Not to punish the individuals, but to highlight the groups to compost

In tech, the last 20 years have been a mess of #fashernista trends and the ongoing #geekproblem, a compost heap of broken promises and abandoned projects. It’s obvious if you lift the lid and really look. The glossy hype fades fast, the rot underneath remains.

Much of what we call “innovation” ended up as #techshit – rushed, bloated, short-sighted code that needs serious composting if we’re going to grow anything real. #Openweb dreams have been buried under a #dotcons landfill.

The real challenge now isn’t just pointing at the pile (fun as that can be), it’s handing the next generation proper shovels – real tools, real critical thinking, real spaces for building rooted, resilient, open tech.

One of the most corrosive problems on the path to rebooting the #openweb is the nasty, unconscious blocking that seeps through all #mainstreaming and careerist #NGO spaces. It’s not usually overt, it doesn’t come with a clear “no.” It comes with silence, with being ignored. With polite nods and a quick pivot back to safe, fundable, middle-of-the-road ideas that don’t rock the boat. This is how real change is smothered, how compost we need becomes concrete we are trying to break up.

Whenever something grassroots or genuinely native pushes into these spaces, say, someone trying to move beyond the stale copycat platforms, or raising the obvious problems with #dotcons being repackaged as “innovation”, the response is a passive-aggressive wall of non-engagement. These spaces are deeply allergic to anything that makes the comfort of #mainstreaming uncomfortable.

And you don’t shut up? If you insist on making the mess visible and pushing for something that might actually shift the culture? That’s when it escalates.

Ad hominem attacks begin — you’re “angry,” “difficult,” “not constructive.”

Technical blocking follows — defederation, closed chat groups, funding gatekeeping.

Eventually, it cycles back to the default tactic: ignoring you again.
Because ignoring is easy. Ignoring doesn't threaten careers or grant cycles. Ignoring keeps the status quo safe.

But this leaves the real mess in place, the rot stays buried under layers of “positive vibes,” #PR-driven governance proposals, and performative inclusivity that actually excludes anyone who doesn’t play within broken systems.

This creates perfect conditions for the rise of the #fashernistas, the well-meaning tech influencers, safe radicals, and trendy projects that suck up time, focus, and resources while producing little more than reheated versions of things that already failed. And the cycle repeats:

Grassroots tries to engage.
Gets blocked.
#Fashernistas fill the vacuum.
Compost becomes glittery sludge.

We’ve need to more loudly name this cycle for what it is, a defence mechanism for comfort and careerism, not care or community. And it’s antithetical to the kind of messy, living compost that grows something new. The #openweb needs real pushback, we need native tools, radical simplicity, open processes, and yes – a tolerance for discomfort. Because without discomfort, there is no transformation. Let’s keep making the mess visible. Let’s stop being “ignored” quietly. Let’s build outside the polite paths, where nothing changes.

After working in this area for 20 years, am tempted to list the people I have worked with, outlining good and bad paths they have pushed projects in. do you think this might be useful, not to punish the individuals, but to highlight and illustrate the groups we need to compost on going.

A hopeful note: some #fashernistas are starting to apologize and acknowledge the mess. That’s good compost material too. Let’s keep composting. Let’s keep planting.

Neoliberalism, Fascism

The best working definition of fascism is simple, economic: “The continuation of capitalism by undemocratic means.” This isn’t abstract theory. Fascism in the 1920s and 30s emerged precisely in response to a very real threat of revolutionary socialism. The Russian Revolution sparked global fear among the capitalist class that their time was up. Fascism – in Italy, Germany, Spain, Austria – arose as a counter-revolution. It wasn’t merely authoritarian nationalism or aesthetic militarism. It was the repressive armour worn by capitalism under existential threat.

Look at the details: In Spain, Franco rose after a democratically elected socialist government began to challenge entrenched economic power. In Germany, the first Nazi concentration camps were built for communists, not Jews. In Chile in the 1970s, the overthrow of Allende’s democratic socialist government was orchestrated by domestic elites and foreign (read: U.S.) interests terrified of socialism spreading in Latin America. Fascism wasn’t a deviation. It was capitalism defending itself with violence. Today, we face the same moment – and too many are looking the other way.

For 40 years, neoliberalism, that mix of deregulation, privatization, and gutting of social safety nets, has shaped our economics and cultures unchallenged. Its effects are easy to see: skyrocketing inequality, mass precarity, and ecological breakdown. But there’s a dangerous myth that neoliberalism is simply unregulated capitalism. In truth, it’s much closer path to economic fascism without the jackboots, until now.

#Neoliberalism didn’t grow in a vacuum. Its roots are in explicit reaction to socialism’s successes. Take Friedrich Hayek, ideological godfather of neoliberal – he was deeply disturbed by Red Vienna, where municipal socialism (like public housing) was working too well. His entire framework arose as an intellectual counterattack to collectivist policies.

And Hayek wasn’t just an ivory tower academic. He directly shaped the policies of Thatcher, Reagan, Pinochet, and the Chicago Boys – bringing theory to life through brutal economic “shock therapy.” Thatcher herself famously declared during a cabinet meeting: “This is what we believe” as she slammed Hayek’s book on the table.

From Mussolini to Musk, capitalism’s new wannabe strongmen. There’s little material difference between Mussolini’s Italy selling off state assets to loyal industrialists and today’s global elites (#nastyfew) hoovering up public infrastructure in the guise of “efficiency.” Mussolini at least expected those capitalists to serve the nation. Neoliberalism assumes, foolishly, that global capital will take care of society without loyalty, borders, or accountability.

In Russia, we see a more classical fascist arrangement: oligarchs allowed to profit, provided they serve the state’s nationalist goals. In the U.S., capital’s alignment with far-right politics is more chaotic but no less real. Corporations rarely oppose Trumpism, despite its chaos. Why? Because, as with 1930s Europe or 1970s Chile, fascism is good for business – so long as the profits roll in and unions, climate activists, and grassroots movements are crushed.

Where we are now is neoliberalism’s endgame, capitalism is in crisis again. But this time the existential threat isn’t just socialism – it’s climate and ecological collapse, a crisis neoliberalism created and cannot solve. And once again, the system’s response is not reform, but repression. Neoliberalism cannot survive democratically. The people don’t want it. So increasingly, undemocratic means are being deployed: voter suppression, propaganda, surveillance, repression, and the rise of far-right movements that promise “order” and scapegoats instead of justice. This is fascism, not a return to it, but its next iteration.

So what now? We don’t just need to resist this – we need to name it. Clearly. Loudly. Repeatedly. The myth that neoliberalism is merely “capitalism with the brakes off” must be composted. It is fascism with #PR. And as in the past, a step, a real alternative comes from the bottom up. From grassroots media, mutual aid networks, radical unions, climate justice movements, and the digital commons. We need to rebuild this solidarity, and we must do it #4opens horizontally, outside the broken institutions that created this mess.

The problem we face is simple and brutal. The right-wing eats everything. Every radical spark, every hopeful idea, every challenge to power, they swallow it, mutate it, and spit it back as bland, digestible social shit.

They take our justified rage and push it back as conspiracy. They take our care and twist it into control. Every revolutionary idea, stripped bare, rebranded, and fed into the #mainstreaming machine as more slop to feed and shape the masses.

This isn’t new. It’s the old game of cultural capture. And they’re very good at it. That’s why we need tools and paths they can’t easily co-opt. Stories they can’t rinse out and rebrand. Protocols that don’t translate into buzzword #blocking. The #4opens, the #OMN, the hashtag as resistance, are frameworks built to rot their greed and appetite.

We compost instead of consume. We grow native paths, not polished products. What we’re building is deliberately messy, deeply rooted, and absolutely unpalatable to the #nastyfew and their simpering acolytes. They want power. We want relational fabric. They want purity spirals and hot takes. We want compost, community, and continuity.

It’s a step. And that matters. As I always say – I like big ideas, but right now, I’m putting my shovel into small steps towards big ideas. That’s how you build something that lasts.

Messy language feeds back into our messy culture

The #blocking of current action, the constant stalls, confusion, and fragmentation, has a lot to do with the mess our use of language makes. And the deeper issue is how this messy language feeds back into our culture, which then loops back to make the language even murkier. It’s a feedback loop that clouds meaning, erodes trust, and paralyses collective action.

The last 40 years of postmodernism and neo-liberalism have made this worse. #Postmodernism chipped away at the idea of shared reality, leaving us with endless interpretation and “personal truths.” #Neoliberalism, on the other hand, commodified everything, including language itself, into marketing, spin, and #PR. Together, they’ve hollowed out words like “community,” “freedom,” and even “change,” to the point that we barely recognize what they mean any more.

Take “mutual aid” for example, a term grounded in deep solidarity and reciprocal responsibility. Now, on both #dotcons and #openweb platforms, it gets reduced to casual crowdfunding and anonymous asks, with little relational context. Not bad, but far from what it could and needs to be.

If we want affinity-based action to work, if we want people to come together and trust and act together, then we have to compost this mess. And the way to do that might be surprisingly simple #KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid, not stupid as in naive, but stupid as in clear.

We need to reclaim simple language that carries shared meaning. This is exactly what we’re trying to seed with the positive side of the #hashtag story. Hashtags can act as anchors in this storm of abstraction. They cut through noise, bring us back to the root meaning, and allow collective orientation without needing corporate gatekeepers or institutional filters.

Think:

#4opens — a shorthand for open code, open data, open governance, open standards.
#deathcult — pointing to the suicidal path of #neoliberalism.
#techshit — composting the mess, not throwing it away.
#nothingnew — slowing tech churn, reclaiming meaningful pace and paths.

Each of these tags points to deeper, shared narratives that are simple, but not simplistic. They invite action, not confusion. Compost the abstraction. Regrow clarity. Reclaim trust paths in both tech and social spaces. Speak simply, act clearly, hashtag wisely with intention.

On this working path, It is important for the progressives and radicals to come together and focus on the real issues and challenges facing society, rather than fighting among ourselves. Finding this balance between being “nice” and being “nasty” is key to being effective in bringing about any lasting social change.

The #hashtags embody a story and worldview rooted in a progressive and critical perspective on technology and society. They highlight the destructive impact of neoliberalism (#deathcult) and consumer capitalism (#fashernista) on our shared lives, while promoting the original ideals of the World Wide Web and early internet culture (#openweb).

The #closedweb critiques the for-profit internet and its harmful social consequences, while #4opens advocates for transparency, collaboration, and open-source principles in tech development.

The #geekproblem tag draws attention to a cultural tendency in tech: where geeks, absorbed in their tools and logic, overlook the broader social effects of their creations. This feeds into #techshit, where layers of unnecessary complexity pile up, further distancing people from tech’s social roots. Meanwhile, #encryptionists critiques the knee-jerk reaction that “more encryption” is always the answer, reinforcing control and scarcity, rather than liberating people and community.

Together, hashtags tell a coherent and powerful story. They call for a more humane, collaborative, and transparent approach to both technology and society.

#nothingnew asks whether constant innovation is the right path — or if we need to slow down and improve what already works.

#techchurn names the cycle of flashy, redundant tech that fails to solve core issues.

#OMN and #indymediaback point toward an Open Media Network — and a revival of the radical, decentralized media that once rivalled corporate media on the early web.

#OGB stands for Open Governance Body, an invitation to practice grassroots, transparent, community-led decision-making.

It’s an ambitious but needed path and goal, to build social tech networks that “fail well”, meaning they fail in a way that can be fixed by the people, through trust and collective action, not closed-source patches and corporate updates. The #OMN’s focus is human-first. Tech comes second, as a mediator, a tool, not the destination.

Yes, the #geekproblem is real. Technical expertise becomes a gatekeeping mechanism. But tech can also empower, if we design for simplicity, accessibility, and community-first paths and values. The only working path is simple, trust-based, and human. That’s why we keep coming back to #KISS.

Why haven’t we been dealing with this for the last 10 Years? Over the past decade, we’ve lived in a state of quiet paralysis. Climate change, ecological collapse, technological overreach, all of it loomed. And instead of digging in, we froze. Well-meaning people chose fear over action. Understandably. But fear is a poor foundation for building anything sustainable.

We’re on this site to only blame – we’re here to compost. The problem? We stopped critiquing. We stopped examining the tools in our hands. Not only that, but we bought into the illusion that #NGO paths and tech would save us. That shiny apps and startup culture could greenwash a better future. And when the results disappointed, we turned inward, stopped questioning, and left things to rot.

But what if that rot could be composted? By using the #4opens – open data, open code, open standards for open governance, we have a practical framework to call out and compost the layers of #techshit that have built up. Tech that divides us, tech that distracts us, tech that damages the planet and calls it progress. Yes, like gardening, composting takes time. It smells at first. It’s messy. But give it care, and you get soil. Soil to plant better ideas in. Soil for hope.

One of the reasons we haven’t made progress is the #geekproblem, a narrow slice of technically-minded culture mad up of (stupid)individuals, which so far have dominated the design and direction of our tools. They mean well, often. But in their obsession with technical elegance and “solutions,” they’ve sidelined the social and the ecological. What’s left is a brittle, sterile infrastructure, constantly churning out newness without any substance.

Meanwhile, #stupidindividualism has flourished, encouraged by #dotcons social media systems built for engagement, not connection. These silos encourage performance over solidarity, branding over community, and endless scrolling over doing. We’ve all felt it.

And most activist groups, instead of resisting this tide, drank the #NGO poison, chasing funding, watering down their goals, professionalizing their resistance until it became another logo in a funding application. We’ve lost a decade to fear, distraction, and capture. But it’s maybe not too late.

We have the tools, in the #ActivityPub based #Fediverse. We have the frameworks, the #4opens can guide us to rebuild with transparency, collaboration, and care. The hashtags like #geekproblem, #techshit, #nothingnew, and #OMN give us a shared vocabulary for critique and regeneration. They point to a web where people, not platforms, hold power, and where technology serves life, not control. Let’s stop being afraid to critique. Let’s stop outsourcing responsibility and get on with composting.

Because that’s where the soil of a better path will come from.

A path we need for the #openweb

The #NGO crew can be poison, not because they’re bad people, but because of how social structures and agendas shape behaviour. For the social health of the #openweb, we need to be mindful of what we take in. Just like in nature, some things are toxic in large doses. “Nice” doesn’t always mean “good.” There’s no contradiction here.

“Don’t drink from the #mainstreaming.”

But remember, shit makes good compost! Instead of just being cynical, let’s grow something better from this mess. A healthy #openweb world is still possible.

The Real Problem, is that too many people have been stuck in the #dotcons feedback loop for too long, lazy consumption feeding corporate control, which in turn dulls critical thinking, making people even more dependent. The illusion of #mainstreaming “ethical” alternatives all reinforce this cycle.

This post isn’t aimed at anyone in particular, but if you feel called out… well, maybe think about why.

Q: Why does this matter?

Because right now, #fashernistas (trend-chasers) and their projects are flooding into the #openweb space. Some of these projects are good, but many are just recreating the #geekproblem, building things that look different on the surface but are more #techshit repeating the same mistakes.

We use the #4opens as a litmus test for these projects:

Open Data – Who controls it?
Open Source – Can it be independently verified and improved?
Open Process – Who gets to decide?
Open Standards – Can it be freely networked and flows built upon?

If we don’t actively promote and support real alternatives, people will just step to more of the next “ethically marketed” #dotcons. If we don’t do #PR, they will, and they have far bigger budgets.

Q: What’s the deal with #hashtags, they empower people to break out of controlled algorithms.

Click a hashtag → See real conversations outside your curated bubble.
Follow a hashtag → Keep up with a movement, not just what a platform wants you to see.
Use hashtags → Help build DIY, horizontal networks that weaken centralized control.

Example: Try clicking on #boatingeurope

Simple truth: Hashtags can be used to give you more power, and take power away from the algorithmic walls of the #geekproblem and #dotcons. They help connect ideas, people, and actions outside #mainstreaming corporate control.

Not using them? That’s fine, but why actively reject something that makes change easier? Social transformation isn’t painless, but it’s doable. A simple first step is to just start using shared social hashtags, and when you get pushback, stick with it.

Nobody said social change was easy.

The #mainstreaming progressive are finally moving to what I have been saying in the hashtag story. They are talking about the #blocking of left paths by our #fashionisters, we do need to work at shovelling this mess to grow the seeds we need for change and challenge.

There are piles of shit from this mess.

Our future grows from what we cultivate today

Looking back now, we can see that the #web03 noise were #dotcons in disguise, wearing the clothes of decentralization while perpetuating the same extractive models. They took the language of progress, twisted it, and fed it back to us as an illusion. All the projects that claimed to be building a better future ended up accelerating the same closed, greed-driven dynamics. It’s not innovation; it’s the #deathcult hiding behind #geekproblem #PR smoke and mirrors.

This is the foundation that today’s issues stand on, our current leaders and gatekeepers are shaped by the these foundations of the last 20 years of digital decay. But the tide is always turning, change is happening whether we like it or not, and the only real choice is whether we steer that change to the right or the left. The centre is an illusion, crumbling as we speak.

The way out isn’t through another cycle of empty promises. It’s through composting. Use the #4opens as your guide: open data, open source, open standards, and open processes. Strip away the illusions and turn the rot into fertile ground for real alternatives. Support projects like the #OMN, which are built from the ground up with community, trust, and collective empowerment at their core.

The people current pushing emptiness as an escape from the current mess help no one. Instead, we need to, with care, navigate meaningful outcomes. The centre was never the centre — it was always a holding pattern for the status quo. It’s time to break free. Pick up a spade, clear the ground, and start composting. The future grows from what we choose to cultivate.

#Fashionistas in Activism: How Buzzword Chasing Undermines Real Change

This post is about controlling the narrative, not letting the #nastyfew dictate the terms of engagement. Too often, we let them set the agenda, reacting to their every word instead of actively building the alternatives we need.

Their power isn’t just in what they do, it’s in how much space they take up in our minds and movements. We amplify their mess making when we obsess over their rhetoric rather than dismantling their actions. This is why we need composting, not fixating.

The #Fashionistas in Activism problem is real, when people latch onto whatever gets them attention instead of doing the hard, messy work of creating change. Chasing buzzwords, getting caught in endless reaction cycles, this is what keeps us stuck. We need to be the ones setting the agenda, not just replying to theirs.

Focus. Build. Compost the mess. That’s how we win.

In activism, the term “#fashionistas” captures individuals and groups, especially within #NGOs and advocacy organizations, who latch onto trendy causes or ideologies, not out of any commitment, but more to appear relevant and to align with the latest social currents. This is corrosive to meaningful change, reducing activism to performative gestures rather than a sustained struggle for justice.

Superficial engagement, when they rush to adopt the language of trending movements (like #BLM, #MeToo, or #ClimateJustice) without committing to their radical roots. For example, after George Floyd’s murder, many corporations and NGOs posted black squares on #Instaspam as a symbolic gesture. But what followed? Few made concrete policy changes or redistributed resources to Black-led grassroots organizations. It was activism as aesthetics, empty gestures rather than systemic action that was called for.

Lack of authenticity, when organizations prioritize optics over substance, which breed distrust. Consider the influx of NGOs claiming to champion digital rights but quietly partnering with Big Tech for funding. The grassroots developers working on genuinely decentralized platforms are left unsupported, while the NGO pointless/parasite class absorbs attention and resources, all while pushing and reinforcing the #deathcult paths they claim to oppose.

Mainstreaming, activism, loses its teeth when it’s tailored for palatability. Take the way climate #NGOs soften their language to avoid alienating corporate funders, pushing “net zero” narratives instead of demanding degrowth and direct action. By sanitizing radical demands, they reinforce the status quo rather than confronting the power structures driving #climatechaos.

Misaligned priorities, chasing trends, means resources get funnelled away from sustained struggles. For example, the fleeting attention on #Palestine waxes and wanes with media cycles, while groups doing year-round solidarity work scrape by with minimal support. #Fashionistas flock to hashtags when they’re hot, then move on, abandoning communities who still face oppression once the spotlight fades.

Reactive rather than proactive, when #fashionistas are caught chasing the next big thing rather than strategizing long-term solutions. Think of the explosion of interest in #openweb media during political unrest, a real issue, yes, but one that reveals the broader failure to build #4opens, community-run digital infrastructure proactively. The #OMN project exists precisely to address this, but it’s hard to gain traction when attention constantly flits to the crisis of the moment.

Rectonery, the most toxic aspect of fashionista activism is its tendency to reinforce the systems it claims to oppose. When #NGOs adopt radical language but stay within #mainstreaming paradigms, they create an illusion of progress. For instance, diversity initiatives in tech are often superficial, leading to token hires rather than dismantling structural racism or addressing the #geekproblem that keeps tech culture hostile to outsiders.

How do we compost the #fashionistas mess? The answer lies in prioritizing authenticity, long-term commitment, and meaningful engagement. This means, centring grassroots voices by funding and amplify people working on the ground, not just polished, and mostly pointless #NGO campaigns.

Rejecting mainstreaming, by being willing to alienate power on radical paths. This path needs us to building infrastructure, like #OMN and #indymediaback to grow autonomous spaces outside corporate control. Historical awareness, matters, to remember our past struggles, rights and freedoms were won by collective action, not #PR campaigns.

What, we don’t need, is more buzzword-chasing #nonprofits. We need shovels, compost, and a commitment to grow something real from the ruins of the #deathcult. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the only path to lasting change. Let’s start digging.

#4opens #activism #openweb #OMN #techshit #nastyfew

In the bigger picture. The best revenge against the #nastyfew is simple: don’t talk about them at all. What fuels them is attention — the endless cycle of fixating on their every move. Unless it’s absolutely necessary, keep the focus on the ideas and the collective struggles, not the individuals causing the mess.

Talk about the systems, the structures, in the US the republicans, not the disruptive few seeking to derail the conversation.

Ignoring the #nastyfew is the most powerful revenge you can take. Stay grounded, stay collective, and keep it #KISS.

We Made This Mess—Time to Clean It Up

For the last 20 years, our own crew have played a big part in shaping the digital world we see today. The outcome is what began as a space of radical possibility has been enclosed, exploited, and transformed into a corporate-controlled dystopia of #dotcons. We now lived inside this algorithmic trap, and in many ways, we still do, fighting, trolling, and feeding the very system that keeps us addicted.

Most of us are still trapped inside the algorithm, these platforms we use don’t exist to foster community or critical thought; they thrive on division. They keep us locked into emotional reaction loops, rewarding outrage, amplifying conflict, and turning us into performance artists in an endless identity war.

Take as an example #Failbook and the rise of victim culture. This isn’t an accident, it’s by design. The algorithm doesn’t care about truth or justice; it cares about engagement, and what gets the most clicks? Anger, Fear, Outrage. The result is a world where people react instead of act, trapped in cycles of performative identity rather than building any of the needed real alternatives.

What we don’t need is more “ethical” #dotcons. Repackaging the same centralized control under a new brand of “ethical” capitalism, is not the solution. We don’t need another walled garden with a friendlier #PR campaign. We need an independent, federated media ecosystem, one that #KISS values community, autonomy, and the public good over profit.

This is why the #OMN (Open Media Network) path exists. It’s not just another platform designed to extract data and profit, it’s a network of trust-based spaces, where people interact as humans, not as data points. The #Fediverse and #ActivityPub offer the foundation for this, but we need to push much harder. Right now, these alternatives still carry too much of the #mainstreaming liberal baggage that makes them fragile to inrushing capitalist capture.

We need to build spaces that resist corporate logic from the roots, not just replicate centralized control under new branding. To avoid repeating todays mess making, we need to remember how the capitalists capture of the #openweb in the first place. To understand how we got here, we have to look at capitalism through the lens of the #dotcons. The enclosure of the #openweb was not inevitable, it was a deliberate shift from public good to private profit.

Capitalism broke the web, with commercialization & enclosure, the originally was built as an open, decentralized space for information sharing. Capitalism transformed it into a marketplace, where value is extracted rather than created. Now we have the #mainstreaming exploitation of users, platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon don’t sell products, they sell you. Your data, your attention, your behaviour, all harvested, manipulated, and monetized.

This leads directly to the current monopolization & centralization, the most ruthless companies buy out competitors, stifle innovation, and consolidate power. What started as an open system is now controlled by a handful of corporations. Surveillance capitalism, the term, popularized by Shoshana Zuboff, describes the commodification of personal data for profit. What was once a tool for communication is now a weapon of manipulation.

With this move, we have erased the public sphere. Corporate algorithms don’t care about truth, knowledge, or democracy. They prioritize profit-driven content, promoting misinformation, sensationalism, and division while destroying any sense of a shared public space. This leaves us in a world of short-term gains for the nasty few over long-term vision for the meany, this stagnates progress and accelerates environmental and social collapse we now face.

We made this mess, now let’s fix it, the logic of the #dotcons is the problem. We can’t keep being prats about this. We’ve spent 20 years making this mess, now it’s past time to clean it up. Decentralization alone isn’t enough. We need alternative media spaces that reject control from the start. That’s what the #OMN is about. If we’re serious about breaking free, we need to use the #4opens as a shovel to compost the #techshit we’ve currently drowning in.

Time to stop only talking, let’s build. We don’t need another debate. We don’t need another corporate-controlled “alternative.” What we do need is to step outside the algorithm and start building trust-based networks that work for people, not profit. We do need to reclaim the #openweb before it’s too late. So, what are we waiting for? Let’s get to work.

#4opens #nothingnew #deathcult #geekproblem #OMN #openweb

Mastodon, Meta and Threads

For people who focus on working with the #dotcons there are meany traps, and a lot of dead-ends. This is less of an issue for people fighting them, the problem here is “common sense” #blocking this second path which is a much less lucrative and a thank less task. So we will continue to have more people on the first path. A post that grew from a toot seed, I wonder if Mastodon is to Meta what Firefox once was to Google a small but significant project that big corporations can point to whenever regulators start murmuring about monopolies.

In the early #openweb days, #Firefox was seen as the open-source challenger to the #dotcons of Internet Explorer and later Google Chrome. The NGO #PR represented it as a scrappy, independent alternative, championing the openweb against the increasing dominance of corporate-controlled browsers. But over time, and a lot of funding, Firefox became a tool for companies like Google to gesture toward whenever their monopolistic practices were questioned., “Look, there’s competition! We’re not the only game in town.” The blotted NGO that Firefox became, let the dotcons who funded them, maintain the appearance of a healthy, diverse internet while consolidating power and control.

Today, Mastodon, the corporation, and new NGO projects like the #SWF are likely, unthinkingly, to end up playing a similar role for Meta (#Failbook). With #Meta’s monopoly and influence across social media, platforms like Mastodon offer a symbolic counterpoint. The wider #Fediverse, decentralized, federated model, the alternative “nativist” path, that rejects the data-harvesting, surveillance capitalism model perfected by Meta and the rest of the #dotcons. But in a world where Meta dominates user attention, advertising dollars, and social engagement, the existence of Fediverse when we push #NGO agenda, as people will, like most people did with Firefox could feel more like a token gesture toward competition than a real threat that it needs to be.

The danger on the NGO paths is that Mastodon, and the Fediverse becomes a shield for Meta, just as Firefox was for Google. With the regulators knocking, Meta points to Mastodon and say, “See? There’s healthy competition in the market.” Meanwhile, our grassroots #DIY path will continue to struggle with the challenges that come from operating, outside the #mainstreaming, on the margins, limited resources, scalability, and the constant threat of being drowned out by the sheer weight of the dotcons inflow into our grassroots #openweb reboot.

The truth is, while #4opens decentralized paths like Fediverse are vital to the change and challenge we need, not to mention keeping the spirit of the #openweb alive, they’re still pushing hard for space in a corporate-dominated internet. If we only take the #mainstreaming and NGO path, the existence of projects could be used by the dotcons to maintain their monopoly while paying lip service to “competition.”

The question, can we really afford to be only the ‘token alternative’ when the stakes are so high? Or do we need to find a way to build native projects that not only stands apart from the #dotcons, but also changes and challenges them on equal ground? It’s time to think beyond being the counterculture, and start focusing on how we grow and sustain real #4opens alternatives. If we don’t, if we cop out on #fluffy only paths, there is a danger that we’ll just keep serving as convenient props in mainstream monopoly charade.

Let’s try very hard not to be irrelevant in the fight for humanity and ecological sustainability in the era of #climatechaos and social brake down being pushed by the #mainstreaming mess making, we are composting.

The #openweb, a partnership, not a nasty walk over

On the subject of #NGO foundations for the #openweb what do they do with this money https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/262852431 this one is shutting down, and this one is in trouble https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200097189 This kinda funding could cover the costs of the #Fediverse hundreds of times over…. what do they do exactly?