The End of the “Peace Dividend” and the Return of History

#Identitypolitics, is what happens when liberalism turns inward and fragments – call it mad liberalism. #Culturewar is what happens when that same liberalism hardens and lashes out – bad liberalism. Both look like opposites, but they come from the same place.

The uncomfortable part is both were pushed onto the “left” as the way to fight #neoliberalism the very system that’s been tearing apart the social fabric for decades. Instead of building collective power, we pushed endless identity fragmentation, reactive outrage cycles and symbolic battles detached from material change the left is about.

Energy that could have gone into organising, building, and challenging power structures got redirected into managing discourse and fighting each other. That wasn’t an accident, it was the path of least resistance within a liberal framework that can’t actually confront the roots of the problem, because it’s part of the problem.

So while people were arguing over representation and language, the underlying mess – what we call the #deathcult – carried on concentrating wealth, hollowing out communities and locking in structural inequality. And now, that same system is producing a hard shift to the right, feed by anger without direction, backlash without solutions and reaction filling the vacuum left by the failure of the “left” to build alternatives.

So yes, the liberal centre made the mess, but the more important point is this we’re still stuck inside its framing, still reacting, still fighting on terrain that leads nowhere and still avoiding the work of building something that can actually replace what’s failing. Not to dismiss identity or culture – those matter – but to put them back in proportion, grounded in material reality and collective process. Because if we don’t do that, we stay locked in the loop of liberal fragmentation → right-wing reaction → deeper collapse, and this loop doesn’t end well.

The question isn’t only who to blame, it’s whether we can stop playing the same game long enough to build something else. Let’s look at this from a much wider view.

For a long time, the dominant mainstreaming story has been that today’s instability is blamed on the anger of the “left-behind” in the West, a neat, comfortable narrative. But this is shallow, as long before discontent surfaced in the US or UK, entire societies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union went through something far more extreme.

The 1990s transition to #neoliberalism wasn’t just “reform” – it was a peace-time social collapse when life expectancy dropped, savings were wiped out and crime and addiction surged. This “history” matters now because it shows that what we’re living through isn’t new, it’s the long tail of our worshipping of the same #deathcult, that has been breaking societies for decades.

The illusion of stability from the early 1990s to around 2010, when the world looked unusually stable, even peaceful. Major wars between big powers disappeared, military spending dropped, trade and GDP surged – “Democracy” spread across the globe. This period was framed as success, some even called it the end of history. But this “peace” rested on smoke and mirrors.

#globalisation as control – economic interdependence was supposed to prevent war, the idea was simple if everyone is economically connected, conflict becomes irrational. What actually happened was production was off shored, labour was weakened in the West, global supply chains became fragile and unequal and wealth concentrated at the top. This wasn’t peace, it was #classwar.

The fig leaf of “democracy” was always market compliance, less about collective decision-making and more about maintaining economic growth. In practice governments served markets, institutions constrained popular power and politics became technocratic management. In #OMN terms, this is #mainstreaming – reducing real political choices into narrow, “acceptable” to the #nastyfew options.

The hidden cost was hollow societies, this system did produce growth. But hollowed everything out, communities weakened, industries disappeared, inequality exploded and politics lost meaning. People were told everything was fine, while their lived reality worsened.

So the anger we see today isn’t sudden, it’s delayed. The imperial layer is power without accountability at the global level, this system was held together by a dominant power structure. And here’s where the cracks deepen as rules applied selectively, international law was a tool, not a constraint, economic systems weaponised as needed. The result was a loss of legitimacy, as when rules are not applied equally, they lift the veil to stop functioning as rules at all.

We are now moving out of that world back to no longer having a single uncontested centre of power. Instead, we have competing blocs, regional tensions, fragile alliances and increasing militarisation. This is what’s called a multipolar world in #IR terms. Historically, these systems are unstable unless there are shared norms and limits, right now, those norms are weak or collapsing.

So we understand that the liberal #deathcult logic no longer works, globalisation is fragmenting, states are prioritising more self-sufficiency, supply chain control, strategic industries. The old idea of interdependence is now seen as a risk, not a safeguard.

Liberal ideas of democracy aren’t stabilising conflict, instead of reducing tension, elections amplify nationalism, reward confrontation leading to deepen division. The “#deathcult peace” is no longer holding, It’s a dangerous feedback loop, that without strong shared “rules”, the mess drifts toward proxy conflicts, regional wars, arms races and escalating mistrust. Even if full-scale war is avoided, instability becomes normal, and this instability feeds back into domestic politics – creating more fear, more reaction, more breakdown.

The deeper problem is #neoliberal exhaustion, we no longer treat the #deathcult as sacred and with #climatechaos and social break down our deaths are seeping closer. It’s now visible systemic exhaustion of the rule of the #nastyfew who built this era of #neoliberalism to prioritised finance over production, replaced politics with management, concentrated wealth and power and stripped away collective purpose.

This mess making didn’t resolve contradictions, it displaced them into culture wars, liberal identity conflicts and into abstraction. Now those social control is failing, we see the return of “history” where fundamental questions can’t be avoided anymore:

What is the purpose of the state?

Who benefits from the economy?

What do we protect and why?

How do we organise collectively?

This is uncomfortable, but necessary. As the previous era avoided these questions, this one forces them.

The #OMN perspective on this mess is compost, don’t collapse, that this moment is not just crisis – it’s raw material. The breakdown of the old system creates space, but we need to use the space, it’s why the #compost thinking matters – don’t deny the mess, don’t romanticise collapse, process it into something usable. Because if we don’t, the vacuum gets filled by reactionary politics, authoritarian control and deeper #mainstreaming mess.

The “end of history” wasn’t an achievement, it was a pause – built on unstable foundations. What we’re living through now is history restarting, messy, risky, uncertain. But also the first real chance in decades to build something that isn’t just a updated version of the same #deathcult logic. We might build a #lifecult if we can hold our nerve, and actually do the work.

So what comes next? We are moving from “stability” without meaning to instability with possibility. Yes, that shift is dangerous, but it also reopens agency, the question is no longer
“how do we maintain the system?” It becomes “what do we build instead?”

The #KISS choice is the #OMN path to grow new #openweb, grassroots, trust-based structures, or we default fall back into more centralised, extractive systems?

Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN

Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN

Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip.

In most social/political movements, the hard questions – how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve conflict – are deferred. If people think about this at all – First you win power, then you figure out how things will work. That “later” rarely comes, or when it does, it arrives shaped by hierarchy, bureaucracy, and control.

The #OMN paths flips this. It starts at the micro level of how do a group of people share space? How do they make decisions without bosses? How do they deal with conflict, mess, bad behaviour, uneven effort and how do they build trust that actually holds under pressure? These are not abstract questions, they are everyday problems.

And this path – at its best – has decades (centuries, really) of paths with real answers like messy consensus processes, affinity groups, mutual aid, horizontal organising, temporary structures that form and dissolve as needed. None of it perfect, all of it is grounded. This is why grassroots activism works in real situations: disaster response, grassroots organising, protest camps, community projects. Because it doesn’t wait for permission or perfect conditions. It already has tools for acting now.

The messy bit is it’s not magic, let’s not romanticise this. Horizontal organising is hard, it’s full of friction. You get informal hierarchies, dominant personalities, avoidance of conflict until it explodes and burnout leading to #blocking of uncomfortable but necessary conversations. This is the same “poisonous people” problem you see in every movement. #4opens grassroots activism doesn’t remove it – it exposes it – and that’s actually the point. Instead of hiding dysfunction behind formal power, horizontal spaces push it into the open where it has to be dealt with. Or not – and then things fall apart, which is also a kind of clarity. In #OMN language, this is #compost, the mess isn’t a failure. It’s raw material.

Why this matters for the #openweb – most digital infrastructure is built on the opposite assumption. The #dotcons model says to centralise control, extract value, smooth over conflict, optimise engagement, hide the mess. It “works” – but only by disempowering people and communities. The #openweb path, if it’s going to mean anything, has to go the other way:

decentralised

messy

trust-based

human-scale

and able to function anyway

That last bit is where we can learn from anarchist practice, because building federated, grassroots media (like #OMN, #indymediaback, Fediverse spaces) is not just a technical problem, it’s a social one. The tech already basically works, the people part doesn’t – yet. Micro practice is the missing layer – What we keep hitting is the gap between having tools (#ActivityPub, servers, platforms) and having cultures that can use those tools effectively

You can spin up a server in an afternoon, you can’t spin up trust, shared norms, or collective process nearly as fast. This is where activist/anarchist thinking helps – not as blinded ideology, but as a toolkit:

how to run meetings that don’t collapse

how to distribute responsibility without losing coherence

how to handle conflict without defaulting to bans or dominance

how to balance openness with resilience

These are the problems that keep blocking #openweb projects. It’s about the clash: horizontal vs “common sense”. One of the biggest tensions is this is people default to vertical “common sense” – someone should be in charge, decisions should be quick, authority should be clear. And in moments of stress, that instinct feels right, but over time, it reproduces the same power structures we’re supposedly trying to move beyond.

So we get a cycle of start horizontal, hit friction, fall back to informal hierarchy, burn out or fragment then repeat. Balancing this cycle requires conscious practice, not just good intentions. For #OMN, this isn’t theory, it’s practical. If we want a functioning, grassroots media network:

we need working horizontal processes

we need ways to mediate conflict and #blocking

we need to actively compost dysfunction instead of ignoring it

we need to balance “fluffy” inclusion with “spiky” clarity and direction

Otherwise, the social layer collapses long before the tech does. And then the #dotcons win by default, not because they’re better, but because they’re simpler in the short term.

The real opportunity here is to combine #KISS activist micro-practice (how people actually work together) with #openweb technology (how systems interconnect at scale). That combination is rare, and powerful. It gives us a path that is:

grounded (not abstract)

scalable (but not centralised)

resilient (because it expects mess)

and actually usable by normal people, not just #geekproblem specialists

This path isn’t useful because it promises a perfect future, it’s useful because it takes responsibility for the present. It asks – how do we make this work, here, now, with these people, in this mess? That’s the question the #openweb needs to answer, and if we don’t answer it, the answer we’ll get is more of the same, more #closedweb, more #dotcons, more #deathcult normality.

If we do answer it – even imperfectly – we start to build something else, something that grows not by control, but by practice.

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies – not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn

The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective well-being – a behaviour normalised by forty years of #neoliberalism, where people work against their own community and ecological survival while believing they are exercising “freedom”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=stupidindividualism

In the #OMN hashtag story, #spiky is the confrontational, direct, and uncompromising tendency within radical movements – the willingness to push back against power, name uncomfortable truths, and refuse to sand down political edges for mainstream comfort.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=spiky

#RSS is the unglamorous but democratic backbone of the #openweb – a simple, open standard that allows content to flow without the gatekeeping, algorithmic manipulation, and the data hoarding of the #dotcons.

#reboot is the necessary reset of the #openweb – stepping away from the dead ends of #techshit and #dotcons to rebuild human-centred, trust infrastructure using tools like #activitypub and the #fediverse, guided by the #4opens.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=reboot

#postmodernism is the cultural current that dissolved shared truth into competing narratives, undermines the foundations needed for collective action – leaving people fragmented, cynical, and unable to build solidarity.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=postmodern

In the #OMN hashtag story, #Oxford is a grounded example of real-world contradiction – where elitist power (#mainstreaming, #NGO, #deathcult) coexists with genuine grassroots community, making it a test bed for grassroots #openweb organising and the #4opens path.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Oxford

In the #OMN hashtag story, #PGA (Peoples’ Global Action) represents horizontal, grassroots, anti-capitalist organising – a prefiguration of the #openweb, built on direct action and solidarity rather than #NGO bureaucracy or #mainstreaming compromise.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=PGA

In the #OMN path, #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer – real human relationships and trust as the foundation that decentralised tech should serve, not replace.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=p2p

In the #OMN view, #opensource is not just a licence – it’s a political commitment to transparency, shared ownership, and community control over code, data, and process.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opensource

The #openweb is internet infrastructure built on open standards, open-source code, and community control – where users share power – as opposed to the #dotcons, with the #closedweb which enclose and monetise the commons.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openweb

#openprocess means decisions and governance happen visibly and participatorily – not behind closed doors, so people can see, challenge, and shape outcomes.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openprocess

#opendata means data that is freely accessible and shareable – controlled by communities rather than locked inside corporate silos.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opendata

In the #OMN path, #open means building on the #4opens – open code, data, standards, and process as a foundation for technology that serves people, not profit.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=open

#OMN (Open Media Network) is a grassroots project to build human-centred, trust-based digital infrastructure on the #openweb, grounded in the #4opens and focused on community control over technology.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN

The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is a framework for transparent, inclusive decision-making – replacing hidden power structures with accountable, federated, messy collective governance.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OGB

In the #OMN story, #nothingnew reminds us that cycles of co-option and failure have all happened before – and ignoring this history is how we repeat mistakes.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=nothingnew

In the #OMN story, #NGO refers to professionalised activism that defuses radical politics – replacing grassroots power with managed, funder-friendly “dissent”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=NGO

In the #OMN path, #neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of markets over people – normalising greed and eroding solidarity into the logic of the #deathcult.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=neoliberalism

#makinghistory is the practice of communities reclaiming storytelling – building open, living archives rather than leaving history to those in power.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=makeinghistory

In #OMN usage, #mainstreaming is how radical ideas get absorbed and neutralised – keeping the language while stripping out real challenge.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=mainstreaming

In the #OMN path, #KISS (“Keep It Simple, Stupid”) is a political stance against the #geekproblem – rejecting unnecessary complexity as a form of control.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=KISS

#indymediaback is a call to rebuild grassroots, community-controlled media as an alternative to both #dotcons and hollow #NGO media structures.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=indymediaback

In the #OMN path, a hashtag is not just a label – it’s a node in a shared political vocabulary, building a map of meaning and direction.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=hashtag

#grassroots means bottom-up organising rooted in real communities – accountable to collective need, not institutions.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=grassroots

The #geekproblem is the tendency to replace human trust with technical control – embedding narrow values into systems that shape everyone’s lives.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=geekproblem

In #OMN, #FOSS is a political commitment to collective ownership of technology – not just a licensing model.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=FOSS

In #OMN language, #fluffy describes feel-good politics that avoid conflict – prioritising comfort over any real change.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fluffy

#feudalism describes the emerging digital structure where platform owners extract value like lords from dependent users.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=feudalism

#fascism is what happens when the #deathcult drops its mask – authoritarian control to defend failing systems.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fascism

On the #OMN path, the #fediverse is practical #openweb infrastructure – decentralised, federated, and not owned by corporations.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fediverse

#encryptionist describes the tendency to prioritise technical security over social trust – a core expression of the #geekproblem.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Encryptionist

#dotcons are corporate platforms built on data extraction and control, presenting themselves as neutral while enclosing the commons.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

In the #OMN story, #DIY means reclaiming the ability to build and organise outside institutional control – grounding politics in practice.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

The #deathcult is the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism – sacrificing social and ecological survival for short-term fear drivern greed.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

In the #OMN story, #compost means breaking down failure and mess into fuel for new growth.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

In #OMN, #closedweb is controlled, extractive digital infrastructure where users have no power.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

#climatechaos describes the accelerating breakdown driven by the #deathcult, beyond manageable “climate change.”
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

#classwar is the ongoing conflict between the #nastyfew and the communities they exploit – often hidden by #mainstreaming narratives.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

#capitalism is the dominant system turning everything – relationships, nature, culture – into “profit”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

In #OMN, #block is the reflex to shut down challenge – preventing the messy work needed for real change.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

#blinded is being unable or unwilling to see beyond #mainstreaming and #dotcons logic.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

#fashernista describes performative activism that prioritises appearance over substance.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

#dotcons are the corporate platforms – Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube and their kin – whose business model is built on harvesting user data, manufacturing engagement, and converting human attention and community into profit, while presenting themselves as neutral public spaces.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

In the #OMN hashtag story, #DIY means reclaiming the practical capacity to build, organise, and maintain tools and communities outside of corporate and state control – not as a lifestyle choice, but as a political act of grounding radical change in real skills, real trust, and real human relationships rather than outsourcing power to institutions that don’t serve you.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

The #deathcult is the #OMN metaphor for the self-destructive logic of forty years of #neoliberalism – an ideology so committed to short-term profit, individualism, and economic growth that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations that human life depends on.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

In the #OMN hashtag story, #compost means taking the failures, mistakes, and accumulated mess of past movements and tech projects – rather than discarding or ignoring them – and breaking them down into something that can feed new growth, treating dysfunction and #blocking dead ends as raw material for building better rather than as waste to be hidden.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

In #OMN language, #closedweb refers to the controlled digital infrastructure – platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter – built on proprietary code, extractive business models, and centralised power, where people have no meaningful control over their data, their communities, or the rules that govern them.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

The #deathcult of #neoliberalism has driven us past the point where “climate change” – with its implication of manageable, orderly shifts – remains any honest description of what we face now. What we actually have is #climatechaos: cascading, systemic breakdown of the ecosystems, weather patterns, and social structures that human civilisation depends on, accelerating faster than institutions built on forty years of market logic are capable of, or willing to, address.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

#classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism – the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes – and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit. A conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

#capitalism is the current common sense – the water we swim in – the economic system that systematically converts collective goods, human relationships, and the natural world into private profit, enforcing this logic through every institution and platform we touch, while presenting itself as the only possible reality.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

In the #OMN hashtag story, #block refers to the reflexive, unconscious tendency of individuals and communities to shut down unfamiliar and challenging ideas, people, and processes – a defensive gesture rooted in #stupidindividualism and #postmodernism that prevents the trust-building and messy collective work needed for real #openweb organising.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

#blinded refers to being so captured by #mainstreaming tech orthodoxy and ideological “common sense” – particularly #neoliberalism and #dotcons culture – that you no longer see, or refuse to see, the harms those systems cause or any alternative paths that exist outside them.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

#fashernista describes a person in progressive or radical spaces who prioritises the appearance and aesthetic of activism – the right look, language, and social positioning – over the unglamorous, difficult work of actually building lasting structural change.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

If you want, the next step is to cluster these into a clean “chapter flow” (roots → mess → behaviours → solutions) so this stops being just a glossary and becomes a narrative tool.

These are the foundation tags – the ones everything else grows out of – the overall project: grassroots, trust-based, human-centred media infrastructure

#openweb – the political/technical terrain we’re trying to reclam

#4opens – the non-negotiable baseline (open code, data, standards, process)\openprocess – visible, participatory decision-making as default

#grassroots – bottom-up power, not institutional mediation

This cluster is about legitimacy, if it’s not grounded in these, it drifts into #NGO capture or #dotcons logic quickly. This is the “native soil” everything else either grows from or gets rejected by.

The Problem Space (what we’re composting), these tags describe the mess we’re in – the stuff we don’t ignore, but break down.

#deathcult (neoliberalism as destructive common sense)

#neoliberalism – 40 years of market logic shaping behaviour

#dotcons – corporate capture of digital space

#closedweb – controlled, extractive infrastructure

#mainstreaming – dilution and co-option of radical ideas

#NGO – managed dissent and professionalised politics

#classwar – underlying structural conflict

This is the compost heap, you don’t fix this directly, you don’t “win” against it head-on. You break it down, reuse what’s useful, and grow alternatives around and through it.

The #geekproblem Layer (tech distortions) is where things go wrong in implementation.

#geekproblem – replacing social trust with technical control

#techchurn – endless pointless rebuilding

#encryptionists – over-prioritising technical purity over social reality

#KISS – counterbalance: keep things simple and usable.

This cluster is why good ideas fail, not because the ideas are wrong, but because the tools and culture get shaped by people who don’t understand social process. This is where most #openweb projects die.

Cultural/Behavioural Patterns (how people act). The human layer – messy, unavoidable, and central.

#stupidindividualism – learned self-interest over collective good

#postmodernism – fragmentation of shared meaning

#fluffy – avoidance of conflict, feel-good paralysis

#spiky – necessary confrontation and edge

#block – reflex rejection of challenge

#blinded – inability to see outside dominant narratives

#fashernista – prioritising appearance over substance

This is the real battlefield, not tech, not policy – behaviour. If you don’t mediate this layer, everything collapses back into dysfunction, no matter how good your structure is.

The Alternative Infrastructure (what we build), are the actual tools and practices that make change possible.

#fediverse – decentralised network as a base layer

#activitypub – the protocol glue

#RSS – simple, open distribution backbone

#p2p – people-to-people first, tech second

#FOSS / #opensource – shared ownership of tools

#opendata – accessible, non-extractive information

These only work if rooted in the first cluster, otherwise they get captured and turned into another layer of the #closedweb.

Governance & Process (how we hold it together). Where most projects fail – or succeed.

#OGB – structured, open governance

#openprocess – again, because it’s that important

#DIY – practical ownership and responsibility

Without this, informal power takes over. You end up with hidden hierarchies, gatekeeping, and eventual burnout. With it, you get messy but functional collective control.

Practice & Direction (how we move).

#reboot – reset and rebuild from working patterns

#indymediaback – learning from past grassroots media

#makinghistory – documenting and owning our narratives

#nothingnew – grounding in historical cycles

This cluster stops you repeating mistakes, without it, every new wave thinks it’s inventing something new and walks straight into the same traps.

Grounding Example Layer

#Oxford – real-world test bed of contradictions

#PGA – historical example of horizontal organising

Without grounding, this all drifts into theory, these are example tags anchoring it in lived practice, where things break, and where they can actually work.

The Meta Layer (how to use this)

#compost – break down failure into growth

This is the key to the whole thing – Don’t try to “fix” the mess. Don’t try to “win” cleanly, you compost:

bad behaviour → learning

failed projects → patterns

conflict → structure

Final point (this matters) is the mistake people make is trying to tidy this into a neat theory, reduce it to messaging, turn it into a fixed ideology. That kills it, this clustering is not about control – it’s about navigation.

The mess stays messy, but now people can walk through it without getting lost.If you don’t cluster this stuff, it turns into a wall of noise. The mess is useful.

The hashtag story is messy, that’s the Point

One of the constant pressures we face in #OMN and wider #openweb spaces is the urge to “tidy things up.” People arrive, see a messy landscape of hashtags – #geekproblem, #deathcult, #dotcons – and their first instinct is to fix it, define it, standardise it, make it neat and legible. That instinct feels sensible, but is also the #geekproblem.

The hashtag ecology we’ve been growing over the last decade is designed to be messy. Not as a failure, but as a feature. These tags are not rigid definitions; they’re handles – entry points into ongoing conversations. They hold space rather than close it down. Different people can use the same tag slightly differently, argue over it, stretch it, even misuse it. That friction is not a bug. It’s the composting process.

This is where the #geekproblem shows up hard. The default technical mindset is to treat language like code: define variables, eliminate ambiguity, enforce consistency. In living social systems, that approach kills more than it fixes. You don’t get clarity – you get dead structure. A taxonomy that excludes instead of invites.

But – and this matters – pure chaos doesn’t work either. If everything is noise, only insiders can hear anything. New people can’t find a way in, and the whole thing collapses into a closed loop. The compost stops producing anything useful. So the question isn’t “mess or order?” It’s how to grow balanced living structures.

Dead structure says: this is the correct meaning, this is the right way to use it, anything else is wrong. Were living structure says: here’s how this is being used, here are examples, come play and meaning emerges through use. That’s the difference between a locked-down platforms and the #openweb. One enforces clarity from above, the other grows understanding from below.

Think of it like ecology. Compost isn’t just random waste – it’s a process. Layers, breakdown, transformation over time. Healthy systems have patterns and flows, but they’re never fixed. Forests change. Rivers shift. Nothing is static, but nothing is completely formless either.

The same applies here we don’t need to “clean up” the hashtag mess. We need to use it better by repeating patterns, so people can follow threads, tell stories that embody the tags, let contradictions surface and be worked through and resist the urge to prematurely close meaning. This is basic #KISS, but it’s a hard lesson. Keep it simple doesn’t mean make it simplistic. it means don’t over-engineer what needs to stay alive.

So yes, the mess has value. It creates space for people to build differently, to step outside the rigid frames of the #dotcons and their algorithmic control. It’s how we hold open a commons instead of collapsing back into platforms.

But remember, if everything is compost, nothing grows. If everything is fixed, nothing lives. #OMN sits in that tension, not cleaning up the mess, not drowning in it – but composting it into something people can actually use to make change.

“Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

“Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

The servent of the #nastyfew wispering in the ear of the #deathcult ists liberals

From a #OMN perspective, the mess isn’t just the wording – it’s the ideology embedded in the wording, and how that shapes behaviour over time. “Digital sovereignty” sounds harmless, progressive in a liberal policy context. But if you run this through a #KISS ideological lens, its more mess rooted in control, borders, and authority – concepts historically tied to state power. That’s why it’s so easy for the #mainstreaming crew to reuse the language without friction. When they launch something like a “Sovereign Tech fund,” they’re not inventing a new narrative, they’re tapping into one that was already compatible with their narrow worldview.

That’s the problem we need to keep composting – #mainstreaming language carries “common sense” ideological defaults. So what how can we shovel this mess – Liberals adopt a term to make ideas legible to institutions and funding. But obviously the term carries right-leaning assumptions (control, territory, hierarchy) – assumptions that quietly reshape the thinking and direction of projects. Then right-wing actors step in and feel completely at home using the same language.

At that point, it’s already too much mess, you’re not just “using” the language, you’ve internalised the worldview – “Sovereignty” is about defensive, fear-based framing (“protecting against others”) that clashes directly with #openweb values of networks over borders, trust over control and interoperability over enclosure. Our native world view is commons over ownership, so even if the intent is good, the term pulls thinking in the wrong direction. Its #KISS we need to shift focus from states → to people and communities, from control → to capability, from fear → to empowerment.

But here, #OMN pushes much harder – if you need mainstream policy language to explain what you’re doing, you’re already halfway into the #closedweb logic. The #openweb path doesn’t start from sovereignty, autonomy, or even agency. It starts from something simpler – shared standards, visible processes and trust networks (#4opens). That’s why the #OMN path matters, the more abstract the language gets, the easier it is to smuggle in ideology without noticing.

So what do we do with this mess? Yes, “digital sovereignty” is a dead-end term for open, trust-based politics. Yes, alternatives like “autonomy” are an improvement, but the real work is stepping outside that whole framing, instead of arguing over better words, focus on building systems that demonstrate openness, using language grounded in practice, not policy fashion.

Bluntly, this is mess we need to compost, it’s the normal mess of “blinded” liberals laying the groundwork – unintentionally – by adopting language that was never native to the #openweb. That’s the messy pattern – #OMN keeps pointing at, if you build with messy concepts, you will get messy outcomes. So yes – compost it. And next time, start from cleaner soil please.

The recurring theme is digital & social decay – A “trust collapse” resulting from bad faith and disempowerment online. The Goal is #KISS moving beyond individualistic #stupidindividualism, ” common sense to create a balanced collective, community-controlled alternatives.

The #OMN hashtag story is a shovel to “compost mess” to turn toxic digital decay into valuable, new growth rather than pretending the stinking mess doesn’t exist, the second step is acknowledging that disagreements are not to be avoided but used constructively to build stronger, more empathetic, and more transparent communities.

Do you notice a recurring theme and issue here? Read and use the hashtag story to help compost this.

The hashtag story is messy, that’s the Point

Closed systems protect individuals, but they rarely build movements

People fight against or/and ignore the #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach in tech because simplicity exposes power. Complexity, jargon, and process give cover – they make control look like competence. When paths are simple and transparent, everyone can see who’s blocking, who’s hoarding, who’s acting in bad faith. Many “experts” and institutions are emotionally and professionally invested in keeping things complicated; simplicity threatens their authority, their funding, and their identity.

All the #OMN projects are not directly about social change – they’re about making social change possible. That distinction matters as people don’t step into change unless they first believe change can happen. If the world feels fixed, locked, inevitable, then nothing moves. Our role is simpler, and maybe more important, to open that door a crack, to show that different paths exist.

Think of #OMN as a helping hand, not dragging people forward, not telling them what to do – just making it easier for them to take that first step when they’re ready. But to do this, we need to think more clearly – and more fundamentally – about technology itself. As most of the current “open paths” are cosplay at best, we need a network that links them as flows for there use to be unlocked from the current limits of #stupidindividualism shaping them – to become a native part of the expanding #openweb reboot.

I’ve been working on this for over 20 years, and one thing keeps proving true: we need roughly 90% open and 10% closed, the balance matters. As the current push from the #encryptionists flips this – aiming for 90% closed and 10% open. That isn’t a solution, it’s a retreat. It breaks the social fabric that makes collective tools usable and meaningful. It fragments, isolates, and ultimately shrinks the space where shared culture can exist.

Yes, privacy matters, yes, some things should be closed, that’s the 10%. But the commons – the space where we meet, talk, organise, and build trust – has to be open. Without that, there is no network, just silos. Take a simple example: you’re reading this via #activitypub. That’s a system built on being mostly open, with just enough closure to function safely. And it works, people are here, conversations happen, networks grow.

Compare that to more closed, encryption-heavy systems like old school Diaspora. Technically interesting, sure, but socially? Empty, few people, little flow, no impact. That’s the core point: this isn’t just about functions or features, it’s about culture.

Open federated, networked systems create the possibility of shared culture, and from that, the possibility of social change. Closed systems protect individuals, but they rarely build movements. We need both – but we need to get the balance right. Right now, too many people are getting it the wrong way round.

This Isn’t New: Decentralisation Was the Point All Along

Decentralised servers – what we now call the #Fediverse – are often talked about as if they’re some new, radical innovation. They’re not, they’re a return to the original design of the network. The early internet wasn’t built to be controlled, it was built to survive. The core idea was simple: if parts of the network were destroyed – even something as extreme as a nuclear strike – the rest would keep functioning. No centre, single point of failure or “off switch.”

That’s what decentralisation actually means. And this thinking didn’t even start with the #openweb. Systems like Usenet already embodied this approach: distributed, federated, run by many, owned by none. Messy? Yes. But resilient, open, and hard to capture.

What we’ve been living through for the last 20+ years – the rise of the #dotcons – is the opposite of this. Centralised platforms with single points of control. Easy to use for control and monetise, easy to manipulate, easy to shut down. We didn’t lose the #openweb by accident, we blindly traded it away for this convenience.

What we’re seeing now with the #Fediverse, #ActivityPub, and related projects isn’t innovation in the common sense. It’s a reboot, a return to the path we were on before we derailed it. The difference is that now we’re trying to rebuild this in a world that has spent decades normalising centralisation and control. 40 years of death cult worship has changed people, institutions, social groups and our very internal selves. That’s where the friction comes from, people arrive expecting #dotcons platforms, what they find is networks. People expect control, what they get is responsibility. People expect “free” what they face is shared cost and care.

So, it was never about the tech, the mistake we keep making is ONLY thinking this is a technical shift, it’s not, it’s cultural. You can spin up a decentralised server in minutes, that’s not the hard part, the hard part is everything around it:

Who runs it

Who pays for it

How decisions are made

How conflict is handled

How trust is built and maintained

This is the work the #dotcons hide from us, they wrap control as “free services” paid for with surveillance, extraction, and control. Now that we’re back on the #openweb path, that work becomes visible again, and yes – it’s harder.

Why this matters (Again). Resilience isn’t an abstract idea anymore as we’re living through cascading crises: political instability, #climatechaos, infrastructure fragility. A centralised network fails catastrophically were a decentralised network degrades – but keeps going. That’s the difference between a system you depend on and a system you can trust.

We don’t need to overcomplicate this – Keep It Simple (#KISS)

The #openweb is decentralised

The #dotcons are centralised

One builds commons, the other extracts value, everything else is detail. And yes nobody thinks the Fediverse is not messy, uneven, (yet) match the polish of corporate platforms. That’s fine, mess is where growth happens – if we compost it properly.

The #OMN view, we’re not trying to invent something new. We’re trying to make what already works usable at scale for media, trust, and collective action. The infrastructure is there, the protocols exist, the history is long. What’s missing is the shared layer – the commons – where information flows in ways people can actually rely on, that’s what we’re building.

If decentralisation feels radical, it’s only because we’ve spent so long inside systems that forgot #OMN #openweb #KISS

We keep making mess, then wondering why everything smells

A big part of this is the language we use, when we unthinkingly spread #mainstreaming terms, we push the worldview that comes with them, and that worldview is usually rooted in fear, control, and market logic.

Take “digital sovereignty.” it sounds solid, sensible, progressive. But, it’s a made-up term trying to frame the internet in nation-state and market terms – ownership, borders, competition. It’s a liberal answer to a fear-based economy: “how do we control this thing so it doesn’t threaten us?” That framing is the problem, because the #openweb was never built on control. It was built on trust, shared standards, and open process – the #4opens:

open data
open source
open standards
open process

That’s the native soil, when we blindly shift to language like “sovereignty,” we drag in assumptions that don’t belong. We start thinking in terms of ownership instead of participation, control instead of collaboration. And that creates mess – conceptual, political, and technical Then we spend years trying to “fix” that mess, composting it.

But it’s much better if we don’t make that mess in the first place #KISS, by staying grounded in #openweb values. We don’t need to retrofit control structures onto something that was designed to work without them. We don’t need layers of governance theatre to simulate trust, we can build trust directly through open processes.

This is why clarity, clear language matters, if we keep pushing borrowed language from the #deathcult, we’ll keep rebuilding its logic, no matter how good our intentions are. So yes, we need to talk more clearly about stopping importing broken concepts, stop framing open systems in closed terms and stop making more mess we then have to compost.

Start from the roots, grow from there, please.

The #dotcons, #mainstreaming, and Build to Walk Away

Three years ago I was trying to explain something simple in language liberals might actually hear. They talk about “platform capitalism.” Fine. But I’ve been calling it the #dotcons for 20 years – because that’s what it is – a con.

The last 30 years of tech hasn’t just drifted into this mess. It’s been shaped, step by step, enclosure by enclosure, into systems designed to extract value from us. What we now call the internet is, in large part, a machine built to manipulate, capture, and profit.

The old #openweb got fenced in, and most people, especially polite liberal society, went along with it. So we need to talk about the return and the problem. Now we have a shift of the #mainstreaming is flowing back toward the #openweb, that should be a good thing. But there is a problem: people don’t leave the #dotcons behind when they move, they bring the culture with them.

What we’re seeing is a flood of the same patterns – extractive behaviour, ego performance, status games. Not from one “side,” but from everywhere. The habits built inside the #dotcons don’t magically disappear just because the platform changes.

So the real issue isn’t technical, it’s cultural. If we don’t actively mediate this influx, we won’t rebuild the #openweb – we’ll just recreate the same broken systems in slightly different code.

So why do I talk so much about compost, and mess not being the problem. Mess is necessary, but only if it composts – if it breaks down into something fertile. Right now, we’re mostly just piling it higher.

This is where projects like #indymediaback and #OGB matter. They’re not perfect, but they are native to the #openweb path: grounded in trust, process, and the #4opens rather than control, branding, and capture.

The question isn’t whether #mainstreaming is good or bad. The question is: how do we hold the cultural line so that what grows is something genuinely different? Because if we don’t, the #dotcons don’t need to defeat us. We’ll blindly rebuild them ourselves.

So why do I argue we can’t just leave the #dotcons? This is where people get it wrong, every time the #dotcons tighten control – censoring, tweaking algorithms, shifting rules – the reaction is the same: leave, build the #openweb.

Yes, build the #openweb, but the idea that we should stop organizing inside the #dotcons right now? That’s a trap, because billions of people are still there. The conversations, the communities, the movements, they haven’t magically migrated. Walking away doesn’t free those people, it abandons them, leaving the space to be shaped entirely by the #deathcult and the forces already in control.

This is #nothingnew. The #dotcons are #closedweb infrastructure. They serve power because they were built to serve power. Expecting anything else is misunderstanding the system. The real question has never been: are these platforms good? It’s: what do we do, given that this is where people are?

The #geekproblem and the exodus fantasy, is a persistent fantasy – a classic #geekproblem – that if we just build better tools, people will come. They won’t, not on their own. A clean exodus to the #fediverse or any #openweb space doesn’t happen because we post about it. Movement-building has never worked like that, people move through relationships, trust, and shared struggle – not technical superiority.

So if you abandon the spaces where people already are, you cut those pathways. The #OMN approach has always been simple to use the #dotcons as a bridge, not a home, seed organizing where people already are while focusing energy on building the #openweb in parallel to clearly keep your foundations in the #4opens.

This isn’t about purity, it’s about effectiveness, don’t fall into #stupidindividualism, the idea that personal withdrawal is more important than collective reach. This is about infrastructure and grounding, if the #dotcons can switch you off at any moment, they cannot be your foundation.

That’s why we need:

indymediaback as publishing roots
activitypub and the #fediverse as distributed infrastructure
OMN as a bridge between cultures and spaces

This is the practical expression of the #4opens: not just open code, but open process and open trust. Don’t build your house on someone else’s land, but don’t stop talking to the people still living there either. Stay in the fight, when the #dotcons clamp down, it’s not a surprise, it’s a signal of what they are, and what they’ve always been.

The answer isn’t to run away, it’s to root ourselves somewhere that can’t be shut down, while continuing to show up where the people are.

Build the #openweb, stay in the fight, keep it simple #KISS

Toward Healthier Digital Public Spaces: A Cultural and Structural Challenge

From a practical perspective, the challenges in digital and social technology are not technical, they are cultural. This may seem obvious, but it is often overlooked in policy and implementation. At a basic level, there are two broad approaches to handling disagreement and complexity in online spaces:

Exclusion-focused approaches (e.g. blocking, filtering, silencing), which reduce immediate friction but reinforce fragmentation and polarisation.

Engagement approaches (e.g. dialogue, questioning, listening, and iterative response), which are more demanding but can, over time, reduce conflict and build shared understanding.

In the current mess – shaped by strong norms of individualism and personal optimisation – the first dysfunctional approach dominates. This grows increasingly fragmented discourse, where communities become isolated and less resilient.

Understanding this we can start to show the limits of “Common Sense” in today’s mess, were governance relies on this “common sense.” Over the past four decades, economic and cultural frameworks – market-driven individualism – has controlled how we design and use digital systems contributing to:

Increased social fragmentation

Growing economic inequality

Incentive structures prioritising engagement over well-being

Environmental and social externalities (including visible #climatechaos impacts)

These outcomes tell us that existing models are not sufficient for building sustainable digital public spaces, so we need to #KISS revisit platform dynamics and structural Incentives.

The dominant digital platforms (the #dotcons) operate on business models that prioritise data extraction, engagement metrics, and advertising revenue. These incentives shape what information is amplified, how users interact and which behaviours are rewarded. While these systems are effective at scaling control, they are not in any way aligned with public interest outcomes such as trust, accountability, or democratic participation.

Current trends – ranging from disinformation to polarisation and environmental stress – highlight the limits of systems based purely on competitive, self-interested models. At the same time, alternative approaches – such as the #openweb and federated systems – offer more aligned values but face basic challenges of coordination, usability, and governance. So we need to move from fragmentation to constructive engagement, to reframe the problem, from crisis to stewardship.

This more sustainable approach emphasises stewardship over extraction, collaboration over isolation to help build resilience over short-term optimisation. This does not mean abandoning innovation or individual freedom, but rather #KISS balancing these with responsibility for shared outcomes. As the current challenges in digital spaces are not only the result of “bad actors” or isolated failures. In simple terms we need to move from systems that amplify division toward systems that support understanding and the common good.

To compost this mess we need a willingness to engage with complexity and a commitment to building systems (technical and social) that prioritise long-term public value over short-term individual gains. This is not easy work – but it is necessary if digital infrastructure is to support healthy, democratic societies.

KISS – Keep it simple, sustainable, and focused on the common good.

Beyond Blocking: Building Trust Infrastructure for the Open Web

A Policy Case for Commons-Based Moderation in the Fediverse

The problem with the current approach

The normal response to harmful content and behaviour on federated social platforms today is the block. Instance administrators block other instances. Users block other users. Communities build blocklists and share them. This is understandable – it is the tool available – but it is not a solution. It is, at best, a temporary containment strategy.

Blocking is the digital equivalent of closing the curtains. The problem does not go away. The harmful actor does not change. The tension, between open participation and community safety, between freedom of expression and protection from harm, is not resolved. It is deferred, and at a cost to the openness that makes the Fediverse worth defending in the first place.

When entire instances are blocked, legitimate users on those instances lose access to communities they value. When blocklists are the primary moderation infrastructure, the communities that maintain them acquire disproportionate power over what the network sees. The default is isolation, the Fediverse fragments, not because of any external threat, but because of its own defensive reflexes.

This matters beyond the technical community. The Fediverse represents the largest functioning alternative to corporate social media. It is, in the most literal sense, public digital infrastructure owned by nobody and available to everyone. How it handles the tension between openness and safety determines whether it can scale to serve democratic societies, or if it remains a technically interesting experiment for a self-selecting community.

The #4opens principle and why it matters for policy

The Fediverse is built on a set of principles called the #4opens: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. These are not just technical preferences, they are a statement about what public digital infrastructure should look like – transparent, accountable, forkable, improvable by anyone.

The fourth open – open process – is the most politically significant and the most underdeveloped. It means that governing our communities, including how we handle conflict and harm, should be visible, contestable, and collectively grown. Not handed down by a platform’s trust and safety team or enforced by an opaque algorithm, not dependent on the goodwill of a instance administrator.

The current state of Fediverse moderation largely fails this test. Moderation decisions are made locally, inconsistently, and without shared infrastructure for collective reasoning. The result on balance is less freedom, more a patchwork of micro-kingdoms, each with its own rules, enforced by blocking the kingdoms whose rules they disagree with. This is not a stable foundation for the kind of digital public sphere that European democratic values require.

The commercial platforms are not the solution – but they are in the room talking loudly

Commercial social media platforms – what we call the #dotcons, shorthand for the dot-com era corporations that monetised public digital space, are present in or adjacent to the Fediverse. Meta’s Threads now implements ActivityPub, the protocol underlying Fediverse federation. This means that the same open standard that allows community-run instances to talk to each other also allows a platform with three billion users and an advertising-driven engagement model to participate in the same network.

The response in parts of the Fediverse community has been, predictably, to block Threads at the instance level. This is coherent as a local decision. As a strategy for the #openweb, it is kinda self-defeating. Blocking Meta does not make Meta go away, it does not change Meta’s incentives. It does not protect users who remain on Meta from the harms of algorithmic amplification. And it does little to build the alternative infrastructure that would give those users somewhere better to go.

The principled response to commercial platform encroachment on the openweb is not isolation, it is to build commons infrastructure so robust, so trustworthy, and so genuinely useful that the value proposition of centralised platforms diminishes. That means solving the moderation problem properly, not routing around it.

What trust-based flows offer that blocking cannot

The research and development work at projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN) points toward a different model: moderation not as exclusion but as flow management. In a trust-based flow architecture, content does not move through the network based on algorithms optimising for engagement, nor is it blocked at the border by administrators making binary decisions. Instead, it flows – or slows, or stops – based on trust relationships that communities build and maintain themselves. Trust is local, it is composable, different communities will apply different trust filters to the same content without requiring global consensus or any centralised authority.

This model has several properties that should interest European policymakers directly:

Accountability without centralisation. Trust relationships are explicit and auditable. When a community decides not to propagate certain content, that decision is visible and contestable within the community. This is categorically different from both corporate content moderation (opaque, unaccountable) and simple blocking (binary, irreversible).

Resilience against capture. Because trust is distributed and local, there is no single chokepoint that a bad actor – commercial, state, or otherwise – can capture to control information flows across the network. This is critical infrastructure resilience in the same sense that distributed energy grids are resilient against single points of failure.

Reversibility. The rollback function – the ability to re-evaluate historical content visibility based on updated trust relationships – is something no current platform offers at scale. It means that moderation decisions can evolve as communities learn, rather than being permanently encoded in block lists that few people maintain.

Scalability without hierarchy. Top-down moderation breaks down as communities grow. Moderators experience burnout and trauma. Rules based decision making become inconsistent. The trust-based model scales horizontally – as the network grows, the trust infrastructure grows with it, because it is built into the relationships between nodes rather than concentrated in any central authority.

The culture question is not separate from the technical question

It is a constant mistake to read this as purely a technical, you cannot build a healthy online culture without infrastructure – and you cannot build the working infrastructure without clear visions of what culture looks like.

The Fediverse community is currently navigating this without adequate tools. The result is a recurring cycle: a wave of new users arrives, often fleeing a crisis on commercial platforms. The existing community debates how to handle them. Blocking becomes the instrument of cultural negotiation. Fragmentation follows. The cycle repeats.

What is needed is not better blacklists, we need infrastructure that makes constructive engagement the path of least resistance, where trust can be extended incrementally, withdrawn proportionally, and rebuilt over time. Where communities are not forced to choose between openness and safety because the tools exist to manage both simultaneously.

This is a social and political problem that has a technical component. The Open Media Network project is one concrete path to solving it, building on mature existing infrastructure, proven open standards, and a decade of practical experience in grassroots on the ground and online federated media.

What European public investment can achieve here

European public funding for digital commons infrastructure has a strong track record. The NGI Zero programme has supported foundational work on everything from secure routing protocols to private messaging to federated video platforms. This investment compounds: open source outputs are reused, extended, and built upon by developers and institutions across the continent and beyond.

The case for investing in trust-based moderation infrastructure for the Fediverse is straightforward as the problem is real, well-documented, and getting worse. The Fediverse is growing, but without better tools for managing harmful content and building coherent information flows, its growth will hit a ceiling defined by the limits of volunteer moderator capacity and the inadequacy of binary blocking as a governance tool.

The solution is technically tractable, the components exist, the protocol exists, the codebases exist, the community exists. What is missing is the focused R&D investment to implement trust-based flows as working, deployable, open infrastructure.

The alternative is worse, if the Fediverse fails to solve this problem, the vacuum will be filled either by commercial platforms extending their reach into the federated space on their own terms, or by the continued fragmentation of the #openweb into isolated communities talking only to themselves. Neither outcome serves European democratic values or European digital sovereignty.

The investment required is modest. The upside, is a functioning commons layer for federated media distribution, owned by nobody, available to everyone, accountable to the communities it serves, is large. The time to build it is now, before the structural problems of the current moment ossify into the permanent architecture of the next generation internet.

What happened over the last ten years on our Fediverse path

The first steps were good. #Socialhub emerged as a genuinely grassroots space, shaped to maintain the integrity of the #activertypub native reboot. It grew directly out of the #activertypub affinity group itself – rooted in lived practice rather than imposed structure.

So what motivated this native path? The current #openweb reboot wasn’t exactly planned – it was, in many ways, serendipitous. During the #WC3 process, the usual mainstream players were largely absent. That gap created space for an alternative cohort to step in and shape things in a more “native” way, this is rare. Normally, these processes are dominated by institutional and corporate interests, but for a moment, we had something different – and it worked.

From that strong beginning, #Socialhub grew into a real, functioning community, its high point was during the Fediverse outreach to the EU, when there was a sense of shared purpose and direction. The social and technical sides were in balance, and the space felt alive, open, and productive, but over time, things shifted.

The rapid growth of the Fediverse brought in many people without any grounding in “native” #openweb culture. The influx – particularly from Twitter – changed the tone and priorities. This wasn’t entirely negative; growth always brings energy and diversity. But it also brought confusion, and a drift away from the original focus that worked.

At the same time, there was a strong and increasingly dogmatic shift toward the technical side of #activertypub, at the expense of the social layer that made it meaningful. The balance tipped, the core crew thinned out, and newer, more tech-focused contributors filled the space. This mirrored the rebooting of the #WC3 process, and the two together created a difficult, often unspoken tension over direction and responsibility. Governance also became an issue, the line:

“To use the forum, you must agree to these terms with Petites Singularités, the company that runs the forum.”

Made visible something that had been quietly present for a while: this was not, in practice, a community-owned space. It had an owner, with an agenda. What had been presented as a shared, grassroots commons was, structurally, something else? This marks a deeper shift – from serendipitous emergence to more deliberate control.

A short update: how we are failing

We didn’t fail because of bad intent. We fail because we didn’t hold onto the balance that made the space work.

We allowed the social layer to be sidelined by the technical.
We didn’t build clear, native governance while we still had the chance.
We mistook growth for success, without mediating the cultural shift it brought.
We let ownership and control consolidate quietly, instead of addressing it openly.
And when tensions emerged, we defaulted to avoidance and #BLOCKING, rather than doing the messy work of resolution.

In short, we lost the thread of the #openweb path by not actively maintaining it.

Where that leaves us now? We are now in a more complex, more conflicted space, the community is bigger, but less coherent. The vision is more diluted, but still present, if we choose to pick it up again.

The solution isn’t simple. It likely involves some form of real, lived democracy, and a return to explicitly valuing the social processes alongside the technical ones. And maybe the only solid ground we still have is this: Grassroots is always messy, that mess isn’t a flaw – it’s how you know it’s real. The challenge is not to remove the mess, but to hold it together well enough that it can still grow.

The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb

The Digital Commons: The Ground We Already Stand On

So how do we mediate this fear?

Who would have though this would sum up our needed path for the #Oxfordboaters and the #fedivers?

You would have to be an #asshole to unthinkingly disagree with what we are doing and pretty wise to thinkingly disagree with the path. Which one are you? So why are we in such a mess? Because people are acting from fear. Not always consciously, not always honestly – but fear is the driver.

Fear of losing control.
Fear of losing status.
Fear of uncertainty.
Fear of each other.

And when fear leads, people grasp for control. They close things down, centralise, gatekeep, and default to the safe, known paths of the #closedweb and institutional power. That’s how we get the current mess – top-down structures trying to manage what was meant to be lived, messy, and shared.

In #OMN terms, this isn’t a technical failure, it’s a cultural one. A failure to hold open processes in the face of discomfort. So how do we mediate this fear?

Not by pretending it isn’t there. And not by fighting it head-on – that just feeds it. We mediate fear by building trust through practice:

Keep things open (#4opens): transparency reduces fear of hidden agendas. When people can see what’s happening, they relax.

Lower the stakes: small, reversible steps instead of big, risky commitments. Let people edge in rather than jump.

Normalise mess: show that not everything has to be controlled to work. Messy, lived processes are not failure, they’re how real communities function.

Create shared doing: fear shrinks when people work together on tangible tasks. Composting, media, infrastructure – doing builds trust faster than talking.

Hold both fluffy and spiky: the fluffy path makes space for people to come in; the spiky path protects that space from being captured or hollowed out. You need both, visibly and honestly.

Refuse false clarity: the #dotcons sell certainty and simplicity. The #openweb is different, it’s about holding complexity without collapsing into control.

And maybe most importantly, stay present. Fear thrives in abstraction, it weakens in lived, grounded relationships. In the end, mediating fear isn’t about convincing people with arguments. It’s about creating environments where fear has less reason to exist.

This is the same dynamic you can see with Oxford boaters. The river culture is native, messy, negotiated, based on lived practice and mutual understanding. People want the freedom to move, to live lightly, and not be bound by rigid landlord rules. But when outside structures push in – formal control, ownership models, enforcement – they reshape that culture into something else. The tension isn’t really about rules or functions; it’s about which culture gets to define the space.

That’s the real work of #OMN: not only building tools, but growing the social soil where people feel able to act without retreating into control.

Individual fears