If we close everything, we are left with the evil – A bad outcome

What should be open? What is okay to be closed?

Let’s begin from a traditional liberal framing: Most social interactions should be OPEN, some private or sensitive interactions may be CLOSED.

This isn’t radical. It’s been a functional principle across free societies for the last century. But in our current digital culture, this simple framing is often flipped or ignored. Many developers, activists, and even funders uncritically push for closure, often in the name of privacy, safety and control, without recognizing what’s lost when everything closes.

The power of OPEN is in all good forms of social power, and progress comes from open processes:

Transparency builds trust.

Sharing creates knowledge and community.

Federation gives us alternatives to centralized control.

From the printing press to Wikipedia, openness has always been a powerful force for liberation, creativity, and ideas of justice. Meanwhile, much of the worst abuse and corruption festers in the dark:

Hidden surveillance (NSA/Five Eyes).

Closed algorithms (Facebook/YouTube).

Closed decision-making in opaque NGOs and funding foundations.

If we push everything into private silos or locked behind paywalls, we kill the culture that allows us to challenge and change the systems we live and die under. We are left with only closed, and that’s not a world we want to live in.

A real-world example is needed? Let’s talk about the Diaspora project, 15 years ago, in response to Facebook’s rise, a group of well-meaning devs built a “privacy-first” social network. They rejected the openness of exiting paths like #RSS and federated tech like #XMPP. They wanted to start from scratch, build their own private network, and lock down data flows, for “safety”.

The result was a very predictable mess, Diaspora burned brightly and briefly, but never built a vibrant network. In contrast, existing open networks were shouted down, de-funded, and ignored. Ten years passed. Then, we had to reinvent the same open paths, we had shut out, with ActivityPub to get back to what #RSS and other open tools had already done.

This is the #geekproblem, the idea that you can throw away working social infrastructure because it’s not “clean” or “cool”, and replace it with abstract, closed systems… a path that usually ends in failure. Worse, it delayed progress by a decade. Encryptionism, privacy dogma, and the closing of the commons, where mess we now need to compost

Yes, privacy is important, nobody is arguing otherwise, but what many #encryptionists miss is that building only for privacy is building only for fear. You can’t build a shared culture on fear alone, you need to balance this with trust, transparency, and cooperation too. These require openness. When everything defaults to closed, the commons die, and without the commons, there is no #openweb.

A politics of openness, is not just technical. It’s deeply social and political. It touches on human nature, ideology, and power. If you’re new to these ideas, start with some reading of the basics of Sociology (Wikipedia) and Political ideologies then ask what assumptions are built into tech? Who does it empower? Who does it exclude?

This is about where to begin, to understand motivations and outcomes in #openweb development, it helps to name the ideological currents at play:

Conservatism → favors stability, hierarchy, closure.

Liberalism → favors rights, transparency, and balance.

Anarchism → favors decentralization, autonomy, and openness.

Much of the Fediverse, despite the tech mess, is functionally anarchist in ethos. But this is rarely understood or spoken aloud. We have the A (Anarchy) but not yet the O (Order). A job people could take on is to fix this by building the O in the Fediverse, rather than let the default path be imposed, by the natural flow where #NGOs and #foundations bring closed governance models wrapped in the fig leaf of “participation”, we should be working now to build native, open forms of governance.

That’s what the Open Governance Body (#OGB) is outlined to do, to creating soft structure for an open culture. That’s what the #4opens help guide: basic principles for transparency and shared power, let’s support these paths. As if we default to closure – either because of fear, control, or ideology – we kill the #openweb before it can grow back.

Let’s remember, we are the stewards of the future commons, let’s keep the doors opens. Thoughts? Examples? Let’s keep this conversation alive, in the open.

Telegram messaging app is dieing

Telegram partnering with Elon’s #AI to distribute #Grok inside chats is a clear line crossed. This matters because private data ≠ training fodder, bringing Grok (or any #LLM) into messaging apps opens the door to pervasive data harvesting and normalization of surveillance.

This is an example of platform drift: Telegram was always sketchy (proprietary, central control, opaque funding), but this is active betrayal of its user base, especially those in repressive regions who relied on it.

Any #LLM like Grok in chats = always-on observer: Even if “optional,” it becomes a trojan horse for ambient monitoring and a normalization vector for AI-injected communication.

“Would be better if we had not spent 20 years building our lives and societies around them first.”

That’s the #openweb lesson in a sentence, that the #dotcons will kill themselves. This is what we mean by “use and abuse” of these platforms which have been driven by centralization, adtech, and data extraction, that they inevitably destroy the trust that made them popular. It’s entropy baked into their #DNA. As Doctorow calls this #enshitification, the tragedy is how much time, emotion, and culture we invested in them – only to have to scramble for alternatives once they inevitably betray us.

What to do now, first step, remove data from your account then delete telegram app, not just for principle, but for your own safety. Move to alternatives – #Signal for encrypted, centralized messaging (trusted but closed server). There are other more #geekproblem options in the #FOSS world but like #XMPP, #RetroShare, or good old email+GPG can work too, but they can be isolating, so stick to #signal if you’re at all #mainstreaming.

Then the second step, build parallel #4opens paths by supporting and develop alt infrastructure like the #Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.), #OMN (Open Media Network – decentralized media), XMPP and #p2p-first protocols, #DAT/#Hypercore, #IPFS, or #Nostr etc.

Yeah, things will get worse before they get better, what we’re seeing now is the terminal phase of the #dotcons era. These companies are devouring themselves and will eventually collapse under the weight of their contradictions. The question is, will we have built anything to replace them?

If not, authoritarian tech (like Elon’s empire) fills the void. That’s why we rebuild the “native” #openweb, even if it’s slow, messy, and underground. That’s why projects like #OMN and #Fediverse matter. If you’re reading this, you’re early to the rebuild, welcome, let’s do better this time.

Enclosure of the open web was a crime

This spirit of the early internet and #WWW – sharing, remixing, collectively creating – is the heart of what we call the #openweb. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a space of possibilities, commons, where you could take what you needed and leave something behind, hyperlink by hyperlink. The tools were open – #RSS feeds, #XMPP and #indymedia were built to bridge between ideas and movements, not the walls of monetized algorithmic sludge we have today.

But the #dotcons came. They fenced in the wild garden. What we’re living through now is a digital version of the enclosure of the commons, a #neoliberal land grab dressed in Silicon Valley T-shirts. Just like in 16th-century England, they drew arbitrary lines around our #4opens shared land (data, conversation, culture), declared it private property, and shut the gates. And we, the people, got algorithmic slop in return.

The comparison isn’t metaphor – it’s literal – just as the landed gentry stole the commons to fuel the industrial revolution, the tech gentry stole our digital commons to feed surveillance capitalism. They did it through legalese, marketing BS, and brute force. We were left outside the firewalls, told to be thankful for “free” services while they harvested our metadata to sell back consumerism as advertisements and social control.

The #techbros didn’t invent this theft, they just updated the tools, the same ideological mess that displaced peasants from their land now displaces communities from their networks and platforms, kills independent sites, closes APIs, and locking away archives behind paywalls. Twitter’s 2023 shutdown of free API access? A textbook enclosure. Hundreds of # fashionista grassroots tools and bots vanished overnight, #Techshit at its most brazen.

And then there’s #RSS – the veins of the old web. Stabbed slowly. First by Facebook, then by Google. For the #fashernistas, the blade fell hardest in 2013 with the death of Google Reader, a quiet coup that pushed most of us into the fenced-off gardens of algorithmic consumption we live so much of our lives in today. The commons didn’t vanish; it was actively destroyed, under the smog of monetization, “engagement,” and corporate “safety.”

It is good to see this in a simple way, this isn’t #progress, it’s theft, the kind that wears the mask of legitimacy because lawyers and lobbyists made it look neat on paper. The reality is old, it’s a #classwar fought with code instead of clubs, and it’s won because we stopped remembering what common “land” even looked like.

But not everything is lost. The #Fediverse, the #OMN (Open Media Network) still plants seeds in the cracks. #Wikidata, #OpenStreetMap, the #ActivityPub protocol, these are digital hedgerows that survived the scorched earth. They are messy, collaborative, and unmonetized. That’s their strength, that’s what the #fashionistas to often don’t get – they can’t sell what they can’t own.

A story by Cory Doctorow – Masque of the Red Death

The #geekproblem here is fatal, in both the grassroots and the #dotcons, too many technologists are blind to the politics in their code. In the #mainstreaming, they build better tools for corporations that destroy the commons, over and over again. The solution? For the grassroots coders, compost the #techshit, seed something else, and reclaim what was always ours. As when we lift the lid on the #dotcons mess our unthinking #fashernistras, #NGO geeks call the internet, it is simply a thin veneer on top of what is actually ours, the #openweb

Let’s stop being polite about this. The #closedweb is a crime scene. The #dotcons platforms we rely on are bonfires of common culture, feeding the engines of the next wave of control. If we don’t remember how we got here, we can’t step out of this mess. It’s time to say it plain: The privatized web is a #deathcult, and only a #4opens reboot can bring life back.

An article: https://johl.io/blog/enclosures-and-the-open-web

What could a #4opens World Look Like?

The sins of #openweb chat

Q. A bridge for #matrix to #XMPP this is the most important “political” bridge they could build and support so not to look like a #meto #NGO project. Look at what groups do, not what they say.

A. The moment that both communities manage to provide a seamless, first-class, stable integration of #Matrix and #XMPP without finger-pointing each other for the responsibility to do that, the very moment it doesn’t matter anymore which of these networks you initially signed up to, we could see a huge leap forward for open decentralized messaging.

Q. Think the needs to be a carrot and stick aproch to making this happen. Both supporting the coding and hitting them with the shaming stick. #Matrix as a #meto project likely has to make the move.

A. What if for a moment we gave up on blaming each other and started accepting that #matrix started rather late, tried to learn from experiences and tried to fix some things #xmpp folks weren’t able to address for roughly two decades, for whichever reasons? I see stubbornness on both sides as a main cause for this messy situation. 😑

Q. Its completely understable why we are in this #openweb chat mess.

A. Exactly. The only way to resolve this probably is not to let technical people come up with final product decisions. This overemphasizes the importance of technology and downplays the need to solve actual problems. We end up designing better mousetraps while never even trying to actually catch mice.

Q. The #matrix project being a #NGO has reason not to build the bridge, but more power to build it if they are pushed to do so. The #xmpp folks being a disorganization have less power to build the bridge but more reason to do so. Neither wont to do it and feed off the current mess in different unhealthy ways. Thus, both are actually feeding off the dying #openweb looked at it this way the need for change becomes more obvuse and active carrot and stick work important.