At best, the old #mainstreaming was about equality in worshipping the #deathcult

The old #mainstreaming was only in a limited way about freedom, so we now need to focus on more on what it was about, equality in obedience. Equality in our blinded worship of the #deathcult: growth, consumption, competition, endless mess on a dying planet.

That’s why #fashernista liberal progressivism is always a dead end problem, it plays radical, says radical, but composts nothing. At best, it sells rebellion as a lifestyle. It’s equality inside the system, not about freedom from it.

We’ve seen this play out a thousand times. Movements rise, fresh and alive, then get polished into campaigns, reports, and consultancy slides. Grassroots becomes “stakeholder.” Vision becomes “strategy.” Change becomes “branding.” All form, no compost. All language, no shared life.

Any real change, living change, means turning the dead weight of institutions, egos, and fear into fertile soil. It’s messy, collective, risky. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t chase funding and #NGO approval. It grows because it has to.

That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) path is about – composting the old #techshit, the #dotcons, and the NGO decay into something living again. Media that belongs to no one but serves everyone, built on the #4opens.

So the real question is simple. What does real change and challenge look like to you? How do we build it together, in the open, without falling back into the same polite obedience that killed everything before?

The #OMN and the #4opens aren’t abstract ideas, they’re tools for action. If we’re serious about composting the old world into something living, we need hands in the soil, not just words in the air. Here’s how people can start now, from wherever they stand:

#FOSS coding: Build the #openweb, not the #closedweb. Work on #Fediverse tools – join existing native #fashernista projects like Mastodon, PeerTube, Mobilizon, Funkwhale, or the more useful #OMN itself. Fix bugs, improve UI, write docs, or just help test and report issues.

Use the #4opens in practice: No private repos, no hoarding, public decision-making, everyone can use it. Compost old code: take abandoned projects and adapt them. Don’t build shiny new tech for ego points, fix what’s already here. If you’re practical, run small community servers: self-host media, blogs, Fedi instances. Learn how networks breathe.

Then we have social activism, keep it social, messy, and grounded. Form local affinity groups around #openweb media – film nights, repair cafés, public jams. Document everything: record protests, community stories, forgotten spaces.

The next #Indymedia starts with people saying this matters. Challenge control where you see it growing – in meetings, projects, #NGOs, progressive spaces. Ask: is this open? Who holds power here? What’s being hidden? Compost negativity: don’t waste energy on flame wars. Turn frustration into content, conversation, and code.

Avoid the #NGO trap – don’t let money dictate the mission. Use micro-funding and co-ops:
OpenCollective, Liberapay, cooperative hosting. Keep the process/books open: publish budgets, donations, and decisions publicly (#4opens). Value labour differently, not everything needs to be paid. Shared work and mutual aid count as real economy.

Bridging to #NGOs and Institutions but don’t get eaten. Engage, but on your terms, use the #4opens as a boundary tool. If an #NGO don’t work openly, walk away. Offer bridges, not control. Help NGOs learn openness, federate, don’t integrate.

Bring culture into the conversation. Explain why open process and transparency are political acts, not technical choices. Stay autonomous: The moment an institution starts setting your agenda, compost it.

Build the commons, not empires. Everything we do should feed back into the collective soil.
* If you build a tool, make it usable by others.
* If you make media, licence it open.
* If you host something, teach others how to host too.

This is how we win: not through scale, but through replication. Small, self-organizing, composting networks connected through trust. Remember, revolution isn’t about blowing up the system. It’s about composting what’s dead, sharing what’s alive, and keeping the soil open for what’s next.

#openweb #nothingnew #techshit #OMN #fashernista #mainstreaming #deathcult

How fascism actually works

How can we get people to see that #Fascism isn’t only about goose-stepping soldiers or dictators shouting from balconies – that’s the cartoon version. The current danger sits much closer to home. Fascism is the extreme end of a spectrum that runs right through our everyday lives: hierarchy, obedience, control, and fear dressed up as “common sense.”

It’s an old story of the #nastyfew controlling the many through managed fear. A dictator doesn’t rise from nowhere, they’re made possible by the people who go along quietly. Not because they’re zealots, but because they’re scared of losing their jobs, their status, their comfort.

That’s the quiet machinery of fascism: not just one man with a plan, but a whole system of compliance. Teachers, engineers, clerks, journalists, in the 1930s most joined the Nazi Party not out of belief, but because they had to in order to work. It wasn’t terror of death that ruled them, but terror of being left out.

And this hasn’t gone away, it’s still the mess we swim in. The #deathcult of #neoliberalism runs on the same fuel. The #NGO world, the corporate #dotcons, the mainstream media, all are built on quiet obedience and careerist cowardice. “Don’t speak up, you’ll lose your funding, your platform, your relevance.”

As Upton Sinclair said: “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” That’s how evil becomes banal, not in the villains, but in the everyday silences that pushes system over all of us.

So when people say, “I can’t speak up, I’ll lose my job,” I get it. But understand what that means, it’s the same mechanism that built the worst social systems in history. The real question is what happens after the first person speaks out. Because there always has to be a second, and a third. That’s how the wall cracks – not with one heroic act, but with collective courage.

This is what we’re trying to nurture again with the #OMN – a network built not on fear or control, but on trust and openness. #4opens is our inoculation against fascism in tech. These are not only tech slogans, they’re social tools for courage, for rebuilding collective strength.

We need to compost the rot of obedience, turn it into soil for something alive again. The first one through the door often takes a hit, yes – but the rest of us can’t just stand there watching. Freedom isn’t found in silence or safety. It’s found in trust, in solidarity, in messy, shared action. We either move through that door together – or we stay in the dark alone.

Freedom is not mine or yours. It’s ours, or it isn’t freedom at all

The illusion of modern society is that freedom is only individualistic, when our freedom is in truth interconnected with the well-being of everyone. This is one of the central pushes of the #deathcult – the mess of #neoliberalism we still live and work inside. It tells us that we are free as consumers, that choice equals’ liberation, and that personal success is the highest form of virtue.

But this is a hollow freedom. What kind of liberty exists when every interaction is transactional, every space is owned, and every so-called “community” is just a market segment waiting to be monetized? We experience this every day. The #dotcons sell us “empowerment” through sharing, but it’s sharing inside a cage. Their platforms reduce human connection to engagement metrics and ad revenue. Every “like” is data for their shareholders, not any gesture of solidarity.

The #NGO world isn’t much better. It preaches collective change and “amplifying voices,” yet operates like any other corporation, brand-driven, risk-averse, allergic to the messy, unpredictable reality of grassroots organising. Instead of networks of solidarity, they build vertical hierarchies of control. The people they claim to represent become “beneficiaries,” not participants.

Even in the alt-tech and “decentralised” spaces, this same illusion creeps in. Too often, we see projects confusing personal control with collective freedom, endless talk about privacy and autonomy without any grounding in social trust. A federation of silos is still a field of fences if the people behind them don’t share any values, practices, and care.

Real freedom isn’t about escaping others; it’s about building with them. The #openweb once embodied this, a commons of creativity, trust, and shared #FOSS tools. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked because people shared more than data; they shared intentions. The current #4opens are social principles first, technical structures second, path back to this.

25 years ago, seeded from the undercurrents video collective, we built #indymedia from this soil. Affinity groups came together to tell stories from the streets – direct, unfiltered, alive. You could see and touch it: the cables, the battered servers, the faces in the room lit by CRT monitors and endless tea. It wasn’t about perfection or control; it was about social connection.

Now we are knee-deep in mess, and need shovels to composting the Illusion, the challenge is to compost this #mainstreaming, to turn the rotting soil of #stupidindividualism into fertile ground. This is the work of the #OMN (Open Media Network): to regrow grassroots media not as a brand, not as a product, but as a living ecosystem of stories, links, and local action. Each part feeding the other. Each voice linked, not owned.

Where #dotcons feed on data extraction, we feed on compost, the messy remains of failed systems and burnt-out movements, broken down, rotted, turned into nourishment for the next cycle. Because our freedom doesn’t live in the self, it lives in the network, in the commons, in the trust between people, in the code and culture we share.

The individual without community is not free, only adrift. The collective without openness is not strong, only captured. Freedom is not mine or yours. It’s ours, or it isn’t freedom at all.

Rebuilding Grassroots Media – Back to the Soil

From my point of view, it needs to start from the raw truth: There is currently no functioning grassroots media. Not in any coherent sense. Before we talk about video, storytelling and digital tools, we have to answer the most basic question, one that most people have forgotten to ask: What is grassroots media?

It’s not “content creation.”
It’s not “influencer culture.”
It’s not another #NGO-funded project selling “voices from below” to tick a box for a funder’s annual report.

Grassroots media is the messy, local, real-world network of people using simple tools to speak, share, and act together, outside institutional control.
It’s about agency, not branding.
It’s about trust, not reach.
It’s about doing, not performing.

This is the core almost everyone skips, and it’s why so much “independent media” ends up feeling like a watered-down copy of the mainstream it was meant to replace.

Building networks, not platforms. If we want living, breathing alternatives, we need to think like ecosystem builders, not tech entrepreneurs. Balance means deliberately prioritising the roots – where stories grow from – to counter the dominance of traditional and #NGO media that always speak from above.

The corporate #dotcons – Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, X, all of them – have poisoned the soil. Their logic is control, enclosure, and profit extraction. We can’t reform them, but we can compost them. Use what’s left of their infrastructure tactically. KISS – keep it simple, use and abuse what remains as compost to fertilise the new.

We need to dig back into the living history of #DIY media culture, those messy, chaotic, beautiful experiments that worked, to where and when media grown from social trust, not algorithmic metrics. Back in the day, it used to work because it was grounded in the #openweb a culture built on openness, transparency, federation, and collaboration. What we call the #4opens.

The #OMN (Open Media Network) path is about rediscovering that soil and replanting in it.
Building federated, trust-based, messy, human networks of media again. It’s not about replacing corporate platforms with shinier tech. It’s about rebuilding the culture of open media, the relationships, the ethics, the shared practice of truth-telling and collaboration.

Because if we don’t grow our own grassroots media again, someone else will sell it back to us in plastic wrap.

Extreme liberalism is the outcome of #postmodernism, the rot at the heart of the current “progressive” mess. It’s what happens when shared stories are replaced by (non) individual narrative, and meaning dissolves into (non) individual performance.

Our current #fashernistas swim in this thin soup, they call it “diversity,” “empowerment,” “innovation,” but it’s a dysfunctional mess, with marketing dressed as virtue. The problem we need to compost is that every attempt to make something that works – collective, rooted, accountable – gets drowned in an endless tide of self-expression and identity management.

Postmodernism was supposed to liberate us from hierarchy and dogma. But it left us atomised, trapped in their #dotcons feeds, without any shared compass. Out of that vacuum came the extreme liberalism of the last 20 years we think as “progressive”: the cult of the individual, the religion of choice, and the morality of markets. It’s the #KISS polite face of the #deathcult, its neoliberalism with a rainbow filter.

The #openweb – through the #4opens – is a path out of this swamp. It’s not about the illusion of freedom sold by #dotcons, or the grant-funded “activism” of the #NGO class. It’s about activist trust-based openness: code, data, governance, and process dogmatically open, that people and community can build, see and shape.

The #OMN (Open Media Network) grows from this ground. It’s not another brand or a platform – it’s a garden for messy, local, grassroots media to regrow. It starts from compost: the failures, the blocks, the burned-out projects. From that, we build something living again.

To move at all on this, we have to compost #postmodernism, keep its healthy scepticism, but drop the self-absorption. Keep openness, but return to shared meaning. Truth matters. Trust matters. The network needs to feed the commons, not the “individual” play-acting ego.

Receipts: a brief list of prominent articles proclaiming the death of the web.

It’s how humans have always lived – together

For 200 years, capitalism, for the last 40 years #neoliberalism, taught us that we’re isolated individuals who compete to survive. But any real view of our actual history – and our biology – say the opposite: we’re interdependent, social, and ecological beings. For almost all species time before the current mess, we thrived through commons-based systems, shared forests, grazing lands, rivers, and community knowledge. Villages maintained open wells, fishermen shared tidal calendars, and guilds protected collective craft standards. Cooperation, not competition, is what allowed us to endure.

This is why now alt tech, matters, it is about rediscovering, what makes us human, the digital form of that is commoning online. Just as medieval commons were fenced off during enclosure, our early digital commons were captured by #dotcons. Rebuilding the #openweb is the act of reclaiming that shared ground, not nostalgia, but in the era of #climatechaos and hard right shift its #KISS survival.

What we need to compost is our own-shared memory. The commons are missing from today’s “common sense”. The idea that people can manage shared resources together has vanished from public imagination. Yet the commons is the older, more adaptive, and far more humane way of organizing.

In tech, the #Fediverse shows this in action, thousands of community run servers cooperating through a shared protocol, ActivityPub. Projects like #PeerTube, #Pixelfed, or #Funkwhale replace enclosure with federation, showing that open paths can scale through trust rather than control. Alt tech, built on open protocols and co-governance, is simply the digital commons rebooted, a network of networks where no one owns the whole.

We need much more resources and focus pushed into this real grassroots path of reclaiming the means of communication, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was all ready a commons: decentralized, people-driven, and impactful. Early #Indymedia collectives covered protests outside mainstream #blocking narratives. #4opens email lists and wikis built movements across borders. Then capital pushed in, WE let the #nastyfew of #Facebook, #Google etc privatize our collective infrastructure, turning participation into surveillance and creativity into content.

Alt tech projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), Mastodon, and wider #Fediverse are attempts to rebuild what we keep forgetting, this time, protected by #4opens shield to build shared governance. This path is not a nostalgic throwback, but living/acting paths for post-capitalist communication we need in the growing era of social backdown.

It’s not only “tech” – it’s social trust infrastructure. A common is not only software; it’s the culture of cooperation that surrounds it, shared values, mutual aid, and relational ethics, you can’t “code” trust into hardware, as the last decade of #blockchain and #AI mess proves. Smart contracts failed to make people honest; they just automated mistrust, it’s on going #geekproblem blindness we need to be working to compost.

What works, the resilience, comes from people, not algorithms. Through frameworks like the #4opens: open data, open code, open standards, open process. We can build transparency and accountability into the social layer of the network. Trust is a practice, not a protocol #KISS

We need a future that’s better, not just less bad. The #deathcult story – neoliberalism’s great myth – says “there is no alternative.” Alt tech is the alternative, working proof that cooperation scales, that people build shared infrastructure without extraction and less coercion. Look at LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Linux, or the #Fediverse, all imperfect, collaborative systems built on trust, not profit. They are real-world examples of how collective will outperform the normal deadened paths of corporate hierarchy.

Alt tech gives us believable hope, which is the only real antidote to despair and apathy. The ground for grassroots power is in pushing change and challenge. If the liberal state and #dotcons won’t reform, we need to be building parallel structures that work differently.
Projects like the #OGB (Open Governance Body) experiment with federated, transparent decision-making. The #OMN builds tools to connect grassroots media in trust networks, bypassing gatekeepers entirely. Together they form a scaffolding of a working commons, capable of hosting culture, not only control.

Healing the social media wound? We need to compost the lie of #dotcons which spent the last 20 years turning us into consumers and outrage machines. The shovel we need is affinity groups rebuilding social tech around self-governance, interoperability, and most importantly trust to reclaim the human side of the internet. Imagine the world different, feeds that empower communities, not advertisers, tools that nurture relationships, not metrics, platforms that amplify context, not conflict.

This is the work of making the internet human again, working together on the path of alt tech matters because it’s not about gadgets; it’s about freedom, community, and survival. It’s our path to remembering that the #openweb, like the Earth itself, belongs to everyone, or it belongs to no one. And every time we build a shared tool, or hold open a door, we remind the world that cooperation is not naïve, it’s our oldest #KISS technology.

A cross-cultural conversation on this subject

UPDATE: I haven’t touched on two other #4opens projects here, so let’s tap them at the end: #Nostr is a “me-too” project stuck in the #geekproblem loop, it won’t go anywhere until it learns to value community as a building block. #Bluesky, on the other hand, is already drifting into the hands of VC-funded #fluffy elitists who turn every commons into a brand. It’s a very likely a dead-end for real change or challenge, which is why the #mainstreaming #blocking #NGO and #fashionista crowds flock to it.

UPDATE 02: Digesting the comments. For the past 10,000 years of agriculture, 500+ years of Euro-colonialism, 200+ years of #capitalism, and 95 years of #neoliberalism (45 officially declared as such), the #nastyfew practicing control through production have dominated everyone else. Capitalism, as described in Capital, grew wherever it could. By the late 19th century, labour organised and fought back. Social democracy transformed the capitalist state so effectively that capitalist development stalled by the 1930s.

The response? A reorganisation of capital, using anti-communism as its rallying cry (WWII, NATO, Korea, Vietnam) to defeat social democracy and retake control of the state. By the 1980s, “they” felt secure enough to brand reform itself as a product: #Neoliberalism. I’m simplifying, of course – this is for the #hashtagStory outreach, so it can become a #KISS tool people can actually use. Clarifications and deeper dives you can find in the comments 🙂

Now, about this idea that “capitalism told us we’re isolated individuals competing to survive.” It’s partly true, but not in the way people think. Capitalism depends on interdependence, we work together to produce, but in a way that isolates us socially and politically. That’s the contradiction: interdependence turned into alienation. It’s the mess in our heads that recreates these bad social structures, the inner factory of control. That’s what we have to compost.

In the end, it’s not just social control, it’s social destruction. As we rush deeper into #climatechaos and the global hard-right turn, it’s clearer than ever: the ideology of separation keeps power safe and people powerless. I know this isn’t #mainstreaming liberal logic, that’s the point. We have to think differently.

And for context, I’m not speaking from the sidelines – I’ve got an MA in politics and 30 years of hands-on work in grassroots #openweb tech. Isolation is social control, see #stupidindividualism. Let’s keep this grounded and not turn it into trolling, yeah?

So how can people try not to be prats about this conversation?

In alt tech there are lots of people doing good, and they are, but this is blinded shifting to doing “good” head down worshipping the #deathcult, this would be kinda OK if they held the bridge to a wider view of “good” but they don’t, they block and obscure there #blocking, this is bad, very bad as in the end the “good” they say they do, is just more mess we need to compost.

The real solution is always to respect and build from the fluffy/spiky debate, not bury it under politeness or pretend blindly it doesn’t matter. #Fluffy brings empathy, care, and bridge-building – vital social glue. #Spiky brings clarity, honesty, and challenge – the fire that keeps things real. Both are needed if a project is to stay alive and #4opens. The moment one side silences the other, the culture starts to rot. The second-best path, if balance isn’t yet possible, is to shift the #NGO-style fluffy language – soften its domination reflex – so it stops sounding like control disguised as kindness. This is where care can evolve into openness rather than enclosure.

The worst outcome is what we’ve already seen too often: blinded narrowness, the slow creep of civility politics that smothers dissent while smiling at best and ignoring then #blocking at worst. It’s silent damage, and it killed #SocialHub, turning what could have been a commons into a small irrelevant gated forum of insiders. You can’t maintain trust by excluding the spiky voices; you can only maintain a hollow sham.

So how can people try not to be prats about this conversation? Start by listening across difference. Don’t pathologize conflict; compost it. Assume that critique is care, not attack. Drop the impulse to manage or “align” others – those are imperial moves. Instead, nurture space for spikiness within shared trust. The goal isn’t harmony, it’s living balance – a federation of tones, not a choir of compliance.

UPDATE: my feeling and experience of this is that these types of people will with blindness destroy what they say they value for the security of what they say they don’t value. The next generation will likely repeat this mess, and the compost will likely rot, as will our environment because little real change or challenge comes from the narrow blinded path this group push. Yes it’s a hopeless mess, ideas to change and challenge this please?

PS. I would like to be proved wrong, this is a real opportunity for a nice group of people to do the right thing.

Admit the mess – don’t polish it. Stop pretending everything’s fine. The blindness comes from politeness and professionalised façades – people smiling while quietly blocking change. Naming the rot is the first act of care. #4opens starts with open process, not spin.

Reignite the spiky energy. Spikiness is honesty, critique, fire – not aggression. Without that spark, the culture flatlines into #NGO sludge. Invite spiky voices back with trust, not fear. Build cultures that can handle disagreement as fuel, not threat.

Rebuild from affinity, not hierarchy. Instead of “leadership” and “representation,” think federation – small, rooted, overlapping networks of trust. The #OGB model (Open Governance Body) can be a path: shared stewardship, visible processes, no invisible power.

Compost the infective NGOs. Use what’s useful (resources, access, tools) but don’t let them define the frame. Their language and logic are imperial – centralising, sanitising. Translate their “professional” talk into commons language: from “impact metrics” to “shared meaning,” from “alignment” to “affinity.”

Re-root culture in lived practice. The grassroots aren’t a romantic idea – they’re the only working base. Real change comes from where people actually do things together, not from panels or “stakeholder dialogues.” Focus energy there, make it visible, and let legitimacy flow upward again.

Make openness the discipline. Openness isn’t chaos; it’s a discipline of trust. The #4opens – open data, open process, open source, open access – are the anti-imperial charter. If a group can’t work by them, they’re not #openweb; they’re enclosure with good PR.

Keep it #KISS simple. Most of the blindness hides in overcomplication – endless frameworks, metrics, governance layers. Keep it small, human, and understandable. Simplicity keeps power honest.

STAR WARS: THE SOFT EMPIRE

Let’s try some metaphors DRAFT (was looking for a Star Wars meme but find them horribly right-wing, we have made a real mess,,,)

Had to use an old video, kinda on subject to the metaphor

A long time ago, in a network not so far away… The internet was once alive with wild diversity. Countless small worlds of the #openweb – linked by fragile trust, shared roots, and messy, beautiful collaboration.

The #FOSS Federation of Commons was rising… until the Soft Empire came. They did not come with star destroyers or stormtroopers. They came with funding proposals, frameworks, and friendly smiles. Their weapons were not lasers but language, phrases like “scaling up,” “alignment,” and “governance.” They promised stability. What they brought was assimilation.

Across the #Fediverse, the #NGO Order spread its doctrine of “professionalisation,” pushing free instance into managed dependency. The “Fluffy Fleet,” draped in banners of care and civility, softly conquered all that was unruly, replacing the grassroots with “strategic partners.” Yet in the outer systems, among abandoned nodes and fading servers, a Native Resistance survived.

The composting moon, a dim squat, in forests of forgotten code, small online imaginary fires burn. Around one fire sits a circle of rebels – coders, gardeners, storytellers – the last of the Commons Stewards.

“They say ‘alignment’,” whispers one.
“But what they mean is assimilation,” replies another.
“We compost their words,” says the elder. “We turn control into soil for renewal.”

They speak of ancient #FOSS practices – #4opens, the old code of trust. Their whispered language is relational: “affinity,” “balance,” “re-rooting.” They call themselves the Open Media Network (# OMN) keepers of the native web. Their mission: to expose the imperial euphemisms hiding behind “good governance,” to reclaim naming as an act of freedom, and to rekindle the federation of wild diversity across the digital web.

“In the age of the Smiling Empire, domination wears the mask of care. Naming is resistance. Trust is rebellion. And compost is revolution.”

Our language is where the imperialistic pushing hides

In the change and challenge of the #openweb reboot of the last few years, there are strong echoes of imperialism through #NGOs – soft domination rather than open conquest. Funding becomes a disciplining tool: if you want a seat at the table, you must conform to their norms. This is semi hidden economic and cultural imperialism inside the #openweb, pushing the path of replacing shared trust (#4opens) with institutional control.

First, we need to look at where the Imperialistic language hides, the imperialism here isn’t overt, it’s in tone, framing, and process. You see it in phrases like:

“Scaling up” or “professionalising” community work.

“Creating standards for everyone.”

“Ensuring governance” (but meaning control).

“Bringing structure” or “alignment” to “fragmented” communities.

“Representing the movement” or “speaking for the community.”

These sound neutral or helpful, but in context they reproduce colonial logic: centralising power, erasing difference, replacing “native” messy grassroots diversity with clean, managed systems that serve funders and institutional interests. This is soft imperialism – language as enclosure, framing itself as care (“we’re helping you get organised”) but it’s about ownership and #mainstreaming domestication.

In contrast, “native” grassroots languages, speak in a different tongue, open, lived, relational.
You can hear it in:

“Composting” instead of “managing.”

“Rebalancing” instead of “reforming.”

“Native paths” rather than “standardisation.”

“Affinity” instead of “alignment.”

“Trust” instead of “compliance.”

That’s the language of commons stewardship, not imperial management. The clash in practice, is when #NGO-fluffy or #dotcons outreach talk about “onboarding the next billion users” or “building shared infrastructure,” they’re actually talking about absorbing – pulling people into their world, under their definitions, within their control.

Our native path, on the other hand, speaks about bridging, federating, sharing roots, and keeping diversity alive. That’s anti-imperial by design, the tension is clear: #mainstreaming always wants to flatten difference, while we aim to amplify difference within shared openness.

In our work, with clearer naming, we strip away the euphemisms, we call things what they are. Imperial language real meaning:

“Scaling” Colonising
“Professionalising” De-commonsing
“Governance frameworks” Control mechanisms
“Community representation” Gatekeeping
“Alignment” Assimilation

And on the positive side is commons language rooted meaning:
“Grassroots governance” Native balance
“Decentralised collaboration” Open trust networks
“Interoperability” Mutual recognition
“Commons stewardship” Collective autonomy

The positive #KISS thing we can do is in naming the power play as it happens, not after it’s already shaped the story. Imperial language hides behind civility and “neutral coordination.” Naming is power. And if we name it, we can compost it. #OMN’s job – and ours – is to expose those euphemisms and restore native naming so we can see the social terrain clearly.

“Invisible roots / generation change”… “…the original crew who put the real work into growing the Fediverse… are no longer invited, invisible to the new fluffy crew.” This is historical erasure, rewriting origins stories, to present itself as the natural inheritor of progress. Here, “new” replaces “native.” The grassroots phase is forgotten or mythologized, allowing control to shift quietly to NGOs, corporate “helpers,” or state-aligned foundations.

“Fluffy dominance”, “…friendly, soft, smiling… but sliding into dogmatic blindness.” The language of niceness can act as imperial propaganda. It enforces a monoculture of tone, no dissent, no spikiness. This becomes ideological policing through manners, a soft colonialism of behaviour.

“Zero balance”, “…third event with the same narrow people… zero balance…” Imperial projects always stabilise imbalance. “Balance” is removed, so hierarchy can harden. Here, the imbalance is cultural: those aligned with funding and institutional legitimacy dominate; those rooted in messy grassroots work are marginalised.

Composting the imperialism, in #OMN terms, composting means turning the waste of mainstreaming into soil for renewal. The antidote to imperial framing is openness and plurality:

Reclaim language – stop saying “community” when we mean “closed club.”

Decentralise narrative – many voices, not one authority.

Re-root trust – back to the base layer, where people actually do the work.

Expose the smiling empire – funding, branding, and institutional capture need transparency.

Reassert the #4opens – the anti-imperial charter for #OMN governance.

The future of the #openweb depends on seeing through the soft imperialism of “good intentions.” If we can name it, we can compost it, and grow something real, grounded, and free.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #mainstreaming #grassroots #FOSS

Let’s try a #spiky view of #fluconf

LIVE at c-base a #fluffy Fediverse conference

It’s been going on for the last few years, let’s look at a current example. Live at c-base is a #Fediverse event that highlights the need for composting the dogmatic #fluffy mess making to keep balance in our shared #openweb reboot. With our #fluffy crew talking about the shared reboot, on the surface it looks positive – friendly conversations, smiles, the right hashtags – but underneath it reveals a deeper problem: there is zero balance at these events. This is the third event I’ve seen with the same issue: the same small group, the same narrow framing, the same blindness. It is not healthy. It is not balanced. And it is not a good path to stay on.

What we are seeing, again and again, is a kind of #blinded #blocking. A narrow circle, reproducing itself, shutting out the very people who dug the digital soil for the seedling stage of the current #Fediverse growth. Sadly, #blindness and #blocking makes these people prats, not because they don’t care, but because they can’t see beyond their narrow bubbles.

Composting the mess, we need to be honest here. We all make messes in movement spaces, and the only way forward is to compost these messes. Composting means breaking down what is toxic, unbalanced, or self-serving and transforming it into nutrients that can grow something better. If we ignore the problem, the mess just piles up until the whole project smells. If we compost it, we can build soil, roots, and future growth.

Where’s the hope? Right now, hope is hard to see in these paths. A purely #fluffy approach – friendly, soft, smiling – is good for atmosphere, but it slides into dogmatic blindness. Fluffy alone does not challenge power. Fluffy alone does not create balance. Fluffy alone does not compost.

What we need is spiky/fluffy. We need the warmth of fluff but also the edge of spike, the courage to challenge, to draw lines, to say when things are going wrong. Without this, we share the same blindness, wrapped in smiles and funding applications. One thing that might explain this narrowness is that we are in the middle of a generation change. The original crew who put real work into growing the #Fediverse in its seedling years are no longer invited, and the real problem is that to this new fluffy crowd the last generation are mostly invisible.

Looking at the Berlin Fedi Day schedule the only person I recognise from that seedling stage, that built the current working reboot is Christine Lemmer-Webber, and they were always firmly within the #NGO-fluffy camp. Everyone else? New faces, from before, like Evan Prodromou who played no role in the atavism of the seedling stage or the people from after ??? Who to often bring the #NGO and funding paths that is at the root of current mess making.

One such event would be understandable. But three in a row? It looks less like an “accident” and more like a PRAT move, hardcoded fork of our shared project. A fork that speaks with arrogance “for all of us” while shutting out the #spiky voices of the community who helped built the current #fedivers path. Towards balance, where do we go from here?

Name the mess: We can’t fix what we won’t face. #blinded #blocking is real, and it needs to be called out. This is what I am doing here.

Compost, don’t cancel: These are not enemies, just our #NGO, #fashionista in need of wider perspective. We don’t waste energy and focus in burning them out; we compost their mess into fuel for growth, they are a part of the debate.

Spiky/Fluffy events: The next gathering should explicitly mix both tendencies. Spikiness to challenge, fluffiness to care. That balance is the only way to keep hope alive, let’s not be prats on this, please.

Reconnect with roots: We need to bring back more of the seedling stage #Fediverse builders and seedling voices, not as nostalgia but as grounding. The roots matter if the tree is to grow.

Expand the circle: No small group should speak for the whole. Open doors, open process, open web. #4opens. A part of this is embedded in the closed funding of these events and process.

Final thought, right now, what we’re watching is real prat behaviour, dressed up in smiles and #NGO funding. That’s a dead end. If we want the #openweb reboot to be more than another hollow fad, we need balance, humility, and compost. The fluffy mess won’t compost itself. That’s our job.

You likely need a shovel #OMN to work on composting. Or if you want to continue with this kind of mess making then clearer naming the events for the minority they invite and host would help to make less mess, a few #NGO groups have started to do this like #FediForum and the #SWF now have less imperialistic language, which is at least is a little less blinded.

#fediday #c-based

It’s Not About You

YouTube and the #deathcult of “Independent” Media

Over the last ten years, we’ve all been spending more and more time on #YouTube. And maybe you’ve noticed something strange: many of the channels you once thought of as independent are no longer independent at all. They’ve been quietly bought up by private equity firms with billions in backing from SoftBank, Amazon, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone – the usual #mainstreaming priests of the #deathcult.

Channels like Task & Purpose, Vice, Veritasium, Donut Media, Simple History, Economics Explained, The Drive, and History Hit are already part of the buyout wave. Some of the biggest names in our worship of “creator culture” – CocoMelon, Colin and Samir, The Theorists, Dude Perfect – too. And that’s just the ones who admitted it. There’s no law requiring disclosure.

Capitalism has a logic, that creators are commodities. “Independent” YouTubers once worked on tiny budgets – a camera, editing software, a couple of friends – to reach millions. They were messy, risky, sometimes radical. Capital sees something else: predictable cashflow, brand expansion, safe investment. But these operations are fragile. They depend on one platform (#YouTube), one personality, and an algorithm that can erase a career overnight. Normally, this risk would scare off capitalists. But with $12 trillion sloshing around private equity in the US alone, they’ve run out of businesses to buy. YouTube channels are the new frontier.

This is how grasping control kills creativity, when capitalism takes over, the overhead explodes. Analysts, strategists, managers, lawyers all need their cut. That means: more ads, more sponsorships, more merch, safer, algorithm-friendly content, the same formula cloned across every channel in the for profit portfolio. This “roll-up” logic flattens everything into old-school TV. Risk disappears, the spark that made YouTube compelling at first is smothered by business strategy. We’re already seeing it with channels like Veritasium, slowly shifting away from Derek Muller to reduce “keyman risk.” Once a personality becomes a liability, the accountants start grooming replacements.

Old school #traditionalmedia tried to counter te first wave of #dotcons social media by throwing money at “new media” outfits like Vice, Buzzfeed, Mashable, and Vox. They burned cash, collapsed, and left nothing but layoffs. The new approach is simpler: don’t build, just buy. Disney doesn’t need to grow the next Vice; it just needs to buy a handful of YouTube channels and tell shareholders it’s “ready for the future.”

The same #deathcult logic applies to this, appease shareholders first, audiences last. The cost is paid by viewers, the result for us – #dotcons friendly content becomes blander and safer, sponsorships dominate, but direct support (merch, memberships) dries up, because who wants to fund faceless #nastyfew agendas? “Creators” burn out, and vanish, replaced by interchangeable hosts or locked down with non-compete contracts. It’s the industrialisation of #fashionista “independent culture”.

There is a history to this, and #openweb parallels, we’ve seen this story before, in the 90s, independent radio stations were bought out by Clear Channel, homogenising the airwaves. In the 2000s, blogs were enclosed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter, killing off messy but vibrant grassroots media. Even movements like Occupy or Extinction Rebellion felt the same pressures: a burst of openness and creativity, followed by co-option, #NGO capture, and fragmentation under managed dissent. The lesson is always the same: once capital steps in, the mess is tidied away, and any possibility of change and challenge dies.

I have seen this on the #dotcons platforms we use as backups and hook for the #openweb native projects, our visionontv YouTube loses a video or two every month to not advertising friendly, copyright strike for clear fair use etc.

The #OMN Lesson, YouTube is repeating the same pattern we’ve seen across the #closedweb: a few years of openness and experimentation, followed by enclosure, consolidation, and financialisation. Capitalism cannot tolerate risk, it cannot tolerate diversity, it needs control, predictability, and growth at all costs. And that is the death of any real grassroots media.

The #OMN path is the opposite. We need federated, messy, trust-based networks where media is not just another asset class. Media must be inherently open – created, shared, and remixed under the #4opens. If we don’t build and defend this, the future of online culture is already sold out.

Mess and more mess, “diversity”

We need to look at our paths and current the controversy in “diversity” in our #deathcult worship, to see the need to compost the current mess. The problem with “pushing diversity” isn’t diversity itself. That’s fine – essential, even. The problem lies in the ideology shaping the push.

Much of it comes from #mainstreaming progressive liberalism, which operates inside the logic of the deathcult. It reduces diversity to a checklist, a branding exercise, a way to appear “inclusive” while leaving power untouched. This is not liberation, it’s management.

When we enter into these spaces, conversations about diversity collapse into the same-old mess: the mixing of right and left framings, suspicion on all sides, endless accusations. Instead of solidarity, we end up with #blocking. Instead of building, we burn out. The is no good outcome.

This is the normal worship of the #deathcult, the endless loop of optics and control, where movements fracture and collectives suffocate with “diversity strategies” that have no relation to grassroots realities.

The path as ever is compost. Take the mess – the liberal tokenism, the reactionary backlash, the burnout – and compost it into something alive. Composting means, returning to grassroots voices, not NGO checklists, seeing diversity as lived struggle, not branding. Grounding it in #4opens, where openness makes co-option harder, to turn toxic blocks into fertile soil for collective growth

The #OMN path is simple: it’s not about ticking boxes or replicating liberal #NGO frameworks. It’s about federated, messy collaboration that actually works. Diversity is not a corporate slogan. It’s the lived complexity of struggle. If we can compost the deathcult ideology that poisons it, diversity becomes strength rather than a management tool.

The question is, are we willing to compost the liberal mess, or do we let it keep rotting movements from the inside?

From “Woke” Capital to MAGA Capital – A Case Study

In the US, every presidential election is sold to us as a transformation of the nation. The chattering class pundits and their #fashionista followers tell us: a new people have been elected alongside a new government. Obama, Trump, Biden, each framed as a seismic cultural shift. But if you care to look, the reality is different: turnout is low, margins slim, the electoral college dulls change. What’s hyped as a national rebirth is just a reshuffling of the same #deathcult mess.

Still, perception matters. After Trump’s re-election, the “zeitgeist shift” rippled through politics and corporate boardrooms. Suddenly, dozens of corporations rolled back their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (#DEI) programs. Woke capital simply pivoted into #MAGA capital.

Liberal woke capital was about projecting inclusion as market expansion: Pride logos in June. Minorities cast in blockbuster films. “Inclusive” ad campaigns. It looked progressive, but it was always about markets: new demographics = new customers. Sometimes the invisible hand holds a rainbow flag.

MAGA Capital, in contrast, is about disciplining workers and pleasing investors. It’s about showing loyalty to the strongman, not customers. DEI didn’t collapse because “the people rejected it.” CEOs saw an opening: align with Trump, roll back diversity, keep profits flowing.

The firings of Colbert and Kimmel crystallized this shift. Networks needed mergers approved. “Ratings” were the excuse, but raw political loyalty was the reality. This is crony capitalism: the stockholder and the strongman aligning. Trump, the fake businessman from TV, borrows legitimacy from profits and ratings, hiding authoritarianism in smoke and mirrors “democracy”. This is the logic of the #deathcult: all values are disposable, as long as accumulation continues.

Lessons for the #OMN path. The shift from Woke to MAGA shows how fragile diversity is when it’s managed as a brand. It’s reversible, hollow, and always subordinated to capital. For the #OMN and the #openweb reboot, the lesson is simple: Don’t outsource diversity to branding exercises. Don’t confuse representation under capitalism with liberation. Don’t build systems where power pivots on a corporate whim. Instead, compost the mess. Root diversity in lived struggle. Anchor it in the #4opens so co-option is harder and collaboration is resilient.

What should be more obvious is that capital, the #nastyfew, its servants, doesn’t care about values, only accumulation. If we want diversity, inclusion, and justice to be real, we have to build them outside the #deathcult logic, in federated, grassroots spaces that don’t bend every time the political wind shifts.

The question remains: will we keep chasing the mess of spectacle – Woke vs. MAGA, or will we compost it and build something more rooted, messy, and alive #KISS

“Your Party” and the Fluffy/Spiky debate – a working path

A wider view of this https://nathanakehurst.medium.com/whose-party-ce23a8099624

Fluffy side: cautious, slow-moving, grounded in “keeping the peace” and managing optics. Classic problem: avoidance of conflict means bottlenecking decisions, blocking energy, and trying to centralise control, so things don’t blow up. Spiky side: impatient, direct, “get it done” energy. Spikiness pushes things forward, but often burns bridges, creating splits and mistrust. Neither path alone works – one stalls out, the other fragments. Their clash in the UK “Your Party”, just tore apart what was an opening for a broad left #mainstreaming alternative which we do need.

There are lessons here for horizontal/grassroots paths, a big one is that centralisation kills: When “leadership” becomes bottlenecked around personalities (Corbyn as “elder statesman”, Sultana as “young firebrand”), it reproduces the same control problems we see everywhere – #NGO capture, careerist gatekeeping, etc. Energy without mediation burns out: Spiky approaches are essential (they break inertia), but without social glue and open processes, the movement shatters.

Sadly, it’s looking like the political vacuum, is back. The 700,000 people who signed up are proof that there is real mass desire for something beyond the #deathcult #mainstreaming. But they’re now “homeless” – with no trustworthy structures to plug into. That vacuum will either be filled by opportunists (careerists, NGOs, “#fashernista”), or open the path for something like the #OMN: messy, federated, not centralised around personalities. And/Or the Green Party (this needs a separate post).

Focusing on the grassroots path I have been working on: this is exactly why the #OMN and #openweb reboot needs balance, so the signal-to-noise ratio can stay healthy. Otherwise, we just mirror the left’s long history of splits. What it means for the fluffy/spiky debate: The “Your Party” implosion shows us:

You can’t fix spiky by being fluffy. The soft style just frustrated allies and deepened mistrust.

You can’t replace fluffy with spiky.

The only path forward is process, not personality. That’s where horizontal projects like the #OMN can work – by creating open, transparent, mediated structures that don’t depend on charismatic individuals at the centre.

For the #openweb reboot, this bad moment is actually what we are working to fix. It shows how much energy there is (hundreds of thousands signing up). It shows the cost of control blindness. Likewise, it creates urgency for native governance paths and experiments in the #fediverse and beyond – where messy affinity-based groups, guided by the #4opens, can provide a home that doesn’t implode around personality clashes.

The question now is who can see the need for the practical mediation layer of the #OMN, is designed to bridge – not abstract theory – it’s the path that makes messy, spiky, fluffy humans work together without blowing everything up. For the #OMN and #openweb reboot, the answer isn’t “less conflict” or “more central leadership,” but better mediation and horizontal process, so collective energy isn’t wasted on repeating the same old splits.

What we are the seeing is the limits of #fashionista and #geekproblem control blindness.

How do we deal with this generation of people – formed by #neoliberalism, #dotcons, #mainstreaming, #stupidindividualism – when what’s needed is collective change and challenge?

The generation of the last 40 years of “There is no alternative” (Thatcher → Blair → Sunak/Starmer) produced passivity and cynicism. #Dotcons capture: people live inside algorithmic bubbles, shaped for consumption, not collaboration. This is the era of individualism as common sense: many can’t even imagine “the collective” except as a threat. We now face naked, fear + distraction: #climatechaos, wars, economic precarity → endless doomscrolling instead of agency. And this is why movements implode: the raw material (people) have been warped by the #deathcult.

What we can work with, even in this mess, people still show hunger for meaning (why 700,000 signed up for Corbyn–Sultana’s thing). Anger at the #nastyfew elitists (but it often gets channelled rightwards – Farage, Trump, Reform, conspiracies).

There are moments of solidarity (mutual aid, Palestine protests, climate camps). Skill fragments (#geekproblem energy, activist culture, DIY practice – but siloed). We don’t start from zero – we start from these contradictions.

Practical paths for dealing with this generation is in part about: Break the spell by expose #mainstreaming as a control system, using simple, repeatable stories (hashtags, memes, metaphors like composting/shovels) to make the invisible visible.

Then the path, affinity first, not mass. Don’t try to herd 700,000 people. Start with small, trust-based circles that actually work. Show results, not rhetoric. This attracts people who are sick of endless talking shops. Compost the conflict, instead of suppressing spiky energy (which turns toxic), build mediation layers, so conflict gets processed into growth. This prevents the inevitable splits from killing projects before they start.

We need working, visible alternatives, things people can touch: #OMN publishing hubs, #fediverse tools, radical media gardens. Each working piece is a counter-spell against “there is no alternative.” This is about reframing success and stop only measuring change in electoral wins or #NGO funding circles. We need to measure it in resilient collectives, working infrastructure, and shifts in common sense.

The challenge we need to compost, is that, the current generation has been trained in #stupidindividualism. What we need to learn is you cannot beat that as individuals, the only path is to recreate collectives – messy, organic, trust-based – where people can unlearn the #deathcult through practice. That’s why #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback matter: they’re not just tools, they’re containers for relearning collective life.

OMN projects are tools for YOU to change and challenge the world we live (and die) in

The Open Media Network (#OMN) is an “anything in, anything out” network powered by a mediated trust system. Instead of one corporation or #NGO controlling the flow, the commernerty decides what happens to the data that moves through it. At its core, the #OMN is a data soup: tagged data objects flowing through channels. These flows are shaped by trust. You consume and share based on your trust relationships, not on algorithms designed to manipulate you.

Key features are built-in, not bugs: Lossy data – it doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. Redundancy – multiple instances mean resilience, not waste. Trust mediation – human-scale filters that grow communities. The #geekproblem often resists these messy but living dynamics, demanding rigid perfection. But that rigidity kills creativity. The #OMN embraces mess as the fertile ground where culture grows.

The network is built on the normal #FOSS process, #4opens – open data, open source, open process, open standards. Its focus isn’t inventing new shiny toys. It’s about weaving together what already exists into a functioning grassroots media/news commons. Others are free to build their own projects on top of the framework. What’s exciting is the flows of trust that emerge. These aren’t abstract protocols, they’re the living arteries of new communities.

In short: The #OMN is decentralized, trust-based, open by design. It empowers people and communities to take control of media, to create their own flows, their own networks, their own power.

It’s not about serving users.
It’s about empowering people.
It’s not about control.
It’s about trust.

The #OMN is not a product. It’s a shovel. Use it to compost the #deathcult, and grow something alive.

The #OMN is a simple project

For the more geeky – 5 Functions of the #OMN (#5F)

Think of the #OMN as plumbing for media, a system of pipes, holding tanks, and connectors. It’s designed so anyone (not just geeks) can understand and use it. Every site in the network is built from these 5 basic functions:

Link / Subscribe

Plumb a new pipe into the network. A flow of content comes in or goes out. Each pipe can connect to any other function.

Trust / Moderate

Flow passes through a sieve. Trusted content moves smoothly; noise gets filtered. You can send flows straight through, into holding tanks, or split them into new pipes.

Rollback

Empty the tank, rewind a flow, or remove specific objects. Essential for correcting errors, spam, or bad data.

Edit Metadata

Add tags or notes to the “tail” of a data object. Metadata determines how content gets sieved and aggregated. This is the backbone of news curation in the OMN.

Publish

Add new content objects into the flow. Optionally editable. Publishing is just another pipe into the system. At the core sits the storage tank: a simple database holding all the flows.

Nothing new here. This isn’t rocket science – it’s the same way plumbing works, or how power grids function, or how neurons connect in the brain. The #OMN builds on this #nothingnew principle: simple, understandable systems scaled up to empower communities.

UX/UI then sits on top of these 5 functions. That’s the “macro” – the surface layer people touch – but underneath, it’s all just pipes and tanks for flows of data.

#KISS

If you would like and example of what real #DIY activist grassroots media looks like https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2006/climatecamp/ and https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2007/climatecamp/ and https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2008/climatecamp/

We need to reboot this project #indymediaback #OMN #Fediverse

Content in the #OMN