Q. I am looking for the definition of open standards, and it’s quite foggy. I found on opensource.com something useful, but it’s still a candle in the dark
A. it’s an under resourced process for the #openweb that need input. It’s at the heart of the #OMN project. How we define it at the #OMN is a standard produced with #4opens process which is a bit circler as open “industrial” standards is one of the #4opens 🙂
All “standards” are social agreements/consensuses thus they CANT BE built form #geekproblem#stupidindividualism and the #deathcult we have wasted and will waste more time if we keep pushing this shit.
The idea of the #OMN is that it does NOT host any/meany of projects it incubates rather it is the “holder” of the standards that glues the projects together. Some of these will be “standards body” some will be defacto by use and consensus. In the end we need to look beyond #nothingnew and create new standards #4opens body’s – go slow on this as concessions are hard and only worthwhile if you do the hard work to achieve them.
Too much built in alt-radical tech ends up feeding pointless #fashernista churn. New platforms, new protocols, new branding, new codebases tend to be endless motion with very little grounding in actual social need. People mistake novelty for progress, and the result is a constant cycle of abandoned projects, burnt-out developers, and fragmented communities.
That’s one of the reasons why #indymediaback matters. It is not another pointless radical tech project chasing fashion. It grows from the #nothingnew path, building around things that already worked socially, culturally, and politically before the current mess swallowed the #openweb.
The point of #nothingnew is not nostalgia, it’s mediation. Instead of endlessly reinventing tools and social structures, we look at existing working practices and compost the failures while keeping the value that already exists, we build from continuity rather than disruption.
For the first 5 years of the #fediverse, this often means creating #openweb replacements for existing #dotcons platforms. That has value, people need usable alternatives to corporate systems, but simply copying the logic of the #dotcons into federated code has real limits.
Code is never neutral, all code carries embedded assumptions, social relations, and ideology. When we directly replicate #dotcons platforms, we import the values of the #deathcult along with the interface design. Metrics, branding, influence economies, performative identities, engagement addiction, soft/hard hierarchies – all this gets reproduced inside supposedly “alternative” spaces.
This is where the problem needs mediating rather than denying. The path of #indymediaback is different because it starts from an existing radical social process, not from abstract tech blindness. #indymedia already had working publishing flows, distributed trust networks, collective moderation practices, and real-world activist communities. The technology existed to support those social relations, not replace them.
That means the real value of #indymediaback is not primarily the tech stack, even though the tech matters. The value is in rebuilding the social continuity that made the original project meaningful. Without that grounding, you likely just produce another empty platform that disappears into the pile of forgotten radical tech experiments.
Food for thought: the #geekproblem is often not actually interested in the #openweb as a human value network. Instead, parts of geek culture feed parasitically off the current mess – thriving on fragmentation, novelty churn, status games, and technical abstraction disconnected from lived social reality.
Feeding off the collapse of the #openweb while calling it innovation is still bowing down to the #deathcult. Seen this way, the need for change becomes clearer, that we need active mediation, not passive drift. Both carrot and stick. Support grounded projects that grow from real communities, and challenge the pointless churn that keeps draining energy away from building durable alternatives.
The #OMN is one attempt at this – a shovel for composting the inhuman mess, so something living can grow from it.
Just about all tech and political projects are pointless “A river that needs crossing political and tech – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over complexity”
A solution to this churning is “nothing new” as most of the issues we face have already been solved or at least mediated. #nothingnew and #4opens is a way of stepping away from the current tech mess. The politics is a bit more complex.
What is not pointless is an interesting challenge for tech and politics. To start this conversation, you HAVE to use the #4opens to remove 99.9% of the #dotcons#NGO and #fashernista fluff.
The is NO conversation before you do this. When this is done you need to look at the #geekproblem, which is both a curse and a delight.
The #OMN is built from the experience of 30 years of working at the coal face of grassroots media and tech, its a path people can take to start the composting.
To build an #OMN site, we don’t start with platforms, features, or ideology. We start with flows. Think of the network as a system of pipes and holding tanks, with different connectors at each end. Nothing magical, nothing proprietary. The goal is that every part, in the abstract, is understandable by a reasonably normal human being – not just developers, not just managers, not just “power users”.
This is important: if people can’t picture how the system works, they can’t govern it. Obscurity always centralises power. The entire #OMN stack reduces to five functions. Everything else is interface, aesthetics, and convenience.
Link / Subscribe to a Flow
Plumbing a pipe in. This is the act of connection. You link to a flow, subscribe to a flow, or splice one flow into another. The beginning or end of a pipe can connect to any of the other functions. Flows can be local, remote, personal, collective, trusted, or experimental.
This replaces the platform model (“you are here, inside us”) with a network model (“this is connected to that”). No algorithm decides what you see. You decide which pipes you connect.
Trust / Moderate a Flow
Letting water pass, diverting it, or filtering it. A flow can pass straight through untouched, or it can be routed into a holding tank, where moderation happens. Moderation here is not binary censorship. It is sieving: shifting content to different pipes, slowing or accelerating flow, contextualising rather than deleting, applying trust decisions socially, not invisibly. Trust is not global and not abstract. It is local, situated, and reversible.
Different communities can run different sieves on the same incoming flow – and that’s a feature, not a bug.
Rollback
Draining the tank. Rollback means the ability to: remove content back to a specific point in the flow, undo aggregation decisions, withdraw objects that should not have entered the system, recover from mistakes without pretending they never happened. This is essential for collective systems. Without rollback, every error becomes a power struggle. Rollback allows accountability without permanence-as-punishment.
Edit Metadata
Shaping how water is understood downstream. Content objects are not fixed. Metadata can be added to the trailing tail of an object. This does not rewrite history – it adds context: tags, trust signals, summaries, warnings, translations, relevance markers.
Metadata determines how content is sieved, aggregated, and displayed. This is the core function of news aggregation. In #OMN, meaning emerges socially through metadata, not algorithmically through engagement metrics.
Publish Content
Adding a drop to the flow. Publishing is simply adding an object to a flow. That object may be editable or immutable, contextualised or raw, personal or collective. The key point is that publishing does not automatically grant amplification or authority. Publication is contribution, not domination.
The Holding Tank: Storage
Behind all of this is a storage tank – a database. Nothing exotic. No “AI brain”. No mystical feed. Just stored objects moving through pipes, shaped by social decisions.
Why This Matters
That’s it. Those five functions #5f. Everything else – timelines, feeds, notifications, layouts, dashboards – is UX and UI. Think of it as macarons for news publishing: colourful, tasty, optional, and ultimately replaceable. The core stays simple because complexity is where capture happens.
There is nothing original here. This is how: plumbing systems work, electrical grids work, packet-switched networks work, and how neurons in our brains work. This is intentional. #OMN is rooted in #nothingnew because systems that survive are systems people already intuitively understand.
When tech mirrors human and physical systems, it can be governed by humans – not by elitists, not by opaque expertise, not by venture capital. That’s the point.
