You all built the #dotcons that gave him the power… phww… please try to do better next #indymediaback
Q. The far right have mastered the internet for recruitment and disinformation, the rest of us are barely in the game, would a completely regulation free internet not benefit them and lead to fascism? If so, how should regulation work to stop them?
A. that’s a good question, that the is no easy answer too. Most liberal regulation of the internet are clearly disastrous so this is a bad direction to push. This leaves us only one option to do a better job ourselves. This is currently the only real option we have available #indymediaback#omn
Of course, we have to shovel a pile of post-modern, liberal careerist shit out the way to make room for this radical/ progressive #openweb media. I look around and mostly see “our” media adding to the stinking shit pile we need to compost. Our first step is away from our own mess #OMN
Q. Lies travel faster than the truth, the far right understand that and exploit it without conscience. Without moderation, I cannot see how to combat it
A. Pessimism travels faster than optimism, but only optimism has any hope of creating the change we need. Feed the problem or solve the problem, the is no “third way”
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.
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.
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.
For the last 40 years, we have had #neoliberalism pushed into every part of our living human and natural world. This was designed to disintegrate the social democratic 20th century consensus and replace it with a 19th century market fundamentalism. This has successfully and obviously pushed selfish over selfless. Over the last 20 years, this fundamentalism pushes social democratic norms out of the internet and #openweb and replace these values with powerful tools for social control based on market logic of “want to be” powerful individuals and capital agenda.
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.
With the current #openweb reboot going on there’s a lot of default thinking that is bad, and we do need to learn to judge between the good and bad paths if it’s to live up to its potential. Let’s start to give examples:
* Promoting silos vs promoting networks – as our current thinking is based on closed/silo thinking then when we promote #openweb projects we continue to use this thinking and promote silo/closed thinking rather than harder to understand open/network thinking.
– Protocols rather than platforms, balance talk about #Fediverse/#ActivityPub and #mastodon or branded projects. Our brand thinking is a failure of networking and contains strong unseen #deathcult thinking.
– Always outreach a wide selection of instances rather than a single one, the strength is in the network and not in the silo. Networks scale downwards, more/balanced, with stability is better than one “solution”. Be weary of sites that push themselves as the “place”.
– Networks are based on trust, in this look for groups/families of projects to support. Lose is always good, do not support “we are THE solution” closed siloed thinking. Write articles about a spread of views is better outreach as this is actually the project.
– be weary of projects that promise digital security/privacy first – these projects are always lying and thus dangerous and unhealthy for trust based networks. This is a hard-to-understand open/closed issue, we all need to have real conversations about this.
I have been developing and using #opensource and #openweb projects for nearly 40 years. For the last 20 years at the coalface of development, this is my experience.
Most #openweb projects are more than 99.9% unusable this is normal. A few come up to 5% usability; these are the “successful” ones. It’s very rare for a project like mastodon to be 50% useable – but more than 90% of the people I push in that direction still bounce – though this is more likely because of digital drug habits of the #dotcons than the UX of the project which is good itself.
Let’s be generous our #indymedia reboot project is currently 90% unusable; this is normal for openweb projects. It’s hard to build something with limited resources and training.
Our plan is to make it as simple and #KISS looking as possible to roll out to small groups of testers to develop it into being 20% useable by their feedback. While doing this we can roll out the idea of the project to bring more energy and resources into this shift from 10% to 20% usability.
We only open outreach when we are beyond that 20% level, because it would obviously be self-defeating otherwise. Then inch up the usability while shifting the social expectations of good #UX to a social harmony.
Think of the fedivers as a flowerbed in a big (#openweb) garden surrounded by concrete. We are interested in the garden and bracking up the concrete (#dotcons) to make room for more flower beds and wild forest.
#Activertypub is a part of the flow, as is #RSS and maybe #Odata etc. The apps are the pipes. The human community produces and mediates the flow, in a metaphorical sense is the flow.
The fedivers is lovely healthy’ish flower bed, a small part of the #openweb garden that we are caring/nourishing in our work. When we are down and dirty working in tech it is important to remember this. In the end the garden is the human community’s living as part of a wider natural ecosystem.
The current priority is to get the flow working in a small and sustainable way – thus the hyperlocal test rollout and #epicyon.
This is why i use “mess” “shit” “compost” and “spades” as communication metaphors. The stinking mess we are in is a fertile time for change. For the last 10 years the #encryptionists agender and the #dotcons have been a sterile time, in this shit is a good thing, to live in stinking times 🙂
We have to keep focus on nurturing the seedlings with nutrition rich flows otherwise they wither and die. “Priority is to get the flow working in a small and sustainable way – thus the hyperlocal test rollout and epicyon.”
Looking at wordpress (WP) as a option, would like to try this out on my blog (http://hamishcampbell.com) thus the desire to get it working better. We have already mastodon and peertube. With out a bigger crew we should concentrate on creating a flow with epicyon as this is work anufe. If we can join WP to this flow a bonus.
Remember we are ONLY planting the seeds in the cracks and nurturing them. The roots of the plants (community) bracks the concrete. If we spend time trying to break the concrete we will soon be exorsted and achieve little.
So our mission is to find cracks and plant seeds. Of courses gathering the seeds (crews/code) is a first step – thus outreach and the messiness this brings – we do live in stinky times.
Then think of #searx (http://openworlds.info) as the map to the garden and as a way for people to find out of the concrete paths to the fresh #openweb grass fields. It can all grow up slowly if we keep a nourishing flow going. If we forget, it dries up and dies as it has done meany times in the last 20 years.
You would be surprised how fast nature reclaims concrete given a chance 🙂
Q. I’ve read a lot of your stuff but I’m hoping you’ll clarify something. What’s a “fashernista”?
A. A large part of society who do what’s fashionable. Not what’s right/wrong/best. In the era of the #deathcult of neo-liberalism this has always been the wrong path to take. It’s a simple idea.
The hashtags are designed to make the mainstream as dirty as possible so people see the need to pick up #openweb #4opens tools “spades” to clear the stinking shit and pools of piss #climatechaos is increasingly going to show we live in (consumerism/alienating work/greed is good) Make compost (decay of death) to plant seeds (fertile life) to grow flowers (lifecult). It’s a convoluted metaphor 😉
Its a hard to understand, simple thing. In the era of the #deathcult the fashernisas are almost always wrong and a part of the problem. In the era of the #lifecult fahernistas are mostly right and a part of the solution, does that make it more simple?
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?
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
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.
Help OMN indymedia reboot
* It easy to keep crossing wires with “media” vs. personal. Media should be open, with clear sources, except when protecting them. Whereas personal data should default to private
* #OMN is not about tech – all code is ideology – the OMN is a social solution to a social problem
* teach people the #4opens and review tools/projects they use/want to use by them.
* on the dev/organising site you can help by asking simple basic questions
The #dotcons digital drug addicts are going to need detoxing to be able to give up the #failbook habits. So try not to bite them when they shit all over DIY #openweb projects. Spades we need spades, shit makes good compost 😉
The #encryptionists push stuff that the #fashernista crew then push and the outcome a mess and the decline of the #openweb and resulting ripping of our threadbare social fabric by the #dotcons
