The uncomfortable path

What’s really at stake here is power. The shift has to be away from private ownership and toward the commons – not just in licensing, but in governance, culture, and decision-making. The whole #OMN project is grounded in this understanding. It’s about building shared infrastructure that people can actually use, shape, and grow trust.

One of the great ironies of many “alternative” spaces is that people believe they’re resisting power, yet by locking everything down – secret decisions, closed processes, gatekeeping – they end up recreating the systems they claim to oppose. The result is stasis, nothing moves or grows, everything fragments.

Paranoia is one of the biggest blocking forces in alt-tech and radical spaces. It breeds mistrust, isolation, and internal sabotage, making collective action almost impossible. Some caution is necessary, we’re not naïve, but when paranoia becomes the default posture, it hardens into control. At that point, it stops being defensive and starts being corrupting.

The #4opens is a direct antidote to this. Transparency punctures paranoia. When decisions, processes, and networks are open, there’s less space for suspicion to fester. Trust isn’t built through secrecy or technical cleverness; it’s built through visible, accountable practice over time. Open process beats “good intentions” every time.

This is also why letting technical people make final product decisions is a mistake, overemphasizing technology then underplaying the social problems we’re actually trying to solve. We end up designing better mousetraps without ever asking whether we’re even trying to catch mice. Tech becomes the point, rather than a tool.

This is where the #fashernista problem kicks in, being seen to hold the correct stance replaces doing the work. But staying “right” while nothing changes is another form of failure. If we want alternatives that function, we have to move past paranoia, reopen flows, and accept that trust is something you build, not something you secure with walls.

The uncomfortable truth is that it’s easy to be “right” in theory. It’s much harder to take part in the compromises that building anything real requires. Most people prefer the comfort of ideological purity over the messiness of collective practice, especially when dealing with complex social truths. That’s the trap.

#OMN is often critiqued as if it were a finished system, a moral framework, or an alternative economy. It is none of those things. We need to be clear about scope, sequence, and intent if discussion is going to move forward instead of circling the same ground.

#OMN is a commons-first, tool-building project. It exists to create shared infrastructure, processes, and cultural practices that can grow non-extractive media and communication. It prioritizes shared ownership, open process (#4opens), and reducing capture in order to build the needed public-first infrastructure. It’s about creating conditions, not declaring outcomes.

It’s an early-phase project, an affinity-building space to create tools and governance to reconnect fragmented activist and media histories. It is not claiming to already provide economic survivability, stable long-term livelihoods, or a full replacement for existing systems. Confusing the step with the destination is the root of most disagreement.

It’s grounded in lived historical practice. #OMN grows out of more than 30 years of real projects – Indymedia, grassroots media, squatting and DIY cultures, trust-based networks – and a clear view of where #NGO-driven paths have failed. This history matters. The path is not speculative theory, it’s an attempt to compost what worked, acknowledge what failed, and try again with better tools.

That’s based on a simple historical reality, society does not pay people to challenge itself. Early change is driven by passion, not wages, and support structures emerge after commons exist, not before. This isn’t a moral claim, it’s an observation drawn from experience. #OMN is also a space where tone is a process tool. Friction is used to slow things down, open space for challenge, and form affinity where none yet exists. This is messy by design, not a finished social contract.

We don’t set out to solve how everyone is paid, how risk is evenly distributed, or how long-term security is guaranteed. These are unsolved problems, not denied ones. #OMN exists because these tools do not yet exist, so expecting it to already provide them misunderstands its scope and phase. Participation is voluntary, alignment is practical, not moral. Funding may be used tactically, but OMN is not structured around chasing it.

This is not a safe, smooth, or finished space. The path is unfinished, uneven, and sometimes uncomfortable. If a project has to be safe, stable, and fully funded before it can exist, it will never challenge anything.

The core misunderstanding is that the #OMN is judged for failing to deliver something it has never claimed to already be. What we are doing is building the tools that make survivability possible later, without reproducing the failures that keep repeating. That work is slow, messy, and incomplete – because it has to be.

The shared path is a practical response to repeated historical failure. It is not a promise, a moral demand, or a finished alternative. If you judge a seed by whether it is already a tree, you will never grow anything.

Why groups matter, in our “common sense” we like to pretend society is made up of strong, independent individuals who freely choose everything about their lives. That story is comforting, but it’s also mostly false, humans are group creatures first. People don’t start as individuals. We are born into families, cultures, languages, histories. Our values, assumptions, and sense of what’s “normal” are learned socially long before we ever get a chance to reflect on them. Groups aren’t an add-on to human life – they’re the foundation.

Individual identity is hard work, as modern culture tells us we must be ourselves, define our own path, build a unique identity. But doing that alone is exhausting, being an “individual” means constant self-definition, self-presentation, self-justification. You’re never finished as you’re always proving who you are, to employers, platforms, institutions, and peers.

That permanent uncertainty is what people mean when they talk about burnout, anxiety, and imposter syndrome. Groups reduce that pressure, as belonging to a group shares the load, with values, purpose, norms, responsibility. You don’t have to invent everything from scratch, you’re part of something that existed before you and will continue after you. This isn’t about conformity, it’s about being human, support and continuity.

The current #deathcult myth of pure individual freedom, where individuals are fully free and self-made #KISS serves power. When people are isolated, all problems look personal instead of structural, failure feels like a moral flaw and collective solutions disappear. You can’t organise if everyone thinks and acts as if they’re alone.

Healthy groups vs. toxic groups, yep, groups aren’t automatically good. Some are rigid, exclusionary and authoritarian. Healthy groups are porous and open to change, allow disagreement, are based on trust, not fear and exist to serve their members, not control them. The solution to bad groups isn’t no groups – it’s better ones.

Why this matters for media and the web? The #openweb wasn’t built by isolated individuals chasing personal brands. It grew out of horizontal’ish communities, shared tools, and mutual aid. What broke it, was pushing of individual status, platforms replacing communities then metrics replacing relationships. Projects like #OMN are about rebuilding group-based publishing, shared infrastructure, and collective voice, not amplifying lone influencers.

In short, (stupid) Individualism puts people in a permanent liminal state – alone, unstable, competing. Groups give people grounding, belonging, continuity, and the ability to act together. If we want social change, resilient media, and a future beyond the current mess, we on balance don’t need better individuals, we need better groups.

#stupidindividualism

The Blavatnik worldview, book talk

A talk on a new book by Pepper Culpepper on how corporate scandals could be used to save liberal “democracy”. This talk is the familiar fantasy of elitist institutions like the Blavatnik School, Oxford. Culpepper and co author Lee reframe disasters from Enron to Cambridge Analytica not as structural failures of a system built to concentrate power, but as healthy “corrections” that supposedly can be used by people like them to renew democracy.

In this telling, public anger is something to be safely channelled into regulation, corporations remain indispensable, and democracy survives as a managerial process overseen by the normal “progressive” liberalish policy priests. It is #deathcult logic, polished up, to worship the system while denying its violence, recurring catastrophe not as proof of collapse, but as evidence that the machine still works – if only the right people are allowed to control it.

The Blavatnik worldview in one sentence “Capitalism is broken, but only experts can fix it, without threatening those who benefit from it.” The tone is elitists pessimism dressed as realism, the talk opens with managed the pessimism “Yes, things are bad…” “…but lives are improving” “…and the liberal order still basically works” “…we just need better policy”. Everything else is ornamentation, democracy is talked about constantly, but control is never offered.

This is the #deathcult chant, not in any way apocalyptic enough to demand rupture, and also not hopeful enough to empower people. It’s pessimism, justifying elitist management, so no real change. They talk about democracy, but notice how it’s framed: Democracy = policy capacity, regulatory competence, party systems and institutional continuity. Democracy is not found in any real popular control, public ownership, exit, refusal, redistribution, or material power. The people appear as voters, outrage generators, legitimacy providers, but never as agents who might take any part in control, the old mainstreaming tradition of social democracy as crowd management.

The book is worship of policy nerds vs fear of the #techbrows, a strange inversion at work, that billionaires are dangerous, reckless and markets are running amok. The solution for them, is therefore, “we need policy experts to save us.” who can circulate through the same elitist institutions, depend on the same funding systems and never threaten ownership or accumulation. Yes, capitalism is “broken” – but only as a governance problem to solve. This is instead of any stress of public vs concentrated power, in their book, it’s an intra-elite turf war, sold as democracy.

They get very close to truth here “capitalism is a minority of people with a lot of power, unafraid to use it.” But then they refuse any logical conclusion, if what they say is true, then regulation is insufficient, as any real accountability requires ownership change and democracy requires material leverage to function. Instead, they do a quick pivot to stakeholder capitalism and value generation as a path to “put capitalism back on its feet”. This is a system that’s killing people, while insisting itself must stay alive.

Public capitalism is a bloodless fantasy that might sound radical to a privileged chattering class. But it’s the same failed mess, where the public gets, exposure, risk, volatility while the elitists keep control and set the agenda. It is inequality, endlessly acknowledged, but never touched, the normal elitists preference disguised as inevitability.

There, assumptions are wrong, yes, the is a very real fear of autocracy, but not of oligarchy, they are worried about autocracy, but they are not worried enough about billionaires controlling media, capital, thus veto over policy, regulatory capture and economic coercion. Why? Because oligarchy is their ecosystem. Autocracy is framed as something external, crude, foreign, where oligarchy is polite, networked, respectable… and pays for book launches at the Blavatnik School we sip wine at, after the event.

They are scared by “bad populism” but love “good populism” as outrage without power, believing, outrage can be used to drive a very narrow idea of reform, scandals and anger can be “harnessed” as a fuel for what they see as elitist balance. The public is a matchstick, a controlled burn to open up a space for their class (literally their children) the future“policy entrepreneurs” who, with generational wealth, still rich enough to volunteer, bored enough to care and insulated enough to fail, its politics as a hobby of the ideal rich.

In the Q&A they talk about media fragmentation = democracy in trouble (but not elitist paths). They worry we “can’t agree on facts”. But they don’t worry about who owns platforms, who shapes narratives, who funds think tanks, who sets the Overton window. Fragmentation is blamed on the public, concentration is never blamed on capital. Then we have #AI outrage already being pre-neutralised, the AI bubble “will pop”, they say. The question is, “how do we use that outrage?” Not, how do we let people decide, how do we transfer control, how do we prevent enclosure in the first place.

Outrage is something to be channelled into managerial politics with the Churchillian cop-out “democracy is the worst system except all the others.” Which translates into, lower expectations, accept elitist rule to manage decline politely.

In this path, corporations are treated as unavoidable, people are treated as incapable, you get a strong feeling from this talk and book that this is it is not democratic theory, rather paternalism with footnotes. The core lie, unspoken underneath everything, is “we can fix capitalism without shifting power.” Every answer assumes that capitalism must remain, corporations must remain, and that the elitists must mediate and guided the public not to challenge this.

It’s elite self-soothing, but yes, they aren’t wrong that the system is broken, they’re wrong about who is allowed to fix it.

#Oxford

How our “mainstreaming” people understand what they’re doing

The new #NGO generation are in the process of the second sell-out of the #openweb. These people are eather new or are comeing back to this “native” space, have stepped stright into running the current reboot after the original grassroots path burned out and was pushed aside. This new “NGO generation” holds strong views, their perspective, is that they already lived through a catastrophic failure once, and they are determined not to repeat there version of it.

Their mostly blinded story goes something like this: “We tried radical openness, tried informal governance, trusting culture to hold things together, It didn’t survive scale, money, or power.
The result was capture by corporations far worse than anything we imagined, we can’t afford another naïve collapse.” This trauma – not betrayal – is their common sense starting point. Many of these people genuinely believe they were burned by “idealism”.

From this NGO insider view, they did watched Flickr get eaten by Yahoo, Twitter go from a playful commons to authoritarian infrastructure, and Facebook hollow “community” into extraction. They watched # fashernista volunteer governance implode under harassment, burnout, and capture, but what they did not see was the intolernce of the internal imploshern.

From that self inflicted wreckage, they did not conclude that capitalism is the problem, they concluded that informality does not scale and gets eaten alive by capitalism. So when they hear words like commons, grassroots, trust-based, or we’ll figure it out as we go, what they actually hear is: “We’re about to lose everything again, but faster this time.” That fear shapes everything in the current takeover path they push us down in the Fediverse.

They, think they are OK, and see themselves as harm reducers, rather than visionaries or builders of a new world. In their mindset, “real alternative talk” is too often how bad actors slip in. Their self-image is closer to #mainstreaming than the alt they are trying to manage, thus are think inside the current system, the alt is working to change and challange.

  • Platforms exist – you can’t wish them away
  • Capital exists – you can’t abolish it from a policy office
  • States exist – and they will regulate you whether you like it or not

So their question isn’t “What world do we want?” It’s “How do we prevent the worst outcomes in the world we actually have?” That’s why their tools are regulation, standards bodies, foundations, charters, boards of the great and the good (or at least the less bad). To them, this is adult responsibility, not what we see in the alt as sell-out.

So why do NGO paths feel “inevitable” to them? They believe power only listens to things that look like power, that, what matters, is that governments won’t talk to messy collectives, anonymous affinity groups, rotating stewards and informal federations like our native #Fediverse. Funders won’t fund things without legal entities, without accountability structures or paths without named decision-makers. Media won’t quote “the commons”, “the network”, “some people on the Fediverse”. So to them the path needs foundations, and boards, which aren’t ideological to them, they’re blind to this only seeing simple translation layers in there work.

At their best, they see themselves as “Standing between chaotic grassroots energy and hostile institutions, translating one to the other, so the whole thing doesn’t get crushed.” From inside this framing, NGOs aren’t buffers, they’re shields, a polite way of saying #blocking. Where they are partly right – and where it goes wrong – is that yes, some of their fears are real. Millions of people depend on existing infrastructure, sudden collapse hurts the most vulnerable first, and power vacuums often produce authoritarianism or monopoly – not freedom.

Their nightmare scenario is not enclosure, its collapse followed by something worse. So aim for incremental change, stability (for themselves and their class), and institutional continuity, even when it’s ugly. This is dressed, with radical lipstick up as legitimacy, but, sadly, it functions as structural #blocking.

This part is uncomfortable, but central, they marginalise grassroots voices, and believe this is justified. They sincerely believe grassroots underestimate adversaries and overestimate culture, so will collapse under conflict by refusing compromise needed for staying power. They tell themselves “We’ve seen this movie. Passion burns hot, then disappears. Institutions are what remain when people move on.” So when they sideline grassroots projects as “naïve” or “unscalable”, they think they’re being pragmatic, not abusive. In there common sense they don’t see exclusion, they see triage, were they are the doctors saying who lives and dies.

Where the worldviews break is both sides are responding to real history, they just draw opposite lessons from the same wreckage. What the #NGO crew don’t see – and why this keeps looping – is that their “stability” reproduces enclosure, their “common sense” legitimacy reproduces hierarchy and professionalism produces exclusion, the obsession with safety produces stagnation.

From inside these sell-out paths, survival feels like success with funded projects, policy wins, seats at tables and published NGO frameworks. The tragedy is that both sides are trying to prevent disaster, but they are optimising against different disasters. Capitalism is very good at rewarding one of those fears while quietly #blocking the other.

From the NGO side, grassroots looks reckless, from the grassroots side, the NGO crew looks complicit. Both are partly right – but the power imbalance matters. The NGO crew controls: funding, platforms, mainstream legitimacy and narratives. Which means their fear shapes reality far more than the real hardworking people actually building change and challenge at the grassroots.

Some of the lies that keep this messy system running are “We are neutral stewards, not power holders.” This is a claim to power with NGOs and foundations acting as if they merely facilitate and convene. But they control funding flows, agenda setting, who is “in the room”, which projects are “serious” and finally which histories are remembered. That is, #KISS, power.

They must deny this because admitting it would require accountability to the commons, which they structurally cannot offer. Their accountability flows upward to funders and states, not downward to people. So when challenged, they say “we’re just trying to help” – while continuing to decide. “We represent the ecosystem.” They don’t. They represent whoever didn’t leave there process and whoever depends on their funding to make them stay.

Non-participation is treated as absence, not refusal. Blocking, muting, and burnout are erased. Their legitimacy depends on being the voice, because if they admit they’re just one actor among many, their seat evaporates. Reports about “the community” are published without recall, veto, or dissent.

“Anyone can participate.” But participation requires unpaid labour, institutional literacy, polite tone-policing, time abundance, and tolerance for bureaucratic process. Then the exclusion is reframed as personal failure. When grassroots actors disappear, the story is that “They disengaged.” Never “We made engagement unbearable.”

Formal governance, regulation, and the illusion of control is a dogma that formal structures prevents capture, its an old lie. Formalisation doesn’t prevent capture, it defines the capture interface. Once power is legible (roles, chairs, processes), it becomes fundable, lobbyable, and replaceable.

Informal power is hard to seize, formal power is easy. NGOs point to “best practice governance” while real decisions happen off-record. Likewise, regulation is not a substitute for collective ownership. Regulation manages behaviour, not incentives, shareholder obligation remains, extraction remains, enclosure remains – just slower and more polite. Abolition or ownership transfer is politically unthinkable from their position, so guardrails are celebrated while the underlying model stays untouched.

This is about scale, collapse, and conflict “Scale is necessary to matter” is another unexamined belief. Most harm on the internet comes from scale, most resilience comes from multiplicity, redundancy, and smallness. #NGOs chase scale because that’s how they survive – while dismissing small systems that actually work. Likewise, they claim “we prevent collapse” hides the truth: they mostly prevent transition, stabilises dying models long enough for capital to reconfigure and re-enter. Everything feels “temporarily stuck”, for years in there world.

And finally “Conflict harms the movement.” but in realerty, conflict is how power becomes visible. Suppressing it doesn’t remove it, it pushes it into backchannels, exits, forks, burnout, and silence. Yes, conflict scares funders, so dissent becomes “toxicity”, and #mainstreaming consensus is quietly enforced.

The deepest contradiction “We can midwife the commons without becoming its governors.” This has never been true, organisations that control resources, define legitimacy, and speak externally are exercising power, whether they admit it or not. Smiling NGOs are not outside power, they are simply power with better PR. They say they exist because they don’t trust people. They say they represent people. You cannot hold both without lying to yourself.

Compost is the right metaphor as you can’t argue someone out of a frame that keeps their institutions alive, you can only make that frame less central by growing something that actually works. That’s what the #OMN path is about – if people build it, support it, and let it grow in the spaces we work to open up, we can become the change and challenge we actually need.

The #Fediverse as a lesson, it doesn’t need representation, it needs narration (many voices), aggregation (not unification) and refusal (to be spoken for). Every attempt to “represent” it recentralises it, makes it legible to power, and prepares it for capture. So the current move, the Fediverse isn’t being captured by villains, it’s being domesticated by caretakers. And history tells us enclosure doesn’t come screaming – it comes with minutes, frameworks, and funding rounds.

#KISS

So, who are today’s bad guys? The corporate eliteits, the fossil fuel barons, the billionaire class, and their pet politicians. The #neoliberals who chant ‘TINA’ while the world burns. The green-washers and compromisers who whisper that change must be ‘reasonable’ while we march off a cliff.

Yes, it’s a mess.

DRAFT

Fediverse – What actually happened (no bullshit version)

A few years ago, the liberation cats of the #Fediverse stopped talking to each other. Not only out of malice, mostly through burnout, distraction, and quiet withdrawal. Nature abhors a vacuum. Into that vacuum stepped the #NGO crew.

They didn’t “win” our spaces through better ideas, didn’t persuade anyone. They simply occupied every role that looked like coordination, representation, legitimacy that was funding-adjacency. That’s their native skill set, #NGO people don’t build ecosystems; they replace them with management layers then our history is sold as branding.

This isn’t accidental, it’s a familiar class of friendly parasites that reproduce by feeding on radical paths and left uninterrupted, they will kill again. The painful part is that we saw this coming, and for a moment, we did interrupt it. Projects like #OGB were attempts to embed power visibility, contestability, and trust before capture could harden. But attention drifted, coordination frayed, and then – quite literally – things were blocked.

So here we are again, the mistake, worth being blunt about, is that we keep trying to solve cultural and mythic problems with structural and procedural tools. That’s why everything feels exhausting. We say we’re doing “easy things,” then find ourselves writing documents, attending meetings, moderating tensions, negotiating legitimacy, and fighting over process.

That isn’t easy work, it’s managerial labour. And the unseen and unspoken problem is that the #NGO crew love managerial labour, it’s their home turf. Of course, they take over spaces defined by meetings, boards, frameworks, and legitimacy rituals. Meanwhile, the actual easy things – talking to each other, telling our own history, naming capture when it happens, building small, obvious, human-scale tools, refusing the respectability game – quietly disappear.

Maybe it’s time, we’re circling back to an opening, one practical path is to stop trying to win positions and instead start delegitimising them. #NGO power flows from chairs that everyone else treats as “necessary.” so #KISS name the chairs as optional, loudly, repeatedly: “This working group does not represent us.”, “This foundation is not the Fediverse.”, “This board speaks for itself, not the commons.” isn’t only confrontation, it’s calm refusal, low energy, high impact. To #KISS restarts the conversation sideways instead of head-on.

Don’t attack NGO spaces directly, they’re designed to absorb critique, instead, encircle them with parallel spaces: messy notes, half-finished proposals, visible disagreements. This is where #OMN-style media matters – aggregate instead of argue, tell the story of what’s happening without asking permission.

Use #4opens as a litmus test, not a manifesto. It works best like this: “Cool project. Let’s do a quick sanity check.” is it: Open code? Open data? Open standards? Open governance? If the answers get vague, defensive, or managerial, that’s your signal. You don’t need to argue, simply don’t invest trust or energy. Capture starves quietly when it isn’t fed.

And yes, calling “mythical people” matters, it’s the missing layer. We don’t just need more frameworks; we need shared stories that make capture feel wrong. Stories of Indymedia before NGOs. Stories of early Fediverse moments that worked. Stories of small, trust-based wins. Stories of projects that died from NGO-isation. We should ritualise these: remembering posts, anniversary threads, public post-mortems, “how we fucked this up last time” stories. This is how cultures defend themselves without rules.

A hard but hopeful truth is that we didn’t fail because the ideas were wrong, we failed because we stopped tending the compost. Compost needs turning, air, moisture, attention. The good news is that compost is forgiving. You don’t need permission to start turning it again.

Calling mythical people – if you’re out there and this still itches, we need an affinity group of people with long memories, allergic to foundations, who build and then disappear, who value trust over scale. Now would be a good time to stop ignoring each other.

Not to “fix” the #Fediverse, just to make it awkward for capture again. That alone would be a big step forward.

The greybeards and the second sell-out of the #openweb

Privacy in the age of #Dotcons

Let’s be honest, we already lost metadata privacy. The #dotcons, the surveillance state, and the data brokers see everything. This isn’t a warning about what might happen, it’s the reality we live in today’s mess. In normal peoples lives every click, every message, every connection is tracked, logged, and monetised. There is no going back to the sealed, closed-off privacy of a pre-digital era. Not legally, not technically. The dream of private digital spaces was always fragile, and today it is gone in the #mainstreaming

So what can we do? The answer is radical, counterintuitive, and deeply political: we open the metadata bag, to make the hidden flows of power visible. Every algorithm, every tracking pipeline, every corporate and state extraction point should be exposed, audited, and understood. Transparency becomes a shield against abuse because secrecy is the tool that enforces power asymmetry. We stop pretending that corporate surveillance is acceptable, or that peer-to-peer transparency is inherently dangerous. The logic flips: if everyone can see what is happening, then no one can hide exploitative behaviour behind opaque systems.

Yes, this is uncomfortable, radical transparency is not convenient, it forces us to confront how deeply control and extraction have penetrated our lives. It means admitting we’ve been stripped naked by Google, Amazon, and the NSA. But in a world where we are already exposed, radical transparency becomes the preferred path to justice.

The question is no longer “how do we hide?” – because hiding is largely impossible, but “how do we share wisely, and govern openly?” In practical terms, this means:

  • Open metadata protocols that let communities see what is being collected and how it is used.
  • Collective oversight of platforms and systems, ensuring that algorithms are auditable and accountable.
  • Peer-to-peer transparency, where participants in networks control their data and can trace its flow.
  • Commons-based governance, so that data isn’t captured by a few corporations or states, but managed in the public interest.

Outside often delusional #geekproblem ghettos, privacy as an individual, sealed-off right, is dead. But privacy as collective control over visibility is still possible. It’s not about hiding; it’s about choosing who sees, how it’s used, and under what paths.

The #OMN path treats transparency not as a threat, but as power to know, power to act, power to hold institutions accountable. By making information visible and governance participatory, we reclaim control in a world that has tried to strip it away. In short, in the age of the #dotcons, radical transparency is the new privacy. And it is not only possible, it is necessary.

#KISS

Power, the social cost we keep talking past in #FOSS

A post sparked Hacker News spouting of noise and smoke. It looks like “just fork it.” phrase in #FOSS culture provokes heat. So worth a second look, for some it’s the purest expression of freedom, to others, it’s a conversation-stopper that quietly protects power. What’s striking isn’t that one side is right and the other wrong, it’s that people are too often talking about entirely different things, while using overlapping words, thus the smoke and heat in the linked discussion above.

It’s worth a little time to look at this issue. The pro-fork view is about permissionless agency. From the classic #Geekproblem perspective, “just fork it” is not an insult or a dismissal, it’s a reminder of where power actually lies. The arguments, often bad-tempered, go like this: Open source removes the need for permission, maintainers are not obligated to implement anyone else’s ideas, if you want something different, you can do the work yourself, forks are non-hostile, temporary, and often merge back.

In this view, forking is not fragmentation, it’s pressure relief, to protects maintainers from entitlement, unpaid labour demands, and endless arguments over direction. It’s also what makes #FOSS resilient: even if a maintainer disappears or a project takes a turn you dislike, the code remains usable.

For libraries, tools, and infrastructure components, this works remarkably well. Many developers maintain private forks, carry patches for clients, or experiment freely without any intention of creating a new community. No drama, no schism, no ideology “mess”, just work. From this “native” angle, criticism of “just fork it” sounds like a demand for obligation where none exists.

The counterpoint is that forks aren’t free in social systems, the critique isn’t only about forking code, everyone agrees that’s normal, healthy, and foundational. The tension is when “just fork it” is applied to social platforms, protocols, and shared infrastructure, systems where the software is only a small part of the project.

Running a fork as a new public project isn’t only technical work, it needs: attracting users, building trust, maintaining governance, handling conflict, sustaining moderation and care and thus carrying long-term responsibility. This is where the phrase starts to feel different, in these contexts, “just fork it” is heard not as empowerment, but as exit over engagement, a way to avoid dealing with governance failures, power asymmetries, or unresolved social conflicts inside an existing social project.

From a social #OMN perspective, this isn’t neutral, forking risks: splitting attention, duplicating effort, losing shared history, weakening already fragile commons. Forking may preserve freedom, but it can still destroy value. Forks vs schisms is maybe a way to look at this:

  • forks – technical divergence
  • schisms – social rupture

You can fork without a schism, but every schism requires a fork. Many arguments talk past each other on this, because one side is defending the right to fork, while the other is warning about the cost of schisms. These are related, but not identical. Power, ownership, and stewardship, are fault lines about how people understand authority.

  • One view holds that open source projects are a #feudalistic kingship – benevolent or not – and contributors knowingly accept this. Maintainers owe nothing, forking is the safety valve.
  • The opposing view sees projects as commons built from collective labour where maintainers are stewards rather than owners, carrying responsibilities that go beyond “my repo, my rules.”

Neither position is imaginary, both exist in the wild. The conflict arises when a project quietly shifts from one model to the other without naming it.

Why this matters for OMN-style projects, they are explicitly social, federated, and historical, they depend on: continuity, shared narrative, visible governance, memory. In this context, common sense “just fork it” instincts unintentionally reinforce the problems #4open paths are meant to solve: fragmentation, invisibility of power, and loss of collective learning.

That doesn’t mean maintainers owe endless emotional labour It does mean that governance and mediation matter as much as code, and can’t be solved by technical exits alone. Two truths at once, the debate becomes clearer if we hold these two truths together:

  • No one owes you unpaid labour, forking is a legitimate, necessary protection for maintainers.
  • Social infrastructure is not just software, treating forks as cost-free exits erodes shared commons over time.

When people argue past each other, it’s usually because they’re defending one truth while denying the other. This creates mess, social mess. So to compost this mess, we need to understand better where this leaves us, “Just fork it” is neither a delusion nor a universal solution, it is:

  • healthy in libraries and tools
  • essential as a last resort
  • dangerous as a reflex
  • corrosive when used to silence governance questions

The real work – the hard, unglamorous part – is knowing which situation you’re in, and being honest about the social costs of the choices you make. That’s not a technical problem, it’s a cultural one, best not to be a prat about this.

This matters because we have social problems created by tech intolerances, #blocking culture. The #dotcons industry’s ability to pull the ladder up behind itself should not be underestimated.

We’ve created digital systems so complex, fragile, and professionally gated that an entire generation is being locked out of owning and understanding their own tools. Communities and people should be able to run their own services, control their own data, and participate meaningfully in digital culture, but few can, because we made everything unnecessarily controlled and complicated.

This wasn’t an accident, it’s a part of the #eekproblem, complexity concentrates power, it creates dependency on experts, platforms, and the corporations that have been quietly erasing the possibility of autonomy. What once required curiosity and modest effort now demands specialist knowledge, constant updates, and institutional backing. The result is a widening gap between those who can build and control systems, and those who are forced to rent/beg access to them.

This is why #KISS simplicity matters, why documentation matters and most importantly why social tooling matters as much as code. And why the #openweb was always about people, not only protocols. When we ignore this, we don’t just lose users, we lose a generation’s ability to imagine, agency, and collective control in the first place.

It’s a real mess we need to compost.

Radical Reductions in Inequality

The current #dotcons economy is not neutral, it is designed to centralise control in the interest of the #nastyfew, platform owners, server landlords, data hoarders. These are the financial intermediaries who extract value without producing social good, this is not an accident or a side effect, it is the business model.

We are told that inequality is the natural outcome of innovation, talent, and efficiency. In reality, it is engineered through enclosure. Digital infrastructure that could function as shared public goods is instead locked behind proprietary systems, paywalls, and terms of service designed to concentrate power upstream.

In contrast, a #4opens world starts from a different premise, that core infrastructure – both physical and digital – should be held in common and governed democratically under #FOSS principles. From platforms to commons, today, most people don’t control the tools they depend on. We rent access to our own communications, our social lives, our work, and even our memories. Platforms mediate these relationships, extract data, and monetise behaviour, while presenting themselves as neutral services. This rental model is currently the primary engine of inequality in digital paths.

When access is conditional, participation becomes precarious. When data is hoarded, power becomes asymmetrical. When infrastructure is privately owned, the rules are set to maximise extraction, not social value. The #4opens dismantle this logic at the root.

  • Open code means the tools can be inspected, modified, and shared.
  • Open governance means decisions are accountable and collective.
  • Open data means knowledge is not trapped behind corporate walls.
  • Open processes mean power is visible, contestable, and revisable.

Together these break the closed silos that turn users into resources and communities into markets. It’s a working path, not charity or redistribution after the fact, its focus is change and challenge of power at source. When infrastructure is open and shared, value no longer flows automatically upward. Communities build what they need, adapt to local contexts, and retain control over shaping the outcomes. The surplus created by cooperation stays where it is generated, instead of being siphoned off to distant shareholders.

This changes the nature of inequality itself. “Rich” and “poor” stop being treated as natural or permanent categories, they are revealed as outcomes of ownership models and governance choices. Change the structure, and the distribution follows? In a commons-based paths, inequality doesn’t vanish overnight, but loses its inevitability. It becomes something that can be actively reduced rather than endlessly managed. This takes us a step from dependency to autonomy.

Open infrastructure reduces dependency, when communities host their own services, control their own data, and govern their own platforms, they are no longer locked into extractive relationships. This autonomy has compounding effects: Less value leaks out of local economies, more skills and knowledge circulate horizontally, fewer people are forced into bullshit work just to survive, and most importantly, people stop working primarily to make the rich richer.

The most radical implication of the #4opens is not better tech, it’s a different story about the future. If inequality is structurally produced, then it can be structurally dismantled. Not by perfect policy, benevolent elitists, but by first changing who owns and governs the digital systems we all depend on. In that world, inequality stops being framed as a moral failing and economic necessity. It becomes a historical condition, something future generations look back on as a phase we outgrew, like feudalism or colonial monopolies.

Yes, none of this is inevitable, power will resist, enclosure always fights back. But the tools exist and knowledge exists, the choice is political. Radical reductions in inequality won’t come from better platforms or kinder billionaires. It will only come from reclaiming infrastructure as commons, governed in the open, for public good.

That is the promise – and the challenge – of a #4opens world.

The end of money as the primary motivator

One story, we have to keep telling is that we can take a different path, that in a #4opens world, exchange is no longer driven primarily by the blunt instrument of money. That doesn’t mean money vanishes overnight, or that material realities are ignored. It means money stops being treated as the only valid way to recognise value, coordinate effort, and motivate participation.

This matters, because money is a very crude tool. Capitalism trained us to believe that if something matters, it must be priced. If it has no price, it has no value. If it cannot be owned, it cannot be protected. This blinded framing works tolerably well for scarce physical goods, but it breaks down completely in the digital realm, where information can be copied, shared, and improved without depletion.

In digital spaces, scarcity is largely artificial, and when scarcity fades, the logic of money starts to wobble. This moves us from hoarding to balancing, in an open information environment, value doesn’t disappear, it becomes visible.

With open data, open governance, and transparent process, contributions can be tracked, acknowledged, and supported without enclosing them behind paywalls or ownership claims. Instead of value being hoarded, it can be balanced across a network.

Imagine a system where you give not to accumulate, but to re-balance. Where contribution builds standing, trust, and support, not private monopoly power. Where recognition is social and public, not hidden inside bank accounts. This isn’t about altruism, it’s about realism.

Most of the work that keeps societies functioning – care, maintenance, moderation, documentation, teaching, organising – has always been poorly captured by markets. Capitalism survives by extracting from these invisible labour pools while pretending they don’t exist.

The #4opens make this work visible, making value without commodification. Ending money as the primary motivator does not mean ending value. It means ending commodification as the only language for value. In open systems, value shows up as: usefulness, reuse, care, trust, resilience and continuity.

These things matter enormously, yet capitalism struggles to measure them without distorting them. When every action must be justified by profit, whole categories of necessary work are ignored or destroyed. By contrast, #4opens projects are judged by simple, grounded questions: Is the work open? Is the process open? Is governance transparent and accountable? Can others build on this without permission?

These questions don’t abolish economics, they de-center it. Breaking the spell of money as sacred. Capitalism trained us to see price as truth, markets as neutral, and accumulation as virtue. The #4opens break that spell in the digital realm first.

Why digital first? Because that’s where abundance already exists, where sharing costs almost nothing and enclosure is a political choice, not a material necessity. When we build systems that work in abundance, they give us leverage – conceptual, social, and practical – to rebalance power in the physical world as well.

This is why open media, open knowledge, and commons-based infrastructure matter so much. They are not side projects, they are training grounds for post-scarcity coordination. Not a utopia – a direction. This is not a promise of a frictionless future as power doesn’t dissolve on its own. Material needs remain real, conflict doesn’t vanish, but direction matters.

A world where money is the only motivator inevitably collapses into extraction, enclosure, and #deathcult logic. A world where contribution, openness, and shared process are recognised creates space for cooperation, resilience, and collective intelligence.

The #4opens don’t magically fix capitalism. They do give us tools to outgrow it, not by pretending scarcity doesn’t exist, but by refusing to let artificial scarcity define everything that matters. That’s the shift: from accumulation to balance, from ownership to participation, from price to value.

And once that shift is normalised in digital space, it becomes much harder to argue that money should rule everywhere else.

Ecological Transformation via Digital Abundance

The ecological crisis is not a failure of technology, it’s a failure of values. We’ve been trapped in a toxic loop where growth = progress, where every solution must expand markets, increase consumption, and generate profit for the #nastyfew. This logic is killing the planet.

A #4opens world pulls up this mess at its root. Digital goods are different, they are non-rivalrous, freely replicable, and infinitely shareable. When knowledge, culture, and coordination move into open digital commons, the material basis of economic growth begins to shrink. We stop burning forests to print manuals, stop shipping plastic widgets to lock in artificial scarcity, stop wasting energy enforcing ownership where none is needed.

This isn’t abstraction, it’s leverage. By shifting value creation into open digital abundance, we reduce pressure on physical extraction. Fewer things need to be manufactured, shipped, stored, and discarded just to keep the economy “growing.” The economy stops pretending that more stuff equals better lives.

From this shift, the real ecological transformation we need becomes possible. Energy systems localise because coordination and design are shared openly. Communities can build, adapt, and maintain renewable infrastructure without licensing fees or corporate lock-in. Circular economies flourish because repair knowledge, supply chains, and governance are commons, not trade secrets. Waste becomes compost, not externality.

Most importantly, culture changes. Consumerism loses its grip when identity, creativity, and social meaning are no longer mediated by buying things from platforms. We stop confusing consumption with participation. We stop mistaking marketing for culture. Life becomes something we do together, not something we rent from #dotcons.

This is not a retreat to austerity, it’s an expansion of possibility. In a post-consumption world, human needs can be met without destroying the biosphere. Care, knowledge, coordination, and creativity grow, while extraction and throughput shrink. The planet breathes again because we’ve learned to value abundance where it exists, and restraint where it matters.

The #OMN path is not “green capitalism” with better branding, it’s a civilisational pivot: using digital abundance to escape the growth trap, and using collective governance to align human flourishing with ecological limits.

That’s not incremental reform, it survival – with dignity.

#FOSS “Just Fork It” Delusion

One of the most repeated mantras in #FOSS culture goes something like this: “If you don’t like it, just fork it.” On the surface, this sounds empowering. And technically, it is true. The beauty of open source is that you can take the Mastodon source code, fork it, and do whatever you want with it. Don’t like how it’s run? Do something different. Don’t like the branding? Change it. Got a better idea? Implement it.

But socially, this mantra is misleading, forking is easy, sustaining is hard. Forking code is cheap, sustaining a living project is not. What “just fork it” quietly ignores is that software is only a small part of what makes a project work. The hard parts are social: users, trust, shared norms, governance, maintenance, conflict resolution and long-term care.

When people say “just fork it,” they usually mean “remove yourself from the social problem rather than engaging with it.” That’s not empowerment – it’s fragmentation at best and prat behaver at worst.

From an #OMN point of view, sometimes this is needed, but its rare as it is mostly value destruction. Fragmentation isn’t neutrality, every fork splits attention, energy, documentation, user bases, and developer time. Most forks don’t die because the code is bad; they die because the social surface area is untrusted or unmanageable.

We end up with: dozens of half-maintained projects, duplicated effort, incompatible implementations, project communities too small to support themselves. This isn’t resilience, it’s entropy, not in a good way. And worse, most of these forks are isolated socially, even when they are technically compatible. The result is lost value, lost history, and lost trust – rinse, repeat, move on.

“Just fork it” hides power, it doesn’t challenge it. The slogan pretends to be anti-authority, but in practice it is used to protect informal power. Core teams stay untouched, governance questions are avoided, structural problems remain unresolved. The people most affected – users, moderators, small contributors – are quietly told to leave and rebuild everything from scratch.

That’s not openness, that’s abdication, it’s a prat move that we need to compost. In social terms, it’s the equivalent of saying: “If you don’t like society, go start your own civilisation.” Contribution is not about submission. There is a healthier, but, less glamorous path – start conversations that include people you disagree with, yes, this is slower than forking. It’s also how shared infrastructure survives.

What we need to talk more about is that contribution is not about obedience to maintainers. It’s about stewardship of commons. That means staying in the mess, mediating conflict, and resisting the urge to walk away every time something feels wrong. Forking skips the hardest step: collective sense-making.

Small steps beat heroic exits, the myth of the heroic fork mirrors the wider #geekproblem: the belief that technical control can replace social process. Change usually comes from boring work, partial wins, awkward compromises, long conversations, incremental shifts, not from dramatic exits. Yes, forks in #FOSS have a place, but not as a default. Forking does matter. It’s an escape hatch. A pressure valve. A last resort when projects become irredeemably captured or hostile. But when “just fork it” becomes the first response instead of the last, it stops being a freedom and becomes #geekproblem pathology.

From a social #OMN standpoint, the goal isn’t endless new projects. It’s shared infrastructure that can be argued with, adapted, and cared for over time. Open source gives us the right to fork, open culture asks us when not to. If we want something better than endless reinvention and burnout, we need to stop treating “just fork it” as wisdom – and start treating it as what it often is: a refusal to do the harder social work in #FOSS

And as ever please don’t be a prat about this, thanks.

Power, the social cost we keep talking past in #FOSS

Fascism, treats collaboration as weakness.

Fascism, treats collaboration as weakness. Something you only (pretend to) do when you’re not strong enough to dominate outright. In the fascist worldview, cooperation isn’t power, it’s a temporary tactic until hierarchy and force can be re-asserted. That’s why fascists can never be trusted. Not tactically, not strategically, not “just this once.” They don’t believe in shared outcomes, public goods, or mutual care. They believe in command, obedience, and extraction.

We also touch on this in our own #geekproblm, this is why the #OMN line is drawn. Open Media, commons-based infrastructure, and collective governance only work if collaboration is real, if participation isn’t a trick, and if power actually flows horizontally. Fascist politics is structurally incompatible with this. It can mimic collaboration, but only as camouflage. The moment it has leverage, it closes processes, centralises control, and purges dissent.

We have now made such a mess of society and our ecology that getting out of this mess is going to create lots of new mess, this issue is the base of the democratic path of the #OGB project. Please don’t be a prat on this, because this is also why fascism always collapses. Systems built on domination can’t sustain themselves, they can’t maintain shared infrastructure or produce trust, care, and resilience. They can only hoard, police, and coerce, until the system eats itself.

Meanwhile, everyone else survives by doing the one thing fascism cannot: building together. Collective projects, mutual aid, shared media, and public knowledge create abundance through cooperation. They scale through trust, not fear, and grow because people see themselves in the outcome.

In the long run, fascism doesn’t lose because it’s defeated by force alone, it loses because it refuses to participate in the commons. It isolates itself, hardens, and withers, while networked, cooperative cultures keep building better lives in the open.

That’s the wager of #OMN: Not domination, but participation, not hierarchy, but shared process, not spectacle, but collective power. Fascism cannot survive in that terrain.