What should be closed? And what should never be?

A conversation about ideology, sociology, and the #openweb. Let’s start with a basic liberal framework: “Most social interactions should happen in the open. Some personal interactions should remain private.” Seems reasonable, right? That’s the position many of us think we agree on. Yet when we look at how our technology, and by extension, our society, is being built, that balance is totally out of whack. Today, more and more of life is CLOSED:

Closed apps.

Closed data.

Closed social groups.

Closed algorithms.

Closed hardware.

Closed governance.

And on the flip side, the things that should be protected, our intimate conversations, our location, our health data, are often wide open to surveillance capitalism and state control. What the current “common sense” dogma gets wrong? What is missing is the idea that mainstream tech culture, privacy absolutists, and many crypto/anarchist types:

Almost all good social power comes from OPEN.
Most social evils take root in CLOSED spaces.

When people organize together in the open, they create commons, accountability, and momentum. They make movements. When decisions are made behind closed doors, they breed conspiracy, hierarchy, abuse, and alienation.

It’s not just about what is open or closed, it’s about who controls the boundary, and what happens on each side. If we close everything… If we follow the logic of total lockdown, of defaulting to encryption, of mistrust-by-design… then what we’re left with is only the closed. This leads to a brutal truth, the powers that dominate in closed systems are rarely the good ones.
Secrecy benefits the powerful far more than the powerless. Always has.

So when we let the #openweb collapse and treat it as naive, we’re not protecting ourselves. We’re giving up the last space where power might be accountable, where ideas might circulate freely, where we might build something together.

Examples: When openness was lost. Let’s talk about a real-world case of #Diaspora vs. #RSS. 15 years ago, Diaspora emerged with crypto-anarchist hype as the alternative to Facebook. It was secure, decentralized, and… mostly closed. It emphasized encryption and privacy, but lacked network effects, openness, and simple flows of information.

In the same era, we already had #RSS, a beautifully open, decentralized protocol. It powered blogs, podcasts, news aggregators, without permission or centralized control. But the “Young #fashionistas ” of the scene shouted down RSS as old, irrelevant, and too “open.” They wanted to start fresh, with new protocols, new silos, new power. They abandoned the working #openweb to build “secure” ghost towns.

Fast-forward a decade, and now we’re rebuilding in the Fediverse with RSS+ as #ActivityPub. The same functionality. The same ideals, just more code and more complexity. That 10-year gap is the damage caused by the #geekproblem, the failure to build with the past, and for real people.

So what is the #geekproblem? At root, it’s a worldview issue. A failure to think about human beings in real social contexts. Geeks (broadly speaking) assume:

People are adversaries or threats (thus: encrypt everything),
Centralization is evil, but decentralization is always pure (thus: build silos of one),
Social complexity can be reduced to elegant protocols (thus: design first, use later).
But technology isn’t neutral. It reflects ideologies. And if we don’t name those ideologies, they drive the project blindly.

A place to start is to map your ideology, want to understand how you think about openness vs. closedness? Start by reflecting on where you sit ideologically, not in labels, but in instincts. A quick sketch:

Conservatism: Assumes order, tradition, and authority are necessary. Values stability, hierarchy, and often privacy.

Liberalism: Believes in open society, individual freedom, transparency, and market-based solutions.

Anarchism: Rejects imposed authority, promotes mutual aid, horizontal structures, and often radical openness.

None of these are “right,” but understanding where you lean helps clarify why you walk, build or support certain tools. If you’re building tools for the #openweb, these questions matter:

Do you default to closed and secure, or open and messy?

Who do you trust with knowledge—individuals or communities?

Do you believe good things come from control, or emergence?

These are sociological questions, not just technical ones, maybe start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies. Where do we go from here? Let’s bring this back to the openweb and the projects we’re trying to build, like:

#OMN (Open Media Network)

#MakingHistory

#indymediaback

#Fediverse

#P2P tools (DAT, Nostr, SSB, etc.)

All of these projects struggle with the tension between openness and privacy, between usability and purity, between federation and anarchy. But if we start with clear values, and an honest reflection on the world we want to create, we can avoid the worst traps. Let’s say it plainly:

Not everything should be open. But if we close everything, we lose what’s worth protecting.

Let’s talk: What do you think should be closed? What must be kept open at all costs? What’s your ideological instinct, and how does it shape your view of the #openweb?

Capitalism is a hostage situation -Not an economy

Our current #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t life, it’s a trap, we need a way out. In our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t own,
Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,
Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,
Pay to breathe, because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over (inspired by). That’s not a functioning economy, it’s not freedom, it’s a hostage situation, where every basic human need is held behind a transactional barrier, and the meter is always running.

This #deathcult is late capitalism: an endless stack of paywalls enclosing what used to be public, shared, and free. It isn’t just about money, it’s about control, dependency, and isolation. It’s a system that engineers artificial scarcity, so a #nastyfew can profit while the many just try to survive.

But it wasn’t always like this, for most of human history, people lived within commons-based paths, where land was collectively stewarded, food was grown and shared within communities, tools and knowledge were passed down, not patented and governance was often local and participatory.

The last 200 years of “common sense” capitalism is an enclosure of these commons, first the physical ones (land, water, food), and now the digital and social ones (communication, culture, identity). The #openweb, like the open land before it, is being fenced off. Platform by platform. App by app. Cookie banner by paywall.

This enclosure now defines much of our tech infrastructure, every scroll, click, and share is now mediated by profit-driven platforms. Even activism – once vibrant and messy – is being swallowed by slick interfaces and the same throttled feeds. Resistance is filtered, shadowbanned, deboosted, and pushed to monetize. And “our” #NGOs fighting platform power… are doing so on those same platforms.

It’s an absurdity, and worse: it’s a trap. We need alternatives, real ones. We’re not going to “ethics workshop” our way out of this. We need to rebuild the tools of everyday life – economically, digitally, socially – from the grassroots up.

Commons-based systems, let’s turn some “common sense” on it head, instead of private ownership: stewardship. Instead of scarcity: abundance through sharing. This is where projects, like The Open Media Network (#OMN) come in as a practical framework for grassroots media infrastructure:

Built on the #4opens: open data, source, standards, and governance.

Designed to decentralize publishing, and return control to local communities.

Uses both client-server and P2P bridges for accessibility and resilience.

Encourages trust-based networks over extractive platforms.

OMN is not just theory, it’s active code, messy dev, and practical tools for people to tell their own stories, host their own content, and build alternative knowledge systems outside corporate media. These technologies make community hosting the default – not the exception. They reduce reliance on fragile or compromised #dotcons infrastructure. They’re imperfect, but they’re a step out of the enclosure.

The point isn’t just tech, It’s power, capitalism doesn’t just gate resources. It enforces relationships of power. That’s why rebuilding tech without addressing governance, ownership, and access won’t get us far. The #geekproblem is real: tech that nobody can use isn’t liberation, it’s just another dead-end.

The alternative? Keep it #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), prioritize social usability over technical elegance, build bridges, not silos, return to shared ownership and open processes. Capitalism is a hostage situation, but we can walk out the door – if we build the exit together.

You’re not powerless, and this isn’t about purity or escape. It’s about building real infrastructure for real life, so when the capitalist system keeps crumbling (as it will), we’re not left scrambling. We’ll already be living differently.

#OMN #MakingHistory #4opens #openweb #p2p #indymediaback #geekproblem #commons #decentralize #cooperative #foss #degrowth #resilience

UPDATE the seed of this post was from a toot, but can’t find the original to link to due to the #UX of mastodon updating and no functioning search on my instance to find history, sorry, add in comments if you find the original. Updated

Real world tackling the #geekproblem

With rebooting the #openweb we run headfirst into the #geekproblem, a recurring pattern where: Technically brilliant people build powerful tools …but those tools remain socially unusable …or solve only geek problems, not the needs of actual communities. It’s not malice, often it’s idealism, but it creates a dead-end culture of endless prototypes, abandoned standards, and empty tech demos. Meanwhile, the real-world crisis deepens.

The work we need is bridges building, let’s try this ere “P2P news app” built on #dat Hypercore/Hyperswarm is exciting. Yes, it’s similar to Nostr in structure: distributed relays, client-side aggregation, unstoppable flow. But as with Nostr tech isn’t enough. We are social creatures. A usable system needs:

Clear use cases rooted in human relationships – not just tech possibilities.
User-facing front-ends that invite participation, not gate it.
Interoperability with existing protocols (ActivityPub, ATProto, etc.) to avoid siloing.
Bridges between architectures – e.g. client-server ↔ P2P – so that real-world adoption is gradual and survivable.

The good news, the wider #OMN project is already a sane path forward, with a #KISS hybrid path. The plan is in bridging #P2P and client-server as a way out of this. Something like:

A lightweight server bridge that serves data to client-server users (ActivityPub, fediverse, legacy web),

While simultaneously feeding a P2P mesh, with each peer storing and distributing redundant objects,

So that over time, client-server becomes the bootstrapping layer, and #P2P becomes the long-term archive + resistance layer.

“Data is just object flows – how the user gets the object is irrelevant technically.”

This is the kind of thinking that gets us out of the traps, by moving from protocols to people. This isn’t just about code, it’s about culture. The #geekproblem won’t be solved by more architecture diagrams, it needs movements that embrace imperfection and prioritizes social use, visible, working front-ends people can contribute to and understand, documentation and tooling that builds capacity in others, not silos around the brilliant few.

What next? For the devs:

Can the p2p-news-app codebase be modularized to plug into #OMN projects as a data backend, even in a basic way?

Can we bridge shared data objects across protocols (e.g. post metadata flows from P2P → ActivityPub), even if janky at first?

Can we prototype a simple but cross protocol usable frontend, the examples is the work on #makeinghistory and #indymediaback, that lets non-geeks see and touch the network they’re part of?

Yes, for the movement, keep things messy but moving. Avoid dead ends by always asking:

"How does this empower non-technical users to organize, document, and publish together?"

Keep the tech grounded in the social fabric, the activists, journalists, organisers, and rebels this is all meant to serve. If you’re reading this and thinking, “I can help,” please step forward. There’s space in wider tech/social #OMN and #MakingHistory for everyone, coders, writers, designers, testers and storytellers.

Let’s build bridges, not silos, let’s build tools people can use, not just tools geeks can admire, let’s do this together.

First step: Stop being a prat

We have strong passive #blocking forces stopping the real change and challenge we need before we have any hope of changing the world, thus we as a community have to change our stance towards this blocking. And the first step – the most important one – is painfully simple: Stop being a prat.

That means:

Stop pretending you don’t understand the stakes.
Stop making perfect the enemy of good.
Stop whining about how broken things are while refusing to touch the tools that exist.
Stop treating radical, working alternatives like they’re someone else’s hobby project.
Stop waiting for someone else to do it.

You don’t need a degree in political science or coding, or anything to see what’s happening, from floods and fascists to boat evictions and mass precarity. You don’t need permission from a foundation or a blue tick to take part, you don’t need a five-year strategy. Simple, you just need to stop being a prat, and start doing, so, what does “not being a prat” look like?

Instead of doomscrolling, publish one thing that matters using #OMN tools or paths.
Instead of performative politics, help document what’s actually happening around you in a #4opens way.
Instead of building personal brands, build open #Fediverse infrastructure that your community can use.
Instead of hiding behind cynicism, show up and collaborate – messily, imperfectly is fine, just try not to be a prat.

Why it matters, because the #nastyfew people seizing power right now, from JD Vance to the canal eviction bureaucrats, aren’t being prats. They’re serious about building institutions to shape futures. The tragedy is that our side, the ones with the heart, the vision, the history, are too often busy being clever, passive, cool, and precious, kinda like prats….

The first revolutionary act in the 2020s isn’t heroic, it’s just showing up, not being a prat, and doing the obvious things, together. This is simple, most importantly #KISS please don’t be a prat about this, thanks.

The #mainstreaming is talking about the #deathcult – So why are you still waiting?

The #mainstreaming is talking about the #deathcult – So why are you still waiting?

It took four decades of sleepwalking through #neoliberalism, cultural decay, ecological collapse, and social atomisation, but at last, the #mainstreaming is starting to talk about the #deathcult we’ve been worshipping.

Case in point: Steve Coogan – yes, Alan Partridge – is now publicly accusing Keir Starmer and Labour of “paving the way for Reform UK,” the rising hard-right threat. Here’s the article. It’s not satire, it’s despair. Coogan’s right, and a few years ago, such a comment from a mainstream celebrity would’ve seemed extreme. Today? It’s just stating the obvious.

The “centre” has collapsed. The “left” has hollowed itself out in fear. And the space where #lifecult politics might live is now overrun with fear, cynicism, and opportunism. This is the #deathcult in action, the system that tells you there is no alternative while everything burns down around you. For 40 years we’ve been taught to accept decay as progress, control as freedom, and despair as maturity.

But here’s the thing, we told you so, for people like me, and many others working on open networks, digital commons, grassroots media, and post-capitalist systems, this isn’t news. We’ve been working and talking about this for decades.

In the world I am in, we’ve already working on alternatives: Decentralised governance via the #OGB. Federated publishing through the #OMN. Ethical tech rooted in the #4opens. And a cultural path that doesn’t rely on selling your soul to #dotcons or begging #NGOs for scraps.

We weren’t trying to be ahead of the curve. We were trying to get people to notice the damn cliff. Now that we’re tumbling over it, suddenly everyone’s surprised. Now the #mainstreaming, which ridiculed or ignored these grassroots, native paths, is whispering our language, but still to often refuses to take the paths we are on.

On this continuing common sense #blocking, let’s be blunt – now is the time to stop being prats about this necessary change. No more waiting for the next electoral saviour. No more hiding behind polite inaction. No more pretending that rebranded centrism is going to save us from fascism, it won’t.

If you're reading this, you probably already know the centre won't hold. So what's stopping you?

We don’t need more think pieces, what we need is more people to get their hands dirty, pick up the tools we’ve been building, and start doing the real work. This means, in my area of tech activism:

Federating your networks.
Hosting your own content.
Engaging in horizontal governance.
Publishing with principles.
Building trust and commons, not brands and silos.

The good news? The framework paths exist, the seed communities exist, the infrastructure, with the #Fediverse is small but growing solid. What’s been lacking is you, your time, your courage, your refusal to keep being a prat, to become brave enough to take this different path.

This Isn’t about nostalgia – It’s about now. We’re not dreaming of the past, we’re recovering futures that were lost when the #dotcons, the NGOs, and the #neoliberals buried the #opwnweb’s radical possibilities under a mountain of grift and branding. This isn’t utopianism. it’s simple pragmatism, resilience. It’s how we survive the rise of the new right without defaulting into the arms of the old centre – the ones who made this mess in the first place.

And for the record, if you need reminding: In this tech path, we don’t need another “platform.” We don’t need another fake “community” run by venture capital. We don’t need more loud voices doing nothing. What we need is to take paths back to rooted, open, and federated ways of working.

This is what the #OMN and #4opens have always been about. You can ignore it for another year or two, but you won’t outrun what’s coming, better to start planting now – it’s not too late to grow something real.

The time is now, if you’re waiting for permission, this is it. The people who once called us cranks are now writing op-eds about the collapse we have seen coming for years. The centre is falling, the right is mobilising, the old paths are dead ends.

The future will be built by those who show up now.

We need you, not in six months, not after the next election, now. Stop being a prat, pick up the tools to help build the next world – before the current one burns it all down.

First step: Stop being a prat

The new right weaponizing culture: The right goes post-liberal

Let’s have a look at an example of the new mess we’re facing: JD Vance – author, venture capitalist, convert Catholic, and now Vice President. He’s not a Reaganite libertarian, nor a traditional conservative. Instead, Vance represents something more dangerous: a dogmatic ideology, born in the boardrooms of tech billionaires and the seminaries of Catholicism, forged on in the #dotcons, and now pushing American politics into very dark territory.

This isn’t politics as usual. It’s not even populism any more. While there’s grifting (of course) and plenty of weirdness to laugh at, Vance and his fellow travellers are deadly serious. They are actively wielding state power – not to protect liberal values, but to bury them. They’ve declared the Enlightenment dead. The compromise that held Western democracies together for centuries? Thrown out. In its place, they want to sack the referee and replace him with a priest, a general, and a patriarch. All under the rallying cry of “Culture in Crisis.”

Vance’s origin myth is the breakdown of the American family, as told through Hillbilly Elegy – addiction, poverty, and social collapse in the white working class. That story pushed him through the Thiel-funded ranks of the #techbro elitists. But he didn’t stop at diagnosis, the next step is to legislate culture, to grasp state power and use it to impose the narrow vision of the #nastyfew onto everyone else.

This isn’t nostalgia and posturing any more. This is a fully operational political project, rooted in religion, nationalism, and family. It’s about dismantling the old #mainstreaming and replacing it with a fortress ideology. Neutrality in courts and bureaucracy? Gone. Education? To be weaponised. History? To be rewritten. Opponents? To be punished. This is a hard right revolution, bulldozing the old order as a prerequisite for building the new. “The System Is the Enemy.” Libertarian economics are dismissed as rootless; personal liberty as decadent. Academia, journalism, and law are painted as captured by postmodern “wokeism”, a hegemonic structure that must be ripped out like a tumour.

This isn’t rhetorical. It’s actionable. Seize the Ford Foundation’s assets. Fire the civil service. Override the courts. Vance quotes Andrew Jackson: “The Chief Justice has made his ruling; now let him enforce it.” This is a revolution, not of the people, but for the #nastyfew. At its heart is a revival of ethno-nationalism. Where American identity once leaned on shared civic values, not shared blood, they now champion a mythic “homeland” of “legacy Americans” and cemetery plots. A culture you must inherit to belong. Don’t have children? You’re a “childless cat lady”, a punchline and a pariah. Public servant without offspring? Then you have “no commitment to the future.” It’s an ideological border wall: to belong, you must believe in the right God, live in a traditional family, and descend from the right people. Everyone else? Suspect, and/or disposable.

This isn’t simple reactionary, it’s counter-Enlightenment. The appeal is clear: it speaks to the spiritual hollowness of late capitalism – to the loneliness, the nihilism, the disconnection. And liberal technocracy, the ruling ideology of the last 40 years, has failed utterly to address this. The #deathcult of managerial neoliberalism left a void. Now the New Right wants to fill it, with hierarchy, obedience, and repression.

But it should be obvious that this right-wing “solution” is catastrophic. Meaning cannot be mandated by the #nastyfew. Culture cannot be enforced by fiat. Pluralism is not a flaw, it’s the messy reality of modern life. Pretending you can erase difference and enforce unity is delusional. Movements that try always end in repression, exclusion, and worse. What begins as a culture war ends as a culture purge.

A liberal view of this hard right push

So what can we do? This is where the #OMN – the Open Media Network – matters more than ever. Not to magnify the mess, but to mediate it. The #OMN is a native, grassroots alternative to both the hollow liberal centre and the authoritarian push of the right. It doesn’t build through imposition. It builds through federation, dialogue, and trust. Our path is transparent, accountable, and open-source – not sacred, secret, and top-down. Where the hard right sees liberalism’s emptiness and tries to fill it with obedience and dogma, we recognise the same void, and fill it with commons, care, and co-creation.

Please, don’t worship either the old or the new #deathcult. The #MAGA movement preaches high-control authoritarian ideology with high priests in expensive suits. This is why #openweb projects like #OMN matter more than ever. Because if we don’t build our own rooted, federated commons, our own peer-to-peer culture of meaning, then yes, the future will be built by people like JD Vance and the rotting Trump dynasty. And it won’t be a future you can simply opt out of. So stop dithering. Don’t be a prat about it. The time to build the alternative is now.

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

Trying to Remember: A Personal Reflection on Activist Histories and Memory Holes

Looking back on the activist groups I’ve been part of over the past few decades, I find myself drawn to the messy business of memory. Not nostalgia – something more grounded. A desire to trace the arc of what happened, why it happened, and what it meant, both personally and politically.

But here’s the thing, this is not easy. Many of the people I worked alongside have internalised completely different versions of events. They remember different catalysts, attribute failure or success differently, or – in some cases – choose to forget entirely. Writing about this, even with care, risks reopening bad wounds. It challenges people settled myths. It can feel unkind.

So the question nags: is it useful to try? The answer, I think, is yes. Painful, imperfect, but necessary. Because, as George Santayana reminds us: “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”

And in our small corner of the world, radical media, grassroots tech, DIY networks, we repeat ourselves a lot. The cycle problem in media activism, is one of the most frustrating things, the endless circling of behaviour. We keep reinventing wheels, reliving the same dramas, walking into traps with our eyes wide open. Why? Because we don’t do history.

Or more precisely, we don’t keep our history. Our web resources disappear, servers shut down, backups get lost, important mailing lists become unreadable, whole communities vanish overnight, and the next wave thinks they’re starting from scratch. This amnesia isn’t accidental, it’s cultural. There’s an ingrained mentality among activists: “We invented this. This is new. We’re the first.” I’ve heard this too many times from people I know to be brilliant and thoughtful. It’s not arrogance, it’s isolation. A lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer.

And the result? Every new cycle repeats the last one’s mistakes, with slightly shinier tools and worse outcomes. Liberal histories are at the centre of this activist memory hole. Another reason to write this history down is that someone else will if we don’t, and when they are outside academics or #fashernistas they’ll get it wrong.

Here’s how it works, academics and #NGOs document movements, but only when they can draw from authoritative sources, often the institutions and individuals who have managed to embed themselves in respectable spaces. It’s safer for them to focus on official reports, named leaders, funded pilot projects, or case studies with neat, too often blinded, conclusions.

But grassroots work is messy by design, it’s often anonymous, decentralised, deliberately undocumented for safety and principle. When the official histories get written, they leave out the people who made the real changes happen. And worse, they reinforce liberal myths about how progress occurs: calm reason, funding applications, polite campaigns.

In truth, many of the most effective projects I’ve been part of were born in squats, kitchens, backrooms, stormy email threads, or chaotic hacklabs. They weren’t polished, they were alive. Take #Indymedia. I was there. I helped build and maintain some of it. I watched it rise, and fall. It was a revolution in online publishing and participatory journalism. It worked, until it didn’t. What killed it wasn’t just tech debt or burnout, it was a lack of historical grounding. We didn’t know how to document our process. We didn’t know how to pass on lessons. When things fractured, there was no record to return to, just fragments and gossip.

That’s part of why I started working on the #OMN (Open Media Network), and later the #indymediaback and #makeinghistory projects. These are attempts to not forget, to build infrastructure with memory baked in, and to do it in a way that resists co-option by the #NGO industrial complex or the liberal publishing gatekeepers. They are also efforts to balance individual and collective histories, to encode the process not just the outcomes, and to ground technology in shared political practice.

Should we document activist histories? Yes, because we keep losing what we built. Yes, because the next wave needs our shoulders to stand on, not just reinvent the same platforms with a shinier interface and worse governance. Yes, because remembering is a political act.

But we should do it with care, with plural narratives, not single heroes. We need archives that respect disagreement and dissonance. We need to document failure as much as success – not as shame, but as compost.

And we need to stop assuming the truth will speak for itself, it won’t, we have to speak it, even when it’s hard. Even when others remember it differently. This is not about gatekeeping. It’s about keeping gates open for others to come through.

If you were part of those times, I invite you to write your piece of it, even if it contradicts mine, especially if it does. If you weren’t, but you’re building now – take time to look back. Ask questions, find the old code, talk to the elders, search for the backups. Document your own work as you go, don’t let it vanish. History isn’t just past, it’s infrastructure. Let’s build some together.

Rise and Fall of Grassroots #OpenWeb

The #fashionistas are coming https://yewtu.be/embed/u_Lxkt50xOg? It’s time to become more real before this inflow swamps our “native” reboot, if we let them they will consume it and shit it out as more mess. To mediate this shit storm, it’s time to act, please, feel free to repost these web posts, thanks.

To understand where the #Fediverse and the #OpenSocialWeb are heading, and how not to lose our way, we need to reflect on where we’ve come from. The history of grassroots #openweb activism offers both inspiration and hard lessons.

Foundations are built by real people, social movements start local, they begin with people on the margins – those directly affected by injustice – taking action with the tools they have. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, tech projects like #Indymedia were the blueprint: decentralized, radically open, and run by volunteers who trusted each other and worked horizontally. It worked, for a while.

Today, projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), #indymediaback, and #makeinghistory try to learn from that past. They aim to reboot media infrastructure and historical memory, powered by the #4opens: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. We need to remember that this kind of work doesn’t scale by magic, it grows from grounded trust and native infrastructure, not from #VC injections or #NGO grants.

The trap of #NGO thinking is one of the biggest reasons grassroots projects fail, co-optation. When grassroots groups chase funding, they start shifting agendas to fit the funder’s priorities. Slowly, the mission gets neutralized. Culture changes, risk-taking of change and challenge vanishes, the projects to often become empty shells wearing yesterday’s slogans.

This has happened time and again, from later #Indymedia nodes to #EU-funded tech projects that are now more about kickbox reports than what any “user” wonts or the needed basic radical change. We can’t afford to go down this path again in the current #openweb reboot, the Fediverse.

We need Spiky/Fluffy balance, mutual aid that’s not just charity, but infrastructure. That’s where the #Fediverse shines: not just as an alternative platform, but as a parallel public space for organizing, sharing, and then resisting. It has to support both spiky (radical, disruptive) and fluffy (care-focused, relational) approaches.

On these paths, memory matters, projects like #makeinghistory remind us: if we don’t remember our wins and losses, we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes. Documenting not just content but working practice, how decisions were made, what trust looked like, what failed and why – is crucial. History is not just a mirror; it’s compost.

No monoculture, today, #Mastodon is becoming the monoculture of the Fediverse. It’s not evil. But it is dominating to the point of distortion. It’s following NGO-friendly paths and watering down the radical possibilities the #openweb offers. That’s a problem. We need more balance, more useful codebases, more governance experiments. This space is meant to be a garden, not a plantation.

Security isn’t paranoia, it’s culture, security on the #openweb isn’t about creating another bureaucratic nightmare of permissions and logins. It’s about cultural practices, trust, openness, moderation by consent, and keeping things simple. Most of all, it’s about not building what you don’t need, complexity is the enemy of security.

Final thought, to build real alternatives, we need to stop chasing virality and start building resilience. Less hype, more humility. Less “engagement,” more entanglement. And always, a ruthless focus on not becoming the thing we were trying to replace. Let’s not feed the mess. Let’s compost it and grow something better.

Affective Protest vs. Effective Power: From Spectacle to Strategy

What can we learn from the current mess. The protests didn’t fail because people didn’t care. They failed because the system is not built to respond to protest, it’s built to absorb it. We’ve marched for climate justice, taken the streets for peace, rallied for gender freedom, and now we mobilize for Palestine. The awareness is unprecedented. The turnout is historic. But what has shifted?

Police powers expanded. Fossil fuel extraction accelerated, Gaza burns. The truth is: awareness is not power. That’s a bitter pill for many on the #mainstreaming liberal left, who still believe that if we just scream loud enough, someone with authority will finally listen. But listen to what? A million voices chanting through state-sanctioned routes, wrapped in #NGO branding, monitored and shaped by our mobile devices?

This isn’t failure by accident, it’s design. Modern post #neoliberal governance has perfected the art of managing dissent, it doesn’t crush opposition, it curates it. It schedules protest, builds fenced-off “free speech zones” tallies engagement for annual reports. It makes this work by funding the same nonprofits it pretends to oppose to push protest as a pageant, a performance of resistance that never practically interrupt the flows of capital.

Worse than this, it trains us into harmless routines: march, chant, selfy, hashtag on the #dotcons, disperse, donate, repeat. It pacifies rage by channelling it into metrics, and then sells those metrics back to us as success. It offers us vacuous victories made of smoke and mirrors: a viral post, a headline, a panel discussion.

But to put this simply, real power doesn’t care how you feel, it cares what you can disrupt. And right now, they know we can’t disrupt much, because power doesn’t fear signs or slogans, it fears logistics. We know this from history. The Viet Minh didn’t defeat the French colonial army with slogans. The IRA didn’t survive the British Empire through branding. The Zapatistas didn’t hold territory in Chiapas by waiting for permission. These movements did not rely on protest. They relied on operations. On strategy. On adaptability. On patience and planning.

What do we need, to shift from affective protest to effective resistance? This doesn’t mean abandoning public protest entirely, but it means recognizing what it is: a signal, not a structure. It’s the spark, not the engine. And too often, we mistake the spark for the fire.

So what does this shift look like? Stop chasing virality. Build networks that don’t rely on platforms owned by billionaires. Organize in ways that can’t be throttled or shadowbanned.
Don’t just protest; prototype. Create alternatives: cooperative farms, tool libraries, mesh networks, open media infrastructures (#OMN), community defence projects. Measure what matters. Track not followers or clicks, but mutual aid distributed, infrastructure built, people trained, tools replicated. Treat resistance like an ecosystem. Not wannabe famous (stupid)individuals shouting louder, but communities learning, adapting, and reproducing decentralized power.

In short, we need an operational culture, built not on outrage cycles but on daily commitment, iteration, and survival. This is prefigurative politics in action: we don’t beg the world to change, we build the new one inside the shell of the old. Yes, the current system will collapse. It is already collapsing. The question is no longer how to reform it, but at this stage, how to outlive it, and outgrow it.

This is where strategy matters, this is where affect must meet action. Because we aren’t here to perform resistance for an audience, we’re here to construct parallel systems in the cracks of empire. And that starts with understanding: protest alone is not enough. We must become ungovernable, not just in what we say – but in how we live.

#KISS

Get Out of the Money Economy – Rediscover the Gift Economy

If you want to live a more interesting alt life, the first most important step is to stop prioritizing “making money,” you need to step away from the money economy. This isn’t abstract theory, it’s a practical need to shift how we live, relate, and create. The best way to do this? Support and build the gift economy.

In the cash economy, value is transactional. Every act is priced, every moment potentially monetized. It trains us to hoard, to calculate, to protect, not to share. The money economy is the fuel of capitalism’s exploitative engines.

But the gift economy works differently. Here, value is rooted in trust, reciprocity, and relationship. You give what you can. You receive what you need. No receipts, no invoices, just care, commitment, and collective survival.

Oxford boater towpath screening, with food and communerty

Think food co-ops, free software, mutual aid groups, open media projects, towpath film screenings. Think #FOSS, #Indymedia, #OMN. Think friends fixing each other’s bikes. These are not fringe examples, they’re real, everyday signs of a parallel economy already alive.

The more time, skills, and energy we invest in the gift economy, the less dependent we become on extraction and scarcity. The less we need to “make money” just to survive. And the freer we are to imagine other futures. Build the gift economy, it’s a path to start to live again.

Toxic Positivity

Programming Mission: Let’s Fix the Fediverse Discovery Gap

Here’s a small but powerful challenge for #openweb builders – and a perfect #DIY project if you’re fed up with the current #geekproblem. I’ve been trying to find #Fediverse instances that actually cover my town, Oxford, UK, so I can help promote and grow them locally. You’d think this would be simple, right? But… nope.

Tried the standard “instance pickers”? Dead ends. Tried generic web searches? Useless #SEO sludge. Tried maps like this one, a good start https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/fediverse-near-me_828094#7/52.076/-1.714, but nothing covering Oxford.

Why is this happening? Because our current tools focus only on technical facts (server specs, software used, uptime, etc.) and ignore the uncontrolled (dangerous) metadata that actually makes discovery meaningful:

What’s the instance for?
Who does it serve?
What community does it represent?
Where is it rooted geographically or socially?

This is the #geekproblem in action: great code, but no way to find things people actually want to use. What’s the fix? Someone (maybe you?) could create a community-focused discovery tool that:

Encourages instance admins to tag with location, community, topics, etc.
Provides search/filter UI that works for real people, not sysadmins
Uses the Fediverse’s open standards (#ActivityPub + #microformats) to pull this info in
Maybe even integrates with OpenStreetMap or a simple opt-in geo-tagged registry
Outputs something friendly – like “Find your Fediverse community in your town”

This is not a hard project, it’s a weekend hack for someone who cares, but it has real social value as it helps bridge infrastructure to lived communities. That’s the core of the #openweb reboot.

So for people who can’t see why this matter. If we want the Fediverse to grow beyond techies and Twitter refugees, we need to help people find their people. Local discovery is key. Place-based communities are still powerful, especially when rebuilding trust, mutual aid, and shared media in a collapsing world.

So, want a simple mission? Build a tool that helps people find #Fediverse instances by town, city, or region. Start with Oxford, but make it global. Make it open. Make it federated. And when you do? I’ll be the first to push it out.

#Fediverse #OMN #openweb #4opens #FediverseDiscovery #programmingchallenge #Geekproblem #MutualAid #CodeForGood #FOSS #localweb #trustnotcontrol #KISS

Update: my suggestion of path, a simple UX:

A few dropdowns over the map,

Region (countries are regions, anti-nationalistic)
City/area (a county or city)
local (village, area in city)
Them maybe latter hyper local (but not for now)

Then we have subject – it would be normal to have a multi subject hashtag map, that updates on each click – adding the clicks to a list on the side – with “new button” to jump back to start.

Then you have advanced for the normal tech stuff… which currently is the front end on most pickers. This would also be displayed on the info box for each instance on the map, so still central, just not AT THE FRONT.

UPDATE: can just pull all the existing data out of the current sites like https://instances.social/list#lang=en&allowed=&prohibited=&min-users=&max-users= as these are all #4opens. So the projected site could be up and running with full data in little time. Yes, you would have to ask people to tag their installs to geolocate their instances. This could be done a hard way or a simple #KISS way like any admin in the instance adding a #hashtag with a geolocation hashtag after it. Then periodically go through the instance list and spider all admins on each instance if you find the hashtag – add the next hashtag as a geolocation or something as simple as this.

Ideas in comments, please.

UPDATE: this is this one https://fediverse.observer/map works better still nothing in Oxford – it seems to be pretty random with little relevance to subject and area, is it by IP address, that would be #geekproblem

Why Doesn’t Every City Have a Fediverse Server?

This is a story of power, plain and simple

Over the last few years, we’ve been watching a familiar story unfold, we’ve seen repeat itself in radical spaces, tech movements, and grassroots networks for decades. It starts in the grassroots with “progressive” #fashernistas (yes, them) pushing themselves into the front to speak for “us.” They talk the talk of decentralisation, care, community, and #FOSS ethics. They wear all the right hashtags: #opensocialmedia, #Fediverse, #commons, #techforgood. But when you look at how power is actually exercised behind the scenes, it’s something else entirely. This is a story of power, plain and simple. Not in the dramatic “revolutionary” sense. But in the subtle creep of careerism, institutional capture, and “safe” social capital games that flatten the radical and uplifts the “palatable”.

Let’s take a few examples from the #activertypub world, first with the #SocialHub stagnation, this open space was originally created by the grassroots crew to shape the standards of the decentralised web, It was originally a commons, protocol-building and governance exploration space. So, what happened? The people now “leading” came from lifestyle #fashionista activism and wannabe NGO circuits, who in the end were all trying to be embedded in the institutional funding environments, or visiting from the safe academic bubble. And thus they brought with them the dogmas of safe spaces, of “emotional consensus,” “hidden affinity group governance,” and “(ex)inclusive dialogue”… that JUST SO happened to exclude the radical and messy paths that are actually native to the #openweb, the bad mess they then made, ended up only pushing the dogma of the #geekprolem as it was the ONLY path they could imagine controlling in a way that would not threaten the thin connection to the institutions they were feeding from. This behaviour so often slips into forms of parasitism, which is not a good thing at all.

Then we have the current #Fediverse outreach infrastructure capture, where we’ve seen the same class of actors attach themselves to the most visible projects – like Mastodon, ActivityPub standards, and now “Fediverse governance.” They secure seats on boards. They host conferences with glossy branding and friendly logos. They use these controlled spaces to then push out “code of conduct” documents and “safe space” branding… while closing and excluding the very messy native infrastructure of discussion and direction that is both native and needed.

Examples? #Mastodon’s GitHub, issue tracking, and moderation are all tightly controlled by a small clique around the project founder. Community voices are kinda tolerated at best, discarded at worst. The project is moving onto the #NGO path, no bad thing in its self, but with its years of pushing its own branding as THE Fediverse, it becomes a bad thing. In this, there is a very real debt of damage they need to pay back – as a part of a functioning gift economy – saying sorry and admitting mistakes would be a good first step.

Then we have the example of the #FediForum events, pushing into the space blindly, with zero historical context or any actual knowledge, to represent the #activertypub ecosystem. The problem is they paywalled, which lead “naturally” to increasingly gate keeping with #NGO commercial interests being pushed to the front to represent “us”. When the radical and experienced grassroots voices obviously don’t get involved, as they simply refuse to step over the paywall. This is an ongoing mess, that we do need to compost and not only with #fashionista outrage but with real working paths, we used to do this, but we can’t any more – why?

Over the last few years we have had proposals for genuine horizontal governance, that could have been used to shift this mess making and to actually shifts power outward – but these were labelled “too messy,” “too political,” or “not the right time.” This is not accidental, it is liberalism functioning as control – with a smile. So… what can we do? Let’s be clear: This is a power issue. It’s not about bad intentions. It’s about how power is used, and then abused, even in the so-called “horizontal” paths.

The first thing we have to do is recognise the smell of #NGO-style liberalism that so easily hides itself in good intentions, grants, DEI language, and “process.” But it then ends up:

Disempowering community autonomy
Replacing radical potential with “professionalism”
Marginalising away activists and messy real-world projects
Recreating the same vertical hierarchies, just with better “open” branding

Composting this mess is needed to break the cycle:

Build and back native projects. The only way to push back against capture is to grow infrastructure from within our communities, like: #OMN (Open Media Network) #OGB (Open Governance Body). These must be trust-based, not credential-based. That means supporting those doing the work without demanding they translate it into pointless and most importantly powerless NGO-speak to be taken seriously.
Use the #4opens as a filter, this simple social retelling of #FOSS is designed precisely to push out the 95% of #techshit and focus energy on projects with: Open source Open data Open standards Open governance. Apply these consistently, and the parasite class will struggle to keep and find a foothold.
Push for messy, lived governance, stop waiting for perfect systems. We need to prototype imperfect, transparent, accountable governance now. It should be: Based on trust, not rules-lawyering Driven by use, not representation Grounded in solidarity, not status
Refuse the “leader class”, just because someone has a title, a grant, or a #dotcons following, doesn’t mean they speak for us. Call out the unaccountable influence. Politely or not. Let’s not let careerists write our futures.:

The Fediverse path could be the most important #openweb reboot of the commons of this decade. But it will only be that if we keep it rooted in social power, not polished #PR and #NGO mess. We don’t need new kings. We need more gardeners, to work together to compost the piles of #techshit and keep the space open and safe.

I think when our #fahernistas say to us “what have we done, please be nice to us, you’re not welcoming.” We need to reply: Am happy to be nice #KISS, just stop being a prat in this space please.

It’s really simple, please stop being (an often nasty) prat.

The Mess We Make (Again… and again)