It’s encouraging that more people are questioning whether we really need another new tech project. The truth is that most new projects are unnecessary. They solve imaginary problems, reinvent existing tools, or add to the growing pile of #techshit.
Before building anything, do a #4opens review. Ask simple questions: Is it open? Does it strengthen the commons? Does it distribute power? Does it solve a real social problem? Then publish that review. Let’s build a culture where communities evaluate technology together instead of chasing novelty. We need to do better.
The last decade of #techchurn has buried us under mountains of abandoned apps, duplicated projects and half-finished platforms. This isn’t just a technical problem; it’s a social one. Years of #mainstreaming have stripped away social purpose, while endless reinvention has consumed the time and energy that could have gone into maintaining and improving what already worked.
Some of this mess needs to be composted, not everything should be saved. The useful ideas, working code and lived experience should be recovered and reused. The rest can decompose into fertile ground for building something more humane.
From a grassroots perspective, one of our biggest problems is that many of the alternatives we once had have been hollowed out. Community media, social centres, cooperative technology and radical organising didn’t disappear because they failed completely. Many were absorbed, professionalised or defunded by the #NGO world, turned into projects for #fashernistas, or simply worn down by forty years of #deathcult thinking disguised as “common sense”.
That history matters. Many people wonder why motivation feels so low today. Part of the answer is that previous generations experienced real alternatives. Imperfect, often messy, but real. Anarchist projects, ecological movements, cooperative media, community technology and socialist experiments created spaces where people could participate rather than simply consume.
Most of those spaces have been dismantled, enclosed or forgotten. So let’s stop pretending we have to invent everything from scratch. Let’s recover what worked. Let’s learn from what failed. Let’s reboot the best of those traditions using federated, #4opens infrastructure like the #Fediverse and #OMN. Not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as the foundation for new experiments rooted in today’s reality.
Innovation isn’t about endless novelty, it’s about carrying forward what has lasting value. That’s the path beyond #techchurn.
Worth a read to see the issue of feeding off the state and the VC poison that shapes the #fashernista ploughing over grassroots by the #deathcult These people are adding to the #techshit and shifting the focus to pointlessness, I have seen no good outcomes from their work.
But they were “our” people at one time, our old friends in activism took the heathy internal stresses that were braking projects like #indymedia to feed a #fashernista vampire class, to built careers feeding on and draining grassroots corpus for 20 years.
It’s not a good look, but people like these are the gatekeepers you talk to when you talk to “power” #indymediaback
The current open-source/free software world is based on medieval political ideas of aristocracy and monarch, this is OBVIOUSLY useless in the modern world.
The is a pretty sorted #ActivityPub crew, then some organizing sites/forums, the yearly conference. MOST importantly some “kings”, “princes” a bit of a tech/influencer aristocracy who currently hold much of the “power”.
Where do we go from here?
On online “governing body” to be a VOICE for the #Fediverse – all done #4opens in social code:
We have a yearly voting/consensus (online) body made up of “stakeholders”
Who are the bulk stakeholders-representatives:
One voice one instance – if you run an instance you get a vote – put the URL in as long as it’s online last year your vote counts.
The is then an equal/matching number of votes based on a “user” lottery – have to opt in by adding your account name. This is refreshed every year.
Then we have other more “affiliate” stakeholders that have to be “ratified” through the body
Codebases – could be factored by installed based on instance registered above. Over a basic threshold and the body agrees.
fedivers events – any group that regularly runs events gets a “stakeholder” vote based on them doing it last year. If the body agrees to this.
fedivers support organizations get a vote if the body agrees to this.
activitypub standards crew – get votes through all the rest and can have a vote as a founding fedivers org.
Groups and individuals could get more than one vote – which is fine.
This would give us
A representative “stakeholder” body that could accept proposals and make decisions.
How would the body work?
#techshit all ready has way to much LOOK at ME look AT me. I don’t like competitive elections as the shit float to the top
Let’s do a LOTTERY- from these “voters” that makes up the body a lottery decides 3-5 as #spokespeople then leave um to get on with it. There is a tick box to opt out of being in the “spokespeople” lottery, so you have too wont to do the extra work if you don’t want to, its opt out rather than opt in – this is important.
They have the power to speak for the body and thus the #fedivers and can make policy decisions on consensus minus one process. Or put policy directly to the body to be voted (majority vote) on by the stakeholders. (of course they would be subject to recall/impeachment if they fuckup too much, say proposal and 2/3 vote of the body)
Levels of “voice” anyone with an #activertpub account can put in a public proposal to be voted on by the stakeholders – if it jumps that hoop then it can be edited/pushed by an open group of stakeholders though a semiformal #4opens online process to jump to an agreement. Agreements are acted on by the “spokespeople” up to them to take these ideas forward? If non are interested better luck next year with your agender and new spokes people.
Q. what dose digital online Community “democracy” look like
If it does not have elephants running around throwing paper planes it’s likely the wrong structure.
NOTE: of course these alt-ideas have been tried in the offline world, and they generally DO NOT work. But this is no reason to go down the dead end of “liberal” foundation governances that also does not work. People are trying these ideas in Citizens’ assemblies so no issue not to try them online.
Lotteries take the “power” out of power politics… likely worth an experiment.
Compost and shovels are needed.
The power of the voice
User proposals are excepted by anyone who has an activertypub account- just an idea – this can become a group.
User groups – a part of the process, these come from ideas getting a level of support of the stakeholders.
User agreements come out of groups these can then be enacted by the spokes people if they are interested.
Spokes people can start groups to reach agreements and can enact agreements.
Consensus of spokes people (-1) makes agreements body wide.
What are the risks:
* need basic security and checks – to see if an instance still exists and is real. If a member account is actively posting or a pulpit – all of this can be done with flagging some of them by code some by people – flags stuff goes to the “security group”
* Groups can be captured by agenders – being open to all stakeholder members mediates this – we solve swamping by having a dynamic short non-voting time based on the number of new members in the group.
* Bad group of spokes people, it’s a lottery, it’s up to the groups to influence and as a last resort “impeach” if one goes a new one is chosen by lottery.
* The actual number of spokes people are dynamic depending on the number of stakeholders but between 3-5 is likely a good number.
UPDATE
The body is made up of stakeholder one for each instance – you wont a voice you run an instance and register it. This is clearly the voice of the #Fediverse as they are the people running it.
This is then balanced dynamically by the same number of “users” who are interested in the process, they are chosen by lottery from the registered accounts. Your choice to register or not your account as a possable stakeholder.
On registration the is a box you can untick if you do NOT do this then you are in the lottery to get “governing positions” Sortition – Wikipedia for a background on why this path.
Only people who want to be part of the governing body AND play an active role are enrolled in the lottery.
You second point “common voice” comes from the working groups, agen are made up of ONLY people who are interested in playing a role.
“serving the humans trying to communicate.” we get out of the way and let the humans work it out – we provide structer for the groups, we don’t define the groups.
SocialHub though an interesting tool has strong tech aristocracy which is not surprising as this is how almost all open source project run – the Fediverse is something different which is why we do so badly at governance. Let’s continue to use the SocialHub for #ActivityPub organizing and possibly governance though it has no tools that I have found for the governance.
Sign up for the site, then don’t untick the box for “do work” if you become a “stakeholder” every time a position opens the lottery picks a stakeholder to fill it if it is you and you would like to do the job – get to it. If you do not wont the job then resign and the lottery will pick a new person.
If you are not picked by the lottery for a job opening the is still a meany things you can do as a stakeholder in the groups. If you are not picked as a stakeholder you can still put ideas for the stakeholders to make into group decisions.
The outcome is something much more representative of the #Fediverse than we can currently think about let alone implement.
The is #nothingnew in this idea or implementation, some examples from Wikipedia
Examples
Law court juries are formed through sortition in some countries, such as the United States and United Kingdom.
Citizens’ assemblies have been used to provide input to policy makers. In 2004, a randomly selected group of citizens in British Columbia convened to propose a new electoral system. This Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform was repeated three years later in Ontario’scitizens’ assembly. However, neither assembly’s recommendations reached the required thresholds for implementation in subsequent referendums.
MASS LBP, a Canadian company inspired by the work of the Citizens’ Assemblies on Electoral Reform, has pioneered the use of Citizens’ Reference Panels for addressing a range of policy issues for public sector clients. The Reference Panels use civic lotteries, a modern form of sortition, to randomly select citizen-representatives from the general public.
Democracy In Practice, an international organization dedicated to democratic innovation, experimentation and capacity-building, has implemented sortition in schools in Bolivia, replacing student government elections with lotteries.[23]
DanishConsensus conferences give ordinary citizens a chance to make their voices heard in debates on public policy. The selection of citizens is not perfectly random, but still aims to be representative.
Private organizations can also use sortition. For example, the Samaritan Ministries health plan sometimes uses a panel of 13 randomly selected members to resolve disputes, which sometimes leads to policy changes.[24]
The Amish use sortition applied to a slate of nominees when they select their community leaders. In their process, formal members of the community each register a single private nomination, and candidates with a minimum threshold of nominations then stand for the random selection that follows.[25]
Citizens’ Initiative Review at Healthy Democracy uses a sortition based panel of citizen voters to review and comment on ballot initiative measures in the United States. The selection process utilizes random and stratified sampling techniques to create a representative 24-person panel which deliberates in order to evaluate the measure in question.[26]
The environmental group Extinction Rebellion has as one of its goals the introduction of a Citizens’ assembly that is given legislative power to make decisions about climate and ecological justice.[1]
Let’s be optimistic and say half the instances signed up that would be over 3000 instances stakeholders and thus 3000 user stakeholders for a total of 6000 and a number from affiliate groups. This number is likely too much, so we can put a limit to 100 chosen by lottery from the stakeholders instances, this is then matched by 100 from the user stakeholders for 200 stakeholders + 5-10 affiliates it’s up to the admin group to choice the right number to build a working community, if you don’t have enough good workers open the pool up if the is to much dicushern close the pool down, try different approaches.
UPDATE
Looking at this in conversation it becomes clear it is a 3 way split of stakolder groups: instances/users/builders&supporters with the last group in big groups could be the size of the others so just to higlight they would be treted in exactly the same way if they are over the number of the body then they would be chosen by lottery just like the others.
This looks like a tech/process based attempt at grassroots governance. Must say straight out, in my expirence, I have seen many process lead models like this, and they have NEVER worked.
Though it is always a good thing to try iteration. And good to contrast this to the humane/serendipity based aproch that we have been working on at the #omn
The #geekproblem is a humane failure of trust and its replacement with control.
The #hashtags add up to tell a story and thus build a way out of this mess.
The #deathcult is the last 40 years of neo-liberalism.
Need to work in shovels, shit and compost to the story. Hashtags a tool for #openweb organizing ideas/stories/community’s. The is obviously a balance with self-expression. At the moment this “balance” is pure #deathcult being pushed by our shared #stupidindividualism
We have a #shoval, common storied #hashtags we have piles of #techshit to shovel for #compost to build up fertile soil for planting flower and vegetables to nourish our soles and actions.
Why talk in “soft” metaphors?
The issues are soft as are the explanations/metaphors. You can’t have a hard explanation of the social world without building it up from an ideological foundation. As most people are in denial of the possibility of different world views/ideologies this makes “hard” conversations a largely pointless way of communicating. People asking for them have not taken the first step so talking their hand to help them will soon lead you down a different/ideology path. As the project is about #KISS and focus this is something we have limited time/focus for.
If you can glimpse the world from different views/ideologies than the soft/metaphor will talk to you and the attraction for hard will be less strong. These people have a hope of building a different/ideology world/process so can help in real ways.
As we need to focus, it’s not an issue to talk to the first and more important to consolidate around the second… question is finding people that have not been “broken” by #mainstreaming agenders.
One simple metric for judging #Bitcoin, is has it actually replaced or seriously disrupted the banking system? The answer is obviously no. The same financial institutions still dominate global economics. The same scams continue. The same offshore tax havens still hide elitist wealth. Politicians and oligarchs continue stuffing money into secrecy jurisdictions exactly as before. The banking system remains firmly in place, untouched at its core.
Bitcoin promised disintermediation, it promised liberation from financial power, it promised decentralisation. What it delivered instead was a speculative asset bubble.
Another useful metric is, do ordinary people use Bitcoin for everyday life? Again, no. No people buy food, pay rent, organise community infrastructure, or sustain local economies through Bitcoin. Almost nobody accepts it for normal goods and services. What dominates instead is speculation, hoarding, market gambling, and endless “number go up” culture.
This is important because technologies reveal their social meaning through actual use, not ideological promises.
And then there is the ecological cost. Bitcoin’s energy consumption exceeds that of entire countries, it consumes more electricity than the Netherlands. This is an extraordinary level of waste for a system that has failed to achieve all of its original social goals.
At a time of accelerating #climatechaos, building gigantic energy-hungry computational systems dedicated to financial speculation is not innovation, it is social and ecological vandalism.
Bitcoin is not a “net positive for humanity.” It did not dismantle banking power. It did not democratise wealth. It did not create meaningful commons infrastructure. It did not produce resilient local economies. What it did do was make already-rich people richer while burning staggering amounts of energy.
The winners were early adopters, speculators, venture capital, crypto exchanges, and existing elitists with enough surplus wealth to gamble. The losers are everybody forced to live inside the accelerating ecological and social consequences.
Bitcoin is a classic expression of the #geekproblem. It approaches deeply human and social issues through abstract technical absolutism. Instead of rebuilding trust, community, accountability, and collective institutions, it attempts to replace them with cryptographic mechanisms and computational systems. It is the worship of mechanism over humanity.
The #encryptionist mindset imagines that social trust can be replaced by mathematical trust. That code can replace culture. That computation can replace politics and markets can replace community. But humans do not actually live this way, human life runs on trust, care, reciprocity, relationships, mutual aid, shared stories, and collective responsibility.
The real currency of life is not cryptographic tokens, it is the smile, the helping hand, the shared meal and the neighbour who shows up when things fall apart.
Making machines into gods is profoundly inhuman. And the last 40 years of neoliberal money worship have pushed this pathology by reducing value into market value, relationships into transactions, and all meaning into competition and accumulation. This is the #deathcult logic, that in the era of ecological breakdown, this path is becoming openly suicidal.
The answer to this mess is not better speculation technology. We do not need more #techshit built to accelerate extraction, surveillance, financialisation, and social fragmentation. We need technologies designed to grow commons, this is where projects like #OMN matter. The #OMN path starts from a different assumption that technology should support human relationships, not replace them.
Instead of building systems around profit extraction and artificial scarcity, we can build systems around shared infrastructure, open process, collective publishing, federated trust networks, mutual aid, community governance, and resilient local organisation.
The point is not technological purity, the point is social usefulness as healthy technology should be about lowering barriers, strengthen communities, distribute power, encourage participation, and help people organise collectively. On this path the #4opens matter because they expose power instead of hiding it – open data – open source – open standards – open process. This visibility allows communities to compost problems before they become entrenched systems of control.
The opposite path – the dominant #dotcons and crypto worlds – increasingly hides power behind complexity, branding, speculation, and artificial technical priesthoods. People become users, consumers, and data points instead of participants.
We need compost, not worship, we need to stop worshipping the systems that are actively destroying the conditions for human life. Compost is a much better metaphor as compost takes waste, failure, and breakdown and turns them back into living systems. That is the #KISS task ahead of us, not denial, not technological salvation myths, not billionaire futurism. Practical rebuilding, shovels matter more than fantasies.
#OMN is a shovel, and compost is the basis of life.
