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Archiving the #openweb in a personal way

I spend a bit of time copying conversations off transient communication, microblogging, #failbook, chat etc. and archive this on my blog. I don’t tend to do “good practice” in this as I do it #DIY and don’t get paid for my time 🙂

I have two ways to “anonymize” text, if I keep the flow then I take the names out and put Q. and A. as the voices, if it’s out of the flow I just put “from the #openweb” this makes it quick and simple to archive things of value without jumping though impossible conversations each time. If people won’t credit and ask, I add it, it’s the polite thing to do.

Now if someone made code to automate credit and archiving work just as well, I would be happy to use it 🙂

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Talking about grassroots media as a step away from the current #techshit

Hamish Campbell, a veteran in radical media for the past 30 years, discusses the failure of current technology and mainstream culture. He highlights how the #dotcon boom commodified our data, resulting in closed technology silos like #Facebook and #Instagram that capture our attention and data for their own profit. Campbell argues that alternative technology built around an #encryptionist agenda has gone nowhere and that the world is dominated by these tech giants. He argues for the importance of the #openweb, which was born open but is dying closed over the last 20 years, and advocates for rebooting grassroots media as a solution. Campbell uses the Oxford #IMC as an example of how a simple federated network can work by sharing content, using trusted link flows, and allowing content to be moderated or rolled back. He believes that the beauty of the #openweb is based on free flowing links, unlike the #closedweb of our current dominating technology. Campbell concludes that the #OMN project is more important for what it does not do than for what it does, and highlights the need to take small steps towards a solution by rebooting grassroots media as a example project.

What you can do

In the last few years there have been events and gatherings in the US, Portugal, and Madrid, discussing the possibility of #rebooting #Indymedia. The current history of Indymedia has been primarily written by academics and is very Americanized, so there is a need to retell the stories and provide a wider perspective. To successfully reboot Indymedia, I think it needs to return to its open and serendipitous roots, rather than the bureaucratic and closed structure it became. Fortunately, most of the technical tools needed for a decentralized and federated system, such as ActivityPub and Scuttlebutt, already exist. To maintain its radical grassroots philosophy, the principles should be used to ensure openness and accessibility. To get involved, one can search for #indymediaback or “reboot Indymedia” and find useful links #OMN

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The problem with institutions funding the social side of #openweb tech

Almost all our #geekproblem software fails because they are building “control”, where all good societies are built on “trust”. We keep making piles of #techshit because we can’t communicate about this simple understanding #techchurn one way to address this is to fund the social side of tech.

The problem which we need to solve is the institutions funding of the social side of #openweb tech, if we do this now most of this funding will feed parasite #NGO’s rather than anything useful. This is also a problem of the existing funding for coding, it pushes the #geekproblem when it funds anything outside the basics.

We have a mess because our world is messy, current funding plays little role in composting this mess.

That’s the job of people with shovels – who funds them.

Most of our software fails because it is built with a focus on “control”, rather than “trust”, which is the foundation of a good society. This leads to an endless cycle of creating useless technology that we can’t communicate about. To address this problem, we need to invest in the social side of technology.

The challenge lies in funding the social aspect of #openweb technology. Currently, most funding goes to non-governmental organizations (#NGOs) that are not always effective. Additionally, the existing funding for coding primarily focuses on the basics, which perpetuates the problem of the #geekproblem.

Our world is messy, and the current funding plays little role in cleaning up this mess. People with shovels – those who do the work – need funding to make a difference.

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Thinking about why #openweb projects fail.

Many #openweb projects have failed over the years, and there are reasons, first is the challenge of sustaining a project that is built on open-source principles and relies on community involvement and collaboration. In capitalism, without a clear and consistent funding model, it can be difficult to keep projects going over the long term.

Another factor is the competition from proprietary technology that is always better funded and more easily accessible to the public. This can create a challenging environment for open-source projects that struggle to keep up with the pushing of “innovation” in the tech industry.

There are also ideological differences between different groups within the open-source community that leads to conflicts and disagreements over the direction of projects. This can result in splintering and fragmentation of the community, making it difficult to achieve a shared goal.

Non “standard” #UX is a big issue as well, nice to make something you like, but better to do something the user community likes.

From @bob@epicyon.libreserver.org Irreconcilable musical differences, someone in charge of donations taking it to Vegas, becoming a parent or getting a new job, burnout, unrealistic expectations based on hegemonic BigTech systems, illness, an excess of technical debt and trolling can all result in failures of open source projects.

Most projects are one or two people with occasional driveby patches. Projects with more volunteers than that are rare exceptions. Most maintainers are not people on six-figure salaries going on slides at Google. Usually they are barely making rent.

Another factor is that often accessibility is not as good as it could be. The big companies can dedicate a department to just ensuring accessibility meets a minimum standard, but open source projects often don’t have the knowledge and are regularly criticized for accessibility problems.

From the #openweb

(https://elplatt.com/) happy to remove this link if asked

The main challenges I’ve experienced in projects I’ve been a part of:
* Tendency for potential contributors to start new projects from scratch
* Lack of communication within the user community and between users and maintainers
* Contributions driven by prestige or excitement, prioritizing new features over maintenance
* Lack of funding

It’s a good list, maybe we need a post writing up covering them all.

(This is why I work #KISS whaw that is bad behaver, lie about someone then blocked their instance. #GreatjusticeNet has blocked campaign.openworlds.info for plagiarizing fediverse content. In this post, it says “From the #openweb” in BOLD, so clearly it’s not plagiarism. But happy to remove stuff if people don’t won’t it archived)

 

Over the years, many #openweb projects have failed due to various reasons. The first challenge is to sustain a project that is built on open-source principles and relies on community involvement and collaboration. In a capitalist society, without a clear and consistent funding model, it becomes difficult to keep the project going over the long term.

Another factor is the competition from proprietary technology that is better funded and more easily accessible to the public. This creates a challenging environment for open-source projects that struggle to keep up with the “innovation” pushed by the tech industry.

Ideological differences within the open-source community leads to conflicts and disagreements over project direction, resulting in splintering and fragmentation of the community, making it challenging to achieve shared goals.

Non-standard #UX is also a significant issue, as it’s better to create something the user community likes than something just the developer likes.

Some ideas on this from the #openweb, irreconcilable musical differences, individuals in charge of donations taking it to Vegas, becoming a parent, getting a new job, burnout, unrealistic expectations based on hegemonic BigTech systems, illness, an excess of technical debt, and trolling can all result in open-source project failures.

Most projects have only one or two people, with occasional drive-by patches. Projects with more volunteers are rare exceptions, and maintainers are typically not people on six-figure salaries going on slides at Google. Usually, they barely make rent.

To sum up, the main challenges experienced in the projects that the author has been a part of include the tendency for potential contributors to start new projects from scratch, lack of communication within the user community and between users and maintainers, contributions driven by prestige or excitement, prioritizing new features over maintenance, and lack of funding.

Additionally, accessibility is often not as good as it could be, as big companies can dedicate a department to ensure accessibility meets a minimum standard, but open-source projects often lack the knowledge and are regularly criticized for accessibility problems.

In conclusion, a post covering all these challenges would be useful.

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Libertarian #Fediverse “cats”

This story is about a group of libertarian #Fediverse “cats” who convinced one of the largest and most bureaucratic institutions, the European Union, to embrace decentralized and #openweb technologies. Through outreach efforts, EU-sponsored events and advocating to policy-makers, they raised awareness of the benefits of decentralized models of the internet and the positive impact this has on creating a more equitable and sustainable online environment for European citizens.

As the #Fediverse, #Mastodon, and #ActivityPub continues to rapidly grow in popularity, the #openweb cultural values at the heart of this outreach have been validated. Through continued grassroots community building and outreach efforts, radical activist have the potential to empower users and promote an inclusive, equitable, and sustainable online environment for all of us.

Please help tell this real life story https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/eu-outreach-if-we-dont-tell-our-story-am-not-sure-who-will/2950

 

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A little about #openweb projects, the Fediverse

The Federated Web, or #Fediverse, is a decentralized #openweb project that allows people to communicate and share content across different servers.

* Decentralization: In a centralized platform, all data is stored and controlled by a single entity, which can lead to issues such as censorship, data breaches, and loss of control over data. In a half decentralized network like the Fediverse, no single entity controls all the network or the data.

* Privacy: Fediverse platforms generally place a strong emphasis on privacy and security, this is always a white lie, as it’s a project.

* Freedom of expression: In the Fediverse, there is no centralized authority that can censor content, so people have greater freedom of expression and can express themselves with less fear of censorship.

* Control over data: In the Fediverse, users have some control over their data and can choose to move it from one platform to another if they choose to do so.

* Customization: Fediverse platforms can be customized to suit the needs and preferences of uses, allowing for a more community infrastructure use.

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Please share this #openweb project widly thanks

The #OGB is focused on decentralized and autonomous models of governance for the #fediverse and #openweb groups. It aims to resist the imposition of traditional top down power structures and promote social change and challenge by involving community members in decision-making and empowering them to shape their “producer” communities.

The project will leverage existing open-source technologies and the #fediverse infrastructure, and will balance structure and flexibility to promote creativity, innovation, and sustainability. The project has three main subjects of discussion: 1) the tradition of working activist grassroots organizing, 2) the use of technological federation and ActivityPub, and 3) original thinking for grassroots #openweb producer governance. The project is bound by the and #PGA principles and will be conducted using #KISS online tools.

#ActivityPub is a protocol for decentralized social networking that is based on #openweb standards. It provides client and server APIs for creating, exchanging, and receiving content, as well as notifications and other activities. The protocol uses the #ActivityStreams vocabulary and defines key concepts such as Actors (profiles), Objects (content), Inbox, and Outbox to facilitate communication and interaction between users in a decentralized network.

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Draft story about our EU outreach

#Mastodon is a free, , decentralized microblogging platform that is part of the #Fediverse.

The outreach of these technologies to the European Union started as a way to promote alternative models of the internet that were more inclusive, equitable, and empowering for users. The EU was seen as a natural fit due to its commitment to promoting human rights, privacy, and data protection online.

The outreach effort focused on raising awareness of the benefits of decentralized and #openweb models of the internet and how these technologies could be used to create a more equitable and sustainable “native” europen online environment. The libertarian “cats” of the #fediverse participating in EU-sponsored events, such as hackathons and tech conferences, as well as engaging with policy-makers and stakeholders through direct outreach and advocacy campaigns.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/search?expanded=true&q=EU+workshop

NEED a hashtag link to this outreach.

As the outreach effort continued, a minority of people in the #EU became interested in these technologies and began to adopt them in a soft rollout of “official” services. The Fediverse and Mastodon rapidly grew in popularity due to the #twittermigration, attracting a diverse and vibrant community of users from across the EU. This growth helped to validate the importance of decentralized and autonomous models of the internet and their potential to shape a more inclusive and equitable online environment.

Today, ActivityPub, Fediverse, and Mastodon continue to be important players in the EU’s efforts to promote a more decentralized and autonomous internet. Through continued grassroots outreach and community-building efforts, these technologies can empower users and citizens to create a more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable online environment for all.

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Talking about the #indymediaback project

Q. A few comments on your excellent video.

Your page layout is driven by desktop. Nowadays, people think mobile first.

The rollback: an interesting idea.

A. Yep it’s the #nothingnew part of the project, the original IMC was ripped apart buy internal arguments and bad process, so we are rebooting the project before this happened so making minimal changes outa the box of UX and process, the needed changes can then come FROM “consensus” of the fresh crew running the rebooted instances.

The mobile expirence is swipe sideways to each of the menu items as columns. This is a reasonable compromise, as the original project had no mobile interface.

This is an example https://indymedia.hs2rebellion.earth/users/news you have to click past the SSL error to see the site, on mobile a single column interface, but the swiping is not implemented, so you have to click on the menu at the top. This test site is a RSS/AP aggregator #indymediaback

Q. Well, that is interesting. Seeing something is so much more impressive than just a video. What is the software platform? What web server are you using?
It is pretty easy to do https.
Is anyone actually using the software?

A. sadly, the 2-year working project was killed off by covid just as we were going to start the outreach at protest camps. The codebase is now abandoned, was based on epycion, but dev on this folk is now stopped/blocked.

What we had is a good expirence though, Imagen if the swiping worked. The RSS and AP side works for input, the AP output does not work, none of the tagging was implemented on these rollout test sites, we are still running 3 but needs a committed crew to restart #indymediaback

Was 6 months work for 3 people to put this working code together #DIY and a wider collective to do the work on the text and process to bring the original #indymeda back in the spirit of #nothingnew but the stress of dev and covid broke this as we were getting close to test rollout, been dormant since then.

We need to chose a new codebase and find a coding crew, most of the hard work is done, all the existing design, process and outreach text is in place to push this out agen as the “news” part of the #fediverse

But its another year of nonpaid #openweb work… phwww… fighting agenst the pointlessness of the #mainstreaming is a hard sell, even though it’s blatantly and obviously needed.

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A look at the recent history of radical grassroots activism

#ClimateCamp was a radical grassroots direct action movement to directly challenge #climatechoas and raise awareness about climate change and advocate for solutions to mitigate its effects. The movement was made up of a loosely organized network of activists who used a diversity of tactics to achieve their goals. Climate Camps were established in many countries. The movement reached its peak in the late 2000s and early 2010s and had a significant impact on public debate and government policy.

#Protestcamps are gatherings of activists who set up temporary camps in public spaces in order to bring attention to a cause or issue. The goal of these camps is to create a direct action space where people come together, discuss and demonstrate. The camps may range from #fluffy peaceful gatherings to more #spiky disruptive and confrontational events, depending on the nature of the issue protested and the diversity of tactics of the activists involved. Some well-known examples of protest camps include #Occupy, #ClimateCamp

#CriticalMass a decentralized activism movement started in 1992. The movement is centred around a monthly direct action bike ride where participants gather to raise awareness about car culture.
The idea behind Critical Mass is to reclaim public space for cyclists and to assert the right of cyclists to use the roads. The rides are often a festive and celebratory event. The Critical Mass movement has since spread to cities around the world, with similar events taking place in many cities.

Using #openweb tools like #RSS and #ActivityPub has several benefits in the context of direct action and grassroots politics.
Decentralization: RSS and ActivityPub are decentralized technologies that are not controlled by any single entity, making them resistant to censorship and control.
Interoperability: By using open standards like ActivityPub, organizations and individuals can communicate and share content with each other, regardless of the platform they use.
Transparency: The use of #openweb tools can increase transparency and accountability in the political process, allowing for greater public scrutiny and engagement.
Ownership: By using #opensource tools, individuals and organizations can own and control their data, rather than relying on proprietary services controlled by corporations.
Accessibility: By using open web technologies, information can be more easily accessible to those who are marginalized or excluded from the mainstream, enabling more inclusive and equitable participation in the political process.

Direct action and grassroots politics are important tools for effecting social change. Direct action refers to forms of activism that seeks to achieve a goal directly, without intermediaries, often through disruptive or confrontational means. Direct action can include strikes, sit-ins, blockades, and other forms of resistance.
Grassroots politics refers to a political movement or approach that is bottom-up, rather than top-down, meaning it seeks to empower citizens to take action on political issues, rather than relying on traditional power structures such as political parties or government. Grassroots politics aims to give a voice to marginalized or underrepresented communities, and to create change from the ground up.
Together, direct action and grassroots politics offer a way for people to engage in the political process and to bring about change in a democratic and inclusive way. By taking action outside of traditional political channels, activists and communities bring about change on issues that they care about.

#Fediverse is a #openweb decentralized social network ecosystem consisting of independent, user-run servers that are all compatible with each other. This allows for a more open and democratic internet experience, as users can choose to participate in a variety of online communities without relying on any single centralized platform.
The Fediverse is seen as a more privacy-friendly alternative to the #dotcons this is a working “white lie” based on thinking.

#XR “Extinction Rebellion,” is a global social movement that uses nonviolent civil disobedience to protest against the failure of governments to take action on the climate and ecological crisis. The movement seeks to disrupt the status quo and force political leaders to take immediate action to address the crisis. The movement was founded in the UK in 2018 and has since spread to other countries around the world, with a focus on large-scale protests and acts of civil disobedience.

#XR is a protest movement, some people classify XR as a #spiky radical protest movement due to its tactics and goals, but others consider it more liberal because of its commitment to #fluffy nonviolence. Ultimately, the classification of XR as radical or liberal depends on individuals looking at the problem, it’s a debate.

Programming and ideology are different areas that intersect.
Ideology refers to a set of beliefs, values, and assumptions that shape an understanding of the world and people’s place in it. In the context of programming, ideology comes into play when a programmer brings their often #mainstreaming values and beliefs to the coding they write and the systems they build. You can see this in the copying of the #dtcons to build the #fediverse and how this is now shaping the #openweb

Discussing #postmodernism and the criticism to “isms”. The idea is that blindly following a particular ideology can make a person a “zombie” to limit the ability to think critically. The phrase #nothingnew is used to suggest that fresh thinking on old issues is needed, rather than blindly following existing dead #mainstreaming ideologies. The use of ad hominem arguments, which is a type of logical fallacy that attacks an individual rather than the argument they are making, is clearly #blocking

The #OMN is a project focused on linking alt/grassroots media. In the context of the need for a rebooted #openweb and avoiding the #blocking of this by #fashernista and #geekproblem agenda.

The #OpenWeb is the internet where information and content is accessible to all, regardless of their location, device or network, and can be shared, linked, and re-used without restrictions or barriers imposed by proprietary platforms, walled gardens, or monopolistic practices. It is based on and aims to provide a more inclusive, equitable, and participatory world.
The #OpenWeb is often contrasted with the #closedweb or “walled garden web”, where content and data are locked behind proprietary platforms, controlled by corporations or governments, and subject to limitations, restrictions, and surveillance. The #dotcons