Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
What we are seeing here is an absolute failure of our liberals. In both America with the right-wing nutters and British virus plague.
The nutters in “power” need challenging, where is this challenge coming from?
The right and the centre are useless for any nice outcome. The left are missing as an option. The is a pile of social shit, we need shovels and compost heaps to clear this mess #OMN
The majority of #mainstreaming #openweb tech projects have the assumption that human nature is a fixed thing and that every project has to be built in reaction to the 40 years of neo-liberal #deathcult that we all live in now as this is the “only” human nature visible. They completely miss/ignorer the social nature of people in groups in this look back at the 20th century, and we have clearly different views of human nature as examples to build society. Call it social democracy, call it communism, call it what you like. We DO NOT have to build tools in relation to the #deathcult, and we clearly should not base “hope” on tools that are built in this relation.
Mastodon, activertypub and the fedivers took a small #stepaway from this mess. The #OMN takes the next step away. For the rest #compost and #shovels come to mind.
The #OMN is a simple #KISS social tech project.
All these projects work off the same core code/workflow of tagging and editing metadata.
#Indymediaback is the news part of the project. This is to grow journalism from the grassroots and to make our news mainstream.
#Makinghistory – is the archiving project. This is to preserve and grow our history from the grassroots and make our history mainstream.
#Friendsandfamily – is the social networking project. For family/affernerty groups to move away from the mainstream #dotcons and to nourish the grassroots.
All the projects are #4opens and federated.
The world is full of well shitty people… this is not surprising as we have lived in a sewage outlet for more than 40 years, to be covered in shit is human. What is not human is to go along with #stupidindividualism to play #fashionista agenders. Make judgments for social good, don’t go with the flow as it’s a sewer. You do need a shovel #OMN
The #OMN project is more important for what it does not do. The is a core/ perfiery outlook, more than 99% of peoples input from mainstream tech culture is clearly coming from the perfery for the human centred workflow of the #OMN Our mission is to shift through the tech pile and find the 1% that is core to the human project. Avoid getting lost in the stinky, shiny, fashions that the majority push.
A good project needs focus, without it you just have a diluted mess. In a world driven by #stupidindividualism we have problems with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith to constantly overcome. Generally people have no idea they are coursing a problem which makes it difficult to deal with.
For the January meeting am interested in looking in detail at #activertypub (and the new tech around it) as we should have a wider outline of the social #OMN project by then and have an urgent need to find technology that fits into it. Good focus for this meeting. Of course everyone is welcome.
This should lead to working on the next codebase of the #indymediaback project.
We are on a mission
The #OMN Framework: the Five Functions (#5f)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
#NothingNew by Design
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.
Everything else is noise.
Report back on peertube/youtube video posting experiment. #XR video posted only to peertube got 18 views in 48 hours. Video posted only to youtube got 26 views in 24 hours so far. Both videos were nice fluffy #XR shared widely in meany #dotcons groups with 1-10k subscribers so in theory to 20-50k people based on “simple” subscription count.
Posted to peertube
Posted to youtube
Let’s look back for a moment. Last year posting similar video you #youtube would have received 100-250 views
10 years ago 2000-4000 views would be normal.
Thoughts on this the #dotcons algorithm affectively #BLOCK straight grassroots video reports – only by shaping your media to #SEO games can you get any views in the #dotcons. This behaviour has shifted popular radical messages/media makers to #deathcult agenders to have any hope of achieving personal “success” and will continue to malform our media if there is no working alternatives for them to use.
I think our “digital addictions” explains the failure of the videos to organically spread inside the #dotcons with views not being feed by the algorithms which prefers #clickbate and people have been trained to push #clickbate so no longer see the need to push straight content – “vanilla” radical grassroots content does not feed their digital addictions or the hole mainstream culture leaves inside us all.
On one hand, if we keep going down the #dotcons path our media will become more and more malformed to #deathcult agender simply to get views and attention. on the other “straight” grassroots coverage will be affectively BLOCKED.
A note here for the #fashionistas “Gaming” the algorithms is just SEO under a new path. Let’s worship the “cargo cult” mentality and not a helpful comment/reply please have a think on this point.
For the last 10 years I have been pushing anti-algorithm content to amplify the exclusion affect. Looking at these numbers I think we are starting to get peek exclusion as our visionontv youtube channel has 7k subscribers so to get only 26 views in 24 hours is notable bad, just on this subscribe base not to mention the #failbook groups embed postings etc.
Talking about the #deathcult is not advertising friendly no matter how fluffy some of your content is 🙂
To conclude. Two points for #openweb media we need to remove “advertising friendly” as criteria. Second we need to actively detox people from their digital addictions. We do the first one, but we have no real plan/implementation/ideas on the second.
The #OMN has PGA and #4opens as concrete foundations, so we have firm ground to build the second needed part down the line.
Yes. Lots of #NGO’sh people will want to add “common sense” #dotcons ideas and process to #openweb projects as they take off. There will be a pile of shit shovelling need to get past this “common sense” issue. We need good shovels #OMN
The reason we are building out the wide #OMN network to provide a space for our messages and to make compost out of our current shit pile;)
UPDATE: the youtube video got to 42 views in 2 days the peertube stayed at 19 views both are very poor numbers but the #openweb one is growing and the #dotcons one visible declining which is positive.
Take a moment to think about basics: activism/campaigning is about building resistance to the mainstream to change its flow in progressive directions. Were #mainstreaming is about shifting activism to reduce these resistances to the mainstream flow. Thus, it’s good to understand that #mainstreaming is a #NGO agenda to build the jobs of the people involved, and is in turn funded to this end. Good not to get this shit mixed up.
Lifestyle is a way of forming a tribe inside this mainstream flow. The problem for activism is that this old school tribalism is obviously a BLOCK on social change, as looking and talking right are MORE important than being right. Being right would be “resistance” and lifestyle is about going with the counter flow.
On the other hand, there are advantages to “modern” tribal and lifestyle activism – it functions as social glue to hold campaigns together and provides a “uniform” flag to rally round. You notice I do not use words like anarchist, socialist, liberalism here as these have a different role in social change thinking – they are the ideas – the clothing is what I am taking about #fashionista is the hashtag.
#Revolution is about blowing up the flow of the mainstream so it floods into a different path, with much “collateral” damage in the process as we live inside a highly urban complex society. Both paths can be useful, both have costs.
Good not to mix this shit up, let’s build something to compost this mess #OMN
Who does your code actually empower? (#FOSS reality check for #openweb builders). In web application development there are broadly three groups you can empower. Every architectural decision – whether you acknowledge it or not – shifts power toward one of these groups.
Understanding which group your system empowers is probably the single most important design question in social technology. In the “fluffy thinking” the three power centres:
1) Users, people who consume, participate, and live inside the system. They care about usability, safety, autonomy, continuity and real-world outcomes. Users are rarely technical, but they are the reason the system exists. If users lack agency, your project is a toy or a control mechanism – not infrastructure.
2) Producers are people who create content, knowledge and value. Examples: writers, organisers, artists, moderators and community builders. These are the people who make platforms meaningful. Without empowered producers networks stagnate, communities collapse and content becomes algorithmic sludge.
3) Geeks (developers/admins). The builders, maintainers, infrastructure operators who care about architecture, performance, elegance, security and scalability. This group is essential – but historically, especially in #FOSS and federated spaces, it becomes the dominant power holder.
This is the #geekproblem. Most #openweb projects “accidentally” empower the third group above all others. Why? Because developers build tools primarily for themselves, #UX is treated as secondary, social dynamics are assumed to be solvable through technical controls and complexity becomes a gatekeeping mechanism.
The result is systems that might be technically impressive, but socially brittle, unusable by normal humans. The tiny group of unthinking “elitists” end up deciding what is good for everyone else, not because they are evil – but because the system structurally centres their perspective. Good #UX in social technology is extremely hard precisely because it requires humility about what engineers don’t know.
The #dotcons model works much “better”, as corporate platforms take a different path. They empower capital which then hires geeks to serve producers, extract from users and optimise engagement and surveillance.
Power structure is: Capital → Developers → Producers → Users. The users become the product, producers become dependent and developers become instruments of extraction. It’s an efficient machine – and a socially destructive one.
The missing model is user empowerment, an uncomfortable truth is that users are rarely genuinely empowered. Some partial attempts that worked in the past are early #Indymedia (open publishing + collective moderation. Wikipedia (community governance + editable commons), email protocols (user portability, decentralised identity) and RSS/blogosphere era (subscription over algorithm). None are perfect – but they shift power closer to participants.
What we need are non-extractive incentives. As good #openweb projects try to do, real grassroots projects empower users AND producers together. Not by removing structure, but by distributing power through federation, open standards, collective moderation and visible process.
These are still rare because they are harder to build. They require solving social problems, not just technical ones. It’s why we keep repeating the same failure, oscillate between two broken patterns of #geekproblem systems → technically elegant, socially inaccessible and #dotcons systems → socially addictive, structurally extractive. The problem we now need to compost is that both have produced piles of stinking manure across the tech landscape of the last 20 years.
The #OMN approach is not perfection, it is #KISS shifting the default power alignment to infrastructure that empowers users to participate without needing technical expertise. Producers retain agency over their work and context and most importantly developers build frameworks that decentralise their own authority over time.
In short, build systems where developers are gardeners, not rulers. Questions for #FOSS developers are, before writing code, ask: Who can say “no” inside this system? Who owns the data? Who can leave without losing their social graph? Who defines moderation rules? Who can fork socially, not just technically? Questions like these questions help reveal where power really sits.
You have a shovel, we don’t need more abstract debate. We need people willing to compost the failures and build differently. That means accepting messiness, designing for humans, not idealised users, building structures where power flows outward rather than upward. That’s the path #OMN is trying to walk.
Q. I’m not interested in doing that, as I don’t know what it is you are actually proposing. Apart from using hashtags and talking about #deathcult I don’t actually understand your plan?
What I haven’t heard is a practical way of hosting and distributing alt media.
Visionontv turned into a mess, just as Indymedia did. So what has changed?
A. What happened is a good question. The answer is simple the #Fediverse maybe start here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
Where we are now https://the-federation.info/ or https://fediverse.network/
From an activist tech prospective. The real opening we have is this was built outside activism outside #encryptionist amenders and for the #openweb and is thus #4opens
Our own tech in activism was ripped apart by the open/closed war, indymedia dies because of this, visionontv never went anywhere because of this. Outside activism this war has also been fought, the closed/encryptionists have been dominant for the last 10 years.
Around 5 years ago a handful of people said fuck this crap we need a spade. They created #openweb tools, and it has exploded from there to be a real UI friendly alternative. This is exactly the same outcome of the World Wide Web did to the silos of the early internet.
Am simply bring this explosion of affective DIY creativity into the ossified and dead depression of activism tech. Obviously, meany nay sayers are going to piss and shit all over this move. Activist tech died for very good ressions. This does not have to be a block, as I say this makes good compost so get your shovel ready and let’s plant some seeds. I hope that not to metaphorical
A simple video on the tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S57uhCQBEk0 from this it’s clear this #openweb tech works and scales and people like it
What is also clear is that is people are getting seriously unhappy on the #dotcons
YES its going to be a mess of shit and piss and fuckups, that’s activism, and the #encryptionsists pushed “closed” ideas deep into our #fashernistas so it’s a uphill battle.
BUT we do not have a choice to stay in the #dotcons it’s poison and our ecosystem and social syteams are dyeing.
A realistic timeline, a year of dev and small scale roll-outs. During which there will be lots and lots of shit shovelling to stop it becoming a stinking mess that people will not go, nowhere near.
The tech is “easy”ish, it’s the shovelling shit that’s hard, non techs can help with this bit.
The project is to decisively shift power from the geeks and admins to the producers and consumers of media. In this its about good UI and simple empowering #KISS tools to move content by categorising it with a bootum up folksonermy. This simple approach is balanced by shared site level higher languages for the complex crew.
“This is the Internet”
GET
PUT
POST
DELETE
–MERGE–
This Odata is the #4opens #OMN project.
People can get involved at a level they feel they can add to the project to reshape there world.
Consuming content
* simply on a portal/app (aggregation top site/app)
* on there own site as a sidebar or page.
* as a part of an admin team on a middle/bootem site
*
Producing content
* from a feed from there own site or #dotcons account
* writing linking articals as a part of a top/middle/bootm site
*
Aggravating content
* as a embed on there own site
* on a bootem/middle/top site
*
For the geeks the project is based on #4opens protocols
1) For bringing legacy content in – RSS
2) For talking to the fedivers – Activertypub
3) And for internal working – OData
Lets look at the last:
OData fundamentals (from https://blogs.sap.com/2018/08/20/monday-morning-thoughts-odata)
OData is a protocol and a set of formats. It is strongly resource oriented, as opposed to service oriented. There are a small fixed number of verbs (OData operations) and an infinite set of nouns (resources) upon which the verbs operate. These OData operations map quite cleanly onto the HTTP methods
| OData operation | HTTP method |
| C – Create | POST |
| R – Read | GET |
| U – Update | PUT |
| D – Delete | DELETE |
| Q – Query | GET |
If something is important enough it should be addressable in that elements should have addresses, not hidden behind opaque web services endpoint. In the case of an HTTP protocol like OData, these addresses are URLs. And the shape of the data can be seen in the way those URL addresses are made up.
OData goes back further than you might think, its a grassroots project.
TThe protohistory of OData
OData’s origins go back to 1995, with the advent of the Meta Content Framework (MCF). This was a format that was created by Ramanthan V Guha while working in Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, and its application was in providing structured metadata about websites and other web-based data, providing a machine-readable version of information that humans dealt with.
A few years later in 1999 Dan Libby worked with Guha at Netscape to produce the first version of a format that many of us still remember and perhaps a good portion of us still use, directly or indirectly – RSS. This first version of RSS built on the ideas of MCF and was specifically designed to be able to describe websites and in particular weblog style content – entries that were published over time, entries that had generally had a timestamp, a title, and some content. RSS was originally written to work with Netscape’s “My Netscape Network” – to allow the combination of content from different sources (see Spec: RSS 0.9 (Netscape) for some background). RSS stood then for RDF Site Summary, as it used the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to provide the metadata language itself.
Atom. Like RSS, the key to Atom was the structure with which weblog content was described, and actually the structure was very close indeed to what RSS.
An Atom feed, just like an RSS feed, was made up of some header information describing the weblog in general, and then a series of items representing the weblog posts themselves:
header item item ...
A few years later, in 2005, the Atom format became an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard, specifically RFC 4287, and became known as the Atom Syndication Format:
“Atom is an XML-based document format that describes lists of related information known as “feeds”. Feeds are composed of a number of items, known as “entries”, each with an extensible set of attached metadata. For example, each entry has a title.”
What was magic, though, was that in addition to this format, there was a fledgling protocol that was used to manipulate data described in this format. It was first created to enable remote authoring and maintenance of weblog posts – back in the day some people liked to draft and publish posts in dedicated weblog clients, which then needed to interact with the server that stored and served the weblogs themselves. This protocol was the Atom Publishing Protocol, “AtomPub” or APP for short, and a couple of years later in 2007 this also became an IETF standard, RFC 5023:
“The Atom Publishing Protocol is an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web Resources using HTTP [RFC2616] and XML 1.0 [REC-xml]. The protocol supports the creation of Web Resources and provides facilities for:
Is this starting to sound familiar – OData is exactly this – sets of resources, service discovery, and manipulation of individual entries.
AtomPub and the Atom Syndication Format was adopted by Google in its Google Data (GData) APIs Protocol while this IETF formalisation was going on and the publish/subscribe protocol known as PubSubHubbub (now called WebSub) originally used Atom as a basis. And as we know, Microsoft embraced AtomPub in the year it became an IETF standard and OData was born.
Microsoft released the first three major versions of OData under the Open Specification Promise, and then OData was transferred to the guardianship of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the rest is history.
Something that humans could understand, as well as machines. The resource orientation approach has a combination of simplicity, power, utility and beauty that is reflected in (or by) the web as a whole. One could argue that the World Wide Web is the best example of a hugely distributed web service.
OData has constraints that make for consistent and predictable service designs – if you’ve seen one OData service you’ve seen them all. And it passes the tyre-kicking test, in that the tyres are there for you to kick – to explore an OData service using read and query operations all you need is your browser.
Have a quick look at an OData service. The Northwind service maintained by OASIS will do nicely. Have a look at the service document and, say, the Products collection.
Excerpts from the service document and from the Products collection
Notice how rich and present Atom’s ancestry is in OData today. In the service document, entity sets are described as collections, and the Atom standard is referenced directly in the “atom” XML namespace prefix. In the Products entity set, notice that the root XML element is “feed”, an Atom construct (we refer to weblog Atom and RSS “feeds”) and the product entities are “entry” elements, also a direct Atom construct.
Today’s business API interoperability and open standards are built upon a long history of collaboration and invention.
Food for thought #OMN
Nourishment for action