Three years ago I wrote: “I get the feeling we are running on dregs on the #fediverse dev side. Social movements come in waves; this one is ebbing into the #mainstreaming. No bad thing, but not, I think, what any of us want for ‘our’ #openweb.”
Looking back, I wonder what has actually changed – and more importantly, what have we learned? The #Fediverse has grown, more people know about decentralised social media, more organisations are paying attention, and the ideas that once lived mostly in activist and technical circles have moved closer to the #mainstreaming.
But growth always brings questions – What happens when movements become successful enough that the surrounding culture starts changing? The early #openweb was built around different assumptions that people have agency, communities shaping their own spaces, experimentation over optimisation, trust over control and commons over platforms. The #mainstreaming process brings different pressures of scale, professionalisation, funding, institutional legitimacy, standardisation and “safe” governance structures.
None of these things are automatically bad. A movement cannot stay frozen in its early phase forever, but there is a risk that the thing being scaled is only the technology, while the culture that gave it meaning gets diluted. Maybe we need to talk more about how the #openweb was never just about protocols, federation is a technical idea, living commons is a social one. Three years on, the challenge is still the same, how do we grow without losing the roots? The #OMN view has always been that we need both:
- The fluffy path — welcoming people, building bridges, making things usable.
- The spiky path — challenging capture, resisting enclosure, keeping power visible.
Without the fluffy path, alternatives stay small and isolated. Without the spiky path, alternatives get absorbed into the same systems they were meant to challenge. So maybe the question is not “did the Fediverse win?” The question is more what kind of victory are we building towards? A bigger version of the old internet? Or a genuinely different culture of communication? This question is still the work, the seeds are there, but are we are tending the garden, or just watching the weeds grow.
It might be useful to look at a narrow view of this. The #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) world is one of the greatest successes of the #openweb era. Without it there would be no Linux, no Apache, no Firefox, no Wikipedia-scale infrastructure, no Fediverse, and much of the internet would simply not function. The culture has produced extraordinary amounts of shared value. But from an #OMN perspective, success should not stop us looking critically at the social dynamics underneath. The question is not whether #FOSS works. The question is: who does it work for, where does it struggle, and what can we learn from both?
A resent example, from a native #openweb perspective, this non “just fork it” diatribe is not about code at all, more how we misunderstand collective work in an age of growing #stupidindividualism. The #geekproblem framing treats open source as a marketplace of sovereign individuals – I do my work. You do yours. If you don’t like it, go away and rebuild it alone. That looks like freedom, but it’s actually a deep cultural narrowing. Because what gets erased in that framing is the social fabric that makes FOSS work in the first place, yes, technically you can fork, walk away and rebuild. But socially, that’s not neutral. It assumes that collective effort is disposable and that coordination is optional. That’s where #stupidindividualism kicks in, the fantasy that all meaningful action is just isolated agents choosing between exit options.
In reality, most functioning open source systems are not built on exit, they are built on ongoing relationships between contributors, trust built through repeated interaction, informal negotiation of direction, shared norms about responsibility and maintenance and a lot of invisible care work that never shows up in the code. The “just fork it” response hides this by pretending power is symmetrical, it isn’t. Maintainers don’t just “own code” – they sit at choke points of attention, merge authority, reputation, and continuity. Forking isn’t just copying code; it’s rebuilding all of that social infrastructure from scratch. So when “just fork it” is used as a dismissal, it’s not a statement about technical freedom, it’s a way of closing down negotiation while maintaining the appearance of openness.
That’s the concern, not whether forks are possible, but how often they are used to avoid the harder work of collective problem-solving in shared space. Because there are two very different meanings of forking:
- Healthy fork (fluffy) based on experimentation, divergence where needs differ, pluralism in practice and sometimes leading back to upstream collaboration.
- Fragmentation fork (spiky reality of #stupidindividualism) growing from social breakdown disguised as technical freedom, loss of shared direction, duplication of effort due to failed mediation and communities replaced by isolated projects.
The distinction is not technical – it’s social coherence before the fork happens. In a healthy #openweb culture, “fork it” is a last resort after dialogue has failed, differences are irreconcilable or experimentation genuinely needs independence. Were in #stupidindividualism culture, it becomes the first reflex with disagreement → exit → rebuild alone → repeat fragmentation cycle. That cycle produces the illusion of freedom while steadily destroying any shared capacity that builds real freedom.
The real question is not “Do you have the right to fork?” Of course, you do. The real question is “Are we maintaining enough shared social infrastructure that we don’t always have to?” Because if every disagreement becomes a fork, then we don’t have ecosystems – we have atomised toolboxes with no collective memory. And at that point, the system is no longer open in any meaningful sense. It is just individualism with better licensing.
The commons → #geekproblem → meritocracy → forking → #stupidindividualism. But on a positive note from an #OMN perspective, #FOSS remains one of the healthiest cultures we have. The challenge is not to abandon it, but to compost the #geekproblem and grow stronger social practices alongside the technical ones. The future of the #openweb depends on both.
In this mess we have to keep shovelling to compost the negative smell of #fashionista – That is a socio-political and tech-subculture #hashtag used to describe performative activists, influencers, or lifestyle subcultural participants from the grassroots, open-source tech, and radical political communities who prioritize the aesthetic and language of activism over the unglamorous, foundational work of building actual structures.
- Performative engagement, trendy slogans and identity-driven rhetoric over substantive, embedded organisation.
- Echo chambers, exclusive, inward-facing discussions that fail to translate into any impact.
- Trend hopping, between “ethical” or radical tech and social projects without committing in meaningfully ways to their development or maintenance.
A #blocking cultural tendency to adopt a radical or alternative aesthetic without understanding or participating in the unglamorous work required to enact actual change or challenge.
