when dominant approaches fail. This is something repeatedly demonstrated in the history of internet development. Funding these spaces is therefore not charity; it is long-term risk management.

  1. The current gap: refusal to fund counter-currents

Some current alternative funding bodies – including initiatives like #NLnet – have done valuable work supporting open technology. However, when funding structures avoid explicitly supporting activist or counter-cultural paths, a structural imbalance emerges. By prioritising technical outputs without investing in the social and political ecosystems that sustain them, funding breaks down, reinforcing the same dynamics that previously enabled enclosure and platform capture. Technical neutrality is not neutral. It implicitly favours existing power structures.

A truly balanced funding flow would intentionally support more grassroots organising capacity to build activist infrastructure projects with working governance experimentation like the #OGB to open spaces to shape community memory and historical continuity. Without this, mainstream funding cannot claim to represent the full health of the #FOSS ecosystem.

  1. Why this matters now

The European tech stack is at a turning point. As public funding grows, so does the risk of institutionalising the very problems open technology originally emerged to resist. Activism is not only an external threat to mainstream projects, it is also a feedback system.

Supporting counter-currents prevents stagnation and helps to surface blind spots early by keeping alignment with public values. It’s needed to keep the tech ecosystem genuinely open rather than merely #NGO branded as such. The simple principle is if mainstream funding only supports what already looks safe and legitimate, it stops being an engine of innovation and becomes a mechanism of consolidation.

To keep the #openweb alive, we need funding flows that intentionally include the messy edges – the activists, the grassroots builders, and the experiments that don’t yet fit neat categories.

Not because they are comfortable, because they are necessary.

And to tell the truth we need a better balance of useful verses funding poured down the drain #NLnet #EU #NGI #NGIzero and likely more, please post in the comments.

The uncomfortable path

Yes, its messy stepping out of the churn

Everywhere we look – what we see, touch, and use – we are living inside systems shaped by decades of economic and technological assumptions. This isn’t only something happening “out there”. It has been normalised and internalised over the last forty years.

The dominance of #stupidindividualism, combined with rigid economic dogma, influenced how we design technology, how we organise communities, and how we imagine progress itself. The outcomes are now starkly visible: #climatechaos, social fragmentation, and a weakening of collective sense-making.

The internet reflects this reality. Online and offline are no longer separate spaces; they feed back and reinforce each other. Recognising this isn’t only about blame, it’s more importantly about understanding the terrain we’re all navigating. These are the technology limits of the current path and why we continue to repeat familiar patterns. New platforms emerge, new interfaces are launched, yet the underlying values remain unchanged. The result does feel like endless churn to people who notice, innovation that rearranges surfaces while leaving deeper structures intact.

This isn’t simply the fault of individuals or communities. Many developers, especially within #FOSS and the #fediverse, are actively trying to build alternatives. But the broader ecosystem still pushes toward centralisation, scaling, and extraction because those are the dominant incentives of the wider paths.

So recognising our #geekproblem isn’t about rejecting technical culture – it’s about expanding it. Technical excellence alone cannot solve social problems without grounding in alt collective needs and lived social realities. This is what the #openweb means, it’s more than #blinded nostalgia for the early internet. It represents a shared direction many communities are already moving toward.

The #openweb is an internet where #4opens information is accessible regardless of platform or location, content can be shared, linked, and reused, participation is not gated by proprietary control. It’s basic: open data, open source, open standards, and open processes.

The growth of the Fediverse demonstrates that alternatives like these are possible. Decentralised social networks, community-run servers, and cooperative governance models show glimpses of a healthier digital ecosystem. Yet within these paths, tensions remain between “native” grassroots values and pressures toward #NGO #mainstreaming and power politics institutionalisation.

For this space to grow, we need to keep moving beyond false choices. On institutional paths, many proposed solutions focus solely on regulation or institutional reform, imagining that better rules will fix systemic problems. While governance matters, relying exclusively on top-down solutions risks becoming another form of dependency to add to the mess.

Another path exists alongside institutional change: horizontal, grassroots approaches rooted in #DIY practice, #4opens shared infrastructure. This path is imperfect and often messy, but it keeps agency within communities rather than outsourcing change to distant structures.

The goal is not purity, it is balance, the #OMN approach grows from this perspective. Grassroots, #DIY, non-corporate, human-scale, not disruption for its own sake, not scaling driven by venture logic. Instead, building social technology that serve collective needs while respecting individual agency. Many people within #FOSS and the Fediverse are already working toward these goals, even if they use different languages. The opportunity now is to deepen collaboration, connect projects that share values, and strengthen the social foundations alongside the technical ones.

So the path we need is about finding each other, it’s the path we made work for a while then failed on socialhub, so I need to repeat, the question isn’t whether alternatives exist, they do. The challenge is finding alignment among people who are already trying to move in similar directions, but feel isolated or fragmented.

Who recognises that technology must serve communities rather than extract from them. If you see value in grassroots, cooperative approaches to technology – if you believe the #openweb is still worth building – then the invitation is simple. Stop churning, start building. Who is ready to move beyond endless reinvention toward shared infrastructure and shared purpose?

Seeds, Safety, and the Chicken-and-Egg Problem – A Q&A on Practical Building vs Intellectual #Blocking. This explores a recurring tension in grassroots technology projects: the gap between practical historical paths and fresh “intellectual” critique, it reflects on a broader patterns seen in #openweb, #FOSS, and #DIY spaces.

Q: What is the “shared path” and why describe it as a seed?

A: The shared path is a practical response to repeated historical failure. It is not a finished solution, a moral demand, or a complete alternative system. It begins as a seed, something small, imperfect, and grounded. If you judge a seed by whether it is already a tree, nothing will ever grow. The idea is to start building despite uncertainty and allow structure to emerge rooted organically through practice.

Q: What is the main critique of this “seed” approach?

A: Critics argue that metaphors like seeds and growth avoid addressing concrete mechanisms. They focus on first-step effects: What signals are being sent? Who carries risk or unpaid labour? What moral pressures are created? What happens when survivability is deferred? From this perspective, issues must be addressed at the beginning rather than grown from the seed.

Q: Why does this debate often become circular?

A: Because both sides are asking different questions. Practical builders ask: Where do the resources come from to implement safety before anything exists? Critics ask: How do we prevent harm if we begin without safeguards? Without answering the resource question, discussions loop endlessly between ethics and feasibility.

Q: What is the “chicken-and-egg” problem here?

A: Many grassroots projects face a structural paradox: You need resources, tools, and commitment to build sustainable alternatives. But those resources only appear after something exists and demonstrates use value, agenst mainstreaming pushback Waiting for perfect conditions prevents starting; starting without resources has risks, but it’s the only thing that can grow change and challenge.

Q: What work is actually happening in practice?

A: Practical work often remains messy, distributed, and unpaid. Examples include: Supporting student journalists in rebooting grassroots media projects like Oxford #Indymedia. Motivating unfunded technical communities to collaborate on shared codebases such as #indymediaback. Maintaining ongoing organisational and community infrastructure through long-term volunteer labour. These efforts are naturally invisible and impossible to summarise because they work organically rather than following formal project structures.

Q: Why is documentation itself a source of conflict?

A: Critics ask for clear summaries or structured documentation of ongoing work. Builders simply see this as additional unpaid labour imposed on already stretched contributors. External demands that assume others should organise information for them, creates friction between expectations of accessibility and the working realities of #4opens and #DIY grassroots work.

Q: What role does #DIY culture play?

A: In #DIY culture, participation is active rather than observational. If someone believes something needs improvement – documentation, tools, funding guides – the expectation is that they step in and contribute rather than stand outside only pointing critique. Critique without participation is too often lazy negative pressure rather than constructive help on “native” DIY paths.

Q: Is this simply a disagreement about ethics?

A: Not entirely. Both sides often share ethical concerns. The deeper disagreement is about sequence: Should, impossible and irrelevant in a practical sense, safety and compensation frameworks exist before building begins? Or can these frameworks emerge better through #DIY messy real-world working practice?

Q: What is the takeaway?

A: Grassroots building requires balancing, ethical awareness and practical starting points. Intellectual critique can help identify risks, but when detached from material constraints it too often unintentionally blocks action at best or turn into trolling at worst. Likewise, practical work can benefit from reflection, but cannot wait for perfect theoretical clarity.

The challenge is to compost both approaches into something that moves forward.

The uncomfortable path