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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 (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 app 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.
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, embraces friction, understands that governance isn’t something you tack on later, it’s something you live through, build with, and struggle over, together.
If we’re going to have a real #openweb, we can’t keep mimicking the logic of #dotcons, or #NGO platforms and empires. We have to build our own paths, grounded, imperfect, resilient.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
In the world of decentralised, peer-to-peer, and federated networks, from the Fediverse to grassroots projects like the #OMN, moderation works differently. It’s not a matter of top-down control or terms-of-service written by #process lawyers. Instead, the basic unit of moderation is trust – and this shifts everything.
Yes, we need practical moderation tools – blocking, filtering, reporting, curation – the whole established toolkit. But more importantly, we need to root these tools in a tech shaped culture of care, responsibility, and openness. This is where the #4opens come in:
Open data
Open source
Open standards
Open process
These aren’t #FOSS buzzwords, they’re guides to building (tech) trust in messy, real-world communities. In this path, you don’t have many hard “rights” in the liberal legalistic sense, there’s no authority swooping in to save you. Instead, you build #DIY community “safety” through the act of creating and sustaining relationships of trust. You find people. You then build a crew to join or establish norms and commoning practices.
This isn’t a call to abandon boundaries, it’s the opposite. You draw your boundaries with others and work to hold those, with #4opens bridges in place. You don’t demand control over others, you build spaces that work for you and find ways to federate, connect, and mediate with others doing the same. Your rights are your relationships. Your safety is your crew. Your power is your network.
This is the #KISS path – Keep It Simple, Stupid – agen, not in a naive way, but in a native way. It’s the opposite of the bureaucratic, compliance-obsessed, legal control systems of the #dotcons and the #NGO gatekeepers. Those are alien models people keep trying to drag into our “alternative” spaces and paths. And every time we do, we replicate the very systems we claim to oppose.
We don’t need more frictionless tech platforms with “Trust & Safety” departments that answer to advertisers and #PR teams. We need open communities of care, rooted in shared values, transparency, and mutual responsibility. On this path its about working to compost the mess and growing something else.
This is how moderation works in a decentralised network, not by pretending we’re neutral, but by showing up with care and accountability. It’s messier, more human, and it works, when we let it.
On this path, we need a reboot of the #Indymediaback Infrastructure. As a core to reboot the radical media commons. Bring back trust based publishing, peer moderation, and local focus Why? Because #mainstreamin media isn’t neutral – it mainstreams the crisis while making resistance invisible. We need native alternatives.
If you need a working definition of the #geekproblem, it’s the habit, no, the reflex, of putting the social side of tech outside of tech. It’s the behaviour of someone sticking their head in the sand and mumbling, “That’s not my department.” It’s “I just write the code.” It’s “We’re neutral tools.” It’s “Let’s keep politics out of it.”
This isn’t just naivety, it’s a deep, culturally reinforced avoidance of responsibility. And it’s one of the key reasons why even alternative tech replicates the same failures and power structures as the mainstream.
Worse, this behaviour is too often mainstreamed in the alt-tech spaces themselves, turned into best practice by #NGO people who should know better. It becomes active #blocking of any progress on alternative paths. New governance? Too political. Radical accountability? Too messy. Grassroots involvement? Too slow. Let’s just build it and hope for the best.
We can’t afford this any more, in the midst of #climatechaos, rising authoritarianism, and the enclosure of digital commons, building better tools without building better relationships, better communities, and better politics is a dead-end.
This is the core of the #geekproblem, and if we’re serious about anything more than shiny toys, it’s something we must talk about at our conferences, meetups, and hackathons. Let’s stop pretending code is apolitical, let’s start with this: tech is social, or it is very likely more wortless #tecshit.
Let’s be blunt, “inclusive” tech/#NGO events talk about change but don’t platform the people doing the hard, messy work of building this path. This is a real problem, rooted in comfort, control, and careerism.
Radical grassroots projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN) exist precisely to challenge the #mainstreaming mess, not to dress it up. We aren’t here to repeat feel-good slogans and deliver polished #PR. We’re here to offer lived solutions grounded in the #4opens and decades of collective, hands-dirty work.
So why should OMN and similar voices be invited in?
We speak from the grassroots, not the conference stage.
We build tools that people have historically used, not just write funding proposals about.
We hold space for #DIY, for #p2p, for real change, not only the reform theatre.
If your event doesn’t include these voices, like almost all of them, it’s the #mainstreaming problem of locking out knowledge, networks, and resistance, which the events #PR claims to support. This clearly makes the people involved into hypocrites.
On a positive, #KISS, this doesn’t need to be a fight, let’s make events better together. Can you imagine real dialogue between grassroots builders and NGO funders? Imagine shared workshops where friction leads to function, messy, honest space that acknowledges power dynamics – and really then starts to do something about this mess.
Want a better event?
Put grassroots groups on the stage, not just in the audience.
Pay people for their time — especially those working outside institutions.
Focus on practice, not just policy.
Drop the gatekeeping.
Build open process into your event — make your own structure accountable to the #4opens.
But, remember, we aren’t going just to play nice, to be seen, we’ll come to compost the status quo, and plant something that might actually grow. Let’s try and maybe do this right, please.
In this accelerating collapse – where #climatechaos spirals and #neoliberalism guts the very idea of society – we urgently need to confront a painful truth: it’s simple, the #nastyfew are a parasite class. And that this class feeds on the very foundations of well-being, survival, and joy that the majority of the global population desperately needs. They are the ones who keep the engines of destruction humming, not out of necessity, but out of greed and fear of irrelevance. These people and their institutions flourish precisely because most of us are lost in the distractions of #mainstreaming and false hopes of reform.
The big picture is Capitalism’s global predation – Zooming out, this is the capitalist class – those who own, hoard, and manipulate the resources, labour, and attention of billions. They weaponise economics, push debt, drive resource wars, and now greenwash their way through #climatecollapse while investing in bunkers and surveillance. They bankroll right-wing populism and push for austerity, while lobby for tax cuts as profits soar.
The close-up: People you might know, zoom in, and things get messier. This parasitic drive isn’t only held by billionaire industrialists. In many cases, it’s people close to us, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes not. These are the minor functionaries of capital, the wannabe gatekeepers, and the careerists who believe that “playing the game” will protect them from collapse.
In tech, it is clearer, parasites wearing hoodies. The Bitcoin Bros: Obsessively libertarian, they fetishise decentralisation while promoting hyper-individualist economics that mirrors the worst of Wall Street. They talk about freedom but build systems of exclusion, greed, and extraction. If you spend your energy pushing #crypto as liberation while ignoring ecological and social costs, you are enabling the parasite class – and likely dreaming of becoming one.
#Dotcons Executives: The Zuckerbergs, Bezoses, and Musks of the world are obvious examples. But look further down the food chain: the startup bros who pivot endlessly looking for #VC buyouts, the marketing execs who gut communities for ad metrics, the devs who code endless optimisations to squeeze more value out of users. If your business model depends on surveillance, addiction and enclosure, you’re the problem.
The careerist #NGO tech elitists: Yes, even the “good” sector can be captured. NGO professionals who endlessly hold conferences and produce whitepapers while blocking actual grassroots projects. They take seats at tables designed to exclude the people doing real, messy, transformative work. They don’t oppose the #nastyfew; they stabilise their control.
So what do we do? First, see clearly, name the parasitism. Understand that systems don’t just fail; they are designed to benefit the few and contain the many. Second, build bridges away from this mess – rooted in the #4opens: open data, open source, open process, and open standards. This is the beginning of composting the parasite class. Third, support native projects: not the VC-funded copies or the corporate-friendly NGOs, but the messy, local, collaborative tools and networks that build resilience and joy from the ground up. Projects like #IndymediaBack, #OMN, and others pushing against the tide are places to start.
Because in the end, the parasite class only exists as long as we feed it.
