A lot of people talk about censorship on the #fedivers without much understanding how this is different to censorship on the #dotcons The fedivers instances voluntary federate to other instances of the fedivers, its part of the open network that you can choose not to federate with some instances. This is not censorship as each instance has its own TOS and ethos and is happy to share information with other instances that share this world-view and not to share federation with instance that don’t, this is the point of a voluntary network.
Users who do not feel happy with the instance they are on can simply move to an instance that shares their world view. The is no “censorship” in the American sense of blocking #freespeech the reposabilerty is placed onto the user to find a place where their speech fits. If they cannot find such a place they have the freedom to set up their own place. Then instance can choose if they will federate with them or not.
It’s kinda annoying that the #rightwing#trolls and the “progressive” conspiracy crew CRY #censorship without this understanding as it take up space and focus. I mostly just end up blocking them or de-federating from their instance if they cannot understand and keep throwing shit thinking into my spaces. On the #openweb its simple don’t be a troll please.
Q. While I agree with everything you wrote in that post, I don’t get how that illustrates the geekproblem. Is the #geekproblem the same as the #encryptionists?
A. The #geekproblem is illustrated here http://hamishcampbell.com/index.php/2021/03/06/over-the-last-10-years-we-have-been-told-a-lie/
Q. In one post you wrote that the geek problem is replacing trust with control. That immediately communicated clearly to me.
A. The #geekproblem is a general issue of misunderstanding of “total control” and what it is to be human. The #encryptionists are an example of this, that have been dominate for the last 10 years, the solution to everything is “privacy” “lock down” isolated individualism, me only me “no such thing as society only individuals and their family’s”.
The hashtags have different meanings if you look at them from different directions – but always #KISS and radical at base. Metaphors, soft knowledge. The are no hard definitions – but add them together and they tell a story of “control”. The opening is that YOU have the opertinertly… maybe its a bit Qanion, first time I thought about that one 🙂
Q. I assume open data, which is good in some contexts but shades into surveillance in others.
Open processes? Which again I like in most of the contexts I work in,
What else?
A. The is a few pages http://hamishcampbell.com/index.php/projects/4opens its a radical “social” definition of the open-source/free-software process. #4opens can be used to judge any tech/social project. It’s needed to lift the lid on what #dotcons and #NGO say and what they actually do, always different. If people make judgments it’s likely to put to one side 95% of the current tech crap and concentrate on real #openweb projects that get lost in the churning of #fahernista and #geekproblem agenders.
With #opendata currently we have a control issue. All the #dotcons data is open to corporations who pay and government agencies who spy, it’s just closed to us. What is the role of data in society is a complex issue that we do almost nothing to talk about in any real sense.
Social (data) ideas to think about:
What is a “free-market”
A. Ain’t no such thing and never has been nor will be
What is a command economy.
A. Any capitalist supply chain.
What are humane relationships.
A. longer conversation…
Q. But this is such a thing as a “free-market” in inverted commers 🙂 it’s the data we have on the things we “value” which we exchange for “data” that is created and guarded by our “states” with lots of guns and bombs.
A command economy is what the soviets tried and failed and china is trying to recreate with a state “manoalay” on data and metadata.
The “humane data” is the interesting one for #4opens and #OMN which are planting seeds for.
And we have chat/wikis, bots and other projects. The running cost of all This is currently just over £500 a year as we have upgraded the visionontv server to host lots more video.
Feel free to use/support the #openweb projects and get involved in running them, become a mod, its #DIY
The #geekproblem is a humane failure of trust and its replacement with control.
The #hashtags add up to tell a story and thus build a way out of this mess.
The #deathcult is the last 40 years of neo-liberalism.
Need to work in shovels, shit and compost to the story. Hashtags a tool for #openweb organizing ideas/stories/community’s. The is obviously a balance with self-expression. At the moment this “balance” is pure #deathcult being pushed by our shared #stupidindividualism
We have a #shoval, common storied #hashtags we have piles of #techshit to shovel for #compost to build up fertile soil for planting flower and vegetables to nourish our soles and actions.
Why talk in “soft” metaphors?
The issues are soft as are the explanations/metaphors. You can’t have a hard explanation of the social world without building it up from an ideological foundation. As most people are in denial of the possibility of different world views/ideologies this makes “hard” conversations a largely pointless way of communicating. People asking for them have not taken the first step so talking their hand to help them will soon lead you down a different/ideology path. As the project is about #KISS and focus this is something we have limited time/focus for.
If you can glimpse the world from different views/ideologies than the soft/metaphor will talk to you and the attraction for hard will be less strong. These people have a hope of building a different/ideology world/process so can help in real ways.
As we need to focus, it’s not an issue to talk to the first and more important to consolidate around the second… question is finding people that have not been “broken” by #mainstreaming agenders.
Q. I am looking for the definition of open standards, and it’s quite foggy. I found on opensource.com something useful, but it’s still a candle in the dark
A. it’s an under resourced process for the #openweb that need input. It’s at the heart of the #OMN project. How we define it at the #OMN is a standard produced with #4opens process which is a bit circler as open “industrial” standards is one of the #4opens 🙂
All “standards” are social agreements/consensuses thus they CANT BE built form #geekproblem#stupidindividualism and the #deathcult we have wasted and will waste more time if we keep pushing this shit.
The idea of the #OMN is that it does NOT host any/meany of projects it incubates rather it is the “holder” of the standards that glues the projects together. Some of these will be “standards body” some will be defacto by use and consensus. In the end we need to look beyond #nothingnew and create new standards #4opens body’s – go slow on this as concessions are hard and only worthwhile if you do the hard work to achieve them.
Almost everything built in alt-radical tech ends up feeding pointless #fashernista churn. New platforms, new protocols, new branding, new codebases tend to be endless motion with very little grounding in actual social need. People mistake novelty for progress, and the result is a constant cycle of abandoned projects, burnt-out developers, and fragmented communities.
That’s one of the reasons why #indymediaback matters. It is not another pointless radical tech project chasing fashion. It grows from the #nothingnew path, building around things that already worked socially, culturally, and politically before the current mess swallowed the #openweb.
The point of #nothingnew is not nostalgia, it’s mediation. Instead of endlessly reinventing tools and social structures, we look at existing working practices and compost the failures while keeping the value that already exists, we build from continuity rather than disruption.
For the first 5 years of the #fediverse, this often means creating #openweb replacements for existing #dotcons platforms. That has value, people need usable alternatives to corporate systems, but simply copying the logic of the dotcons into federated code has real limits.
Code is never neutral, all code carries embedded assumptions, social relations, and ideology. When we directly replicate #dotcons platforms, we import the values of the #deathcult along with the interface design. Metrics, branding, influence economies, performative identities, engagement addiction, soft/hard hierarchies – all this gets reproduced inside supposedly “alternative” spaces.
This is where the problem needs mediating rather than denying. The path of #indymediaback is different because it starts from an existing radical social process, not from abstract tech blindness. #indymedia already had working publishing flows, distributed trust networks, collective moderation practices, and real-world activist communities. The technology existed to support those social relations, not replace them.
That means the real value of #indymediaback is not primarily the tech stack, even though the tech matters. The value is in rebuilding the social continuity that made the original project meaningful. Without that grounding, you likely just produce another empty platform that disappears into the pile of forgotten radical tech experiments.
Food for thought: the #geekproblem is often not actually interested in the #openweb as a human value network. Instead, parts of geek culture feed parasitically off the current mess – thriving on fragmentation, novelty churn, status games, and technical abstraction disconnected from lived social reality.
Feeding off the collapse of the #openweb while calling it innovation is still bowing down to the #deathcult. Seen this way, the need for change becomes clearer, that we need active mediation, not passive drift. Both carrot and stick. Support grounded projects that grow from real communities, and challenge the pointless churn that keeps draining energy away from building durable alternatives.
The #OMN is one attempt at this – a shovel for composting the inhuman mess, so something living can grow from it.
Q. A bridge for #matrix to #XMPP this is the most important “political” bridge they could build and support so not to look like a #meto#NGO project. Look at what groups do, not what they say.
A. The moment that both communities manage to provide a seamless, first-class, stable integration of #Matrix and #XMPP without finger-pointing each other for the responsibility to do that, the very moment it doesn’t matter anymore which of these networks you initially signed up to, we could see a huge leap forward for open decentralized messaging.
Q. Think the needs to be a carrot and stick aproch to making this happen. Both supporting the coding and hitting them with the shaming stick. #Matrix as a #meto project likely has to make the move.
A. What if for a moment we gave up on blaming each other and started accepting that #matrix started rather late, tried to learn from experiences and tried to fix some things #xmpp folks weren’t able to address for roughly two decades, for whichever reasons? I see stubbornness on both sides as a main cause for this messy situation. 😑
Q. Its completely understable why we are in this #openweb chat mess.
A. Exactly. The only way to resolve this probably is not to let technical people come up with final product decisions. This overemphasizes the importance of technology and downplays the need to solve actual problems. We end up designing better mousetraps while never even trying to actually catch mice.
Q. The #matrix project being a #NGO has reason not to build the bridge, but more power to build it if they are pushed to do so. The #xmpp folks being a disorganization have less power to build the bridge but more reason to do so. Neither wont to do it and feed off the current mess in different unhealthy ways. Thus, both are actually feeding off the dying #openweb looked at it this way the need for change becomes more obvuse and active carrot and stick work important.
Before diving into the whole open/closed misunderstanding and conflict, it helps to step back and look at the different roles inside a project, and who has the power to say yes or no at each level. A healthy project usually has something like this structure:
admin mod producer user reader
The real difference between “closed” and “open” systems is mostly about where power sits inside this stack. In a “closed” system, power is concentrated at the top – admins control everything, moderation is restricted, producers have little autonomy, users are mostly passive consumers, and readers have no meaningful agency at all.
This is the standard #dotcons model, centralised control with limited participation. In a more “open” system, power shifts downward toward the producers and community.
The reader still has little direct power because they have no real buy-in yet. They are consuming information, not helping shape the space.
The “user” gains a small amount of power through posting, commenting, tagging, reacting, and participating from their own account.
The “producer” is where things start becoming socially valuable. Producers create content, organise discussions, document knowledge, and help sustain the commons. Once producers become trusted through practice and participation, they should naturally begin moving toward moderation roles.
The “mod” should hold as much practical power as possible without endangering the stability of the instance or project. Moderation works best when it is close to the lived reality of the community rather than imposed from above.
The “admin” still needs strong technical power because someone has to maintain infrastructure, security, backups, federation, and legal responsibility. But socially, there should be a very strong cultural rule against using that power casually or politically.
In a healthy #openweb project, the day-to-day running of the space should mostly sit with the mod/producer layer, not with the admin layer. That distinction matters, admins maintain infrastructure, mods and producers maintain community.
When admins dominate community decisions, projects tend to slide toward enclosure, control, fear, and eventually stagnation. A recent example, this is what happened with #socialhub in the Fediverse. The path to making this work is social mediation through the #4opens, combined with transparent audit logs and visible decision-making, this creates accountability without needing rigid top-down control.
The goal is not “no power.” That is fantasy, the goal is to distribute power socially, visibly, and responsibly, so communities can self-organise without constantly collapsing into either chaos or authoritarian control. That balance is the real challenge of the #openweb path.
If I look at the metric of “is the banking system gone yet?” I notice that indeed, no, Bitcoin has not made even a ding in the banking system. The same crooks are running the same old international scams, politicians are still stuffing their ill-gotten cash in offshore accounts, and Bitcoin has made no difference.
I can also look at the independent variable of “are people spending bitcoins on stuff they actually need?”, and indeed again no, nobody around here uses bitcoins, or accepts bitcoins as payment for goods or services.
The energy consumption of Bitcoin exceeds that of the Netherlands (https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons) in this Bitcoin is clearly a crime against our habitat and a crime against humanity.
Bitcoin is not a “net positive for the globe” it set out to disintermediate the banking system, it failed. What it produced was a horrendously inefficient energy-guzzling monstrosity, which only really empowers people who already had a lot of money in the economy prior to Bitcoin’s invention. The usual suspects got richer out of Bitcoin and the banking system wasn’t obsoleted by it.
So on every measurable indicator, Bitcoin has been a failure.
My thought. Bitcoin is the ‘#geekproblem solution to the worship of money, its a meto project. The #geekproblem has meany sins of which the #encryptionist project has been a destructive one for the last 10 years. It is inhuman to make mashion into gods. The smile, trust, a helping hand are the currency of life. The fundamentalist money worship of the last 40 years is going to kill billions of us #XR
We need to start to shovelling this shit, not worship it #OMN is a shovel, compost is the bases of life.
Are a simple way to judge the value of a “alt/grassroots” tech project.
* Open data – is the basic part of a project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data without this open they cannot work.
– you can likely download your chats and metadata, seams to be there so that a open
* Open source – as in “free software” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software this keeps development healthy by increasing interconnectedness and bringing in serendipity. The Open licences are the “lock” that keep the first two in place, what we have isn’t perfect, but they do expand the area of “trust” that a project needs to work, creative commons is a start here.
– its maybe be technically open-source but it is the most restricted open-source you can get so give it half a open
* Open “industrial” standards – this is a little understood but core open, it’s what the open internet and WWW are built from. Here is an outline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
– it looks like it uses no open standed for chat? Not sure for encryption so no open for now
* Open process – this is the most “nebulous” part, examples of the work flow would be wikis and activity streams. Projects are built on linking trust networks so open process is the “glue” that binds the links together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process
– looking at the github the process is locked down and not excessable to normal people, the company structure is a #dotcons so no open.
– so its 1 and ½ opens and is thus not a #4opens project so do not recommend using it.
It’s easy to become a 4opens project and join the #openweb family:
EVIL – At the stinking end you have the #dotcons with full on technicology and privacy nightmare. Facebook messenger, whatsapp (facebook) and telegram (who lies) imessage (just trust us)
NEUTRAL – At the next stage you have the ethical, good technologically working, socially problem apps like signal (king who dose not federate) and matrix (a non-industrial #NGO standard)
GOOD – Then you have the usable, but complex good tech like modern jabber/XMPP that ticks the boxes but still suffers from the #geekproblem
Then you have the #geekproblem with IRC and blockchain spam.
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Or for a less “moral” view on the same subject, a post from the #openweb
You could have a chat compass. Centralized/decentralized on one axis, Open/Closed on the other.
One uncomfortable thing we need to address, calmly and constructively, is this: for the last decade, the right has been better at cooperating around #openweb media than the left.
This isn’t because the right has better politics. It’s because they’ve been more pragmatic about infrastructure. While much of the left argued endlessly about identity, fashion, theory, tone, and purity, right-wing and reactionary groups quietly built linking ecosystems: shared blogs, cross-posting networks, video hubs, newsletters, forums, and self-hosted media that reinforced each other. They understood, often instinctively, that control of distribution matters more than rhetorical perfection.
By contrast, the left has been worse than useless on some of the basics. Something as simple as linking between radical media projects has often failed. Projects compete for attention, split over minor differences, or collapse into internal conflict. Even when the politics align, cooperation doesn’t follow. The result? Fragmentation without any resilience.
Ironically, the few left-wing media projects that have succeeded at scale largely did so by abandoning alternative tech altogether. They built their audiences and careers inside the #dotcons – Twitter/X, YouTube, Facebook, Substack – accepting algorithmic dependency as the cost of survival. That choice brought reach, but at the price of autonomy, long-term stability, solidarity and real political leverage.
This isn’t a moral judgement – it’s a structural observation. Platforms reward individual brands, they block collective ecosystems. Once inside that logic, cooperation becomes optional and is often discouraged.
Where progressives have quietly seceded is not primarily in party politics or campaigning, but in lifestyle and cultural subcultures. This is where the #fediverse, #Mastodon, and other #openweb tools first took root. These spaces were driven by values – privacy, autonomy, care, consent – rather than reach or growth.
For a long time, that made them feel “apolitical” in the narrow sense. But in reality, they were deeply political, just not aligned with electoral or media spectacle cycles. They were building infrastructure for different kinds of social relations, not greed feed messaging machines.
Alongside this, we’re seeing tools being used more explicitly for radical and progressive agendas. Projects like #VisionOnTV and #IndymediaBack are reconnecting media with movement. Spaces like #Kolektiva bring an explicitly #fashionista anarchist politics into federated infrastructure. And frameworks like #OMN (Open Media Network) focus on shared process, trust, and governance rather than branding or growth.
This is important because as #mainstreaming accelerates and trust in the #dotcons continues to erode, both progressive and reactionary groups move further into the #openweb. The question is not whether this will happen, it’s how we shape the culture and norms of these spaces.
The right tends to treat tech instrumentally: as a tool for mobilisation, influence, and power accumulation. That can make them effective in the short term, but it often leads to centralisation, cults of personality, and brittle structures that fracture under pressure.
The left, when it’s at its best, treats tech as part of a broader social ecology: something that should support care, plurality, mutual aid, and collective agency. But when the left fails, it fails by refusing to build — mistaking critique for action, and purity for strategy.
The #openweb doesn’t automatically belong to anyone. It’s a terrain of struggle. If progressives don’t show up, cooperate, and do the boring work of linking, hosting, moderating, and sustaining infrastructure, others will fill that vacuum. This is why now is the time to make your space in this network and be heard.
Not by abandoning existing networks overnight, but by practicing a #stepback: one foot in, one foot out. Staying connected where people are, while actively building and strengthening open alternatives. Helping others take that step, rather than shaming them for not already being there.
If we could build #dotcons social media, we can build #openweb social infrastructure. If we could centralise power, we can federate it. The #openweb path is not a retreat, it’s a return to shared ownership, shared memory, and shared responsibility. And it’s long past time the left took it seriously again.
