#Mastodon and the wider #fedivers are native #openweb project based on the #4opens people who try to “harden” and “secure” these are completely missing where the value is at.
They are spreading #FUD and endangering real activists acting this way.
Anything that is not media should use encrypted p2p chat, there are many mature #FOSS projects for this.
At the moment as the #Fediverse is a #OMN based on the #4opens you have very low barrier to running or even developing an instance, this is where the value is.
Adding security generally makes a HUGE barrier to Dev and #DIY running an instance.
The #geekproblem has no idea of the damage they do when pushing their “common sense”. This creates a signal-to-noise issue that has been blocking alt for 20 years.
The #Fediverse is all #4opens so should not be used for anything that should be P2P encrypted. It’s important to keep this clear to users by not focused on the fig leaf of “hardening” security as the is non. It’s a very successful #OMN open media network, and it’s value lies in this.
Peoples pushing this are often not seeing the point that it’s designed #4opens this is why it works.
Both paths have value, but they are different.
And the push a different project (#closedweb) which is fine. But not a #OMN maybe they would be better off working on bridges as companion projects.
Good to think about this mess they talk about as it is not solved by more tech, we already have most of what we need.
* Open media is #4opens based on trust, the current ActivityPub is a relatively #KISS good example of this.
* Privacy is encrypted p2p chat, which there are meany good #UX mature #FOSS projects you can find
The change we need is social, getting people to use the different approaches for different needs, this is surprisingly difficult.
Bridges while dangerous are needed here, it’s good to talk about this in the sense of “security”.
This text reads like a vanguards path, based on #mainstreaming reading and narrow #geekproblem thinking. It’s missing the paths that hold value in #4opens horizontal activist paths we are building. But yes, we are getting lost in the growing #fediverse and the wider spread of #openweb reboot diversity projects.
What it does highlight is the need for social and political thinking is needed, the is value there.
It’s hard to stress how “nave” meany devs on the #fediverse
#openweb#4opens is about building human trust, hard security is a very slightly overlapping but easy to see different path for building non “trust” based connections.
Some surprisingly hard to build bridges might help with this ongoing mess.
#Visionontv is a grassroots media project that aims to provide an alternative to mainstream media by creating and distributing independent video content. The project has been running for over ten years and is based on the principles of openness, collaboration, and decentralization. It uses #FOSS open-source software and decentralized platforms to create and distribute activist video content. One of the key features of the project is its participation in the Open Media Network (#OMN), a decentralized network of media sites that share content and promote independent media that is not controlled by any single entity. The project emphasizes the importance of grassroots community-driven media, where people and groups can create and share their own content.
Hamish Campbell is an #openweb organic intellectual and a core contributor to the #OMN (Open Media Network). He publishes at http://hamishcampbell.com, where he documents decades of radical media work, social tech projects, and reflections on activist culture. You’ll find him across the #Fediverse, on the #dotcons, and #YouTube – pushing for open dialogue around politics, technology, and media.
Over the years, Hamish has been central to meany grassroots tech and media initiatives, including:
Undercurrents – video activism documenting direct action and alternative culture.
Ruffcuts – Copy left (before, Creative Commons) licensed video CD-ROMs project distributed across UK and global activist networks.
UK Indymedia – part of the global Indymedia network, building open publishing platforms for activist journalism.
VisionOnTV – producing and distributing social movement video through peer-to-peer networks and open tools. Now in its fourth generation of FOSS tech, the project has been running on and off for nearly 20 years.
The PeoplesTV Project – creating low-cost, live-edit, and video aggregation tools for real-time, mobile grassroots reporting.
4opens – a framework for ethical #FOSS tech development, demanding openness of code, data, standards, and governance.
OMN (Open Media Network) – building a trust-based federated media infrastructure for alternative publishing.
ActivityPub and the Fediverse – working with native protocols and community to develop open, decentralized publishing tools and outreach them.
OGB (Open Governance Body) – prototyping grassroots governance models tailored to activist and Fediverse cultures.
Rebooting Indymedia – re-energising grassroots media infrastructure with fediverse tech and horizontal process. This Fediverse tech got to roll out before covid but did not survive the pandemic
MakingHistory – a new project under active development, exploring collective memory and storytelling.
Hamish approaches all of this through a political lens – believing that code is ideology made real. He is sharply critical of tech shaped by capitalism, which he sees as systemically extractive, closed, and hostile to real social change. His approach to “humane coding” centres on designing systems that embrace complexity, emergence, and care – tools that reflect human relationships rather than enforce control.
Beyond the tech world, Hamish has been involved in hundreds of activist campaigns and alternative life experiments. He’s written academically on vagabond culture and hitchhiking, and has produced and edited over 1,000 videos and documentaries in the last 20 years.
For the past decade, he has lived aboard a semi-off-grid lifeboat, navigating Europe’s canals and coasts, a real-world metaphor for the digital values he champions: autonomy, resilience, and mutual aid. #BoatingEurope
In the #Fediverse we are going to have waves of #mainstreaming people coming into “our” #openweb counter currents, bringing a lot of non-native, unthinking blinded mess with them, they will push this blindness over us as “common sense” then they will retreat back to #mainstreming and point at us covered in mess… “Look these guys are covered in mess we can’t work with them…”
Yes this is bad behaver, ideas please?
The question I am asking is who is creating the mess, and the very “uncommon sense” obvuse answer is “they” are. Composting comes to mind, do you need a shovel #OMN
And yes, the “us” and “them” are in quote marks, to highlight the need for more composting.
OK, had to close then open new accounts on #visionontv#peertube because of #spam, the spam is starting agen – there is an update that allows you to put new accounts on ask/moderation, we need to upgrade at some point to get this.
Interesting this is exactly the way our ten-year-old #OMN project handles flows as is the “new” moderation in #bluesky… if we don’t manage to go to the world, the world come to us… well more like the world walks right past us looking the other way and takes the big bundle of bills from capitalism.
This is normal, we are still doing needed work, but better would be good to 🙂
The #KISS path is to simply bridge them all and let them cooperate, as they are all a part of the #openweb family.
The more complex and messy path is that some of them might not want to do this… OK now we get to the part where piss is likely signal rather than noise. Let’s draw a line, (a date is good) if they don’t bridge, we let loose the pee, liquid trickling in will short out their servers.
Ending thought:
For a lot of our #fashernistas in our spaces, things only matter if they come from #mainstreaming this is obviously crap blinded behaver – but it’s hard to communicate why, likely they can’t see me 😉
There is an unspoken negative effect of traditional foundation funding agendas on grassroots #openweb projects. These grassroots projects have different priorities and goals than traditional organizations, and the formal processes used by existing #NGO projects, such as decidim.org and loomio.org, may not be well-suited for them.
#The#OMN team is on a mission to address this by focusing on empowering communities through decentralized decision-making processes. Their experience and track record make them well-suited to carry out this mission.
If successful, the #OGB project can have a significant impact on the way communities make decisions in the future. By empowering grassroots movements and organizations, it helps to ensure that their voices are heard and that their needs are addressed.
Requesting funding for the Open Governance Body (#OGB) project. Which is being developed by the Open Media Network (#OMN). The OMN is a collective that builds and hosts #4opens standards-based socio-political software. Our mission is to provide communities with the tools they need to organize, communicate, and make decisions.
The #OGB project is a grassroots initiative that seeks to empower communities by giving them a stronger voice in decision-making. We believe that traditional social coding projects that are based on a top-down approach to power are not effective. Our approach is different. We are developing a bottom-up solution that is based on the principles of sharing power and collective decision-making.
Our team has years of experience in grassroots social tech projects. We have been directly involved with #UnderCurrents, #indymedia, #VisionOnTV, #LondonBoating, among others, and have a firm grasp of what does and does not work within organizing both social and technological communities. We have also worked on UN and World Bank projects in West Africa and have decided to manage them through community/scrum, rather than formal methods.
We are seeking funding in the amount of $50,000. This funding will be used to pay four people to work on the project at a fixed rate of ten thousand euros for 9-12 months of work. The bulk of the work will be programming and implementation details. The remaining ten thousand will be used for servers, expenses, outreach work, extensive testing, and basic project upkeep.
A Look at Existing Projects
It is important to note that foundation funding agendas can have a negative effect on the agendas of #openweb projects. A brief look at some existing projects highlights this issue. For example, decidim.org, which is an NGO process similar to loomio.org, Formal processes can be a bad tool for “herding cats” in social challenge or activist groups. And has been imposed numerous times in activism but has always failed.
After reviewing loomio.org, it is clear that the same ideas and workflows were pushed onto #climatecamp, #indymedia, and #occupy. In the first two cases, it ossified the projects, and in the last case, it was a mess. The #processgeeks behind these projects have not changed, and their projects are a bad fit for life and a terrible fit for the fediverse and activism. However, they may work for some NGOs and more formal cooperative organizing.
It is important to note the differences between formal and informal governance structures. Both use “consensus,” but the Open Governance Body is more like a do-ocracy than a formal governance structure.
The #hashtags embody a story and world-view that are rooted in a progressive and critical perspective on technology and society. They highlight the negative impact of neoliberalism (#deathcult) and consumer capitalism (#fashionista) on society, and promote the original ideals of the World Wide Web and internet culture (#openweb). The #closedweb hashtag critiques the for-profit internet and its social consequences, while the #4opens promote the principles of transparency, collaboration, and sharing in open-source development.
The #geekproblem hashtag draws attention to the cultural movement of geeks, who can become blinded by their own technical knowledge and fail to consider the broader social implications of their work (#techshit). The #encryptionists hashtag critiques the dominant belief among some geeks that all solutions need more encryption, which can lead to a desire for total control and artificial scarcity.
Overall, these hashtags are interlocking to tell a wide-ranging story and world-view that advocates for a more humane, collaborative, and transparent path in technology and society. The #nothingnew hashtag raises whether new technological projects are needed, or whether we should focus on improving existing ones. The #techchurn hashtag refers to the technological outcome of the #geekproblem, which can lead to a constant cycle of new projects that do not address underlying social issues. Finally, the #OMN and #indymediaback hashtags promote the idea of an open media network and the rebooting of the altmedia project that was once the size of traditional media on the #openweb. The #OGB hashtag represents the need for open governance and the power of the community to make decisions collectively.
It’s simple #KISS, so please try not to react like a prat about this, thanks.
One of the recurring problems in alternative organising is that people often destroy the things they love – not out of hatred, but out of possession. Projects become extensions of identity, territory, career, or personal ideology rather than living commons that others can build on. This is one of the hidden traps of the #fashionista path.
It’s worth looking at a few examples to critique how good intentions repeatedly fall short because of a lack of connectivity, grounded process, and social maturity.
The project at anagora.org/distributed-cooperative-organisation is an example of this tendency. It presents itself as a distributed cooperative organisation model and contains some useful ideas around commons-oriented, cooperative, and feminist economic forms. But it suffers from a familiar problem – it does not truly LINK. The concepts float in isolation, disconnected from wider movements, histories, infrastructures, and practical organising paths.
This is the #fashionista view of the now 20-year-old #OMN path. Full of energy, aesthetics, and radical vocabulary, but with a distinctly teenage focus on novelty and identity rather than long-term grounded federation and commons building. Without deep linking between projects, communities, histories, and practices, ideas tend to fragment, scatter, lose continuity, and dissipate into noise.
Flight and scatter to the wind – more compost. The same pattern appears in the #DisCO (Distributed Cooperative Organisations) manifesto at disco.coop. Again, there are worthwhile insights and language around care, commons, and distributed organising. But the project still largely exists as a self-contained branding exercise rather than part of a deeply interconnected ecosystem. The issue is not bad intentions, the issue is isolation.
Projects that do not effectively link socially, technically, historically, and organisationally. On this #fashionista we cycle, struggle to accumulate real collective power, repeatedly restart from near-zero while presenting themselves as innovation.
The COMPOST digital magazine at two.compost.digital follows a similar #NGO and #fashionista path. It produces discourse and aesthetics around collapse, care, and alternatives, but again lacks the hard connective tissue needed for durable commons building. There is very little federation of process. Very little shared infrastructure. Very little accumulation of collective memory. Very little practical continuity.
This is what the hashtag #blocking is trying to point toward, these projects unintentionally block healthier growth by occupying cultural and organisational space while failing to create pathways others can build through. Energy flows into maintaining identity, branding, and internal discourse instead of constructing durable public commons. This is where possessiveness becomes destructive, and slowly the commons closes.
This is not unique to these examples. It is a widespread problem across activist, cooperative, and #openweb spaces. Our “common sense” instincts are shaped by the wider culture of #stupidindividualism and #neoliberal competition, even inside projects supposedly trying to escape those systems.
This path naturally leads toward informal hierarchy, gatekeeping, branding over openness, resistance to criticism, control of information, and fear of genuine federation. Over time this undermines the collaborative nature of commons projects. As leadership roles become possessive, transparency weakens, collective goals become secondary to personal or organisational survival, criticism becomes threatening rather than useful and conflict becomes personalised instead of productive. Eventually the project spends more energy protecting itself than building shared infrastructure.
This is one reason, so many alternative projects repeatedly fragment despite good intentions. The tragedy is that many of these people genuinely care, but care without openness still become enclosure. That is why the 20 year old #OMN path keeps returning to linking, federation, and the #4opens, not as abstract ideology, but as practical anti-possessive tools.
The goal is not purity, not ownership, not building another isolated brand ecosystem. The goal is to create living commons that other people can actually connect to, extend, challenge, reuse, and build beyond. Without this, projects become temporary performances orbiting personalities and trends. With it, they have at least some chance of growing into real social infrastructure.
The hopeful part is that even failed projects contribute compost, ideas break down, fragments spread, lessons survive and people move on carrying experience. Compost matters, but we should still try to build gardens rather than endlessly producing piles of unfinished compost.
How protocols die… #SSB was a protocol that they all reallyed round, a “commons”, we now have 3 “commons” on the table. The rabble one which has hidden #VC money behind it, then this individualist one https://www.manyver.se/blog/2023-04-05 which will maybe rally the grassroots, and the original #SSB which might or might not carry on.
We don’t have a cross culture “common” any more. A clean separation of the #mainstreaming and the #grassroots. To make this relevant, the same is likely going to happen to #ActivertyPub when the #W3C “formal consensuses” is captured by the #dotcons
The enclosure of commons is always a bad path. And yes not saying #SSB was a good protocol it was not, it came from the encryptionsists, but it was a rare “commons”.
#AP is a good/bad protocol, we don’t need to do the same path. Thus, the message to #socialhub, 95% chance they will ignore it or more likely see it as weakness and attack harder, cats…
“The is currently an undeclared battle going on between the rebooted #WC3 and the grassroots (#fashernista dominated) #socialhub for power. If the libertarian cats can’t herd themselves to do something useful, like we managed with the #EU outreach – currently they cannot do this, have a feeling socialhub will lose.
Not a big problem, but a dangerous outcome for #ActivityPub as #WC3 is formal consensus which is easy to capture and control for the #dotcons – where socialhub libertarian cats have failed messy consensuses so less open to capture.
But from my view the libertarian cats are being prats as cats are… so WC3 is stepping back in to CONTROL… how to herd cats – should I try? Or keep focus on #OMN codeing is a question am asking my self?
@xxx @xxx@xxx, have tried building bridges, but no foundation stones laid on this building work. Honest question are we helping or hindering in this grassroots space?”
There is a small chance they act, we did herd cats on #socialhub for the #EU outreach. This is why I bring it up, though, think people can only see the power politics and not what am saying when doing this. Agen 5% chance of a good outcome…
Maybe this helps to make the “mess” metaphor clearer. For the #geekproblem they likely have no idea about the damage they do. Because in their terms they are mostly right. Step back to look at the wider picture, and it’s obviously adding to the mess to be composed.
