How #mainstreaming can meaningfully fund grassroots movements, they get the value from

One of the biggest tensions in the fight to build an alternative, sustainable future is the relationship between mainstream resources and grassroots projects. The reality is STARK: grassroots movements need resources to survive and thrive, yet the very act of receiving funding, if they can access it at all, drags them into the suffocating grip of #mainstreaming culture, where the radical edges that make them valuable are dulled and destroyed. So, how can conscious mainstream actors support grassroots movements without killing the radical energy that creates the value in the first place.

The answer lies in sharing resources in non-mainstreaming ways, a difficult leap for many, but an essential one. The only people who can truly be useful in sustaining #openweb paths are those willing to break free from the entrenched habits of top-down control, endless bureaucracy, and the need to polish everything into marketable, bite-sized pieces.

What does non-mainstreaming support look like?

Unconditional Funding: Grassroots projects need funding without strings attached. Too often, funding comes with requirements that reshape the project itself, turning radical experimentation into pointless palatable, measurable outputs. True support means trusting grassroots communities to know what they need and allowing them to allocate resources nimbly. #TRUST #opencollective

Trust-Based Relationships: A “native” healthier approach is to build long-term relationships with grassroots groups, listening to their needs and responding in an organic, flexible way. #TRUST #OMN

Decentralized Decision-Making: Bottom-up governance models. Funding should flow to collectives, not charismatic individuals or figureheads building careers #KISS #OGB

Infrastructure, Not Ownership: A path that might work, rather than buying influence, mainstream actors can provide infrastructure, hosting, bandwidth, servers, physical spaces, without attempting to control the projects using them. Think of it as building bridges, not fences. #Fediverse instances

Amplify, Don’t Absorb: Mainstream platforms and institutions need to amplify grassroots voices without assimilating them. This means using their reach to highlight native radical projects but stepping back to let those projects speak for themselves. No need to repackage the message, people can handle raw, messy reality. #indymediaback

Why this bridge building matters, the current mainstream is crumbling under the weight of its contradictions. As #climatechaos accelerates, as #neoliberalism fails to deliver anything but more suffering, people will look for alternatives. But if those alternatives are already swallowed and sanitized by the current mainstream, hope dims. Grassroots movements are the seedbeds of real change, they hold the living knowledge of how to build differently.

Keeping the bridge in place isn’t an act of charity; it’s a #KISS survival strategy. The future will grow from the compost of the old world, and those willing to step off the conveyor belt of #mainstreaming and into the rich, chaotic soil of grassroots experimentation will be the ones who help plant the seeds.

#fediversehouse

Balance, Activism, Tension, Reframing, Extremism, To Cultivate Change

The paths of the challenges we face in activism lies in the dynamic tension between the “fluffy” and “spiky”, two forces that shape the progress and direction of movements. The fluffy path leans into compassion, empathy, and collective care, while the spiky path channels righteous anger and confrontation. Both are essential, like two hands working together to break the soil for new growth. It’s vital to resist the dogmatic tendencies that demand purity in one direction or the other, as that stifles the movement’s ability to adapt and evolve. The real strength of activism comes from this tension, a push and pull that keeps us grounded while still reaching for radical change.

The need for focus, balancing inner reflection with outer action. For activism to be effective, we need focus, a deliberate balance between introspection (“how do we become better?”) and external action (“how do we change the world?”). Too much introspection leads to inward collapse through endless critique and infighting, while relentless external action without reflection burns movements out.

The balance between these perspectives builds resilience and adaptability. It helps us avoid the trap of arrogance (believing we already have the answers) and the pit of despair (feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the problem). By living this debate, movements can remain agile, humble, and hopeful.

Reframing extremism is about flipping the narrative, one of the most powerful narratives we can wield is the reframing of whom the true extremists are. For too long, the right and centre have positioned themselves as the guardians of “reasonable” politics, while labelling the left as “radical” or “dangerous.” This is a con, designed to defend the status quo. The truth is, unregulated capitalism, climate destruction, and hoarding of wealth are the real extremist positions that threaten human survival. Meanwhile, leftist ideas like universal healthcare, living wages, environmental protection, and worker rights are fundamentally moderate and life-affirming.

By amplifying this #KISS reframing, activism disarms accusations of #blinded radicalism and shows the extremism of both the #neoliberalism of the “centre” and the growing far right. It flips the media narrative and highlights that what the left fights for is simply the bare minimum for a just and sustainable world. Resisting fear and darkness: Building light and trust, fear is the primary weapon of the right and centre-right. They use it to divide, immobilize, and control. The relentless messaging of doom and chaos keeps people clinging to the familiar, even as that familiarity is what’s driving the world to the brink of climate collapse and social disintegration. Activists need to resist being pulled into this framing, rather than playing defence in the fear game, we build light, trust, and tangible hope.

Show, don’t just tell: Build real-world examples of the alternatives we talk about — community gardens, worker co-ops, autonomous networks.
Celebrate small wins: Demonstrate progress, however incremental, to inspire people and build momentum.
Encourage openness and connection: Create spaces for people to share, learn, and build collective trust in the movement itself.

Fear isolates. Hope connects. And connection is what feeds movements. Tools for the fight are the #4opens and the shovel. The #4opens provide a basic framework for clarity and accountability. Meanwhile, the shovel metaphor reminds us of the unglamorous, necessary work of composting the mess, breaking down the rot of the #deathcult to create fertile ground for growth. The shovel isn’t flashy, but it’s a tool of transformation, turning waste into the soil of new life.

The role of the Open Media Network (#OMN) is an amplifier of grassroots narratives, bypassing corporate gatekeepers and platforming diverse voices, the #OMN challenge traditional media distortions and broadcast alternative stories. Connect disparate movements and weave together struggles. Creates networks of trust and collaboration, where voices of lived experience shape the discourse. The #OMN isn’t just about media production, it’s about building infrastructure for collective power. It becomes a living movement, sharing resources, knowledge, and strategies in real time.

This is how we break the isolation that fear depends on. And this is how we build a media that serves movements rather than undermining them. The Path is cultivating the garden of change, the challenges we face are immense, but so is the potential for transformation. Movements don’t need to choose between fluffy and spiky, they need to hold the tension and let both paths inform each other. It won’t be quick. It won’t be easy. But with shovels in hand, we compost the mess — and grow the revolution.

🔗 http://hamishcampbell.com

#Activism #FluffyAndSpiky #4opens #OMN #RadicalMedia #Trust #ReclaimTheFuture

A conversation on trust/control in social technology

Q. In a nutshell, my manifesto could be “form your own little communities and federate them”

A. What would be the “common” understanding/agreements/standards that would bridge these communities, or would it Only be code, if only code what standards?

Q. Federation just depends upon the willingness to do so. The code is just the plumbing which makes it happen. And I think nearly all fediverse federation is opt-out, so that you are federating by default but can opt-out (block) if you want to.

A. Interesting to look at #peertube backend for a opt-in federated model, this aproch is the social/technical model for the social/tech of the #OMN project. That is building a human network first, technology is to support and mediate the very strong #geekproblem that is #blocking the human change/challenge we need #KISS

Q. Opt-in is ok if you are trying to build a small federation or an institution with different departments (eg a federation of libraries with particular rules and membership criteria).
I don’t think the fediverse would have been as successful if it had been opt-in from the beginning, though.

A. The #peertube network is an working example of this opt-in for content sharing. Think commenting is opt-out. It’s not got any “social” UX for this, which is why its kinda limited at mo… it suffers from the #geekproblem like just about all coding projects so worth looking at/using but its not core #OMN

Q. The problem with peertube was that the way it was federated initially was pretty bad, and the large majority of the videos being posted were not self-made and were just copyright violations, inviting legal takedowns. Initially, they also didn’t have enough moderation capability to combat disinformation and spam.
Often developers are expecting a twee world in which everyone is nice, but this is never the case for social networks. That expectation has a lot to do with the socio-economic position of commercial software development and its demographic homogeneity.

A. think the resion they did not do good moderation was a question of priorates, we have endemic BAD history for most of our tech, good to keep this in mind.
There are two paths out of the mess you touch on, one is social, one is hard tech. Agen we have only BAD history of thinking about this, good to keep this in mind.
The #geekproblem that writes this bad history is #BLOCK ing the social technology we need, good to think about this.

#OMN #KISS #OPENWEB notice the last hashtag, we DO NOT NEED more #closedweb if we have any hope of mediating the #geekproblem for tech/social progressive outcomes that we so urgently need.

Q. And opt-in is kinda closed. “Your name’s not down, you’re not coming in”. That sort of thing. Exclusivity isn’t really going to move the needle on anything, though.

A. This reply is a #geekproblem view of the thinking.
Good to look at a social view, all society are based on #TRUST and healthy society have more reliance on trust and unhealthy society more reliance on “hard” process/structure.
There are academic bases to this, a sadly right-wing view https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_societies
The #geekproblem fails in building “good trust” based society, it’s an endemic failing of our tech/thinking.
TRUSTLESS is the #geekproblem good to think about this when coding social/technology.
We need to build tech social networks that “fail” so that human beings can fix this “failing” based on TRUST and from this build a real progressive society.

Q. I don’t advocate trustless. You can’t prove trust merely by doing some complicated blockchain math. Trust is earned, or broken, by people. Not by machines.
Also, vaguely related to #chatcontrol. The EU is going to lose a lot of trust by trying to do policing-by-algorithm. The algorithm approach is a sort of abuse of trust.

A. the #OMN is this project: “We need to build tech social networks that “fail” so that human beings can fix this “failing” based on TRUST and from this build a real progressive society.”
No geeks/technologist are building this, let alone thinking like this. The #geekproblem we need to mediate for any outcome.

Leave the #EU to one side on this, as they are well hopeless on social technology, though some of them are looking (with blindfolds on)

Q. I’ve been around the block enough to have seen many online communities fail. I think you have some experience of that also.
When communities fail, there can be a lot of bad outcomes, and sometimes it’s actually fatal. Social networks are a lifeline for a lot of people and when the network fails so do its members.
This isn’t even about narrowly technical failures. Social engineering attacks such as the ones of the last few years can cause enough aggravation and fear that people just lose trust and quit.
So when building this type of software, we need to be mindful of the potential consequences, and not design failure into the system. People’s social lives are not a demolition derby for the entertainment of others.

A. it’s normal, that you are finding it difficult to see the point am talking about. All humane relationships fail It’s what makes us human, the #geekproblem trying to fix this is taking away our humanity. You see this in both mainstream #dotcons like #failbook, and you also see it in all ALT_TECH it’s a (social) systematic problem.
Build stuff that is messy, human. Please DON’T TRY AND FIX problems created by the problem you are trying to fix is basic. Take the #geekproblem blindfold off is a good step.

Reading this book would help https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.101521/2015.101521.The-Sciological-Imagination_djvu.txt