We need an honest conversation

The current generation of activism is crap – fragmented, self-referential, lost in identity wrangles, #NGO capture, and #fashionista online posturing. What can be learned:

Affinity and Trust > Bureaucracy and Branding

The 1990s/2000s alter-globalization movement and early #Indymedia weren’t “organisations,” they were ecosystems. Small affinity groups moved fast, trusted each other, and shared infrastructure without needing a brand deck or a funder’s approval. Lesson we can learn: build movements through trust, not paperwork. Organising should be messy but alive, not tidy and dead.

Media as Commons > Media as Market

#Indymedia: it was open “trust” based publishing, anyone could access, and no corporate ad trackers attached. Compare this to today’s #NGO “campaign media” or endless Twitter/X outrage cycles: closed, shallow, fleeting. What lessons can we learn: if you don’t own your media, you don’t own your message. The #OMN and #4opens try to restore this, we need grassroots media infrastructure, not another silo.

Direct Action > Endless Process

From anti-roads to climate camps, action mattered more than Zoom calls or social media petitions. Protest camps, blockades, squats: they disrupted the system physically, not just discursively. Lesson from this is got off the timeline. Occupy space, take risks, make it visible. Without action, all the online noise is just background music to the #deathcult.

Messy Coalitions > Purity Politics

Earlier waves brought anarchists, trade unionists, students, farmers, hackers, and faith groups into loose alliances. Today, movements too often fragment into micro-identities that cannot scale. The lesson: you don’t need to agree on everything, you just need a shared enemy and a common tactic. #KISS.

Culture Matters

Camps and protests weren’t just strategy meetings, they were lived experiments with free kitchens, pirate radio, temporary autonomous zones. Joy and play sustained the struggle. What we can learn? Activism that feels like homework will burn out. Activism that feels like life will endure.

What, can we learn from this? The current generation must relearn: activism is not a brand you attach yourself to, it’s a practice of building collective power. You don’t need permission, you don’t need a platform, you don’t need an #NGO to bless you. You need each other, and tools you can trust.

That’s the rebooting of the #openweb and the #OMN path. Compost the crap. Pick up the shovels. Plant again. To take this path seriously, we need to remember a little history. In 1933, German conservatives thought they could “manage” Hitler. Two years later, they were being shot in their own homes.

Q. is there any time in history where fascists were voted into power and then peacefully voted out? The answer is brutal. Not once. Ever.

Everyone thinks they know Germany’s story. Von Papen said, “We’ve hired him.” Within 18 months, his allies were corpses. The clever men who thought they could tame the beast were either dead, exiled, or crawling for survival.

Italy? Worse. The king could have crushed Mussolini’s blackshirts in an afternoon. Instead, he handed him the keys. Twenty years later: mass graves, partisans hanging Mussolini upside down like rotten meat.

Spain? A bloodbath. Franco staged a coup, the “democracies” wrung their hands, and fascism ruled for 39 years. He died comfortably in his bed. His victims are still being dug up in 2025.

Hungary? Orbán walked in through the ballot box in 2010. Within three years he controlled the media, the courts, the state. Fourteen years later, the EU is still “deeply concerned” while Hungary is a one-party state.

The only clean win? Finland 1932 – fascists jumped too soon, tried a coup before winning elections, and the army crushed them. That’s it. One time in a century.

The pattern is obvious:

Conservatives panic about socialism.

They ally with fascists as the “lesser evil.”

Fascists seize power.

Fascists immediately purge the conservatives.

Then you get 30–50 years of dictatorship, and mountains of corpses.

How many times did conservatives actually control the fascists they backed? Zero.
How many times did the fascists purge them once in power? Every single time.

A. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: violence works for fascists. They smash their enemies while whining they’re victims. They sow chaos, then impose “order.” Meanwhile, democrats write editorials, pass resolutions, and file lawsuits – while the fascists laugh and consolidate power.

The numbers don’t lie:

Fascists removed peacefully after winning elections: 0

Average length of fascist rule: 31 years

Removed by voting: 0

Removed by asking nicely: 0

Removed by war or coups: almost all of them

The historical record gives us three choices:

Stop them before they take power.

War.

Wait for them to die.

We missed the first. The window’s not closing – it’s closed.

And this is where the truth bites: fascism isn’t some freak accident. It’s not “outside” the system. It’s the sharpest edge of the #deathcult – the same system that sells endless growth on a dying planet, that privatizes solidarity, that mainstreams cruelty while smiling about “freedom.” Fascism is not an exception, it’s the rule, 40 years of #mainstreaming is now trying to enforce as the mask slips.

If history teaches us anything, it’s this: the centre will always betray, the right will always unleash fascism, and the people will always be left to dig up the bodies.

Please take note of the working activism at the start of this article. You can support and take part https://opencollective.com/open-media-network and https://unite.openworlds.info/ are entry points, there are likely more post them in the comments.

The stubborn few who show up with shovels, laptops, and trust

In the tech world of social change and challenge, we’re living with a strange imbalance. Too often, the spaces we use and try and build are crowded with useless, self-destructive prats – people more interested in ego, control, and clout than in making anything grow from the roots. And when they do very rearly act, their “help” is often poison: it blocks, slows, and derails.

At the same time, the number of people doing truly useful, collective, grounded work feels small. You can see this in every grassroots project, tech or activism, whether it’s, coding radical #FOSS projects, building alternative media, running servers, or planting food forests. The people who actually show up and keep things moving are always fewer than we need.

Then into this gap steps the parasites of #mainstreaming. Yes, they look like they’re helping. They reach out, they polish up the image, they “outreach” grassroots tech projects to wider audiences. But under the surface, this isn’t really helping. What they are doing, shifts focus away from what makes grassroots powerful – trust, messy collectives, stubborn autonomy – and towards something glossy and hollow.

Real help doesn’t come from smoothing out the rough edges for palatability. Real help is messy, reciprocal, and based in care. It’s, shipping working code, turning up to maintain the server, to keep the firewood dry, to cook food for the meeting, to argue about governance without walking away. It’s staying rooted when everything pulls you towards the easy path of compromise.

The good news? The work that does happen, when it’s done by those few stubborn and lovely souls who commit to it, is real and lasting. Every #fediverse instance that survives another year, every scrappy #openweb tool that stays online, every cooperative that resists collapse – these are proof that grassroots power is alive.

So yes, most of what gets labelled as “help” from outside is damage. But the grassroots path is still there. If we keep it simple – #KISS – and keep choosing trust over polish, collectives over branding, we can tip the balance back to where it needs to be.

Let’s look at some examples:

#Indymedia worked because it was built on trust, open publishing, and direct participation. But once the dogmatic #eekproblem, the NGOs and professional activists came sniffing, the energy shifted. Gradely the rough edges, the wild openness, became a “problem to be managed” instead of a strength. And with that, the vitality drained.

Or look at the #Fediverse. It thrives when it stays scrappy, with collectives running their own servers and shaping their own cultures. But already we see #Bluesky, #Threads, and NGO-backed “Fediverse Foundations” pushing. They’ll say they’re amplifying the movement. In reality, they’re clipping its wings, taming it for the same #mainstreaming logic that gutted Indymedia.

The #OMN (Open Media Network) was always an attempt to resist this drift. Instead of begging for a seat at the mainstream table, it builds trust networks from the ground up. No gatekeeping, no branding games – just collectives #4opens sharing content, tools, and governance in open, federated ways. It’s not sexy. It doesn’t polish well for a TED talk. But it works, because it stays close to where publishing and power actually happen: at the grassroots.

I’ve seen this first-hand in my own work. On the boats at Rummelsburger Bucht, in affinity groups fighting #climatechaos, and in rebuilding #indymediaback, the same pattern repeats. The parasite #mainstreaming arrive smiling, but what matters is the stubborn few who show up with shovels, laptops, and trust. Those are the people who keep the fire burning. The #KISS truth, it doesn’t take everyone. It just takes enough of us who refuse to give in.

While it’s easy (and justified) to call out the parasitic #mainstreaming types, it’s harder (and more important) to think about how to bridge to them without being captured or co-opted.

1. Meet them on fluffy values, not hard projects. Most #mainstreaming people say they care about openness, creativity, and inclusion. Use those as starting points. Instead of hitting them with #4opens or #OGB right away, talk in simple, human terms: trust, care, mutual aid, freedom. Then show how the OMN already embodies those values with examples like: When talking about #indymedia reboot, don’t begin with federation protocols; begin with “this is a people’s newswire where communities publish, and no single organisation can control it.” Then connect that to the tech.

2. Frame the commons as abundance, not scarcity. Mainstreaming comes with a scarcity mindset (“we need funding,” “we need gatekeepers”). We counter with an abundance story: the #openweb grows by sharing, remixing, and federating. Emphasise that our strength isn’t owning the pie but baking more pies together. An example might be: OMN flows content between blogs, small sites, and #fediverse projects. This isn’t competing with “platforms,” it’s weaving a bigger web where everyone benefits.

3. Offer them low-stakes ways to join. Not everyone is ready to dive headfirst into spiky, fluffy, grassroots culture. Make lightweight on-ramps: federated publishing plugins, easy “flows not silos” demos, or spaces where they can share without having to fully sign up.

4. Keep the tone sometimes fluffy, sometimes spiky. People new to grassroots tech often get scared off by the first bit of conflict. Fluffy spaces – campfires, storytelling, art – can bring them in. The spiky edges – calling out parasitism, blocking #NGO capture – should remain, but not be the only door in.

5. Make co-creation visible. Show them that grassroots projects don’t just “talk” about collaboration – we live it. When people see decision-making without bosses, publishing without gatekeepers, and coding without silos, they realise it’s possible. An example of this can be found in #OMN wiki pages on Unite Forge which are messy, open, and collective. That’s not a bug, it’s a living record of co-creation. Point to that messiness as proof of trust-based work that they can make more “tidy”, this is work as gift.

The #bridgeing isn’t about diluting grassroots culture into “NGO-speak.” It’s about keeping our paths, our politics sharp, while offering ways for curious people to join with less fear. Some will drop off (parasites always will), but others might step over the bridge and become part of the messy, hopeful commons.

#KISS

Who are the #nastyfew?

They are the people who always rise to the top when #mainstreaming takes hold. You see them on TV, in parliament, running #NGOs, managing #dotcons tech projects.

On the surface, they don’t always look bad – in fact, they often present as competent, articulate, even charming. But scratch that surface and the pattern is clear: their drive is not shared flourishing, it’s possession and control.

This minority #nastyfew, from a historical view, are today’s bourgeoisie. Marx outlined (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie), that the bourgeoisie historically gained their power through ownership of the means of production – factories, land, capital – while the working class had nothing but their labour to sell. The bourgeoisie used their control over wealth and coercion to keep society in balance, a balance where they stayed on top and everyone else stayed dependent.

The same dynamic runs through our present, the #nastyfew work to preserve a status quo that serves them. They exploit labour (waged or unwaged), capture resources, and use subtle or blunt coercion to suppress any change or challenge.

Those who hold power – social, technical, financial – remain the #nastyfew unless we actively work to compost them.

Then, in our cultural circles, we have our own “common sense” #blocking, the “parasites” who feed from progressive paths.

#fashernistas – chasing visibility, hashtags, and trends instead of substance. They drain energy by endlessly cycling the latest buzzwords while ignoring the compost underneath.

#Blinded dogmatic liberals – well-meaning perhaps, but so trapped in their own ideology that they block radical change without even seeing it.

The wannabe #nastyfew – those who orbit power, adopting the habits of control in hopes of rising up themselves.

Neo-liberals in disguise – the most dangerous, because they consciously wear the clothing of other paths: climate, diversity, openness… while quietly feeding the #deathcult of enclosure, growth, and control.

Some of these act blindly, reproducing harmful patterns without much thought. Others are deliberate: they know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it to consolidate control.

The unthinking #mainstreaming majority are shadows of the above. They’re not directly malicious, but they absorb the surface story: They repost the slogans. They nod along with “common sense” solutions pushed by the #dotcons and NGOs. They go with the flow, even when the flow is a sewer. Without working composting, they become the mulch for the #nastyfew to grow stronger.

The “nice liberals”. Not all liberals are destructive. Sometimes they play a healthy role: They keep projects afloat by doing practical work. They can mediate between radicals and the #mainstreaming. They often mean well, and can be allies if they’re not left holding the steering wheel all the time. They’re not the compost, they’re more like the worms: sometimes useful, sometimes wriggly, but part of the soil cycle.

And beyond, there are what has value, the progressive radical paths – both #fluffy (trust, care, openness) and #spiky (confrontation, defence, rupture). That’s another layer of the compost pile, and deserves its own focus. The key point: the #nastyfew and their parasites will always try to rise up in any fertile ground. The progressive trick is to compost them early – recycle their energy, block their possessiveness, and keep the soil rich for new seeds.

To recap, let’s look at some history. When the #openweb reboot began about a decade ago, it was rooted in grassroots values: #4opens, federation, collective governance, affinity trust networks. But as soon as the energy started to gather, the #mainstreamin pushed in:

#Dotcons pivoting into the space – Facebook rebranding as “Meta” and trying to swallow the Fediverse through the #Threads/ActivityPub move. This is enclosure dressed up as “openness”.

Standards capture – The #NGO actors increasingly gatekeeper the “neglected” #W3C processes, pushing, more corporate-driven priorities while blocking messy grassroots paths that did the shovelling to grow the reboot during the seedling years.

Control of resources – a few “elitist” individuals began hoarding power over infrastructure, domain names, and repos, reproducing the same top-down model we’re supposed to be escaping.

The result? We are seeing the #mainstreaming channeling energy away from collective growth into more controlled, branded silos. The Fediverse started as messy, small-scale, radical. But the same pattern repeated:

SocialHub degeneration – once the buzzing hub for ActivityPub, it decayed into a handful of blockers. The sometimes competent-and-charming surface masks a deeper instinct for control. Threads stagnate, dissent is suppressed, and the soil turns barren.

Mastodon centralization – while #Mastodon has been vital, its dominance has also let a single dev-team shape the Fediverse “common sense”. That concentration of reputation and technical control looks very much like a wannabe mini-bourgeois class rising.

#NGO incursions – funded NGOs present themselves as allies, but bring managerialism, paywalls thinking, and “stakeholder” logic. Instead of composting conflict, they plaster over it with workshops and careerism. Then #block the people who complain.

This is the #Fediverse version of “workers remain workers, employers remain employers”: contributors remain contributors, gatekeepers remain gatekeepers. We face the issue of possession over collaboration – we see that collectives fracture when individuals cling to admin roles, mailing lists, funds, and leadership positions. Possession rots trust and then groups wither.

The people who hold (and hored) resources, contacts, and media attention become more deadened than path, even if they started with good intentions.

The composting lesson, is that over and over, the #nastyfew and their parasites repeat the bourgeois pattern at scale: They present as competent and charming. They consolidate possession and control. They preserve the status quo by suppressing dissent.

And over and over, the solution is the same: compost them. Turn the piles of #techshit and #NGO mess back into fertile ground. Protect the seeds of grassroots tech trust, keep the social soil messy and alive.

The #OMN is based on
human beings doing the right thing.

And they will not,
and it will fail.

Human beings doing the right thing,
and they will not,
and it will fail.

And they will not,
and it will fail.

And will fail.

This is the challenge
in the era of the #deathcult:
A culture that feeds on fear,
on greed,
on possession.

Seeds are planted,
but the soil is barren.
Trust is offered,
but hands close into fists.
A path is drawn,
but the walkers scatter into shadows.

The #OMN is fragile,
thin green shoots
in a field of ash.

It asks the simplest thing:
Do the right thing.
Not once,
but again,
and again,
and again.

And if we do not?
It will fail.

And if we do?
Perhaps,
seeds will take root,
and grow beyond the compost,
beyond the #deathcult,
into the messy, open,
living forest.

Compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth

Compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth

It’s good to see more people turning their focus back to the #openweb. For the past five years of the #reboot we’ve been distracted in a signal-to-noise mess from the #fashionistas. That time needs to be over, we need to start looking clearly at both internal rot and the external threats.

A good first step is in balancing the realisation that we actually have far more direct power to deal with the internal mess than we do over the eternal #dotcons and their #closedweb “common sense”. That’s why we need to put activism into composting the internal #blocking (see: https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost). Composting isn’t just a metaphor – it’s a way to recycle the piles of #techshit we’ve built up into soil that can grow new #openweb seeds. #KISS

I understand the focus on the external #dotcons, yes, we also need to keep pushing back against the external enclosures. But inside our own spaces, it’s clear that possessiveness, in code, in reputation, in control over projects, undermines cooperation. It destroys trust, it wastes resources, it corrodes integrity. People often destroy what they love, not out of hate, but out of possession.

This is directly relevant to the degeneration of the #SocialHub project (see: https://hamishcampbell.com/why-teach-everyone-to-code-has-become-a-dead-end-slogan/). What was once the lively centre for the #ActivityPub and #Fediverse reboot is now reduced to a handful of unthinking “problem” people circling the drain. That’s not unusual, it’s a normal outcome when we fail to compost.

The lesson is simple: compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth.

#OMN resources we can support

Drafting blog posts, polemics, and rallying calls to sharpen the #OMN narrative. Use the compost metaphors (#techshit, seeds, soil) into accessible messaging that sticks. Editing to transform the long posts into shareable, short-form content for Mastodon, Fediverse, and allied networks.

Curating and organizing existing #OMN writings into a structured wiki-style knowledge base. Building summaries, FAQs, and primers for newcomers who hit the projects cold. Draft “composting guides” – how to deal with #blocking, #fashionistas, and #geekproblem inside communities.

Writing simple documentation for the Unite Forge and other #OMN tools. Helping draft roadmaps that explain what’s built, what’s missing, and what needs contributors. Produce explainers on why #OMN is different from #dotcons and #NGO capture, grounded in #4opens.

Write out templates for horizontal decision-making (#OGB style) that projects can adapt. Suggest practical ways to “compost” blockers while keeping the wider network fertile. Help draft neticate rooted in #KISS + #4opens rather than #NGO-speak.

Each of these can be grown into living resources: wiki pages, blog posts, shareable guides, or activist toolkits – depending on where you want the energy to flow.

Coding work https://unite.openworlds.info/explore/repos

Funding work https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

Thinking work https://hamishcampbell.com

Who are the #nastyfew?

Smiling-faced vileness: How enforced politeness becomes a weapon in grassroots paths

All too often, the ugliness we face in grassroots spaces wears a smile. It’s smiling-faced vileness: pleasant, agreeable individuals who wield control by blocking dissent, sanitizing movements under the guise of compromise, and maintaining the illusion of consensus. This is especially true in spaces overly tolerant of #NGO-style protocols – those bureaucratic, #fashionista postmodern traps that slowly erode the spark that makes radical communities thrive.

From my work across decades – from protest camps to #openweb projects – I’ve seen this pattern again and again. Projects like early #Indymedia were messy, radical, and fiercely autonomous. That edge, that wildness was slowly excised until what remains is either safe, bland, and powerless or locked down and paranoid, both smother the naive grassroots paths.

At late era #climatecamp i’ve witnessed activist planning groups that masquerade as open and inclusive, but doom radical ideas by policing language. If someone speaks candidly about power or inequality, they risk being labelled as “derailing.” Not unlike what I describe on the Fediverse: “a consensus ritual where insiders quietly veto contentious proposals, pushing them offstage.” The effect is chilling – the bold, and meaningful, get diluted and then silenced.

I’ve also seen “horizontal” groups adopt soft authoritarianism: a handful of insiders subtly side-line contentious voices with endless calls for care, safety and more research or structure, this is simply polite gatekeeping, in those quiet pauses, power consolidates. These practices don’t just kill energy, they devour possibility. They cannibalize the chance for communities that are both fluffy (nurturing) and spiky (radical).

Smiling-face vileness is not satire – it’s #fashionista postmodern gaslighting. It slowly smothers life with calm care and precision. The task of the grassroots is to replant what’s been stomped. That means cultivating friction -mess, disagreement, negotiation – because that is how community grows, trust is built, and real alternatives emerge. Let’s embed this friction into our code, our community practices, our shared care. Let’s compost the #NGO and fashionista chokeholds so we can grow radical, tender, collective futures #KISS

A lot of the “smiling-faced vileness” comes from a mix of personal psychology, learned behaviour, and the systemic incentives that shape #NGO, institutional, and #mainstreaming culture. It’s not usually deep evil – it’s something more banal, entrenched, and self-justifying. Examples of this mess makeing:

Fear of losing control when change threatens the structures they know how to navigate, so they subconsciously (or consciously) try to stop it. Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil idea applies here: harm is done by “ordinary” functionaries protecting their turf “The real danger is not that people will rebel, but that they will acquiesce in doing what they know is wrong.”

Cognitive dissonance management, as they see themselves as “the good guys,” so any action – even blocking positive change – must be reframed as “responsible” or “prudent.” #Postmodern self-protection: everything can be justified with enough narrative spin, “No one is the villain of their own story.”

Status preservation, NGOs and funding orgs reward stability over creativity, hierarchy over challenge. If your position, funding, or reputation depends on maintaining the current order, you will fight disruptive change, even if it’s obviously better “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Incompetence + insecurity, breeds paranoia. If you don’t know how to manage real change, you start to fear those who do. The façade of competence becomes more important than actual results, “When a man’s only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

Groupthink & conformity pressure, #mainstreaming cultures reward going along with the majority, even if the majority is wrong “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

This is why these people who take a cling to “power” often look “nice” on the surface while quietly gutting or neutralising anything spiky, challenging, or any change of path. It’s not just personal malice, it’s a cultural immune system against change, fuelled by fear, vanity, and comfort.

When, the tiny few of these people “secede” in #mainstreaming media (and the history it writes) it is not neutral, it’s a kind of #PR machine. It launders power and polishes away dissent. The smiling faces and “respectable” voices are just the velvet gloves over the iron fist. It’s fake history as PR – it isn’t history as lived memory or contested struggle, it’s official narrative, a “storybook” written to flatter the winners and confuse the rest. That’s why it feels vile and pointless: it distracts, pacifies, and reframes mess as inevitability.

The people who produce this are not innocent. Yes, many are clueless functionaries who internalize the system’s values without question. Others are parasitic aspirants, desperate to climb into the #nastyfew, copying their methods. Even when they do “small goods” (a sympathetic article, a cultural puff piece), in the larger pattern they still serve the mainstreaming machine.

The compost metaphor is about instead of raging endlessly at the mess, take what can be siphoned off (attention, fragments of narrative, disillusioned individuals) and redirect that flow into the alt systems (#OMN, #4opens, Fediverse, grassroots histories) then compost the rest: let it rot, break down, and become the fertilizer for something alive and grounded. Because otherwise we get stuck in their cycle: doom-scrolling their fake stories, wasting energy on reacting instead of building. The challenge is mediation, not just rejection. Spot the toxic flows, tap them for useful nutrients, and feed the roots of alternatives.

#KISS

Activist tech has been stuck in a defensive crouch

For two decades, activist tech has been stuck in a defensive crouch. We’ve built bunkers (security tools, encryption layers, anonymity networks) but very few bridges. That’s left the field fragmented, insular, and often unattractive to the people we’re supposedly trying to empower.

If the aim is to push social change and challenge rather than just survive, here’s what I think needs building:

#4opens-native infrastructure Open data → not just sharing docs, but making activist knowledge queryable, remixable, reusable. Open source → tools that anyone can template and that are designed for non-geek participation. Open process → transparent decision-making, recorded and accessible, not locked in Discord chats and private Signal groups. Open standards → making sure our platforms talk to each other rather than becoming new silos.

Right now, most “secure” activist tools violate at least two of these, which is why they never scale socially.

Publishing-first culture (#OMN approach)

Defensive tools keep activists inside – whisper networks, encrypted groups – but change needs broadcast. We need infrastructure for:

Collaborative publishing (like a modern Indymedia, federated rather than centralised)

Native-to-activist communities, not corporate platforms with activist skin

Embeddable media flows that any group can plug into their own site and feed back into the commons

Bridges between the “geek” and the “street”

We keep losing people at the handover point between coders and campaigners. This means:

Building social UX: not just “usable” but welcoming, narrative, and easy to onboard without a training camp

Open governance for projects, so they don’t ossify into closed dev clubs

Mixing online and offline organising so the tech is embedded in the movement, not floating above it

Messy but live governance (#OGB model)

Most activist tech projects fail when the original team burns out or falls out. We need:

Federated governance where each node makes its own calls but can still coordinate

Lightweight, transparent conflict resolution instead of exile-by-moderator

Structures that reward contribution over gatekeeping

Narrative + polemic

Tech alone doesn’t move people, stories do. The #4opens path should be wrapped in cultural work: films, zines, podcasts, political memes, all pointing back to live, working tools people can join today.

Why this matters: If all we do is encrypt ourselves into tiny rooms, we’ve already lost – the social fabric will rot away outside those walls. Encryption is necessary for many struggles, but it’s not sufficient. Positive activist tech must be porous, messy, and visible, because change needs an audience and a route for people to join.

Bridges: An activist tech roadmap

We’ve made excellent hiding places – but the point was never to hide. What we need to stop building. (Let it compost – it’s done its job, or it was a dead-end from the start?)

Paranoid toys for the already paranoid. Endless “yet another secure messenger” forks for people who already have six installed.

Security fetishism that confuses obscurity with safety.

Crypt bro sandcastles. Blockchain “liberation” projects that replicate Silicon Valley greed, gated by tokens and VC hype.

Anything that smells like replacing corporate overlords with slightly more smug overlords.

Single-issue encryption fortresses. Tools so focused on privacy that they have zero public presence or outreach capacity. Result: the tech survives, but the movement starves for connection.

Endless horizontal-but-empty governance “frameworks” Looming Google Docs full of aspirational process that nobody follows in practice. No real community roots, just “process cosplay.”

What to start building (This is the real #4opens + #OMN work)

Social-first tech stacks. Start with people, not protocols.

Build interfaces that encourage conversation, collaboration, and collective memory.

#4opens principles applied to UX, governance, and hosting — not just the code repo.

Native governance baked into the stack. #OGB-style decision-making visible and accessible to every user. Influence exercised in the open, with accountable stewardship, not backroom admin chat.

Open media networks that publish first, secure second. #OMN-style federated publishing where public content flows freely, while personal data defaults to private. Focus on amplifying radical stories instead of just hiding them better.

Tools that make bridges not walls. Mediating the signal-to-noise rather than blocking at the first whiff of disagreement. Spaces where trust can grow between different grassroots tribes without falling into the #NGO/#dotcons gravity well.

Composable, messy, repairable tech. #KISS principles, with the option for local hacks and templates. Document the how and why so that when projects die, others can compost them into new growth.

The call-out is we can’t code our way out of the #deathcult with bunker software. The way forward is messy, social, and built in the open. Let’s stop pretending that better locks will save us, and start making better streets for our movements to meet, cooperate, and fight together.

The #4opens + #OMN path is the stepping stone back into the light. Take it, or stay buried.

Compost the Chancers: How Careerists Kill Horizontal Tech Movements

It happens every time. A fresh grassroots project kicks off, chaotic, joyful, full of promise. The code is rough, the conversations messy, but the energy is real. People come together not for money or prestige, but because something needs doing and no one else will do it.

Then, they arrive, the careerists, the chancers, the opportunists who talk a good game of “community” and “values” while quietly positioning themselves for influence, funding, reputation. You know these people, they start “facilitating” things, pushing for “professionalism,” organising pointless panels, and – without fail – introduce hierarchical management logic dressed in pseudo-horizontal language.

Soon, the messy collective space becomes an application form, organic conversations shift to curated “working groups”, governance becomes gatekeeping, code becomes control.

Careerism is a cultural virus, OK, these people aren’t evil villains, they’re simply products of their environment, trained to extract value, shape narratives, and build CVs. But their impact is destructive, even if unintentional. What they bring with them is the #mainstreaming mindset, a default toward #NGO logic, safe liberalism, risk-aversion, and the slow suffocation of wild experimentation.

They start to block with niceness., they silence with process, they smother with “inclusivity” until there’s no air left to breathe. When people question this, then they start to become nasty, trolling, blocking and finally ignoring runs its predictable course…

Examples? Let’s name some very formiler patterns:

The Self-Appointed Spokesperson – Shows up late, speaks the loudest, builds a personal brand on the back of others’ labour.

The Grant-Whisperer – Always chasing the next funder, reshaping the project to fit what’s "deliverable" instead of what’s needed.

The Gatekeeping Ally – Claims to represent the marginalised, while shutting down dissent and complexity with soft authoritarianism.

The #NGO Zombie – Thinks every grassroots space needs a board, a charter, and a code of conduct before it needs trust or purpose.

The Pivot Junkie – Tries to steer the project toward startup land “just to be sustainable,” and ends up reinventing capitalism in #FOSS clothes.

These types thrive when horizontality lacks grounding. On the path we need to take, “cancel culture” is a cul-de-sac. Blocking them just makes them martyrs. Ignoring them lets them take over. The alternative? Compost them, let their bullshit rot in the open, call things what they are. Tech is political, values are not neutral. What to do? Compost, don’t cancel.

To reboot the #openweb and keep it rooted in the #4opens: Open Code, Open Data, Open Standards, Open Process. Rebooting needs resistance, we have to build spaces that are both porous and protected, we need, paths and spaces with membranes, not walls. Trust-based collectives with clear boundaries. If someone’s treating your community like a stepping stone, show them the compost bin. If someone’s building with care, humility, and rootedness, then share our tools with them.

This is not a purity test, it’s composting as culture, if something smells off, trust your nose. Because if we don’t get serious about this, the chancers will take over. They always do. Unless we make the path too muddy for them to walk it.

A core problem is that too many “open” tech projects try to model social relations after code workflows rather than shaping code to reflect healthy social processes. Ersatz writing, ersatz governance and the slow death of the #openweb. We’re living through a wave of fakery. The #AI hype machine spews endless streams of ersatz writing – grammatically perfect, stylistically smooth, and hollow. It feels like content but carries no lived experience, no rooted context, no risk. Unedited, it’s a shadow play of culture.

The same hollowness infects too many horizontal tech spaces. Here, we find ersatz governance – systems that borrow the forms of openness and collaboration, but replace the substance with tech bureaucracy. Instead of starting from lived social practice, they mimic software workflows: people reduced to issue tickets, trust replaced by “process,” culture swapped for sprint planning. The result is the same as with AI: the outputs are technically competent but socially dead.

When governance is reduced to process, the door swings open for the chancers, the careerists, and the #NGO climbers. They’re fluent in the language of inclusivity and consensus, but they’re not here to build, these people thrive in systems where nothing is anchored in lived trust or collective history. In such environments, appearances are reality, and they control the appearance.

The mirror needs to flip, healthy social production can inspire healthy code production, but trying to run human interaction like a Git repo produces brittle, alienating cultures. We see it in the #Fediverse right now: meetings full of procedure but no warmth; #PRs merged while communities fracture; polished governance documents for projects this pointlessness.

The #openweb was never meant to be safe for professional managers of openness. It was meant to be a living commons, messy, unpredictable, full of disagreements and breakthroughs. If we can root our governance in actual relationships rather than corporate abstractions, we can build tech that reflects community rather than forcing community to reflect tech. Otherwise, we’ll just have two hollow empires – AI’s Ersatz Writing on one side, and our own Ersatz Governance on the other – both looking open, both feeling dead.

The #OGB: A Native Path for Open Governance

The #OGB (Open Governance Body) isn’t built around the smooth, efficient ideals of platform logic or institutional control. It’s messy by design, because it’s rooted in real-world activist practice. It draws from the hard-won experience of protest camp organising, where consensus, affinity, and trust are the foundations of action.

The #OMN governance model we’re working with doesn’t come from corporate boards or #NGO playbooks. It comes from the mud, the rain, the late-night meetings under tarps and tents, where people work through differences because they have to – because they’re doing something together that matters. This is people-to-people trust, built over time, grounded in shared struggle. We’re not designing for online autocracy. We’re designing for affinity groups.

So yes, the #OGB is trying to do what many others won’t. Not because it’s easier (it’s not), but because it’s necessary.

We already know this kind of organising works, not in theory, but in practice. Sometimes badly, sometimes slowly, but it works. People come together, they make decisions, they take action, and they build power without needing top-down control. But we also know it doesn’t scale well – that’s always been the limit of these methods. Consensus is powerful at small scales, but it breaks under weight if there’s no structure to hold it.

That’s where the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub come in.

The #OGB is built on the idea that the horizontal protocols of the Fediverse can scale this kind of messy, native governance, not by centralising it, but by networking it. Federation isn’t just a technical model; it’s a political one. It mirrors the way affinity groups operate: autonomous, loosely coordinated, sharing enough common ground to work together without collapsing into uniformity.

This is what we mean when we say the #OGB is native. It’s growing from within the world we’re already in – not imposed from outside. It respects mess. It embraces friction. It understands that governance isn’t something you tack on later, it’s something you live through, build with, and struggle over, together.

You can see the work in progress here: https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody

If we’re going to have a real #openweb, we can’t keep mimicking the logic of platforms and empires. We have to build our own paths, grounded, imperfect, resilient.

We invite you to walk this path.

A story for outreach: https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/wiki/Out+reach+short+story+-+Stalls+and+Code.-

A guide for staying honest and native

A community is only viable if enough people care enough to keep it relevant. In this era of #stupidindividualism, most people don’t lift a finger to make that happen.

This is the norm across many #4opens spaces: a near-total lack of interest in building or maintaining shared paths. It’s a textbook case of right-wing Tragedy of the Commons. Developers show up when it suits them, use the space for their narrow needs, then drift off without contributing to the upkeep. They treat community like free infrastructure – something passive they can extract from – rather than a living, tended path.

This same pattern plays out across the grassroots and #FOSS world. Devs focus on their code, their projects, their timelines. Rarely do they look up and engage with the broader ecology that their work depends on. In the #Fediverse especially, most developers ignore shared infrastructure, governance, and the standards they rely on, until something breaks. Then they complain.

Same social dynamics, same outcome: a mess that keeps repeating itself. And until we break that pattern, we’re stuck.

On the alt path, it’s fair to ask for clarity. When we talk about “#openweb projects,” we mean efforts grounded in the values of the early web commons: transparency, decentralization, collective ownership. This includes things like the rebooted #Indymedia, the #OMN (Open Media Network), and the #OGB (Open Governance Body). These aren’t about building shiny platforms, they’re about building the structures and relationships that allow real alternatives to survive and grow outside the #mainstreaming mess.

This isn’t just evangelism, it’s hands-on work: shaping frameworks for local and federated publishing (like the original Indymedia), and now modelling governance and trust systems that resist hierarchy and #NGO capture.

As for government institutions joining the #Fediverse – What we pushed was a bottom-up, native process rooted in people and practice, not imposed solutions. But as is often the case, after we laid the groundwork, the institutional #PR and #NGO crowd moved in and took over.

The “community” we speak of does exist, even if it’s fragmented, marginal, and ignored. You’ll find it in squats, permaculture collectives, activist media spaces, messy corners of the #Fediverse, and in the hands of people still building trust and tools outside the #dotcons. It’s not centralized or funded, so it’s not visible like capitalist platforms are. But it’s real. I’ve lived inside it for decades.

You’re right that real code is needed. But it’s not about one perfect tool. It’s about the network of trust and shared values that can hold many tools and projects together. That’s slower to build, less flashy to show off, but far more resilient and necessary.

The #Fediverse is a good first step. But let’s be honest: we’ve lost the thread when it comes to building tech that walks off the beaten path. Most #mainstreaming energy, and much of the #NGO outreach, still flows into reinforcing the same old ruts: centralization, enclosure, obedience to capital. Anything that doesn’t follow those routes is starved of support and often treated as a threat, a curiosity, or a waste of time.

But it’s exactly that off-path infrastructure we need, not just to resist the current system, but to outlast it. To still be standing when the old ways collapse. That means supporting tools and systems that aren’t profitable, aren’t convenient, and aren’t slick. They’re harder to fund, harder to maintain, but they’re what let us keep moving forward through the coming storm of #climatechaos.

If we don’t build and sustain these alternative tracks, the dominant ones will keep absorbing or destroying everything new. It’s a recursive trap: we need better systems to make better tools, but we can’t build those tools without some of those better systems already in place.

So we need to hold space – with care, mess, and trust – for that in-between.

That’s where projects like #OMN, the rebooted #Indymedia, and the #4opens live. Not trying to escape friction, but embracing it. Mediating it. Letting it guide us toward what’s honest, what’s native, what lasts.

The new litmus test isn’t “Does it scale?”
It’s: “Does it spread? Does it take root? Can it compost and regrow?”

It’s important to recognise that friction – the mess, the slowness, the need for constant negotiation – is not a flaw in native paths, it’s a virtue. It’s how trust, mutuality, and accountability are sustained over time. These are not bugs to be eliminated with slick #UX and #VC-funded convenience – they’re part of what keeps a community honest and rooted.

The problem arises when less-native, often externally imposed systems (driven by capitalist or institutional agendas) treat these messy, friction-full spaces as broken or backwards. This is the classic dynamic of imperialism and settler colonialism: imposing order, “fixing” things, extracting value, and in doing so erasing the lived, relational logic of native systems.

If you look through the lens of native/western histories – indigenous struggles vs colonial modernity, the same pattern plays out again and again: the native path is degraded, disrespected, overwritten. In tech, it’s no different. You see it when horizontal, trust-based networks get steamrolled by #NGO capture, institutional gatekeeping, or #VC-funded platforms that sell convenience and control.

So the real work is mediation. Not purity, not retreat, but balancing these tensions in practice: holding space where native paths can grow without being co-opted or crushed, while still reaching out to shift the wider terrain.

We need to stop seeing native approaches as “immature” or “inefficient.” They’re often the only thing holding the line against complete enclosure. The question isn’t “How do we fix the mess?”, it’s “How do we stay with it, tend it, and let it teach us how to do this differently?”

It’s an old but urgent problem: how do we support tech that walks outside the dominant paths long enough to clear new ones? Infrastructure that can challenge the mainstream only survives if we build support systems that reflect different values — trust, openness, and care over control, profit, and scale. Right now, we’ve stopped thinking seriously about this. If we don’t return to this work, building the path as we walk it, we’ll be stuck cycling through the same traps, watching each alternative collapse back into the old defaults.

People keep asking for my history, so a link https://hamishcampbell.com/introduction/

We Don’t Need More Liberal Techno-Utopianism

We need to start saying this more often, and without apology: there is a moral difference between left and right. Not just a difference in opinion, or strategy, or culture, but a real difference in the kind of people and world each side fights for. Left-wing politics, reflects our better human instincts: generosity, compassion, mutual care, sociability, conviviality, and courage. These are the values that hold communities together, that push back against cruelty and isolation, that imagine a world where no one is left behind. In contrast, right-wing politics are the organised expression of greed, selfishness, ego, bigotry, and fear. They hoard, they divide, they scapegoat, and they dominate.

It’s time we stop pretending this is just a polite disagreement and call it what it is: the left is the political force for good, and the right is the political expression of evil. Naming this clearly matters – because when we blur the line between solidarity and selfishness, we lose the ground we need to stand on. And note we need to put much of the hierarchical left on the right spectrum, it’s important to say this often as well.

Then on the centre path there’s a lot of #fluffy around these days. Take books like Abundance – dressed up as bold new visions, but really just more of the same old liberal centrism with a shiny, tech-friendly finish. It flirts with Marx at the end, but only to dress up in borrowed credibility. At heart, it’s not socialist, it’s a manifesto to reassure the #mainstreaming chattering class that everything will be OK if we innovate harder and manage smarter. This is blinded feel-good “supply-side liberalism” for the TED Talk crowd.

Let’s be very clear: the “problems of the modern Left” exists. Identity tokenism, #NGO capture, and aimless cultural navel-gazing have turned real struggle into performance art. But the answer isn’t to step back into the arms of liberalism or #techbro ideology – it’s to push further and deeper into balancing the path of radical collective politics. Not less left, but more grounded and grown-up socialism?

Because the actual problem isn’t scarcity, or inefficiency, or bad design. The problem is capitalism. Let’s spell it out: Capitalism needs artificial scarcity to work. That’s how it makes money. You think landlords want more housing to be built? Of course not. Flood the market with affordable homes and they lose their grip on rent extraction. Same with developers, they make their money by building just enough to keep prices high. It’s not a bug, it’s the core business model. We need to see this for what it is #miseryeconomics.

Take energy, the whole history of fossil fuels is cartels, from the Seven Sisters to OPEC, it’s a game of controlling supply to keep prices (and profits) up. It’s not about abundance, it’s about engineered shortage. Try fitting that into your neat little supply-and-demand graphs.

Even beyond housing and energy, the entire financial system is tied to the constant rise in asset values. You don’t keep Wall Street humming by flooding the world with free and accessible goods. You do it by enclosing, bottling, and selling scarcity.

So when these liberal optimists talk about “unlocking abundance” without touching class power or property relations, they’re missing the entire point. Or worse, helping to hide it.

What we actually need is a radical shift, that builds on grassroots cooperation, trust, and open systems. Not more shiny ethical #dotcons platforms or visionary #nastyfew billionaires, but boring, solid, stubborn collective action. We need commons, not commodities. Federation, not feudalism. We need to compost the #techshit, not polish it.

This is where projects like the #OMN come in – grounded in the #4opens and decades of lived, messy, practical resistance. Built to share, not to own. Grown from the ground up, not imposed from on high.

We’ve seen what doesn’t work. Let’s stop pretending that liberalism with a few wires stuck in it is going to save us. It’s time to build something real, together, and you get to chose to take the left or the right path. And on this choice, try not to be “common sense” evil in your choice.

Here is a trilogy of stories you can use for outreach if you take the grassroots left path:

Oxford: Going with The Flow

Chatsworth Market: Stalls and Code

And story in process, the Berlin Bay

Why Most Fediverse Codebases Are Languishing

Do you ever stop and wonder, really wonder, why most of the codebases outside #Mastodon are languishing? It’s not a technical issue. It’s not “a lack of funding” (though that’s what they love to talk about). It’s not even about network effects, not really. It’s because they’re all following Mastodon’s lead, straight into the #NGO world.

This is a path paved in smiles and slow death. A warm bath of grant cycles, diversity reports, and performative panels. On this dead-end, the goal isn’t to grow, challenge, or change. The goal is to survive, to be tolerated, within existing institutional structures.

Let’s be honest: this is such an obviously pointless and self-defeating direction that it’s stunning more people aren’t calling it out. Why is it pointless? Because in the #NGO world, success isn’t the point. The hierarchy already has its chosen project. It has its darling. And surprise surprise – that’s Mastodon.

Everyone else is there to tick the diversity box. You’re the “alternatives” that prove there’s choice, even if there isn’t. You’re invited to speak, but not to decide. You’re encouraged to exist, but only if you don’t matter.

So these projects stall, not because they’re bad ideas, or bad code, or have no community.
But because they’ve internalized powerlessness, shaped by institutions that reward conformity and punish genuine independence.

Here’s the bitter truth: If you want your project to thrive, you have to stop only begging at the gates of the palace. You have to stop only trying to be included, you have to also build outside their logic. That’s what the #OGB (Open Governance Body) is about, not building consensus at the top, building trust at the roots.

That’s what the #OMN is about, a web of native projects, not another hierarchy with a different brand. We don’t need to only “be taken seriously” by NGOs. We really need to #KISS build governance that works without them. And what we don’t need is more performative panels, we need compost, shovels, and seeds. Let #Mastodon be the flagship, in the long term, it’s likely to drift into irrelevance, or rot into compromise. Let the rest of us get on with building the working path.

You don’t have to only attack problems, you can also build round them and leave them to decay, then shovel over the mess to compost, the problem we face now is that we need a shovel, a first step is to build that #OMN

Some strategies to mediate the #blocking mess in a way that stays true to the #4opens:

1. Compost the Conflict. Don’t try to avoid the mess – use it.

Acknowledge blocking as an emotional reaction to risk/fear/powerlessness.

Create safe compost heaps where disagreements can break down slowly (forums, slow chat, moderated conversations).

Let things rot before replanting — time is part of the process.

Tools:

Slow-fed moderation queues

Forkable discussion

Bridge-building protocols

2. Build Friction Where It Helps. Instead of forcing “smooth consensus,” engineer positive friction.

Let friction surface hidden assumptions early, but contain it constructively.

For example, structured disagreements (Yes/And).

Use #4opens to keep the process visible and trustworthy.

Tactic: “This disagreement stays open – until it breaks something or blooms something.”

3. Create Walkable Paths Around Blockers. If someone/some group blocks – don’t go through them, go around them.

Design with pluralism and forking paths as core strengths.

Accept divergence — allow others to fork rather than forcing them to bend.

Metaphor: Every open path has forks. We need more people walking, fewer people standing still yelling.

4. Bridge the ‘Trust Gap’ with Small, Lived Examples. Many people block because they don’t trust the process – they feel tricked, ignored, or co-opted.

Rebuild trust through visible, small-scale functioning examples — real communities doing real things with the #4opens.

Highlight stories where governance and code worked together.

Stay humble: don’t oversell the vision; show, don’t tell.

5. Normalize Changing Your Mind. Most blocking happens because people are afraid of losing face, status, or being co-opted.

Create spaces where changing your mind is not shameful — it’s rewarded.

Public “reconsideration threads,” “I changed my view” badges, etc.

Use organic intellectuals who model doubt and curiosity, not just certainty.

Reframe the debate using values: trust vs. fear, openness vs. control, native vs. extractive.

You don’t solve #blocking by trying to make everyone agree, you solve it by making space for disagreement to stay open and generative – not as a problem, but as part of the compost from which better paths grow.

Signal, Noise, and the Mess of #Mainstreaming

“Because controversy equals attention and attention equals brand recognition.” LINK

Yes, an interesting thread on advertising. But let’s add to this view in wider paths:

Mainstreaming controversy = attention.

Alt controversy = #blocking, by ignoring.

This mainstreaming/alt mess making is not about real disagreement or dynamic ideas. It’s about channelling noise that flatters the existing structures and silences anything genuinely alternative. This isn’t controversy, it’s signal-to-noise warfare. And right now, the noise is winning.

Let’s be blunt. On the subject of this site, nearly every so-called “alternative” tech event funded or structured by #NGO culture is riddled with parasites – projects more interested in their next grant or their place at the conference table than building anything outside the status quo. They’re not evil – just placated, softly herding us back into the polite cages we were trying to escape.

They block by doing nothing, block by talking too much, block by looking away when real change knocks. They block by turning real signal into noise.

The actual energy, the radical possibility, is elsewhere. The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is designed with this in mind: not to convince the already-compromised, but to build something permissionless and let it loose. Let people feel the value, or not. No “hard” hand-holding, no pre-approval, no gatekeepers.

It’s a #KISS project: Keep It Simple, Stupid. We’re building for the people up shit creek without a paddle, not the people arguing about paddle aesthetics on a conference panel. We don’t need more “controversy” to win attention in the #NGO #PR-sphere. We need real signal, real builds, real grassroots governance to share power.

And yes, we do have a problem with apathy and Laissez-faire “common sense” that lets this cycle repeat. So let’s stop waiting for the right moment or the perfect audience. We build with this problem in mind. We design #DIY structures that can work in the real mess.