Governance rooted in trust rather than formalized decision-making

In alternative paths and spaces, governance is rooted in trust rather than formalized decision-making. These are environments where shared values, relationships, and practical action matter more than rigid rules or bureaucratic processes. People who come from more institutional or #NGO-style backgrounds default to proposing formal structures – voting procedures, consensus check-ins, rotating chairs, code-of-conduct enforcement committees. While these processes feel necessary to them, in practice they fail in grassroots spaces. Why? Because, fundamentally, nobody has to do anything.

Take a volunteer grassroots run radical media collective, for example. If someone proposes a complex consensus model or tries to enforce step-by-step project plans, it usually ends with endless meetings, unresolved tensions, and burnout. The reason is simple, unlike in paid or hierarchical systems, there’s no leverage to force participation. When push comes to shove, people just walk away.

What happens next is revealing. After the mess, what we might call the composting of the formalized process, people who are still around begin to just do what needs to be done. A few trusted people pick up the shovel, others join in when they see real work happening. Momentum builds through doing, not debating. The group evolves informally, with leadership emerging from action and care, not from mandates. Trust grows as people witness each other’s commitment over time. This informal flow tends to work surprisingly well most of the time.

For example, in the early days of Indymedia, despite various affinity groups having very different political approaches, decisions often came down to who stepped up to do the tech work, write the stories, or run the servers. Trust was built by contribution and consistency. Similarly, in grassroots disaster relief efforts (like Occupy Sandy), attempts to impose centralized control often broke down. But mutual aid networks thrived on trust, initiative, and lightweight coordination, text threads, shared spreadsheets, and informal roles. It was messy, but it worked.

The insight, in trust-based spaces, power flows not from authority or process, but from care, responsibility, and visible action. People trust those who show up and do the work, not those who talk the most or try to control the process. While this model isn’t perfect – and trust can be broken – it often outperforms rigid structures in flexible, values-driven communities.

And then there’s the wannabe #nastyfew – those who feed off control, disruption and ego, often seeking to dominate through manipulation and obstruction. We don’t need to fight them head-on or sink into their drama. In healthy alternative spaces, we learn to step around them, focus on building trust and function, and let their influence compost along with the rest of the mess. In time, as we balance and grow, manage our own lives better, we can feel empowered to push them out of the way, not with force, but with the strength of community, clarity, and shared purpose. They might then become useful in some way?

Composting the fiendlyenemy’s

These people are hopeless, in the literal sense of not having any hope.

The #mainstreaming of the #Fediverse is happening. You can see it in many “progressive” info flows, where the chattering classes of tech – academics, #NGO staffers, consultants, and developers with foundations or startup ties – gather to shape the narrative. On the surface, this looks like success: the native grassroots #openweb is being taken seriously. But look a little deeper, and the cracks start to show.

These are the #friendlyenemy – people who share some values, but whose institutional positions and funding streams push them toward compromise. On a good day, they’re allies. On a bad day, they become gatekeepers, smoothing out the radical edge of the #Fediverse in favour of comfort, control, and incrementalism.

You can smell the vertical path creeping in – softly, but persistently. Some voices are given more weight than others. Those who have access to money, credentials, or “platform” get to define the agenda. Those who don’t are politely sidelined. This inequality, dressed up in professional polish and well-meaning governance processes, is not native to the #openweb – it belongs to the broader culture of common sense #neoliberalism that says, quietly but firmly, “power follows money.”

One of the central issues here is signal-to-noise. These folks will acknowledge it if you ask, that real community voices are harder to hear, that grassroots actors are often overlooked, but in practice, they do little to shift the balance. The very structures they rely on (panels, funding calls, curated spaces) reproduce the same inequalities we’re trying to escape.

The “chattering classes” are not a new problem. In every progressive movement, there is a class of well-spoken, well-educated, well-funded individuals who dominate discourse without doing much of the risky, grounded work needed for real change. They often co-opt language, soften radical ideas, and set up systems that make it harder – not easier – for grassroots actors to lead.

So where do we go from here? We don’t reject these people outright, they are part of the mess we must compost. But we do challenge the structures that elevate them above others. We remember that the #Fediverse was born from messy, volunteer-driven experiments, not corporate playbooks. We prioritize horizontal spaces, open governance, and trust-based collaboration. And we keep building the #OMN and other alternative structures that reflect these principles natively, not as afterthoughts.

If we don’t, the #openweb becomes just another place where a different few speak for the many, and we lose the path in #NGO mess and the chance to build something genuinely “native”. What we don’t need is more non-native paths, please, we have enough #techshit to compost already. We do need ideas on how to communicate this to the people who need to hear?

#Fiendlyenemy

OMN, best not to get distracted, this isn’t about purity, it’s about direction

Enclosure of the openweb

This spirit of the early internet and #WWW – sharing, remixing, collectively creating – is the heart of what we once called the #openweb. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a space of possibilities, commons, where you could take what you needed and leave something behind, hyperlink by hyperlink. The tools were open – #RSS feeds, #APIs, #XMPP, #indymedia were built to bridge between ideas and movements, not walls of monetized algorithmic sludge we have today.

But the #dotcons came. They fenced in the wild garden. What we’re living through now is a digital version of the enclosure of the commons, a #neoliberal land grab dressed in Silicon Valley T-shirts. Just like in 16th-century England, they drew arbitrary lines around our #4opens shared land (data, conversation, culture), declared it private property, and shut the gates. And we, the people, got algorithmic slop in return.

The comparison isn’t metaphor – it’s literal. Just as the landed gentry stole the commons to fuel the industrial revolution, the tech gentry stole our digital commons to feed surveillance capitalism. They did it through legalese, marketing BS, and brute force. We were left outside the firewalls, told to be thankful for “free” services while they harvested our metadata lives to sell back to us as advertisements and social control.

The #techbros didn’t invent this theft. They just updated the tools, the same ideological mess that displaced peasants from their land now displaces communities from their networks and platforms, kills independent sites, closes APIs, and locks away archives behind paywalls. Twitter’s 2023 shutdown of free API access? A textbook enclosure. Hundreds of # fashionista grassroots tools and bots vanished overnight, #Techshit at its most brazen.

And then there’s #RSS – the veins of the old web. Stabbed slowly. First by Facebook, then by Google. For the #fashernistas, the blade fell hardest in 2013 with the death of Google Reader, a quiet coup that pushed most of us into the fenced-off gardens of algorithmic consumption we live so much of our lives in today. The commons didn’t vanish; it was actively destroyed, under the smog of monetization, “engagement,” and corporate “safety.”

This isn’t #progress, it’s theft. The same kind that wears the mask of legitimacy because lawyers and lobbyists made it look neat on paper. The reality is old, it’s a #classwar fought with code instead of clubs, and it’s won because we stopped remembering what common “land” even looked like.

But not everything is lost. The #Fediverse, the #OMN (Open Media Network) still plants seeds in the cracks. #Wikidata, #OpenStreetMap, the #ActivityPub protocol, these are digital hedgerows that survived the scorched earth. They are messy, collaborative, and unmonetized. That’s their strength, that’s what the #fashernistas to often don’t get – they can’t sell what they can’t own.

The #geekproblem here is fatal, in both the grassroots and the #dotcons, too many technologists are blind to the politics in their code. In the #mainstreaming, they build better tools for corporations that destroy the commons. Over and over again. The solution? For the grassroots coders, compost the #techshit, seed something else, and reclaim what was always ours. As when we lift the lid, the #dotcons mess our unthinking #fashernistras, #NGO geeks call the internet is simply a thin veneer on top of what is actually ours, the #openweb

Let’s stop being polite about this. The #closedweb is a crime scene. The platforms we rely on are bonfires of common culture, feeding the engines of the next wave of control. If we don’t remember how we got here, we can’t get out. It’s time to say it plain: The privatized web is a #deathcult, and only a #4opens reboot can bring life back.

An article: https://johl.io/blog/enclosures-and-the-open-web

We do need tools to share to help people on the path back onto the #openweb

The struggle to grow the #Fediverse and this #openweb reboot has never been about technology alone – it’s always been about narrative, framing, and belonging. If we want people to step away from the toxic silos of the #closedweb and #dotcons to step into something better, we need more than protocols and servers – we need invitations.

That’s why it’s good to see the redesigned onboarding experience at Fedidb.com/welcome. I had a quick look at it, and it seems to be a “native” practical tool we can share and use, not just as a gateway into the #Fediverse, but as a wider entry point into the ecosystem of the #openweb.

For too long, onboarding to the Fediverse has been a confusing, even alienating experience for newcomers. Too much #NGO pushing of “branding” too many choices, not enough context. Geeky terms like “ActivityPub” and “instance” are clear to us, but for the uninitiated, they create a wall instead of a welcome. We need more and better, Fediverse onboarding to give new people a structured, thoughtful, and human-first guide to joining this #humanistic diverse and decentralized space.

But here’s the real value, it’s not just technical hand-holding, it’s about cultural translation. This is why language matters: #Fediverse vs #Openweb. While “Fediverse” is a useful term, it points to specific protocols and tribal communities – it doesn’t always resonate beyond our circles. It can sound cryptic, niche, or overly geeky. That’s why it’s helpful to expand the use of the term #openweb alongside it.

The #openweb is bigger than any one path. It’s a historical vision – built on a history of cooperation rather than control, of federation instead of centralization. It’s the contrast to the #closedweb, where corporate algorithms shape what we see, and people and community freedom is traded for convenience and profit. Framing this as a cultural and political distinction helps move the conversation from tech choice to social movement.

Using #openweb helps make the values of the Fediverse legible to a wider public, openness, transparency, interoperability, and community control. And it opens the door to include other aligned projects – peer-to-peer tools, decentralized publishing, grassroots governance – that don’t neatly fit under the “Fediverse” label, but absolutely belong in the same garden.

Tools alone aren’t enough – But they help. Let’s be clear, no onboarding tool, however well-designed, can solve the challenges we face in building a vibrant, humane alternative to the #dotcons. This is not a tech issue – it’s a social, political, and cultural one. But non branded tools like this matter, are a good step, because they lower the barrier to entry. They help us welcome people in, especially those who want to leave the toxic platforms behind but don’t know where to go or how to start.

We should treat this onboarding page as compost, part of the broader cycle of growth. It helps new people take root, connect, and contribute. And as they do, we need to support them not just technically, but socially, through trust-based networks, clear values, and open processes. This is how we build resilience. This is how we grow real alternatives.

So yes, this is something we can share. With friends, with family, with disillusioned Twitter refugees or burned-out Instagram doom scrollers. But more than that, it’s something we can build on. The #Fediverse is a living, breathing project. The #openweb is the soil it grows in.

Share the link: https://fedidb.com/welcome

Bridging alt and mainstreaming: A note on the shape of resistance

There’s a nice post by Elena Rossini’s, “This is what resistance to the digital coup looks like.” she is commitment to the #Fediverse, #FOSS tools, and open publishing solutions, and her critique of #VC-funded platforms like #Substack and #Bluesky is needed. At the same time, it’s worth pausing to reflect on how we talk about these things, particularly when we’re speaking to an emerging audience, still navigating the gap between centralized tech and more native, grassroots tools. Because while we do need clarity, we also need care. Otherwise, we risk turning signal into noise.

Rossini’s article is a good example of how alternative infrastructure begins to reach broader consciousness. Many of the platforms she champions – Ghost, Beehiiv, and even certain curated Mastodon experiences – fall within or adjacent to the broad #4opens networks. They are a part of the solution. But they also carry baggage. Some are corporate-lite. Some depend on foundation funding. Some straddle a line between truly open and VC-sanitized.

This isn’t a problem per se, but it’s important to be transparent about it, many of us in the radical grassroots space, those nurturing compost heaps of alternative media, peer publishing, and federated community infrastructure – have seen what happens when clarity is lost. The #NGO-ization of resistance. The capture of the #openweb by polite #PR. The story gets smoothed out, the needed risk disappears, and the power we need to shift can simply be adapted and absorbed.

Let’s name the agendas, kindly. We’re not calling anyone out, quite the opposite, this is a call in. A reminder that it’s polite and politically grounded to acknowledge the agenda and position of the tools we use, even more so the ones we promote. Are they native to the grassroots? Are they part of a transitional bridge? Are they compromised in some ways?

Rossini’s argument – that using Substack and Bluesky while denouncing Big Tech sends a mixed message – is fair. But the same critique could be gently extended to Ghost and Beehiiv, too. These aren’t immune from #mainstreaming pressures. If we want to build a truly alternative infrastructure, we have to be honest about what’s native, what’s transitional, and what’s being branded as “alternative” without any deeper roots.

The #4opens as compass, one tool that helps us make these distinctions is the #4opens: open source, open data, open process, and open standards. It’s not a purity test, nothing ever should be, but it gives us a compass. A way to orient ourselves as we navigate the mess. A platform might look open because it feels different from Big Tech. But if it lacks open process, if its governance is closed or opaque, then it’s not truly part of the alt path. If it uses open source code but locks users into proprietary hosting or hidden metrics, that’s worth noting too.

This doesn’t mean we throw out every tool that doesn’t tick all four boxes. It means we contextualize. At best, we practice a kind of digital literacy that includes politics, power, and history, not just user experience. Clarity is compost, Rossini’s voice is part of a broader chorus rising in defence of a better “native” web. That’s good news, but let’s make sure that as more people join this space, we compost the confusion, not spread more of it, some things you might want to do as good practice:

Choosing native language when we can (use “open publishing” or “independent Fediverse platforms” rather than brand names as default). #openweb is a powerful statement in itself as it contrasts to #closedweb.
Naming the agendas behind the platforms we use or promote.
Valuing bridges, but not confusing them for destinations.
Practicing digital humility, so we can learn without defensiveness.

There’s little clarity to begin with, let’s help each other work through the compost, with bare feet and open minds, toward something truly rooted in the commons. And yes this will mean dirty feet and hands 🙂

#TED – A Community of Delusions

The mess we make – capitalism and climatechaos

The current extreme inequality between rich and poor isn’t a bug in the system – it’s a feature of capitalism. It’s not just inevitable, it’s desirable for those who benefit from it. The structure is built to concentrate wealth and power for the #nastyfew at the top, while extracting labour and resources from the grassroots at the bottom. A contemptible disregard for those less fortunate is the design, not some unfortunate side effect our #NGO’s tell us about.

Take a walk through any city, and you’ll see it in the gleaming skyscrapers rising above sprawling slums. In places like Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, or Cape Town, the inequality is visible at a glance. But even in the Global North, it’s masked behind fences, zoning laws, and digital walls. Capitalism excels at keeping suffering hidden or aestheticized so the few who grow fat don’t have to think about it.

With #climatechaos as the planet continues to heat up, these divisions are only becoming more grotesque. Climate change, driven by the lifestyles and consumption habits of the Global North, will over the next 20 years be felt much more in the Global South. Rich countries, like ourselves in the UK, will continue to talk about carbon neutrality and green energy transitions, while still pushing our use of pollution-heavy industries and extracting rare earth minerals into poor nations, leaving growing environmental and human devastation in their wake.

Examples are everywhere:

Electronic waste, of our shiny new gadgets which we replaced every year or two, but where do the old ones go? Places like Agbogbloshie in Ghana, one of the world’s largest e-waste dumps, for children to pick through toxic waste for scraps of metal, breathing in fumes and dying young.
Fast fashion, cheap clothes from brands like H&M or Zara, are made in sweatshops in Bangladesh or Cambodia, where workers earn a few dollars a day, labouring in unsafe conditions that led to tragedies like the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013.
Climate displacement, sea levels, floods, droughts, and extreme weather events are forcing millions to migrate. Communities in the Pacific Islands are disappearing beneath the sea, while African farmers face collapsed food systems. Yet, it should be obvious that they’re the ones who contributed least to the crisis. And when they try to migrate for survival, they’re met with growing border walls and dehumanization.

This isn’t an accident, it’s how this nasty unthinking path works – externalize the damage, push it as far away as possible, and then build walls, digital and physical, to keep the consequences out of sight. Whether it’s the child labour behind our smartphones, the communities poisoned by oil pipelines, or the forests razed for palm oil, these are the visible costs of our convenience. That is if we look at all. In this mess of a path, capitalism is a system of organized forgetting. It turns ecosystems into commodities, people into data points, and suffering into an acceptable byproduct. The #nastyfew, and in this context this is meany of us, get to live in curated bubbles of comfort, while the damage is made invisible – outsourced, decontextualized, and sanitized.

Best not to keep being a prat about this.

And let’s be clear, climate change isn’t a technical problem in need of genius innovation. We already know what causes it – our addiction to fossil fuels, deforestation, industrial agriculture – and we’ve had the solutions for decades: political change and challenge to reduce emissions, transition to renewables, protect ecosystems, and radically change consumption patterns. So when people talk about “putting our brightest minds on solving climate change,” they’re both deluded and deflecting. This isn’t about a lack of intelligence or ideas; it’s about wilful political paralysis and #nastyfew vested interests. Those in power cant think outside of private escape bunkers in New Zealand. It’s not a knowledge gap – it’s a power and values gap. And that’s the much harder issue that we need to compost.

Tech governance fails, its pastime to compost the mess

The last 20 years of tech governance projects keep missing the mark because they refuse to engage with the real, lived experiences of grassroots activists and community builders. Instead of listening, they fall back into the comfort zones of the #geekproblem: control over collaboration, certainty over-curiosity, code over community.

This is further compounded by the “professional” #NGO class of detached, branding-obsessed, and career-driven #mainstreaming. They claim to serve communities but remain disconnected from the daily struggles, uncertainty, and messiness that define grassroots organizing. These people aren’t building relationships; they’re building resumes.

If they could stop and actually listen to those of us who’ve been in the trenches, those who’ve composted decades of failures and seeded collective wins, they’d quickly see the futility of their rigid, technocratic paths. Real governance isn’t found in plush committee rooms or geeky blockchains. It always emerges from shared struggle, radical trust, and the mess of collaboration.

Until tech governance initiatives shift focus, from control to cooperation, from professional advancement to collective empowerment, they will continue to fail. Worse, they will undermine the communities they claim to support. And let’s be honest, it’s well past time to compost the last ten years of #encryptionist fantasy-making as a first step.

The #OGB (Open Governance Body) was created as a response to this mess making. Rooted in the #4opens principles, it challenges the false promises of #blockchain and #DAOs, which replicate the worst aspects of capitalist market logic, financialization, scarcity, and the concentration of power. Tokens and ledgers are not the future of grassroots governance, they’re its co-option.

We need to actively resist these technological distractions because we know that community is not code. And governance is not a smart contract. We need grassroots paths that reflect gift economies, mutual aid, and social trust, not digital casinos. The truth is that still too many #mainstreaming #NGO types are more interested in branding their codebases and instances than actually serving the messy, vibrant, collective reality of the #openweb as it exists.

That’s why we need the #OMN (Open Media Network). Because governance, media, and tech are not separate, they’re bound together. The #OMN path is about rooting our tools in real communities, building trust over time, and composting the failed hype cycles of the last decade.

If we want an #openweb that matters, we have to dig deeper. Start local. Share power. And stay messy.

Without discomfort, we won’t challenge the system we’re still living inside

A problem we’ve inherited from the last ten years of corporate social media, the #dotcons, is the toxic confusion of the personal and the public. Platforms like #Facebook and #Twitter blurred the lines between private conversation and public broadcasting, monetizing both as if they were the same. That mess wasn’t accidental; it was profitable.

Unfortunately, we’ve reproduced this mess on the #Fediverse without properly composting it first. What does that mean? We’ve taken this tangled, unhealthy paths and rebuilt them with new tools, many of them open-source, but we haven’t separated the core issues or composted the conceptual issue. As a result, we still see confusion around what content belongs in the public commons and what should stay private. People are still posting as if they’re in a private chat while standing on a soapbox, or trying to gate keep public news through private group dynamics.

The reality is: we already have a clear, simple solution.

The Fediverse is public. It is for public media, public conversation, news, projects, what we want to share with the world.
Encrypted chat apps (like Signal) are for private communication, what we want to keep between individuals or trusted groups.

This needs to be simple #KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid, but instead, we have well-meaning but unthinking devs and users trying to remix the worst of #dotcons culture, mushing together public and private spaces, throwing moderation at everything like it’s a catch-all fix, and muddying the waters of what these networks are actually for.

This is not innovation, it’s common crap behavior inherited from systems built to manipulate, monetize, and pacify us all. If we want more of real, trusted, meaningful media, we have to get back to basics: public news needs to be built on #4opens, and it needs to be created, distributed, and discussed in public spaces.

That’s why projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB (Open Governance Body), and the #indymediaback reboot matter. They offer paths where grassroots, trust-based publishing thrives again, outside #NGO capture and corporate control and enclosure.

With this change in mind, why the #Deathcult Hashtag?

People often ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult so much. It’s provocative, yes, but it’s not just for shock value. It’s a term that names the dominant ideology of the last 40 years: #neoliberalism. An ideology so pervasive that most people can’t even see it any more, even while it’s actively eroding the very values they claim to be upholding.

You see this when a liberal proudly buys “organic” yogurt at Safeway while supporting systems that are destroying the planet. That’s not just irony, that’s the entire logic of the deathcult. It’s the normalization of destruction wrapped in “ethical” branding. And no, it’s not just the yogurt, that’s just the joke. It’s everything: our phones, our work, our schools, our activism.

If you can’t find a part of your life untouched by the deathcult, it’s because it has touched everything. That’s why the hashtag exists: to make people uncomfortable. Because without that discomfort, we won’t challenge the roots of the system we’re all still living inside.

This movement isn’t about reinventing wheels, it’s about returning to native paths. The public internet worked before. Let’s compost the #techshit by usefully separating the public from the private, and rebuild the “native” path on clear, #4opens foundations.

We can do better, we already know how, let’s stop pretending we don’t.

Not to punish the individuals, but to highlight the groups to compost

In tech, the last 20 years have been a mess of #fashernista trends and the ongoing #geekproblem, a compost heap of broken promises and abandoned projects. It’s obvious if you lift the lid and really look. The glossy hype fades fast, the rot underneath remains.

Much of what we call “innovation” ended up as #techshit – rushed, bloated, short-sighted code that needs serious composting if we’re going to grow anything real. #Openweb dreams have been buried under a #dotcons landfill.

The real challenge now isn’t just pointing at the pile (fun as that can be), it’s handing the next generation proper shovels – real tools, real critical thinking, real spaces for building rooted, resilient, open tech.

One of the most corrosive problems on the path to rebooting the #openweb is the nasty, unconscious blocking that seeps through all #mainstreaming and careerist #NGO spaces. It’s not usually overt, it doesn’t come with a clear “no.” It comes with silence, with being ignored. With polite nods and a quick pivot back to safe, fundable, middle-of-the-road ideas that don’t rock the boat. This is how real change is smothered, how compost we need becomes concrete we are trying to break up.

Whenever something grassroots or genuinely native pushes into these spaces, say, someone trying to move beyond the stale copycat platforms, or raising the obvious problems with #dotcons being repackaged as “innovation”, the response is a passive-aggressive wall of non-engagement. These spaces are deeply allergic to anything that makes the comfort of #mainstreaming uncomfortable.

And you don’t shut up? If you insist on making the mess visible and pushing for something that might actually shift the culture? That’s when it escalates.

Ad hominem attacks begin — you’re “angry,” “difficult,” “not constructive.”

Technical blocking follows — defederation, closed chat groups, funding gatekeeping.

Eventually, it cycles back to the default tactic: ignoring you again.
Because ignoring is easy. Ignoring doesn't threaten careers or grant cycles. Ignoring keeps the status quo safe.

But this leaves the real mess in place, the rot stays buried under layers of “positive vibes,” #PR-driven governance proposals, and performative inclusivity that actually excludes anyone who doesn’t play within broken systems.

This creates perfect conditions for the rise of the #fashernistas, the well-meaning tech influencers, safe radicals, and trendy projects that suck up time, focus, and resources while producing little more than reheated versions of things that already failed. And the cycle repeats:

Grassroots tries to engage.
Gets blocked.
#Fashernistas fill the vacuum.
Compost becomes glittery sludge.

We’ve need to more loudly name this cycle for what it is, a defence mechanism for comfort and careerism, not care or community. And it’s antithetical to the kind of messy, living compost that grows something new. The #openweb needs real pushback, we need native tools, radical simplicity, open processes, and yes – a tolerance for discomfort. Because without discomfort, there is no transformation. Let’s keep making the mess visible. Let’s stop being “ignored” quietly. Let’s build outside the polite paths, where nothing changes.

After working in this area for 20 years, am tempted to list the people I have worked with, outlining good and bad paths they have pushed projects in. do you think this might be useful, not to punish the individuals, but to highlight and illustrate the groups we need to compost on going.

A hopeful note: some #fashernistas are starting to apologize and acknowledge the mess. That’s good compost material too. Let’s keep composting. Let’s keep planting.

We need to shape native paths, not recreate #fashionista ones with shinier branding

We’ve got a new bunch of #mainstreaming tech devs flooding into the #Fediverse. Some from burned-out Big Tech, some from the academic funding circuits, some just looking for the next shiny project after the #AI hype wore thin.

Now, this could be good. IF even a few of them started working on native, grassroots tech – tools built for and by the communities who actually use them, not just more #dotcons platform clones.

Right now, we’re at a turning point. The first wave of the Fediverse was all about copying the #dotcons:

#Mastodon as “ethical Twitter”

#PeerTube mimicking YouTube

#Mobilizon as a Facebook Events replacement

#Lemmy doing Reddit but federated

All of this was necessary, it helped people jump ship and start imagining life beyond the dotcons. But that wave is peaking, and the second step is overdue. That next step? It’s about original, grassroots infrastructure. A federated trust graph instead of reinventing karma points or like-buttons. Protocols for local-first publishing, like the #p2p side of the #OMN or radical #4opens-inspired news and tools for community trust flows, moderation and accountability, rooted in values, not corporate TOS and PR management. Infrastructure for interoperability and redundancy, so projects don’t die when a maintainer burns out or a server goes down

But here’s the risk, if the new #devs only copy the #dotcons AGAIN, it’s a fail. Worse still, if they get sucked into the #NGO vampire nests, the slow, bureaucratic funding black holes of the worst paths of #nlnet and #NGI, we’ll just see more “safe” projects that burn grant money building tools nobody uses.

Let’s be clear, these institutions do some small good, on basic infrastructure, but their #NGO sides are hoovering up resources by pushing for risk-free deliverables, and ignore the actual needs of grassroots groups. This funding is way too often shaped by #mainstreaming politics and careerism, not lived practice. We’ve seen it before, and we’re seeing it again.

What we need now are tools that grow from compost, not code sprints. Tools built from social use, not tech fashion. We need radical simplicity, transparency, and flexibility, tech that can’t be easily co-opted by the forces we’re trying to move beyond.

So if you’re a dev stepping into this space, welcome. But please don’t make another Mastodon, but with more “privacy” or #AI features. Instead, work with those who’ve been composting here for years. Build with the messy, weird, and beautiful people who need to shape new paths, not, boringly, recreate the old ones with shinier branding.

Messy language feeds back into our messy culture

The #blocking of current action, the constant stalls, confusion, and fragmentation, has a lot to do with the mess our use of language makes. And the deeper issue is how this messy language feeds back into our culture, which then loops back to make the language even murkier. It’s a feedback loop that clouds meaning, erodes trust, and paralyses collective action.

The last 40 years of postmodernism and neo-liberalism have made this worse. #Postmodernism chipped away at the idea of shared reality, leaving us with endless interpretation and “personal truths.” #Neoliberalism, on the other hand, commodified everything, including language itself, into marketing, spin, and #PR. Together, they’ve hollowed out words like “community,” “freedom,” and even “change,” to the point that we barely recognize what they mean any more.

Take “mutual aid” for example, a term grounded in deep solidarity and reciprocal responsibility. Now, on both #dotcons and #openweb platforms, it gets reduced to casual crowdfunding and anonymous asks, with little relational context. Not bad, but far from what it could and needs to be.

If we want affinity-based action to work, if we want people to come together and trust and act together, then we have to compost this mess. And the way to do that might be surprisingly simple #KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid, not stupid as in naive, but stupid as in clear.

We need to reclaim simple language that carries shared meaning. This is exactly what we’re trying to seed with the positive side of the #hashtag story. Hashtags can act as anchors in this storm of abstraction. They cut through noise, bring us back to the root meaning, and allow collective orientation without needing corporate gatekeepers or institutional filters.

Think:

#4opens — a shorthand for open code, open data, open governance, open standards.
#deathcult — pointing to the suicidal path of #neoliberalism.
#techshit — composting the mess, not throwing it away.
#nothingnew — slowing tech churn, reclaiming meaningful pace and paths.

Each of these tags points to deeper, shared narratives that are simple, but not simplistic. They invite action, not confusion. Compost the abstraction. Regrow clarity. Reclaim trust paths in both tech and social spaces. Speak simply, act clearly, hashtag wisely with intention.

On this working path, It is important for the progressives and radicals to come together and focus on the real issues and challenges facing society, rather than fighting among ourselves. Finding this balance between being “nice” and being “nasty” is key to being effective in bringing about any lasting social change.

The #hashtags embody a story and worldview rooted in a progressive and critical perspective on technology and society. They highlight the destructive impact of neoliberalism (#deathcult) and consumer capitalism (#fashernista) on our shared lives, while promoting the original ideals of the World Wide Web and early internet culture (#openweb).

The #closedweb critiques the for-profit internet and its harmful social consequences, while #4opens advocates for transparency, collaboration, and open-source principles in tech development.

The #geekproblem tag draws attention to a cultural tendency in tech: where geeks, absorbed in their tools and logic, overlook the broader social effects of their creations. This feeds into #techshit, where layers of unnecessary complexity pile up, further distancing people from tech’s social roots. Meanwhile, #encryptionists critiques the knee-jerk reaction that “more encryption” is always the answer, reinforcing control and scarcity, rather than liberating people and community.

Together, hashtags tell a coherent and powerful story. They call for a more humane, collaborative, and transparent approach to both technology and society.

#nothingnew asks whether constant innovation is the right path — or if we need to slow down and improve what already works.

#techchurn names the cycle of flashy, redundant tech that fails to solve core issues.

#OMN and #indymediaback point toward an Open Media Network — and a revival of the radical, decentralized media that once rivalled corporate media on the early web.

#OGB stands for Open Governance Body, an invitation to practice grassroots, transparent, community-led decision-making.

It’s an ambitious but needed path and goal, to build social tech networks that “fail well”, meaning they fail in a way that can be fixed by the people, through trust and collective action, not closed-source patches and corporate updates. The #OMN’s focus is human-first. Tech comes second, as a mediator, a tool, not the destination.

Yes, the #geekproblem is real. Technical expertise becomes a gatekeeping mechanism. But tech can also empower, if we design for simplicity, accessibility, and community-first paths and values. The only working path is simple, trust-based, and human. That’s why we keep coming back to #KISS.

Why haven’t we been dealing with this for the last 10 Years? Over the past decade, we’ve lived in a state of quiet paralysis. Climate change, ecological collapse, technological overreach, all of it loomed. And instead of digging in, we froze. Well-meaning people chose fear over action. Understandably. But fear is a poor foundation for building anything sustainable.

We’re on this site to only blame – we’re here to compost. The problem? We stopped critiquing. We stopped examining the tools in our hands. Not only that, but we bought into the illusion that #NGO paths and tech would save us. That shiny apps and startup culture could greenwash a better future. And when the results disappointed, we turned inward, stopped questioning, and left things to rot.

But what if that rot could be composted? By using the #4opens – open data, open code, open standards for open governance, we have a practical framework to call out and compost the layers of #techshit that have built up. Tech that divides us, tech that distracts us, tech that damages the planet and calls it progress. Yes, like gardening, composting takes time. It smells at first. It’s messy. But give it care, and you get soil. Soil to plant better ideas in. Soil for hope.

One of the reasons we haven’t made progress is the #geekproblem, a narrow slice of technically-minded culture mad up of (stupid)individuals, which so far have dominated the design and direction of our tools. They mean well, often. But in their obsession with technical elegance and “solutions,” they’ve sidelined the social and the ecological. What’s left is a brittle, sterile infrastructure, constantly churning out newness without any substance.

Meanwhile, #stupidindividualism has flourished, encouraged by #dotcons social media systems built for engagement, not connection. These silos encourage performance over solidarity, branding over community, and endless scrolling over doing. We’ve all felt it.

And most activist groups, instead of resisting this tide, drank the #NGO poison, chasing funding, watering down their goals, professionalizing their resistance until it became another logo in a funding application. We’ve lost a decade to fear, distraction, and capture. But it’s maybe not too late.

We have the tools, in the #ActivityPub based #Fediverse. We have the frameworks, the #4opens can guide us to rebuild with transparency, collaboration, and care. The hashtags like #geekproblem, #techshit, #nothingnew, and #OMN give us a shared vocabulary for critique and regeneration. They point to a web where people, not platforms, hold power, and where technology serves life, not control. Let’s stop being afraid to critique. Let’s stop outsourcing responsibility and get on with composting.

Because that’s where the soil of a better path will come from.

A letter from the margins of the #openweb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#RIPENCC #NGI #NLnet