Tag: p2p

OMN: Broken Institutions, and the Need to Rebuild the Commons

For progressive and radical people, one of the central political questions of our time is simple to ask but hard to answer – Why is it so difficult to rebuild the institutions that were destroyed in our #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s? And more importantly why does the impossibility of rebuilding them make it so hard to change the needed balance of power in society? These question matters for working on the future of the society and most importantly the grassroots part of this: #openweb, grassroots media, and projects like #OMN.

The hollowing out of institutions, in the 20th century, politics used to be deeply institutional. People didn’t just express opinions, they joined organisations. If you marched in a protest, we usually marched as a member of something: a trade union, a political party, a civil rights organisation or community association. These organisations formed the infrastructure of democracy, connecting everyday anger and hope to real power.

But beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, much of this infrastructure was deliberately dismantled. Union power was broken, mass political parties were hollowed out, and community organisations lost resources and influence. The result is the political landscape we inherit, a society with political anger but without any working political structures.

Today we live in what #fashionistas and academics call #hyperpolitics or what I call #stupidindividualism in the hashtag story. Yes, some people are more politically engaged than they were in the 1990s or early 2000s: More fluffy protests, #dotcons online political discussion. But this engagement is almost all unstructured in the old sense.

Millions may join a protest or share a political message in the #dotcons, yet very little, if any lasting organisation emerges from this. This surface engagement creates a strange paradox of huge drifting mobilisations leading to very little structural change. We can have the largest protests in history – yet the underlying power structures remain completely untouched.

Closed #dotcons social media lowered the cost of expression, but algorithmically shaped it into smoke and mirrors. Let’s take a moment to lift the lid on this #tecsit mess. The role of media in this is complex, on the positive side, #closedweb platforms drastically reduced the cost of political expression.

Forty years ago, if you wanted to express a political opinion publicly you needed a newspaper, radio station, a public meeting or to stand in a square shouting. Now you can reach thousands of people instantly. But there is a downside that #dotcons smoke and mirror online engagement replaces the slow work of institution-building. Posting, sharing, and reacting can feel like participation, but it has very little role in building the durable structures needed for any long-term change.

So why do the current hard right succeed without institutions? There is an uncomfortable asymmetry between left and right. The right can carry out its agenda without building mass organisations, because it relys on: existing elitist power structures, wealthy donors, state institutions and traditional corporate media.

The left cannot rely on these, historically the left needed mass organisations because its power came from collective action – workers, communities, movements. Without those structures, left politics becomes, mess, fragmented and reactive. This is why protest waves can be enormous but still fail to shift any real policy.

The #undeadleft problem is where vertical left respond to this crisis with nostalgia, there imagination stops at rebuilding the mass political parties and institutions of the 20th century. But this is to often like trying to animate a corpse, even if you could recreate it, the environment has changed so much that it wouldn’t survive.

At the same time, the opposite response – abandoning institutions entirely to relying purely on digital networks – also fails. Purely online movements often dissolve as quickly as they form. We need a #DIY hybrid path based on federated #4opens institutions like the tools we are building and rebooting with the #OMN projects.

Not rigid old institutions, not purely online networks, But something that seeds the in between. The goal is not to create another platform, it is to expand #federated #p2p infrastructure for collective media and collective politics. The original #openweb worked because it supported networks of communities, independent publishers and grassroots movements. The corporate #dotcons replaced this with extractive platforms designed for profit and control.

KISS rebuilding the commons means rebuilding the social infrastructure of media, not just tools, but institutions and practices that persist to allow collective voices to organise and persist.

The simple truth, if we want real political change, we cannot rely on viral posts, temporary movements or algorithmic attention. We need structures that last, connect people, that can turn energy into horizontal power. That work is slow, messy, and unfashionable, but like digging compost for a garden, it’s the only way anything grows.

A path to start to compost this #techshit is growing horizontal tools from the Fediverse for real change (#OMN).

If the problem of our time is political energy without institutions, then the opportunity is clear:
build new institutions native to the #openweb. Not simply recreate the rigid organisations of the 20th century, and not fall into the hollow performative politics of the #dotcons. Instead, we grow native horizontal digital tools to help people organise, coordinate, and act collectively. This is where the Fediverse and projects like #OMN matter.

The #Fediverse already proves that distributed infrastructure works. But right now it is mostly used for conversation. If we want meaningful change and challenge, we need to extend it into practical coordination and collective action. by build tools for organising, not just talking

Current social media tools are built for attention and engagement, not organisation. What we need to add to the mix is simple #4opens tools that help people form groups, coordinate action, share resources, document activity and most importantly maintain continuity over time (#makinghistory). The Fediverse already has #fashionista and #geekproblem pieces of this:

Mastodon / Pleroma → conversation

Mobilizon → events and gatherings

PeerTube → video publishing

PixelFed → visual storytelling

Lemmy / Kbin → community forums

These existing pieces can become seeds to be woven together into workflows for collective action. On this path we need to remember the goal is not more platforms, it’s practical ecosystems. For this to work a first step is rebuilding commons-based media. A core idea behind #OMN is returning to something like the #Indymedia publishing model, but rebuilt using modern federated tools. Instead of a single website, imagine distributed publishing nodes where local groups post reports, media is shared across networks, discussions happen across servers and archives remain accessible and most importantly meaningful.

This builds collective memory, something the algorithmic feeds of the #dotcons constantly destroy. Movements need memory to learn.

#makinghistory is the same code-base as this grassroots media project

One reason mass organisations collapsed is that participation became too heavy, people don’t want to “join a church” politically any more. So tools should allow different levels of engagement: casual participation, occasional contribution, active organising with core stewardship. The Fediverse naturally supports this because it allows loose affiliation rather than rigid membership. You don’t need permission from a central authority to participate.

Focus on infrastructure, not branding. A common #NGO trap in activist tech is building new branded platforms that compete with existing networks. That approach usually fails. The better path is infrastructure building based on protocols instead of platforms for #4opens interoperability instead of silos, tools that connect existing communities. This was the original power of the #openweb, protocols scale. Platforms capture.

Keep the tech simple (#KISS), as the biggest barrier to grassroots technology is complexity. Many promising projects fail because they become too technical for real communities to use. So the rule should always be KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Tools should be installable easily, understandable by non-geeks and maintainable by small communities to grow resilience without large funding. If only developers can run the system, it will never become a movement infrastructure.

Compost the failures (#techshit). Another key idea is recognising that the tech world constantly churns useful waste. Old tools, failed platforms, abandoned code, all of this is #techshit that can be composted instead of chasing fashionable new tech, we reuse working ideas, simplify existing tools to combine proven approaches. The #openweb already solved many of these problems decades ago. Sometimes progress means going back to what worked.

Build trust networks, as the most important layer isn’t technical – it’s social. Horizontal networks only function when there is trust and shared culture. The Fediverse works because communities can federate with trusted peers, block hostile actors, build local norms. This allows networks to remain open but resilient. The challenge is nurturing communities of practice around the tools.

Grow slowly and organically, movements that scale too quickly often collapse. The better model is ecological growth with small nodes → connected networks → resilient ecosystems. Just like compost turning into soil. The goal is not explosive growth, its sustainable infrastructure for collective action.

The real challenge is the biggest obstacle isn’t technology, it’s the #geekproblem – the gap between technical culture and social reality. Too many tech projects assume that better tools automatically produce social change, but tools only matter when they are embedded in real communities and struggles. The work of projects like #OMN is bridging that gap.

Shovels, not silver bullets, we don’t need magic platforms, we need shovels, tools that help people dig, build, connect, and organise together on the native #openweb. If we can do that, the Fediverse becomes more than an alternative social network, it becomes infrastructure for democratic power.

What projects like #OMN can learn from history

A note to #FOSS funders

I’ve been working at the heart of this space for more than 30 years, funded and unfunded. In that time I’ve seen hundreds of alternative tech projects start with energy and good intentions. Most of them wither on the vine, a very small number flower.

After watching this cycle repeat for decades, one thing has become clear: the projects that survive and grow almost always follow a simple pattern. I call this the #4opens. Other people describe similar ideas as open source development, open governance, or commons-based development. The label doesn’t matter – the practice does.

If you want to know which projects will flower and which will wither, look at the ground, not the words. The #4opens ask four very simple questions:

  • Open data – can people access and reuse the information?
  • Open source – can people read, modify, and share the code?
  • Open process – can people see and participate in how decisions are made?
  • Open standards – can different systems interoperate and grow a wider ecosystem?

Projects that are open in all four of these ways tend to build living ecosystems. Projects that are only partially open tend to stall or collapse. The two repeating problems, over the years two patterns constantly undermine good projects.

#geekproblem – A teenage mix of arrogance and ignorance that is surprisingly universal in tech culture. Developers assume technical elegance (and complexity) will automatically solve social problems. They underestimate governance, community, and messy human reality.

#dotcons – The opposite pressure: corporate platforms pushing business models that prioritise extraction and growth over human need. They happily wrap themselves in the language of “open” while building fundamentally closed systems.

Both pressures distort funding decisions. Both lead to projects that sound open but aren’t. Money is a dangerous subject, yes, funding matters, but money inside infrastructure projects to often distorts them quickly. For #openweb work, a useful rule of thumb is: Keep the core simple. Focus funding on maintaining the #4opens infrastructure. Let many different organisations, businesses, and NGOs build external services and applications on top.

This keeps the core commons stable while allowing diversity and experimentation around it. It’s the #KISS principle applied to digital commons. When funding pushes too many external agendas into the core, projects become heavy, political, and fragile.

Some uncomfortable truths, over the last decade we’ve been told several stories about security and scale that simply don’t hold up. There is no security in CLOSED systems, security emerges from open scrutiny and shared responsibility:

  • There is no security in radical individualism, security emerges from community.
  • There is no security in “trustless” systems, real resilience grows from social trust.

These ideas have been obscured by hype cycles and by the influence of #dotcons and their shadow allies, the #encryptionists who push purely technical “trustless” thinking. Both camps wrap themselves in the language of openness, but their systems remain structurally closed. Words are wind, look at the ground: #4opens.

The unspoken scaling problem, there is also an unspoken #geekproblem around how we think about scaling. When many developers talk about #p2p, they imagine data-to-data scaling, systems optimised to move information as efficiently as possible. From that perspective, human friction looks like a problem.

But if you see #p2p as human-to-human, the picture changes. Human scaling limits – smaller communities, slower processes, local trust networks – are not bugs, they are virtues, creating resilience and accountability. The data-first model is the one favoured by the #dotcons.
The human-first model is the one the #openweb actually needs. Funders should be aware of which philosophy a project is building around.

A simple test If you want a quick filter when looking at proposals, ask:

  • Does this project genuinely follow the #4opens?
  • Does it build community and governance, not just code?
  • Is it resilient without permanent central funding?
  • Does it strengthen the commons, rather than a future platform?

Projects that pass these tests are the ones most likely to flower, everything else tends to wither. Food for thought.

#EU #NLnet #NGI #funding

Make some FOSS compost

Chatsworth Rd: Stalls and Code

A DRAFT story about markets, misfits, and taking back the commons (Tagline: “They came for the avocados. They left with revolution.”)

by Hamish Campbell

Outline

THE MARKET STIRS

  1. Chatsworth Rhythms

Setting the scene: It’s a Saturday in East London. The smell of jerk chicken, sourdough, and incense wafts over Chatsworth Road. A young stallholder, Luna (17), sells upcycled clothes and zines with radical poetry. Her best mate Jaz (18) roasts coffee in a converted horse trailer.

The street market has always been the soul of the area, but rent hikes, council interference, and #NGO co-option have worn everyone down. Traders are being squeezed. Street teams from the council show up to enforce arbitrary rules. One old vendor has a panic attack and is carted off.

A new app quietly arrives via a local anarcho-sysadmin named Mo, who says: “If you don’t write the rules, someone else will. Time to fork society.”

  1. Enter the #OGB

The Open Governance Body app isn’t flashy – it’s command-line chic – but it gives people a voice and power through messy consensus-based decision-making.

At first, Luna is skeptical, more tech? More admin? But when she sees how traders start voting on layout, fees, and security, she joins. The app federates with other tools she’s already using, se is a bit of a geek (Pixelfed for promo, Lemmy for discussion).

They tag the system with #OGB, calling their movement “Open Trader Network” #OTN.

A new energy flows. People start collaborating across stalls. Rota for clean-up? Done via the app. Newcomer priority stalls? Voted in. It works. It’s messy, but it’s theirs.
THE SPRAWL

  1. Nodes Spread

Other markets – Brixton, Ridley Road, Chapel – start installing OGB instances. Local flavours, same base. Word spreads via the Fediverse. A hashtag storm of #OMN blossoms across PeerTube vlogs and Mobilizon events.

Local food traders begin direct-networking across markets. No middlemen. No rent-seekers. One market hosts a “Reclaim the Tomato” day after a supply chain collapse – 1,000 people show up.

They aren’t waiting for permission any-more.

  1. Media Panic

A Murdoch-owned paper runs a headline: “Markets Hijacked by Extremist App: ‘Digital Anarchists’ Threaten City Order.”

Talking heads say the traders are anti-business, anti-modern, anti-safety. A Guardian columnist calls it “well-meaning chaos” and suggests NGO mediation.

The mayor calls it “a dangerous precedent for public space management.” A government white paper proposes a ban on “unauthorised digital governance.”

Luna gets doxxed. Her hacked Instagram DMs are read out on GB News. Jaz’s trailer is graffitied. Mo is arrested during a dawn raid.
THE STALLS STRIKE BACK

  1. The Communing

Traders unite across London. “Reclaim the streets”. We built this with our hands, our sweat, and our beans.” They go on strike, not by stopping, but by refusing to recognize council control.

The Fediverse lights up. Mastodon servers amplify local voices. A livestream on PeerTube shows a giant puppet of the mayor being pelted with rotten bananas.

Instead of retreating, people start federating public spaces. Parks, squats, skateparks, each with their own federated #OGB nodes.

Councils panic. The government attempts a DNS take down of #OGB. They don’t understand federation. Nothing central to ban.

  1. Trust vs Control

Luna speaks at a huge public forum, “The Town Hall of the Streets,” organized via Mobilizon. “You can’t run a market on fear. You can’t govern people who trust each other. You can only try to sell them back what they already have.”

Jaz releases a viral zine: ‘We the Traders’ – a manifesto of federated life. It’s printed in three languages by Somali aunties on Ridley Road.
THE SHIFT

  1. The Fall of the Gatekeepers

The mayor resigns after a leaked email shows collusion with private surveillance firms. A public audit reveals widespread misused funds and fake community consultations.

Instead of chaos, the federated markets flourish. An emerging culture of trust, transparency, and local flair grows to replaces the back peddling NGO management class.

Luna and Mo help to push the #OGB into schools and libraries. Jaz co-founds P2P hand to hand USB key decentralized delivery network using bike couriers.

  1. New Normals

Final scene: Luna is now 21. She runs a stall at the market she helped free. The OGB screen is mounted next to her zines – open to everyone. A group of teenagers crowd around to vote on that week’s theme: Fruits, Freedom, or Future?

She smiles. The market hums. The commons holds.
Themes

StupidIndividualism vs #4opens #CollectivePower

Mainstreaming = control + fear Grassroots = trust + mess

Power is not seized, it is federated

If you can federate it, you can free it


The Story

Chapter One: Market Day

Luna arrived just after nine. Her stall was already half set up, two folding tables, a clothes rail, a crate of homemade zines, and a sign that read: Upcycled. Unowned. Unapologetic.

Chatsworth Road was busy. A steady flow of people moved past, hipsters, locals, tourists, and regulars from the nearby estates. The usual mix of food stalls, second-hand clothes, and bric-a-brac. A few of the traders nodded as she walked in.

She checked her phone. No messages. Good. She didn’t want a distraction. The last few weeks had been tense, rumours of new council inspections, talk of fees going up again. There was a meeting planned, but no one trusted the “consultation” process any more.

Jaz appeared from the stall opposite, a reused horse trailer turned coffee hatch. “Council are here,” he said, handing her a coffee. She looked down the street. Two officials in branded jackets stood near the fruit stall, checking tablets and talking quietly. They weren’t buying anything. “Third week in a row,” Luna said. “They’re looking for something to shut down,” Jaz replied. “Heard they’re targeting the people without formal pitch licenses.” Luna didn’t reply. She just took a sip of the coffee and turned back to her stall.

That’s when Mo showed up. No one really knew where he lived. He wasn’t a trader, but he was always around. People said he used to work in tech and walked out during the pandemic. He carried a laptop in his bag and ran a small, unofficial Wi-Fi network that half the market used without realising. He handed her a folded piece of paper. On it, a QR code and the words: OGB – open governance body – not an app – a process

“What is this?” she asked. “Tool for sorting things out. No bosses, no gatekeepers. You decide. You build.” She looked at him. “We already tried that. Committees. Petitions. Nothing changes.” “This isn’t for asking,” he said. “It’s for doing.” He turned and walked off. She scanned the code anyway.

What loaded was basic. A simple page, a login prompt, some instructions. Anyone with the link could register. Anyone could propose a change. Decisions were made collectively. Everything was logged and public. Later that day, someone proposed a rota for waste collection. Five people voted. Then ten. By the end of the day, the bins were sorted.

Luna didn’t say anything. But she noticed. Something had shifted.

Chapter Two: Something New

The next morning, Luna opened the stall before ten. Rain had passed in the night, and the tarmac still held patches of damp. She unzipped the plastic cover from her rail and checked the #OGB app on her phone. Six new proposals. Someone wanted to trial a shared delivery scheme. Someone else suggested swapping stalls once a month to mix things up. The waste rota from yesterday now had over thirty names. She didn’t say it out loud, but something felt different.

Jaz joined her a little later, dragging a crate of clean mugs and a half-repaired sandwich board. “People are talking,” he said. “Like, actually talking. Outside their stalls.” Luna nodded. She’d noticed too. Normally, people kept to themselves. Competition had a way of doing that – especially when everyone was fighting for a spot and a margin.

But today… She saw Fatima, who ran a fruit and veg stall at the corner. Usually quiet, head down, fast hands. She was standing with Andre, the secondhand tools guy, comparing stall layouts on their phones. Both were logged in to #OGB. “Fatima thinks we can make more space for walk-throughs if we stagger the setups,” Andre told her when she passed. “Easier for wheelchairs. More space for queues.”

“Is that on the app?” Luna asked. Andre held up his phone. “Second from the top. Vote’s still open.” On the other end of the street, Amina and her teenage sons, who sold hot food and chai under a big canvas awning, were chatting with Tom, who made hand-pulled noodles on a cart he wheeled in from Clapton each weekend. They were drawing lines in chalk on the pavement- marking a shared seating area.

By midday, the market felt different. Not louder, not busier. Just… more connected. Mo returned in the afternoon. He wasn’t alone this time. With him was Nari, a coder from the south side who ran a quiet Mobilizon server out of her housing co-op. She wore overalls, no expression, and carried a beat-up laptop covered in tape. “Looks like it’s working,” Mo said to Luna, glancing around. Nari added, “You’ll need moderation tools soon. Growth means friction.” Luna wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but she wrote it down.

Later, they held a loose meeting near the benches outside the community hall. Jaz made coffee. Someone brought leftover samosas. Luna recognised a dozen faces, but others were new, people from other markets who’d heard what was happening and wanted to learn more. “We tried this in Tower Hamlets,” said one, a woman named Grace who sold second-hand electronics. “Council shut it down in three weeks. Said it was ‘disruptive to existing partnerships.’” “We’re not asking this time,” Mo replied.

Chapter Three: federate and Spread

By the third weekend, the idea had started to move. It began with a quiet message from a stallholder at Ridley Road, posted in the OGB working group: “Could we copy this setup? Our traders are fed up too. Same rules. Same threats. We want in.” No one said no. That was the point. Mo added a note in the main thread: “Just install it. Each market’s a node. Connect when you’re ready. Shared values, local control.”

Within days, there were new #OGB instances in Brixton, Wood Green, and Walthamstow. Different template layouts, different needs, same code, same network. A delivery driver named Eli helped hook up the networks. He already had a route between Ridley and Hackney and started shuttling hardware and surplus goods between markets. “No middlemen,” he said. “No #dotcons apps taking 30%.”

Meanwhile, Tasha, a baker from Camden Lock, joined the Chatsworth group to learn how the app was being used. “We’ve had five layers of management and three rounds of ‘consultation’ this year,” she said. “No one’s actually listened to a trader since 2009.” At the edges of the council bureaucracy, a few people noticed what was happening. Ravi, a junior urban planning officer in Hackney Council, joined one of the #OGB meetings under his personal account. “This isn’t bad policy,” he said one evening, voice calm, camera off. “It’s just outside the frame they allow for. You’re building governance, not just feedback. That scares people.”

Luna watched the comments scroll. More users joined every day. She couldn’t always tell who was a trader, who was a tech, who was just watching. Then came the backlash. The first article appeared in a small industry newsletter: “Traders adopt rogue decision-making platform. Officials express concern over legality.” No byline. But it was picked up.

By the following week, a local tabloid ran a front page: “MARKET ANARCHY: Hackney Traders Reject Council, Use Shadow App” Inside, it quoted an anonymous “source close to the mayor” calling the movement “dangerous, divisive, and incompatible with good governance.”

A blog on a tech site posted screenshots from #OGB, mocking its “ugly interface” and “pseudo-utopian design language.” On Twitter, a property developer called it “the return of squatters with QR codes.” Then came the calls.

A reporter door steeped Jaz’s trailer pretending to be a customer. When he found out she was press, he shut the hatch and texted Luna: “It’s starting. They want a villain.”

Mo went dark for a few days. Nari added new permission layers to the Chatsworth instance. Luna started getting strange DMs.

But at the same time… more people joined. A group from a Sunday farmers’ market in Lewisham wanted advice. A kids’ clothes collective in Tottenham asked for templates. A new Mobilizon event popped up titled: “Decentralised Governance for Public Space: How To Not Get Co-Opted.”

Even a quiet email arrived, from a .gov.uk address. A policy advisor, asking for a demo.

Chapter Four: We Write the Story

The storm didn’t slow them down. If anything, it made things clearer. At the next open meeting – hosted outside the old library building – over 40 people showed up. Stallholders, musicians, artists, teachers, kids. Even two students who said they were “just here to help document.” Luna stood at the edge, watching as Nari connected her laptop to the projector powered by a battered solar rig.

The screen flickered to life: OGB – Chatsworth Node Active proposals: 14 Active users: 312 Linked nodes: 5

“This is not a platform,” Nari said, addressing the group without looking up. “It’s a process. A tool to federate trust.” She explained how it worked: Anyone trough trust paths can propose an action or change. The community decided what threshold of agreement was needed – majority, consensus, rotating moderation. Anyone could fork the process, by federation if trust brakes down. No lock-in, no central server. Every action is transparent and archived. You could see who voted, when, and how. Linked markets can share decisions, or stay autonomous.

“Messy? Yes,” Nari said. “But it’s our mess.” A few heads nodded. Others typed silently on their phones. Jaz leaned over to Luna. “Better than three forms and a six-week wait for someone to move a bin.” She half-smiled. Truth. And not just metaphorically.

The local sanitation crew, led by a bin worker named Kev, who’d grown up nearby – started attending meetings in plain clothes. He said the market folks were easier to work with than “the suited managers upstairs.” “We just want to know the plan,” Kev shrugged. “If your app tells us where the blockages are, saves us wasting time, why wouldn’t we check it?”

Soon after, Luna spotted a uniformed officer, PC Daoud, off-duty but listening quietly by the coffee cart. He was local. Born three streets over. Later, he reached out through a private chat: “They’re watching you from HQ, but… not all of us think this is wrong. Safer with eyes on it, than locked out.”

Meanwhile, Ravi, the junior urban planning officer who’d joined under a pseudonym, kept feeding small insights back. “Your bin heatmap tool? We copied it at the council. Quietly. Everyone thinks it’s one of ours.”

A local Green councillor, Tanya Okeke, asked to speak at the next open forum. She didn’t try to claim credit. She just said: “Look, we’ve been told this is insurrection. But if the system doesn’t listen, it’s not treason to talk to each other. It’s survival. You’re building what we’ve only talked about.” Her speech was posted to PeerTube, captioned and translated into three languages. The title:“Commons, Not Chaos.”

As pressure mounted in the press, the group shifted strategy: stop reacting – start broadcasting. Zey, who ran a handmade electronics stall and freelanced in media activism, suggested reaching out to the Fediverse project @indymediaback@fedi.town. “They’ve been tracking grassroots stuff – library occupations, community gardens, Palestine solidarity encampments. If they cover us, we get a different signal out.”

Mo sent the message. Within 24 hours, the story appeared on a Mobilizon event and in a long-form post on Lemmy:

“London’s Markets Are Forking Power: How #OGB Is Building the Next Commons” re-posted on Mastodon, PeerTube, WriteFreely. Translated into Spanish and Somali overnight

The response was instant. People from Glasgow, Bristol, even Milan and Athens boosted the post. Small markets in other cities started federated instances. A public librarian in Sheffield messaged: “Could we use this to run our building? The council wants to close it.”

Within days, Luna noticed a shift in tone online. Instead of only backlash, there were now defenses. When trolls came for Jaz on the #dotcons, people linked to their #OGB instance logs. When tabloids mocked the process, someone posted a PeerTube video:“A Day in the Market: Democracy Without Permission.”

It went semi-viral. Not huge. But enough.

The new #Indymediaback project started running updates daily – short, factual, sometimes poetic:

No central server to ban. No single leader to smear. No funding stream to freeze. Just 500 stalls and a growing idea: You don’t need permission to care for your commons.

Even Luna’s mum forwarded it to her. “Did you really build this?” she’d texted. Luna didn’t reply straight away. She just walked back to her stall, opened the app, and voted on a new proposal: Shared Childcare Tent for Saturdays. proposal by: Ana Status: Under Discussion

She tapped yes.

Chapter Five: Dirty Hands in Clean Suits

They should have seen it coming. The tabloids had been circling for weeks, sniffing for a headline. But nothing prepared them for the full-page hit in the Daily Spectacle:

“LONDON MARKETS TAKEN OVER BY ‘DIGITAL ANARCHISTS’ – IS YOUR NEIGHBOR A CYBER-COMMIE?”

Beneath the headline: a grainy photo of Jaz, pouring coffee. Under it, the caption: “Suspected organiser of secret tech cell controlling local economy via encrypted app.”

By midday, it was everywhere. Morning radio shows. Facebook rants. A YouTube grifter livestreaming outside the market, yelling about “foreign influence and crypto-fascism.”

Zey laughed bitterly. “We built a rota system. They think it’s a coup.”

But the damage was calculated, not random.

Kev, the bin crew lead, got called into an HR disciplinary. Accused of “coordinating with unauthorised software.”Ravi’s council account was suspended. PC Daoud disappeared from group chat. Silent.

Worse: a rumour started spreading that the #OGB app was foreign-funded. A #AI disinformation video, made to look like a BBC investigation, appeared on multiple right-wing Alt-news channels. It claimed the Chatsworth node was a front for “globalist collapse networks.” The comment wars were endless.

Then came the real blow. The Council filed a cease-and-desist against the “unauthorised operation of a parallel governance system.” A legal attack – framed in the language of cybercrime. It felt ridiculous, but real. Meetings got quieter. Some traders unplugged from the app. A few pulled out entirely, scared of losing their stalls.

That night, Luna stayed up redrafting a new info page on their WriteFreely site. Simple questions. Plain answers.

Is this legal? Mostly. We’re exercising coordination rights.

Is this funded? No. It’s free software, run by volunteers.

Is this dangerous? Not compared to rent increases, evictions, and ignored flooding protocols.

Meanwhile, Tanya Okeke – the Green councillor – stood up in the local chamber. She named names. Quoted logs. Challenged the smear. “This isn’t lawlessness. It’s governance. Just not yours.”

Clips from her speech hit the Fediverse hard. Boosted by thousands. Translated again and again. One remix turned it into a sound collage set to ambient loops. Zey uploaded it to PeerTube with the title: “Not Yours. Not Theirs. Ours.”

But behind the scenes, the team realised they needed to outpace the attack. Nari inviting the voices of linked markets to strategies. They met inside the app: voice, chat, notes, no hierarchy.

The Tottenham node suggested creating a #OMN redundancy both client server and p2p backup – so if one #OGB instance was taken offline, others could host its decisions and links. Peckham proposed a “data mirroring agreement” – a kind of mutual aid treaty for code. Brixton offered safe hosting outside the UK. Someone from Berlin, unknown but kind, added:

“We’ve seen this before. They attack what they can’t centralise.” The network shifted. Morphed – like roots growing deeper, not taller. They weren’t building a protest any more. They were building infrastructure. And infrastructure doesn’t panic.

Chapter Six: The Glitch Spreads

At first, it was silence. Jaz closed her stall for the first time in four years. Said it was “temporary.” Said she needed to repaint the sign. But the truth was – she couldn’t face the constant stream of customers, each one asking with cautious eyes, “What’s going on with the market thing?”

Nari’s hands shook every time her phone buzzed. She stopped answering unless it was from Zey or Mo. Even then, it took her a few seconds to breathe through it.

Luna, usually the glue, barely slept. The pressure to hold everything together crushed down hard. She’d started avoiding the app entirely – dreading what new node might go dark, what legal thread might appear next.

Mo was the only one who tried to keep spirits up. He showed up to the remaining market days with a battered Bluetooth speaker playing irish toons. But even he moved a little slower. Like the weight of watching his friends break apart was catching up.

One by one, they all started drifting into the library #OGB node’s voice calls. No pressure. No cameras. Just people talking while they made dinner, folded clothes, or sat in the bath. If, the librarian, hosted most nights. Her calm voice grounding people like a soft metronome.

Then came the call from Brixton. A full-blown solidarity strike. Not just markets – garden co-ops, transit collectives, even a radical postal network built on cargo bikes. They didn’t ask for permission. They just paused operations for 48 hours and posted one shared message: “We are infrastructure. We are people. We do not consent to digital feudalism.”

The message rippled. Peckham’s print collective turned it into a broadsheet. A primary school teacher in Camden reworded it into a children’s chant. The remix scene on PeerTube exploded with glitchcore and spoken-word overlays.

Still, the state struck back. New legislation was proposed overnight: the Secure Networks and Commons Compliance Bill. The language was vague but brutal: all decentralised software operating in civic contexts had to be registered, monitored, and approved.

No app could be autonomous. No node could be unlicensed. No commons could exist without a gatekeeper.

Tanya, the Green councillor, sounded near-broken when she spoke to Luna on a late-night call. “They’re scared. Not of you. Of the idea of you. That people might govern themselves and… not miss the masters.”

The crew met again, properly, for the first time in weeks. Not in the café, not in the app, but in the back of Jaz’s shut stall. They sat on crates and pallets. Mo passed round lukewarm tea. Jaz: “We can’t stop. We don’t stop.” Zey: “They’ll ban it. The app, the nodes, all of it.” Nari: “Then we roll out the #p2p code based on #dat”

Luna looked at the group. “Let’s not fight them on their terms. Let’s remind people what this actually is. Let’s roll out the update and hope it scales. then we push out the archive Logs, decisions documenting the forks, mistakes. People can see for themselves.”

That night, they began the fdroid app updates everything to the public. #Indymediaback picked it up immediately. “A river of the real. Too messy to fake. Too decentralised to stop.” The story tipped.

One morning, Jaz opened her phone to find her stall tagged in a new post: Solidarity from Nairobi Street Markets “You gave us the code. We’re giving it breath. #OGB #CommonsRising”

And then another. Athens Free Libraries Federation: “We have adopted the OGB. The glitch lives here too.”

And another. Rio Food Collectives: “We don’t just consume. We decide.”

Then came the real shock. A direct message, unsigned but traceable to a junior policy analyst at the Mayor’s Office: “There are those inside who still believe in public good. Hold the line.”

Then the signal app buzzed. An unlisted call. Luna answered. A voice whispered: “They’re going to try something tomorrow. Big. Broadcast. Legal theatre. Endgame move.”

Luna didn’t speak. Just listened. And when the call ended, she turned to the crew, breath shallow. “They’re going to break us tomorrow.”

Chapter Seven: The Turning Tide

The broadcast hit at 9am sharp. Every major news channel, every tabloid site. The Mayor, flanked by top advisors, stepped up to the mic. Behind them: the seal of the City of London and a projection of the OGB interface – screen-grabbed and labelled like a crime scene.

“These so-called ‘commons apps’ are a threat to public safety, economic stability, and national cohesion. We are initiating emergency take down procedures effective immediately.”

The speech was surgical. Calm. Laced with that special kind of power-polish only years of spin could achieve. And for a while, it worked.

Federated servers running key hubs of the OGB infrastructure began going dark. Hosting providers were pressured, DNS entries revoked. Even mirrors went quiet. The central fedivers network affectionately called the (something outa the antiglobalisation movement) – collapsed under legal threats.

It was chaos.

Jaz stared at her screen. “Everything’s gone. Even the backups.”

Zey slammed their laptop shut. “No. Just the core nodes. Not everything.”

Because the p2p update had gone live.

Quietly, while the press spun stories of a digital insurgency, hundreds of nodes had been switching over to the new peer-to-peer version, built on DAT tech, now called ogb.glitch. Not flashy. Not fast. But immune to takedown.

The main interfaces failed, but the side-channels kept talking, which refilled the main channels. With the #OMN rebuilding from offline backups, all the history started creeping back in over #p2p flows.

Food moved. Stalls opened. People came. And then… reinforcements arrived. Not in tanks or protests. In voices.

Whistleblowers. Junior coders from city IT teams. Delivery drivers. Public sector workers who still had root access to blocked networks. They began helping, quietly. Restoring mesh links in routers. Leaking internal memos. Sharing legal drafts before they hit Parliament.

Inside the Mayor’s office, dissent flared. And then something unprecedented happened. A large bloc of Labor Councillors defected – publicly. In an emergency assembly livestreamed across the city, they announced their resignation from the party and joined forces with the Greens and a new wave of independent civic actors. Their statement was clear:

“This is not about politics-as-usual. This is about the survival of democracy at the roots. We’re joining the commons.”

Under pressure from the split, and fearing a total collapse in support, the Mayor began to back-pedal. A new press release appeared mid-afternoon: “We will open consultation with representatives from the community tech sector and ensure any future frameworks include space for secure, citizen-led platforms.” It wasn’t a full retreat. But it was a crack.

And then came the final blow of the day. A snap national election was announced. Leaked from within Westminster, the story ran that the central government wanted to force a mandate – betting that fear of chaos would swing voters back to the center.

But on the streets, the story felt different. Jaz opened her stall again. Nari reloaded the Chatsworth node log. Zey smiled for the first time in days. The OGB network was flickering back to life – not everywhere, but enough.

Luna posted a new message: “You cant kill the spirit. She is like a mountain. She goes on and on… You can’t kill the spirit…”

Chapter Eight: The Open Reboot

Nari was the first to notice it. She had left her node monitor running overnight, expecting another flatline. But by morning, the logs were scrolling too fast to read. Not just London. Not even just the UK.

“ActivityPub traffic’s exploding,” she whispered. “Look at this… Barcelona. Lagos. Detroit. Christchurch. They’re all lighting up.”

The Fediverse had caught fire, but not in the usual way. This wasn’t drama or celebrity implosions. It was coordination. Real-time.

The Indymedia nodes were leading the charge, stitched into the #OMN backbone. The vibe was different from the chaotic, scandal-hungry timelines of the old #dotcons socialweb. These feeds were dense with practical updates: water access, mutual aid, cooperative building, market logistics. Livestreams from collective kitchens. Meshnet maps scrawled with handwritten overlays.

No algorithms. No trending tab. Just relevance through #hashtag trust and federation flows.

Zey leaned over Nari’s screen, watching a stream from a collective farm outside Athens coordinate crop deliveries with a London market co-op via a shared calendar. “This is… not small,” they said, almost reverently. Jaz pulled her phone from her apron, scrolling through updates from the streets.

“Paris sanitation unions using OGB noids.” “Madrid school collectives switch to federated class planning.” “Buenos Aires: street markets double size with #4opens logistics.”

The old dotcons – Facebook, Twitter (or whatever it was called this week), Uber-style delivery platforms, felt suddenly… quiet. Like abandoned malls. Still shiny, still there, but irrelevant. Their hold broken.

Even the mainstream news had started to shift. Faced with plummeting engagement and embarrassing public walkouts – editors, field reporters, even weather presenters quitting live on air- several legacy outlets began syndicating from the Indymedia feeds. At first they laughed it off. Called it “citizen novelty content.” But views followed function, and soon those grassroots stories outperformed everything else.

Inside the Mayor’s office, the cracks deepened. A quiet resignation from their comms director. A leaked photo of mid-level staffers working on a community garden run entirely via OGB logistics. A memo, never meant for the public, outlining contingency plans for joining the Green coalition if the polls swung harder.

And swing they did. Not toward a party. Toward a way. OGB was no longer just a tool. It was becoming a nervous system – a messy, redundant, unpolished one – but alive. And more importantly, trusted.

New alliances emerged daily. Regional collectives began interlinking through shared trust agreements. The federated school system in Madrid synced timetables with similar networks in São Paulo and Cape Town. It wasn’t perfect. But it didn’t need to be.

Zey closed their laptop and stood up. “We need a new stall. Not for food. For onboarding.” “And a kids’ area,” Jaz added. “They’re all using it anyway. Might as well teach them how it works.” Nari smiled. “The school across the street already federated their lunch program.” Luna sent the updates, tagged simply: #OpenWebRising

Chapter Nine: The Grasping Hand

It began with meetings. Lots of them. Invitations rolled in – some polite, some not. Government task forces. EU think tanks. UN tech forums. Ministry of Culture round tables. Suddenly everyone wanted a word with the crew, or with whoever they could scrape up as a “representative” of the OGB network.

“They want to help us scale,” Nari said flatly, deleting another email flagged ‘URGENT – INNOVATION PARTNERSHIP REQUEST.’

“They want to define us,” Luna muttered. “Then box us in.”

Some groups accepted. Older cooperatives, city-level digital officers, cautious nonprofit administrators, people tired from decades of struggle who welcomed a place at the new table, even if the table was being carried into the old halls of power.

Others resisted. Young collectives in Naples and Glasgow. Feminist tech crews in Kerala. Rooftop data gardens in Seoul. They rewrote the invites into public callouts. Every attempt to co-opt became a meme. Every attempt to regulate sparked a protest.

Jaz read aloud from a new decree the UK government had just published: “All public-facing federated applications must adhere to the National Digital Standards (2026 Revised), under supervision of the Central Technical Authority.”

Zey spat their tea. “So basically, sign over root access or get censored.”

The backlash wasn’t just legal. Media narratives tightened like a noose. Stories started to appear on major channels: Are Kids at Risk in Unregulated Fediverse Zones? Markets or Mobs? A Deep Dive into OGB’s Hidden Influence. New Terror Frontiers: Decentralised Networks and National Security.

Nari traced the story metadata. Half were ghostwritten by PR firms with ties to legacy telcos and tech investment groups. One came from an ex-OGB supporter who had jumped ship to a consultancy firm, now touting “digital demobilisation strategies.”

Then came the leak. An encrypted drop dumped anonymously onto several Indymedia nodes, verified by multiple journalists. Internal documents from the Department for Digital Oversight. Operation MIDAS: a coordinated plan to infiltrate key nodes, identify moderators, coerce ISPs, and trigger selective service outages.

The plan was simple: make the #openweb look unreliable, chaotic, and unsafe. Kill it with concern.

But the OGB network had matured. Node redundancy flows kicked in. The client servers built on a cluster of tech donated by old mutual aid infrastructure – wobbled under pressure but didn’t fall. Peer-to-peer overlays picked up the slack.

And then the unexpected happened. One of the whistleblowers was a senior architect at the National Infrastructure Cloud. They published a post on their federated account: “I’m done. They want to break what works just to keep control.”

Within hours, more followed. An education official from Bristol. A Berlin public transport scheduler. A junior Labour MP.

Then came the move. Labour fracturing agen openly, with a sizable Green coalition forming in Parliament. The Mayor spinning in press briefings, suddenly praising the creativity and resilience of the very projects she tried to regulate.

“We’re not stopping,” Zey said, eyes fixed on the code syncing across the screen. “They came for the network, and now the network is everywhere.”

Jaz nodded. “So what’s next?”

Nari smiled, voice low but clear.

“Now, we govern ourselves.”

Chapter Ten: Patterns of the Possible

The election came and went, but this time, something stuck. Not just new parties in power or familiar faces in different suits. What stuck was the refusal to return to the old rules. A hung Parliament forced new coalitions, but the Fediverse didn’t wait for permission.

Instead, it started governing. Not by decree, but by social trust flows building affinity groups of action.

Nari had been helping coordinate a cross-continental working group: meshnet devs in Montreal, sanitation unions in Mumbai, childcare cooperatives from Lisbon to Dakar. Their shared thread? How to federate decision-making without creating another hierarchy.

“Think grassroots, not top-down,” Luna said during a session broadcast on a rotating PeerTube instance. “Each node autonomous, but interoperable. Each accountable to the commons it serves.”

Cities joined not through deals, but through example. When Warsaw adopted the OGB stack to rebuild their transit planning, local fediverse nodes lit up with more nabourhood noids. Bangkok rewrote its urban flood protocols with open consultation channels, built directly into #Mastodon forks. A co-op in Johannesburg started exporting surplus energy via federated agreements, skipping their failing national grid entirely.

Jaz had started hosting live streaming (name of app?) weekly onboarding sessions at the old market stall – now more like a civic tech info booth. Kids ran federated games in the background while elders plotted data sovereignty campaigns between tea rounds.

“Feels like we’re writing a new horizontal constitution,” said Zey, watching a real-time map of global assemblies syncing through #OMN nodes.

But pressure still loomed. Old institutions tried to reassert dominance by offering ‘partnerships’ – always with terms. The World Bank launched a slick clone of the OGB platform called CivicBridge, complete with consultants and paywalled toolkits. Big Tech spun up their own “decentralised” pilots, riddled with telemetry hooks and dark patterns.

They underestimated the cultural shift. The new networks weren’t just tech, they were communities. Stories. Rituals of care and collective memory. Indymedia Globle ran a week-long series documenting how sewer workers in Mexico City and pirate radio collectives in Jakarta were in the face of #climatechaos federating disaster response protocols. Their slogan trended: “Infrastructure is Culture.”

Nari’s phone beeped, an alert from the assembly. Over 200 cities now federated under the wide #OGB commons protocols. Not aligned. Not ruled. Not centralised. Federated.

“We’re not exporting a model,” she reminded the crew. “We’re sharing patterns.” That night, under a protest-lit sky in downtown Berlin, Jaz took the mic at a solidarity gathering. “We said we’d take back the tools. Now we’re taking back the systems. Not to own them, but to share them.” The crowd responded, not with chants, but with synced updates. Nodes joining. Agreements forged. Decisions passed. Solidarity – not just spoken, but #4opens coded in.

Chapter Eleven: Friends in Strange Places

The billionaires didn’t know what to do with themselves. After a decade of preaching disruption, they now found themselves disrupted. No more keynote spots at summits that mattered. No new killer app – no app at all. Instead: a patchwork of community servers running software they couldn’t monetise, speaking in languages they hadn’t designed, powered by motivations they couldn’t understand.

Yet they tried. Burning Man came early that year. The usual desert cathedrals of ego and LED spiritualism, now rebranded as “decentralised renaissance zones.” A luxury dome near the core had a banner reading: “Protocols, Not Platforms: Sponsored by [REDACTED VENTURE FIRM].”

Two of the old tech bros flew in by private jet – posturing green. One of them, bearded and barefoot in designer hemp, had once founded a payment system that almost became a country. Now he waxed lyrical about “post-capitalist flows” while livestreaming to three million followers from a satellite uplink. “We really believe in empowering local nodes,” he said in a lavish conference panel. “That’s why we’re partnering with the new movement.” They weren’t.

Newspeak House in London – once a haunt for civic hackers and well-meaning technocrats, had become the scene of cautious negotiation. Some institutional figures, even legacy MPs, were genuinely curious. A few came humbly, asking real questions. Others came to shape, contain, co-opt.

Jaz was there one rainy Thursday for a panel: “Civic Tech and the Future of Infrastructure.” Zey sat beside her, arms folded. One of the billionaire emissaries stood to speak, a familiar face from old TED Talks. He gestured at the OGB graph on the wall like it was a product roadmap. “If we can integrate these primitives into an API layer, we could offer interoperability with enterprise cloud infrastructure. That way, everyone wins.”

Zey spoke before Jaz could. “You mean, you win. And we get eaten.” There was an awkward silence. “No thanks,” Jaz added. “We’re not here to scale into your stack. We’re here to compost it.”

Not everyone agreed. Some nodes, overwhelmed by demand or enticed by money and promises, signed conditional partnerships. These versions of the tools were slicker, smoother, branded, but neutered. Governance became consultation. #4opens paths closed. Trust mechanisms obfuscated.

Yet the originals held. Because the people did.

Burning Man ended. The jets left. Newspeak House emptied. And across the globe, the federated stack kept growing. Farmers in Kenya negotiating water rights. Street medics in Argentina syncing training protocols with ones in Oakland. Not corporate alliances. Not NGO frameworks. People-to-people federations.

And the tech bros? They tried to fork the culture. They built metaverse shells with fake local nodes and NFT-based “trust” metrics. But no one came. Not really. Because in a world rebuilt on shared care, scarcity wasn’t the incentive any more. Instead, the question was: who do you stand with? And in that question, the old guard had no real answer.
Chapter Twelve: Boring is Beautiful

By the third year, the #OGB was no longer a revolution. It was plumbing. Most people didn’t even think about it anymore, the same way they didn’t think about water or traffic lights – until they failed. But the #OGB rarely did. It became infrastructure, boring in the best possible way.

Neighbourhood assemblies ran housing cooperatives, not protests. Food systems got coordinated via federated databases. Bin routes were optimised by bin workers, energy flows managed collectively across districts. Boring.

The chaos of old politics still flared, of course, especially in the pockets that resisted federation. But the heat was moving elsewhere. One by one, the institutions gave in. First, local councils turned into administrative shells. Then national ministries started shifting budgets into federated pools managed by #OGB commons councils. These new councils weren’t elected in the old sense, they were sortated, accountable, traceable, transparent. Public because they were of the public.

The old moneyed institutions didn’t collapse – they became largely irrelevant. Legacy banks became pass-through entities, little more than number brokers. Governments still taxed, but now most of the flows went directly into regional UBI funds.

Yes, UBI.

That fight had taken years, and a hundred little cracks in the dam. A municipal pilot here. A federated pension scheme there. Arguments on Mastodon. Policy simulations in lemme forums. But then the German #OGB node rolled out full civic UBI through local OGB-led budgeting assemblies. The results were impossible to ignore.

Other cities followed. Amsterdam. Porto. Ljubljana. Then the flood came. Finland, the Basque region, parts of Scotland, then across the Nordics and beyond. Europe blinked and found itself running on mutual aid, solidarity, not scarcity.

The UBI model wasn’t controlled by a central authority. It was grassroots: managed at the scale of trust. Reputation networks ensured contributions and allocations stayed human. When people needed more, they applied – publicly, with dignity – and the working groups and assemblies debated. Some rejected the overhead. Others embraced the slowness, the care. Nobody called it innovation anymore. It was just… life.

But one challenge had always loomed: climate chaos.

At first, the federated stack was used to mitigate. Crisis mapping for floods. Open wildfire response networks. P2P air quality monitors in every city block. It started with adaptation, but shifted to action.

The OGB-led assemblies began coordinating beyond cities, beyond borders. Coastal regions aligned rewilding corridors. Mountainous communities bartered forest stewardship planting. Urban districts replaced extractive zoning with regenerative planning. And every change was federated, transparent, accountable, participatory.

Collective needs, not individual wants, shaped the path. The tipping point came when the South Pacific nodes federated with Arctic indigenous councils. Resource justice became planetary. And in the vacuum of failed global summits, the OGB stack quietly built an actual Earth Council – nothing symbolic, just sync’d infrastructure.

Jaz had stepped back from the frantic coordination. She now ran a community garden and handled seasonal budget meetings. Zey published oral histories of the uprising. Nari split her time between digital infra upkeep and playing chess with kids at the market.

“Feels like we made bureaucracy human again,” said Luna during a walk through what used to be city hall.

“Not bureaucracy,” corrected Nari. “Just… responsibility.”

Even the language had changed. Words like ‘user’ and ‘citizen’ blurred into ‘participant.’ Budgets weren’t funding lines; they were care trails. And no one talked about overthrowing power anymore. They just… rerouted it.

Epilogue: A Timeline of Change

2025 — First informal test of the #OGB prototype at Chatsworth Road Market. It works. People notice.

2026 — Federation spreads across local markets. Media backlash. Right-wing outrage. Solidarity deepens.

2027 — Fediverse tools interlink: IndymediaBack, Lemmy, Mastodon. Clinter servers falter, P2P survives.

2028 — Council staff, green politicians, and unionised workers adopt #OGB practices. Local budgets begin to federate.

2029 — Labour Party split. Early UBI experiments. Rise of regional assemblies and open public audits.

2030 — Climate response protocols. Flood and fire networks. Coordinated rewilding. First Earth Council node.

2031–2032 — Global federation gains momentum. Traditional parties hollowed out. Banks reduced to number brokers. UBI becomes policy across multiple states.

2033 — #OGB no longer a tool of rebellion. Now, it’s how we manage shared life.

And the spark?

A windswept Saturday morning. A broken-down council stall. A handful of stubborn traders, a tangle of extension cords. And an idea too obvious not to work:

“Why don’t we just run it ourselves?”

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/MakingHistory/wiki/Story+-+Oxford%3A+Going+with+The+Flow.-

Digital Detox Is Urgently Needed

Fighting #fashionistas with fashion. We have an app outline for that: iPhone or android.

Not as a lifestyle tweak, not as wellness branding, not as another individual “better habits” story. These proposed apps and the wider projects have nothing to do with self-optimisation, productivity hacks, or personal purity. Framing it that way is already defeat – that’s #stupidindividualism doing the work of the #dotcons for them.

What we’re facing in our digital mess isn’t only a failure of self-control, it’s a structural capture problem. The #dotcons platforms are designed to extract attention, shape behaviour, and enclose social space. You don’t fix that by telling isolated individuals to be stronger or more disciplined. You fix it by changing the infrastructure people live in.

That’s why this has to be collective infrastructure. Shared norms, shared limits, shared tools. Social agreements embedded in tech and process, not moral pressure dumped onto individuals. The goal is to change default behaviour at the group level, so resistance isn’t exhausting and opting out doesn’t mean disappearing.

The native #OMN path is about rebuilding the commons: tools that assume trust, reciprocity, transparency, and accountability from the start. Defaults that slow extraction, not accelerate it. Processes that make manipulation visible and contestable. Mediation instead of opaque algorithms. Human-scale flows instead of infinite feeds.

We do need to keep lighting, this isn’t self-control, it’s collective self-defence. Anything on the normal path is simply dresses up surrender as “wellness” and calls it choice, it is just more head down, worshipping the #deatcult.

The core idea: The buddy method. You don’t fight addiction alone, don’t detox alone, you don’t escape algorithmic capture alone, you do it with another human.

App 1: Digital Detox Buddy

A simple app that sits on top of existing child lock / screen time APIs. No dark magic, spyware, behavioural profiling. Instead, simple:Just process, consent, and friction.

Defaults matter. Default allowance: 4 hours per day on #dotcons, when time runs out: You get a 10-minute grace extension button. Extending beyond this requires talking to your buddy

To permanently end limits: You must unbuddy (an explicit social action). This creates pause, reflection, conversation – the opposite of dopamine scroll loops.

Time reduction is gradual, a soft landing, not punishment. Start at 4 hours/day, reduce by 1 hour per week/month. People can stabilise or reverse with buddy agreement. This is about retraining habits, not moral purity.

What Is counted (and what Is not)? Metered: Phone screen time (total). Time spent on #dotcons platforms. Unmetered: Web browsing, #FOSS apps, Reading tools, Local-first utilities, Creative tools.

The framing is explicit: The problem is not only “screen time”. The problem is extractive platforms.

Privacy + accountability balance, Aggregated stats are public (community-level visibility, cultural pressure). Exact stats are buddy-only (trust-based accountability)

Public stats answer: Average phone use, average #dotcons use, detox participation trends

This is #DemocracyOfReach applied to behaviour change – cultural signal without surveillance.

Architecture: First version: client–server is OK, preferably designed for #p2p later

Buddy relationship is explicit, revocable, symmetric, no central behavioural scoring, no advertising, no data resale, this is infrastructure, not a product.

App 2: Consumerism Detox Buddy

Same logic. Different addiction.

Consumerism Is also a platform problem, endless consumption isn’t “choice”. It’s nudging, targeting, and engineered impulse. This second app mirrors the first but focuses on shopping behaviour. How it works, uses geolocation, identifies time spent in: shopping centres, large retail chains, branded consumption spaces,

Same buddy rules: time limits, soft extensions, explicit social negotiation. Local markets, repair, reuse, libraries, commons spaces are excluded or positively weighted.

This is people to people anti-#deathcult economics made concrete in apps.

This is why it belongs on the #OMN path, and why it is not about personal optimisation, quantified-self nonsense, wellness capitalism, #NGO nudging, or behavioural surveillance.

A clear path about collective governance of attention. With explicit social process, open defaults, visible culture change. Tools that support people talking to each other, not being silently managed.

The apps don’t “fix” people, they change the environment people live in. This is striving to mediate what matters now: digital addiction and consumerism aren’t side effects. They are core pillars of the #deathcult. If we can’t or won’t build ways to step out together, all we get is isolated “self-help”.

These apps are p2p, gentle, federated, human-scale refusal, not banning, shaming or preaching. Its #KISS “Let’s do less of this – together.” If we can build social media apps, we can build #dotcons exit apps. A #OMN-native path.

Before you ask, the second stage, step, is to socialise the first step, offline.

Why the #OMN works with #ActivityPub – And why we need a bridge to #p2p

Let’s look at this. #ActivityPub is not a product. It’s not even really a “protocol” in the narrow, rigid sense that vertical tech likes to imagine. ActivityPub is a shared vocabulary, a public language for moving meaning and connection across the #openweb. It gives you nouns and verbs, and the community defines the grammar through lived use.

This is why the #OMN works with ActivityPub, a metadata and meaning layer, not a platform, flows, not silos. ActivityPub is the widely deployed #4opens protocol that treats publishing as a flow, a conversation.

Unlike the more vertical stacks (#ATProto is a good example), ActivityPub doesn’t force a worldview. It doesn’t tell you, “this is how your network must be structured.” It doesn’t enforce hierarchy or lock you into one interpretation of identity, authority, or workflow. It’s a #KISS path – here’s a shared language, verbs for publishing and receiving, express objects, updates, relationships. The rest is up to the commons

This flexibility is exactly why the #OMN can become a part of this flow. ActivityPub, with #FAP process, is already evolving this way – not through top-down committees, but by developers and users defining new grammar for shared needs. Quote posts, permissions, object types, and many other extensions are emerging organically. This is horizontal protocol evolution, which aligns well with the #OMN path.

To mediate the #geekproblem trying to break this path. We need to say clearly why we don’t want an “ActivityPub 2.0”. A clean break is a vertical move, it reproduces the #techcurn cycle: throw away the compost, start another shiny stack, burn everything down every five years because fashion demands it. It’s the #fashernista mindset applied to protocols.

For the #OMN, we need continuity, evolving the commons, not abandoning it. ActivityPub works because it’s an accretion protocol, not a replacement protocol. We extend it, we add grammar, we build bridges, we compost the broken bits. This is the #nothingnew ethos: repair, adapt, extend, don’t rewrite reality every cycle.

This is fine up to a point, but still too much – Central points of failure – Which is fine for much of the #fediverse. But the #OMN isn’t only for well-resourced servers, it’s for change and challenge. Activists on the ground, communities without reliable hosting, people under surveillance, low-resource groups, offline-first publishing, pop-up networks, autonomous movements that cannot rely on central infrastructure.

For this layer, we need true #p2p protocols. This is where #DAT, #Hypercore, and similar tools matter – not as replacements, but as bridges. These are needed for resilient metadata flows, where stories, tags, and meaning travel across networks even when the networks are broken.

We need to understand why both matter, It’s because they do different things. ActivityPub gives us: wide distribution, discoverability, moderation structures, federation, slow-moving cultural infrastructure. We add to this what #p2p gives us: autonomy, resilience, offline survival, local-first publishing, anti-censorship pathways,

The #OMN’s job is to bridge these layers, same metadata vocabulary, same hashtag meaning system, same open processes. Two different transport layers depending on the need. Think of it like the compost metaphor: ActivityPub is the shared soil bed. #p2p is the mycelium running underneath, keeping it alive when storms hit.

This matters, we don’t want just another Fediverse, we don’t want just another p2p experiment. We need a living ecosystem that can: publish everywhere, survive disconnection, resist capture, remain open, remain public, remain messy, remain ours. ActivityPub gives us the public commons, p2p gives us the underground root network. The #OMN ties them together through shared metadata, hashtags, practices, and governance.

Compost, not silos, ecosystems, not empires. Federation on the surface, peer-to-peer underneath. This is the #OMN path.

The History of visionOntv: What We Built, What We Lost, and Why It Matters Again

Looking back at the old TubeMogul stats – the archived page from 2011 – I had a jolt:
18 million verified views, and when you added the torrent distribution, RSS syndication, video CDROM redistribution, and all the edge-case channels we seeded into, the total was closer to 34 million views. These were big numbers back then.

All grassroots, all #KISS, all built on the early #openweb ethos, that number matters, not for vanity, rather, it showed proof-of-work for what a truly decentralized media network could do before the #dotcons consolidated their grip.

People forget this now, but #visionOntv was one of the earliest real-world demonstrations of the idea behind what we have now with the #Fediverse, years before the word existed:

  • distributed hosting
  • open content flows
  • creative commons
  • no algorithmic manipulation
  • human curation
  • peer-to-peer distribution
  • training and empowerment as core paths

This wasn’t theory, it was practice, in the era just before the enclosure of the Web took hold. The original vision – visionOntv’s mission statement from back then – looking at it now through the Web Archive – still works:

“Are you feeling dejected and bored? Does mainstream media make you feel ill? Then get off your ass…” This wasn’t branding, it was the cultural tone of a time when people still believed the internet could change things, and it genuinely did. visionOntv was a platform, seed for a network, built around a simple idea: video for social change, delivered in formats normal people could actually use.

We were deliberately designing for the “lean-in / lean-out” model before UX people had the words for it. You could sit back and watch it as TV. Or you could click deeper, link up to the grassroots campaigns behind the stories, jump straight into action.

The point was always outreach, always getting beyond the activist bubble, aways trying to plant seeds of agency in ordinary people, that “compost” metaphor we still use today. Quality, not chaos, visionOntv was not open-publishing, we had a quality threshold, we mentored people into producing work that worked, visually, politically, narratively, not gatekeeping, but gardening.

This is something the #openweb forgot: freedom isn’t the same as noise. We were trying to hold onto a craft tradition inside a political one. Tools, Training, and #4opens. We pushed #FOSS open source production tools as far as they could go, but we weren’t dogmatic. If a corporate tool was necessary for outreach, we used it. The guiding star was always:

Does this help media democracy grow?
Does this empower real people?
Does this keep the compost fertile?

And because we distributed everything in Creative Commons non-commercial, people everywhere could download, remix, project in their communities, hand out self copied video CDs to run their own screenings. One broadband connection could feed a whole neighbourhood. That was media democracy. Again: this was proto-Fediverse thinking before the word existed, this was a people’s broadcasting network built on the #4opens.

What happened, the #dotcons consolidated – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – and sucked the air out of open distribution. We were publishing into a storm of #enshittification before the word was coined. And of course we tried to ride the wave, keep the doors open, keep the channels alive. But the gravity of centralized platforms crushed the ecology, distribution dried up.

The “lean-in/lean-out” mechanism was rendered obsolete by the algorithmic feed. The early #P2P ecosystems were squeezed by copyright paranoia and corporate capture. It wasn’t that visionOntv failed, the Web changed around it, in the same way soil ecology collapses when a monoculture plantation takes over.

The #Peertube Era That… Almost Happened. When the #Fediverse bloomed, we did the obvious thing: we pushed all the video archives, feeds, and channels onto PeerTube. It was the correct move, and we were there early. But PeerTube was young, fragile, underfunded, underhyped. And unlike the massive #dotcons, decentralized tech requires community support to stay alive.

We didn’t get that support, so the server went dark. And now the whole archive – all that history, all that outreach, all the proof-of-work – sits offline. This isn’t a guilt trip, it’s a call-out to the people who care about the #openweb: Come on, folks, let’s bring visionOntv back https://opencollective.com/open-media-network/projects/visionontv

The #OMN Path: Openness as Revolution

This is about revolution as regeneration, not only destruction. In an era built on tech dependency, revolution isn’t only about smashing the machines, it’s about liberating them. Turning tools back into commons, not commodities. It’s composting the toxic monoculture of the #dotcons into fertile ground for the #openweb to grow again. Revolution means reclaiming agency, not blindly rejecting technology, but re-rooting it into light, human-scale, transparent, and accountable relationships.

The #openweb as infrastructure for freedom, isn’t just a technical architecture, it’s a social contract. Revolution means re-establishing that contract through the #4opens. When we build networks this way, we decentralize power, not just servers. The #KISS act of publishing, federating, and remixing information freely is itself revolutionary in a world where everything is locked behind paywalls and algorithms.

Tech as commons, not commodity, We’ve learned that “innovation” under capitalism means enclosure and surveillance. Revolution in this context looks like refusal of extraction: creating cooperative infrastructures that are not driven by profit but by maintenance, care, and shared use. Think of community built #p2p mesh networks, open hardware, peer-to-peer storage, and federated #ActivityPub publishing as revolutionary paths – not add-ons, but foundations.

Cultural and cognitive shifts, shifting the cultural narrative from “user” to participant. From “consumer” to custodian. The real struggle is against the #deathcult of endless growth and the #geekproblem of technocratic detachment. It’s about re-learning how to think together, rebuilding trust, and balancing the #fluffy (care, empathy, collaboration) and the #spiky (truth, resistance, boundaries).

Direct action in the digital today looks like:

  • Practicing digital mutual aid – sharing skills, hosting, dev, and care.
  • Bridging online and offline organising, connecting digital tools to local struggles for housing, food, land, and rights etc.

Above all, any real revolutionary network – like the #OMN – has to strip away the old skins of power. No hierarchies. No hidden structures. No property games. No fetishizing of tools, status, or “official” etiquette.

If we’re building something new, we can’t carry the unconshuse ghosts of the old world with us. That means not just saying we’re open, but being #4opens. Open in decisions, and open in how decisions are made. Transparent in process, not just in outcome. Coherent theory is practice, and practice is theory.

Everyday life has to reflect the world we want to grow. That means composting the commodity mindset, no trading social trust for personal gain. It means building through shared assemblies, through community, through small and self-directing circles that stay alive to change and challenge.

The structure of the #OMN should always be simple, transparent, and direct, so that anyone can walk in, understand it, and shape it. No special knowledge required, no gatekeeping. Thousands of “unprepared” people able to join, act, and make it their own. That’s what #4opens means, a living culture of clarity and participation.

Only when a movement reflects the decentralized, self-organizing community it wants to bring into being can it avoid becoming another elitist shell, another bureaucracy pretending to be radical.

When the #OMN does its work right, it doesn’t stand above the revolution, it dissolves into it, like a thread into a healing wound, leaving behind not an organization, but a living network.

That’s the path: community, openness, trust, and the messy joy of self-organization.

The Fediverse is native to the open web

We are having a tech reboot for the last few years, federated seems to be where it’s at right now, and it makes sense, the #fediverse is flourishing where so many “#web3” or pure #p2p projects stumbled. This isn’t to say #p2p is bad. But for a peer-to-peer social network to actually work and be social useful, it would need mechanisms for collectivising: shared moderation, subjective trust, a way to handle conflict. Purely (stupid)individualist solutions have been tried before, and they don’t hold together at all beyond a tiny scale. Atomised people cannot build any lasting commons.

The strength of federation as a path is that it collectivises by default. Servers are groups, not individuals, decisions are made within communities, not in isolation, this builds resilience. What is currently #blocking this path is our #fashionistas and #geekproblem people, who are still clinging to parts of #mainstreaming “common sense!. If you try to vertically scale, if you dream of competing head-on with Silicon Valley, running giant datacentres with teams of sysadmins, you’ve already lost. That’s their game, their best proficiency. You cannot beat them at it.

The path forward is to do something they cannot do without breaking their own business model. Something they would never want to do even if they could. That’s the opening. That’s the #OMN path. So let’s be clear about what the current #openweb reboot and the #fediverse is not:

  • The fediverse is not an electricity grid. You don’t have to be plugged in everywhere for it to function.
  • The fediverse is not feudalism. You are not a serf bound to some lord’s server. You can leave, fork, migrate, or self-host.
  • The fediverse is not a commodity. It is not like a telephone line or a utility service to be packaged, sold, or regulated in the same way.
  • And no, the fediverse is not a big truck that carries data down the highway. It’s a messy garden, a bazaar, a commons.

The #fediverse works because it is untidy, diverse, and decentralised. It’s a network of collectives, not a monopoly machine. The #OMN path and vision is to lean into this: not to replicate the #dotcons in smaller, scrappier forms, but to compost the mistakes of the past and grow something native, nourishing, and #4opens.

The #OMN isn’t about isolated gestures, it’s about building federated, trust-based media networks that actually work at scale. Right now, the truth is simple: you can’t just join or create one tomorrow. Why? Because the path needs composting first.

By composting, we mean taking the wreckage of past projects – messy, co-opted, burned-out, over-managed, or over-centralised – and turning it into fertile ground. From this social fertile soil can we grow #OMN that support:

  • Open, federated collaboration
  • Shared media creation and distribution
  • Affinity group – based moderation and governance
  • Strong social resilience against co-option by corporations or #dotcons

We need to then bride this existing federated path into the seed #p2p path with social tools that work and hold this bridge in place. The #OMN is a work in progress, and that’s intentional. It’s about building the crew, the culture, and the infrastructure before anyone can just “join.” This isn’t a platform you log into; it’s a path we create together, step by step. Until we do that composting, passive participation isn’t possible, the first step is #KISS that’s exactly what we’re focused on making happen.

A poet’s view of the path

Pick up the shovel, build the commons

Right now, our digital lives are stuck between two bad choices: Stranded silos, your notes, photos, chats locked into one device. #dotcons capture, hand it all to Google, Apple, Meta, and rent your own history back from them.

We deserve better. What we actually need is simple: Blobs of data that syncs across devices and servers. A conflict resolution flow. Sync is hard, but not impossible, better to resolve a clash than lose flow. A protocol path that isn’t “just another cloud,” but part of a commons.

This is the path of the #OMN (Open Media Network). Bridging client/server with #p2p flows, people power, where people hold their own history instead of renting it back from the #deathcult. To make this work, we need to keep it #KISS so normal people, not just geeks, can understand and use it. It’s not about building a new shiny app. It’s about laying the pipes, tanks, and flows – the plumbing – that keeps our media and our history, as a reflection of us, in native flows.

This is shovel work. This is how we compost the #techshit and grow something real. The choice is clear, stay stuck in silos, lease life from the cloud. Or pick up the shovel and build a trust-based, decentralised future. The tools are #OMN, #4opens. What’s missing is you. That’s the shovel work. That’s the compost. The question isn’t “can we build it?” – the question is: who’s going to pick up the shovel first?

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network

https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

Pick up the shovel: turning habits into compost

Looking at working with legacy media thinking – silo vs flow

Every so often I answer the out reach calls from more traditional alt/progressive media orgs, let’s look at some of the very illustrative “common sense” knock backs. The recent examples are Freedom’s reaction and Good Internet’s submission call – As their reaction is useful to illustrate the fault line of “radical publishing” in a federated media path.

Here’s a sketch of how it can (and arguably should) work if we’re serious about, #openweb, and soft-communing infrastructure:

  1. Radical publishing vs content marketing

Linking, promiscuous citation, and remixing are not “self-promotion,” they are the currency of commons media. The #deathcult “common sense” (silo good, linking bad) flips this into “spam” because it serves enclosure. A federated media path re-asserts: to link is to share; the work which is often missing is to normalize this against the #geekproblem hostility.

  1. Federated magazine model

Think of Good Internet or Freedom not as final silos but as temporary, themed hubs: Each issue/edition is an editorial filter over the wider #datasoup. Every piece lives in at least two places: Original home (blog, Fediverse post, OMN node, site). Curated home (magazine issue, zine, aggregator). Citation = federation: linking outward is a feature, not a weakness.

  1. Protocols over Silos

ActivityPub / OMN: an article = Note or Article with links, tags, signatures. Bridging: same content can be pulled into Good Internet’s site, Freedom, an OMN feed, or a #p2p archive. Editorial collectives act as curators, not gatekeepers: they federate, contextualize, and remix.

  1. Radical editorial practice

News vs. Narrative: anarchist/left publishers still to often mimic #mainstreaming news style. But radical publishing can foreground process stories (assemblies, conflicts, federations, mistakes) as valuable. The “native common sense” is that embedded links aren’t a vice; they’re a form of solidarity economy. Columns / paths: rather than stand-alone “takes,” recurring voices build a long-form conversation thread across issues.

  1. Overcoming the spam accusation

Transparency: declare openly, “this piece first appeared on hamishcampbell.com – we federate because knowledge is commons.” Reciprocity: every time you link out, you also lift other projects, so the “flow” is visible. Editorial notes: curators can preface with: “We include links because they build the #openweb – federation isn’t promotion, it’s solidarity.”

  1. Practical workflow (2026-ish)

Write a blog/site piece on your own, or community domain (independent anchor). Publish simultaneously to Fediverse (AP Article). Flag it with #OMN metadata (topic, source, tags). Editorial collectives subscribe to flows/feeds – curate into magazine/zine/weekly digest. Federation tools track lineage: where did this piece appear, when, how remixed. Readers move from curated hubs back to source domains (and sideways to other linked nodes).

  1. Why it matters to anarchists

Free software is political; so is free publishing. Federation prevents capture by the #nastyfew – no central owner can throttle which radical voices appear. Linking promiscuously creates a mutual aid economy of attention, the opposite of platform/silo enclosure. Each zine/collective/magazine is an affinity group node; federation = council of nodes. It encodes horizontalism in media.

So when you bump against “not news enough” or “too self-promotional,” that’s the clash between #mainstreaming editorial common sense and federated radical publishing practice. One assumes scarcity (guard the pages); the other assumes abundance (share the flow).

We do need to compost some of this mess #KISS

Let’s build the shovels: #OMN #indymediaback #makeingstory #OGB

In the reboot of native #openweb media, one guiding principle must be clear: #mainstreaming stays second-rank media. That means:

If you can’t link to a working, open URL, you don’t link.

Any mainstream links are placed at the end of the article, not woven in as authority.

This path is #nothingnew, it’s how we held space before. You can see it in practice back in 2006 with Indymedia’s coverage of the Climate Camp: https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2006/climatecamp/

The real blockages in activist tech

We need to look at this from a different view, it’s not just the tech, we’ve had working #FOSS tools, protocols, and infrastructure for decades. What kills movements is social, it’s the politics. Fractionalism – ideological vanguards fighting to capture and control. Authoritarian “protection” – censorship framed as security, silencing criticism, shrinking ghettos – small groups defining themselves by exclusion, not expansion.

On the so-called radical paths, whether Trotskyist, Stalinist, or anarchist, the pattern is the same: authority asserts itself, dialogue is shut down, energy drains away. This is not new, it’s what happened in #Indymedia’s first wave (2000–2015). A boom of 100+ servers worldwide collapsed under internal antagonisms and the pressure of repression. The pattern is likely to repeat today in the #Fediverse – a federation of “benevolent dictatorships,” ideological ghettos, and isolation bubbles.

On this path, it’s still the same two poisons. Greed – the monetizers, who see everything as an opportunity to exploit. Liberals – who smother movements with control, respectability politics, and blocking, until the right crushes them anyway. Then we have the social issue of the #geekproblem in front of this.

So why do alt tech at all, with projects like #Indymediaback / #OMN? Simple, it’s because this is an attempt to break this cycle. It’s not about building “the next Twitter,” or even just “the next Indymedia.” It’s about building infrastructure that makes it harder for greed and liberalism to strangle movements.

That means, collective relations over exchange relations. If everything is transactional, the hydra of exploitation regrows from within. Messy consensus over vanguardism. Power must remain distributed, rooted in trust, not captured by “protectors”. Openness over gatekeeping, #4opens (open source, open data, open standards, open process) are non-negotiable. The aim is not a perfect system, but a resilient culture that resists authoritarian drift of the controlling left or the right.

What we need now is a space for open discussion – not geek-only, not ghettoized, but broad, accessible, and transparent. What is needed is seed funding – servers and crew are running on fumes, without subsistence support, even the strongest politics collapse from burnout. Affinity groups – real-world working crews who share trust and values, not just abstract online networks. Bridging – from #Fediverse to #P2P and other channels, so we can resist repression and surveillance without pushing us into failed isolation.

With the hard right expansion, we are in a visible naked #classwar, the right is crushing the liberals, which ironically creates more space for the radical left. The “common sense” liberals can’t block as effectively when their own protections are stripped away. On a positive note, this is an opening to build balanced radical progressive infrastructure – not just protest spaces, but growing, federating, living networks of communication and trust.

In short: #Indymediaback using the #OMN framework isn’t just about servers or software. It’s about breaking the repeating cycle of fractionalism, authoritarian drift, and liberal smothering, and creating conditions where grassroots media and alt cultures can actually survive long enough to matter.

The OMN with indymediaback and makeinghistory are paths

Most of the mess, and most of the #blocking, comes down to the same old story – ownership and control. Who holds the keys? Who decides? Who gets locked out? Instead of wrestling in that cage, the #OMN takes a simpler path: we walk away.

We put a class of media into the commons, governed openly through the #4opens: open data, open process, open source, and open standards. That means no one can close it down, hoard it, or fence it off for profit. The value comes from the shared pool, not from gatekeeping.

This is the heart of #KISS in the #OMN: make the flows work first, in ways people can understand, and build trust on top of that. The tech exists to serve these flows, not to dictate them. This isn’t about perfect crypto or hard lockdowns; it’s about commoning media so that everyone has the right to read, share, and build on it.

Yes, the #mainstreaming mess will eventually follow us – as it always does. But the plan and hope is that by the time it catches up, the habits, culture, and expectations we’ve grown around open media will have shifted society enough that the old traps won’t work the same way. If we’ve done our job, the default will be more open, collaborative, and accountable, not locked down. That’s the #KISS path: simple, resilient, and grounded in the commons.

On the #OMN with #indymediaback and #makeinghistory paths – We’re not talking about a single bridge, but a federated ecosystem, with the current example of both #DAT and #ActivityPub running on the same server, sharing a common database of media objects. As the data flows, text and metadata are redundantly stored in the open (#4opens). That way, if one server gets hacked, it can simply be rolled back and restored from the wider pool. #KISS

The P2P side works much like #nostr in that it can have a list of flows in and out to servers and can use any of these to publish and receive media on the #openweb. The advantage of the #p2p app side is that each local app in a backup for the online servers (see #makeinghistory), which as critics say can be, and will be, taken down some times. Also, they will work in their own right for people who need a more locked down path, and this will be needed in more repressive spaces and times. The clear advantage is this still gives them outflows to the wider #mainstreaming client server media outreach, to what matters, effect, so it ticks both boxes.

We aim to solve technical issues with human-understandable social paths, not hard tech for its own sake. Yes, in a minority of cases hard tech will be needed – but that’s for the #geeks to solve after the working social paths are clear, not before.

We fix problems through #KISS social processes and #4opens transparency, not by defaulting to encryption and lockdown. Hacking is outside the focus scope of the #OMN. What we’re building is about trust and flows, not code as an end in itself. Hacking belongs on the #geek paths – useful, but only after the trust and flows are established. The code should be there to secure what’s been built, not to block it before it exists.

Without trust and working flows, there’s no value at all, no matter how secure, encrypted, or elegant the tech stack. If the campaigns, activism, and people aren’t using it, the system is pointless. And being pointless is something we need to be more honest about. Building for the sake of building, while ignoring the social, community layer, feeds the #geekproblem and starves the movement.

So, what can people actually do in the real world to make this path happen?

  • If you have resources, you can help fund the development work – keeping it in the hands of the people actually building the open commons, not some corporate gatekeeper.
  • If you’re technical, you can code the applications and servers that power the flows. We need builders who understand that trust and usability come first, not shiny tech for its own sake.
  • If you work in UX or testing, you can make sure what we build is something real people can actually use and trust – simple, clear, and accessible.
  • If you do media, you can tell the story. Write, film, photograph, blog, podcast – whatever it takes to spread the word. The more people hear about an alternative that works, the more chance it has to grow.

Whatever your skills or resources, the important thing is to get involved in the flow. This is not a spectator sport, and the is unlikely to be pay, it’s #DIY so the commons will only be built if we build it together. #KISS #4opens #OMN