Why you should help

DRAFT

The internet’s public square is privatised, algorithmically controlled for “engagement” over any idea of truth, and placed under the control of a handful of American corporations with no accountability to European citizens or values. The #Fediverse is the most credible existing alternative – but it lacks the shared infrastructure to function as a native commons for news and media. #OMN builds that infrastructure: trust-based, community-controlled, transparent, reversible, and owned by nobody. At €45,000 for a proof of concept, it is one of the cheapest possible investments in the long-term health of European digital public life. If it works – and the technical and social groundwork suggests it will – it becomes the plumbing for a Fediverse that can actually be used to serve democratic societies rather than more #techshit alongside the current #dotcons platforms that undermine them.

Why this matters – because the #WWW was stolen – Designed as commons at CERN, decentralised, open, nobody in charge. What we have today is instead is five American corporations controlling the information diet of billions of people. Facebook decides what news you see. YouTube’s algorithm decides which voices get amplified. Twitter/X decides who gets banned. None of these decisions are transparent, accountable, or reversible. They are made by private entities in pursuit of control, advertising revenue and engagement metrics – not truth, not public interest, not democracy.

The #Fediverse exists as a rejection of this, it’s the largest real functioning alternative to corporate social media, with millions of people on thousands of servers, federated together, nobody owning the whole thing. It works. It’s growing. But it has a weakness: it’s kinda fragmented at the commons layer. There’s no shared infrastructure for how news and media actually flows across the network in any trustworthy and coherent way.

That’s the gap #OMN fills, so why should normal people care? Most people don’t think about internet infrastructure. They think about whether they can trust what they read. Whether the news they see is real. Whether the platform they’re on is working for them or selling them. Whether they can do anything when something goes wrong.

Right now the answer to all of those is: it depends entirely on decisions made by people you’ll never meet, for reasons you’ll never know. OMN proposes something different. If your community trusts a source, a trust flow, you see it. If they don’t, you don’t. And that decision is yours, reversible, transparent, locally controlled.

For a journalist in a small country trying to get independent news out, this is the difference between having infrastructure that works for them and being at the mercy of a platform that can deplatform them overnight. For a community archive trying to keep historical memory alive and accessible, this is the difference between dependence on Google’s goodwill and owning your own distribution. For an ordinary person trying to figure out what’s true, this is the difference between an algorithm designed to maximise your outrage and a network shaped by people you actually trust.

Why the EU specifically should fund this. Bureaucracies fund things slowly, in ways that often serve existing power structures rather than challenging them. But digital sovereignty is an existential European concern. The EU has spent years trying to regulate American platforms – GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act – and the platforms have responded with compliance theatre, token gestures, and armies of lawyers. Regulation of concentrated private power is a losing path. The only actual answer is to build the alternative infrastructure so that people have somewhere else to go. That’s what the NGI Commons Fund is for and what #OMN does.

The EU should not be funding products, it needs to fund commons infrastructure – the plumbing that nobody owns and everyone can use. Like funding roads rather than funding a logistics company. The outputs are open source, meaning any European media organisation, any local community, any public institution can pick this up and use it. No lock-in. No dependency on a vendor who will be acquired or shut down.

The problem #OMN solves is getting worse, not better. Disinformation, algorithmic radicalisation, platform capture of public discourse – these are not abstract threats. They are actively destabilising European democracies. Funding the technical infrastructure for trustworthy, community-controlled information flows is not a nice-to-have. It is digital public health infrastructure.

It’s cheap, with the second stage scaling across Europe with institutional partners, building on European strengths. The Fediverse is disproportionately European. Mastodon was built by a German developer. The culture of digital commons, open standards, and public interest technology is stronger in Europe than anywhere else. This project is native to that tradition. It’s not asking Europe to compete with Silicon Valley on Silicon Valley’s terms – it’s asking Europe to build the alternative on its own terms.

#KISS

What happened over the last ten years on our Fediverse path

The first steps were good. #Socialhub emerged as a genuinely grassroots space, shaped to maintain the integrity of the #activertypub native reboot. It grew directly out of the #activertypub affinity group itself – rooted in lived practice rather than imposed structure.

So what motivated this native path? The current #openweb reboot wasn’t exactly planned – it was, in many ways, serendipitous. During the #WC3 process, the usual mainstream players were largely absent. That gap created space for an alternative cohort to step in and shape things in a more “native” way. This is rare. Normally, these processes are dominated by institutional and corporate interests, but for a moment, we had something different – and it worked.

From that strong beginning, #Socialhub grew into a real, functioning community. Its high point was during the Fediverse outreach to the EU, when there was a sense of shared purpose and direction. The social and technical sides were in balance, and the space felt alive, open, and productive. But over time, things shifted.

The rapid growth of the Fediverse brought in many people without any grounding in “native” #openweb culture. The influx – particularly from Twitter – changed the tone and priorities. This wasn’t entirely negative; growth always brings energy and diversity. But it also brought confusion, and a drift away from the original focus.

At the same time, there was a strong, increasingly dogmatic shift toward the technical side of #activertypub, at the expense of the social layer that made it meaningful. The balance tipped. The core crew thinned out, and newer, more tech-focused contributors filled the space. This mirrored the rebooting of the #WC3 process, and the two together created a difficult, often unspoken tension over direction and responsibility. Governance also became an issue. The line:

“To use the forum, you must agree to these terms with Petites Singularités, the company that runs the forum.”

Made visible something that had been quietly present for a while: this was not, in practice, a community-owned space. It had an owner, with an agenda. What had been presented as a shared, grassroots commons was, structurally, something else?

This marks a deeper shift – from serendipitous emergence to more deliberate control.

A short update: how we are failing

We didn’t fail because of bad intent. We fail because we didn’t hold onto the balance that made the space work.

  • We allowed the social layer to be sidelined by the technical.
  • We didn’t build clear, native governance while we still had the chance.
  • We mistook growth for success, without mediating the cultural shift it brought.
  • We let ownership and control consolidate quietly, instead of addressing it openly.
  • And when tensions emerged, we defaulted to avoidance and #BLOCKING, rather than doing the messy work of resolution.

In short, we lost the thread of the #openweb path by not actively maintaining it.

Where that leaves us now? We are now in a more complex, more conflicted space. The community is bigger, but less coherent. The vision is more diluted, but still present, if we choose to pick it up again.

The solution isn’t simple. It likely involves some form of real, lived democracy, and a return to explicitly valuing the social processes alongside the technical ones. And maybe the only solid ground we still have is this: Grassroots is always messy, that mess isn’t a flaw – it’s how you know it’s real. The challenge is not to remove the mess, but to hold it together well enough that it can still grow.

The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb
The Digital Commons: The Ground We Already Stand On

So how do we mediate this fear?

Who would have though this would sum up our needed path for the #Oxfordboaters and the #fedivers?

You would have to be an #asshole to unthinkingly disagree with what we are doing and pretty wise to thinkingly disagree with the path. Which one are you? So why are we in such a mess? Because people are acting from fear. Not always consciously, not always honestly – but fear is the driver.

  • Fear of losing control.
  • Fear of losing status.
  • Fear of uncertainty.
  • Fear of each other.

And when fear leads, people grasp for control. They close things down, centralise, gatekeep, and default to the safe, known paths of the #closedweb and institutional power. That’s how we get the current mess – top-down structures trying to manage what was meant to be lived, messy, and shared.

In #OMN terms, this isn’t a technical failure, it’s a cultural one. A failure to hold open processes in the face of discomfort. So how do we mediate this fear?

Not by pretending it isn’t there. And not by fighting it head-on – that just feeds it. We mediate fear by building trust through practice:

  • Keep things open (#4opens): transparency reduces fear of hidden agendas. When people can see what’s happening, they relax.
  • Lower the stakes: small, reversible steps instead of big, risky commitments. Let people edge in rather than jump.
  • Normalise mess: show that not everything has to be controlled to work. Messy, lived processes are not failure, they’re how real communities function.
  • Create shared doing: fear shrinks when people work together on tangible tasks. Composting, media, infrastructure – doing builds trust faster than talking.
  • Hold both fluffy and spiky: the fluffy path makes space for people to come in; the spiky path protects that space from being captured or hollowed out. You need both, visibly and honestly.
  • Refuse false clarity: the #dotcons sell certainty and simplicity. The #openweb is different, it’s about holding complexity without collapsing into control.

And maybe most importantly, stay present. Fear thrives in abstraction, it weakens in lived, grounded relationships. In the end, mediating fear isn’t about convincing people with arguments. It’s about creating environments where fear has less reason to exist.

This is the same dynamic you can see with Oxford boaters. The river culture is native, messy, negotiated, based on lived practice and mutual understanding. People want the freedom to move, to live lightly, and not be bound by rigid landlord rules. But when outside structures push in – formal control, ownership models, enforcement – they reshape that culture into something else. The tension isn’t really about rules or functions; it’s about which culture gets to define the space.

That’s the real work of #OMN: not only building tools, but growing the social soil where people feel able to act without retreating into control.

Individual fears

How things can change

Hope this helps compost some of the mess building up. It’s something we all need to do and have responsibility for.

Groups don’t usually fail because of external pressure, they fail because they turn inward and burn energy on themselves. If you want a calm, #KISS path that actually holds diversity without collapsing, we need a few simple lived – traditions and mythos – not heavy governance, not ideology battles, just grounded #KISS practice:

  • Keep the core action very small and clear – a shared purpose. If people can’t easily answer “what are we doing?”, drift and conflict creep in.
  • In twine “doing” with “talking” Most infighting comes from too much abstract discussion. Doing space – Talking space – Don’t let one swamp the other.
  • Protect focus like it’s fragile (because it is), the biggest risk isn’t disagreement – it’s distraction. When things start spiralling bring it back to “what are we building this week?” if it doesn’t help, park it
  • Default to trust, but design for friction, diversity is strength. But unbalanced diversity = chaos. So let people approach things differently, but require shared outputs – If it doesn’t produce something, it doesn’t dominate attention.
  • No purity tests, this is where diversity dies. People will come with different politics, paths (fluffy vs spiky) and have different priorities, that’s fine – as long as they don’t block others doing the work.
  • Make conflict low-energy, not zero-conflict – we won’t avoid disagreements. Trying repression = explosion later. Instead, keep arguments short, move unresolved tension into parallel paths (“try both”) and let results decide, not personalities. This is the “compost” approach we need to talk about – don’t fight the mess, process it.
  • Grow by doing, not convincing, you don’t need everyone to agree. You need visible, working examples. Let people see it working – that’s what grows a community of action.

What we are sketching and building is the hard middle path of not rigid control (kills growth) and not total openness (creates chaos). But a light structure that keeps things moving.

#Oxford example:
Oxford boaters are sovereign, keeping the free-flowing life of the river, not bound by the old rules of the landlords.

#Fediverse example:
The Fediverse is native to the #openweb path. We judge by the #4opens, and walk with power.

Why do we keep bringing this up?

If we want a better web, we have to stop pretending this is just about “bad tech companies doing bad things.” Of course, they are-that’s what capitalist incentives produce. The real question is: what are we doing differently?

That means accepting some uncomfortable truths. The better path will be less convenient, at least at first. We will have to socially support things that used to look free on the #dotcons. Because the cost we didn’t want to face is simple: the #openweb was always going to be harder, someone has to:

  • run the servers
  • maintain the software
  • fund development
  • handle abuse, moderation, and #UX

The fantasy wasn’t that this work didn’t exist. The fantasy was that the market – advertising – would cover it without consequences.

In the current mess in tech paths, this becomes visible again. Bluesky and #ATproto keep getting lumped in with #ActivityPub under the easy label of “open protocols, yay”… but that’s just not true. Yes, they both sit in the #openweb space, but there’s a real structural problem here, and we’re seeing it play out in real time.

At AtmosphereConf, the signal was stark:

“Why would anyone fund an Atmosphere project if Bluesky, with $100 million in the bank, might ship a competing feature at any moment?”

That’s not an ecosystem. That’s a platform with enough gravity to crush its own edges. And people are noticing. The old pattern is back:

  • invite the community in
  • let them build the value
  • then absorb and replace them

Same playbook, again and again. It feels open – but the centre still holds the power. The same dynamic we saw with Twitter. The DNA is obvious.

The difference really matters. #ActivityPub was built as a commons path from the start – messy, flawed, but natively open. #ATproto is something else: a platform-first model with openness layered on top. That’s why it keeps drifting this way. It’s not a bug, it’s the design.

Too much #techshit, and everything starts to stink. Why would anyone step into the #openweb if that’s the smell? This creates a bigger problem, that it’s a mess that keeps coming back, and as usual we’ll be the ones left to compost it, underfunded, unrecorded, and unthanked.

We’ve been here before – with the #encryptionists and the #blockchain mess. Big promises, lots of noise, overlapping hype cycles. Now there’s a clear overlap with #Bluesky and #AI. The risk isn’t just that this fails. It’s that when it fails, it leaves a miasma behind, making it harder for people to trust the actually working open paths. That’s the real damage.

Neglect is not innocence, this isn’t about blaming users instead of power. Power matters. Monopolies matter. Venture capital mess matters. But still, if the #openweb mattered, why didn’t we support it?

Why do people pay for streaming, cloud, and delivery, but not support publishing tools, independent media, hosting, or open infrastructure?

Why did so many #NGO organisations that talked about openness still push people onto closed platforms the moment growth and analytics are on the table? We keep choosing short-term convenience over long-term stewardship, not just a market failure, a cultural one.

So lets look at this mess again. I’ve been trying to find a way to express my view of the people who took over outreach in the #Fediverse, and in doing so helped shape the current #openweb reboot.

DRAFT: naïve, controlling, and self-interested.

They’ve left a mess that the people they pushed aside now have to compost. It’s really useful to look at how we got here.

In the early years, outreach was organised by a genuinely diverse, native crew. It was a good time – three open conferences, and even getting the EU to adopt the standard. But that group burned out, focus splintered, self-interest crept in, driven by the need to control resources. The balance shifted, and grifters gradually outnumbered them, eventually tearing it apart. In the space left behind, a new crew stepped in – filling the vacuum with centralised power and influence. And that’s where we are today.

We don’t fix this by arguing harder. We fix it by building – and holding – open spaces that don’t follow this pattern.

Let’s try and simplify the #OMN

It’s not about features. It’s about culture.

#ActivityPub comes out of the #openweb tradition.

#Bluesky comes out of a split lineage – #openweb roots, shaped by #dotcons incentives, with an #encryptionist upbringing.

Do you remember when technology felt like a way forward?

Do you remember when tech felt like a way forward? That moment’s gone on the mainstream #closedweb path. What we’ve got now is something else entirely. Tools like Palantir and Project Maven aren’t about truth or insight. They’re excuse generators. Power does what it wants, then points to “the data” as cover. That’s the product.

And the people building this? Still cosplaying as the good guys, well-paid servants of the #nastyfew, wrapped in the fading myth of being “freedom fighters”, that’s modern tech dev. On the other side: the wreckage of #web02. Decades of promises, buried under #dotcons centralising everything that matters. Open source didn’t save us either – too abstract, too inward-looking, too lost in the #geekproblem to function in real life.

Yes, #ActivityPub cracked something open, a glimpse of a different path. But let’s not kid ourselves funding is still torched on hype cycles. Blockchain yesterday, AI today, the same ash. Meanwhile, the only things that actually work come from #DIY culture: unfunded, unglamorous, ignored.

And academia? If it worked as claimed, the world would already look different. Instead, we get theory imposed on practice, over and over, making a mess and calling it insight.

The system is built to fail, its risk-averse, paperwork-heavy and detached from reality. Perfect for proposal writers, perfect for box-ticking, useless for building. So where does that leave us? Here – build anyway – #OMN and #MakingHistory aren’t about shiny ideas, they’re about the grind, making tools people can actually use in real communities. Most open projects don’t fail because they’re wrong, they fail because they never leave the bubble, they don’t connect, don’t flow. They don’t live.

So yeah – press the #reboot button. Keep it messy, but make it real. Messy is fine, empty isn’t. Stop trying to fix funding with more control, that’s how you feed the grafters. Do this instead:
– Fund real work
– Distribute trust
– Make everything visible

Fund the compost, not the shiny plastic by backing people already growing things, let trust flow sideways, not upwards. That’s how you starve the grafters without strangling the builders.

Comparing Decentralized #openweb Protocols

News culture on the Fediverse

We have a real problem in Fediverse journalism: almost all linking flows upwards – to established sources and wannabe establishment voices, while there is a strong aversion to linking horizontally (to peers) or downwards (to smaller and emerging voices).

This behaviour isn’t native to the #openweb. It’s inherited from mainstream media culture, where authority, visibility, and trust are assumed to come from the top. In that model, linking becomes a form of validation, and people are cautious about offering that validation outside established hierarchies.

But this creates a real bottleneck by limiting discovery, reinforces existing power structures, and prevents the kind of rich, networked understanding that the Fediverse should enable. If we want a genuinely decentralised and trustworthy news/media ecosystem, we need to shift this pattern. Linking should reflect context, relevance, and trust, not just perceived status.

That means actively encouraging:

  • Horizontal linking between peers and communities
  • Downward linking to new, local, and less visible sources
  • Clear pathways to trace stories across the network, not just back to “authoritative” nodes

The challenge is cultural more than technical. This “linking upwards only” habit comes from fear – fear of losing credibility, of amplifying something unreliable, of stepping outside accepted narratives.

So the task isn’t to attack or block this behaviour, but to compost it – to transform it into something more useful. We do that by:

  • Making trust visible and contextual, rather than assumed
  • Supporting practices that reward good linking in all directions
  • Building tools that make it easy to follow and verify flows across networks

In short, we need to move from hierarchical validation to networked understanding. That’s how we make Fediverse journalism more truly native to the #openweb.

PS. I did not add any links as at this first step its judgmental and thus distracting.

Rebuilding Journalism as Commons (not a product)

Rebuilding Journalism as Commons (not a product)

News culture on the Fediverse

It should be obvious that we need a path back to good journalism – journalism that sheds light on facts, connects the dots, and lets people trace those dots back to sources. This is what allows us to share, question, and discuss within our own trusted communities, and then spread that knowledge outward through federation, always linking back to the source.

Right now, the #mainstreaming path is broken. It’s sometimes hard for people to see this because the decline has been slow, a gradual death of journalism. Since the early days of the internet, we’ve been told the same story: “People expect news for free, so quality journalism is no longer economically viable.” There’s truth in that. Good journalism is expensive. It takes time, skill, trust, and institutional memory.

But that’s only half the story. What actually happened is this: people kept consuming familiar “news brands,” and those brands were bought, consolidated, and financialised until shareholder value replaced any sense of public value. Slowly, investigative journalists were cut and sidelined, editorial independence eroded, and content shifted toward ads, PR, and narrative management. What we now call “news” is marketing, agenda-setting, and reputation management – a distraction. Journalism, as a public good, has been hollowed out, in part through our own passive acceptance of this shift.

Today, we can see more clearly that if you do real journalism – the kind that challenges power – you have no real career path and face risks: #dotcons blocking, right-wing co-option, and at worst, isolation, exile, prison, or worse. The result is a broken landscape: corporate media that won’t tell the truth, and under-resourced independent media that carries high risk for little or no reward. In that situation, who chooses journalism as a life path?

The deeper problem is articulation and power. The world is complex, most people don’t have the time, energy, or tools to fully articulate what they see, feel, and experience. Into that gap step politicians, corporations, and #fashernista influencers. They have the resources – especially through the #dotcons – to articulate reality, but in ways that divide people, flatten complexity into conflict, and steer perception to serve power and profit. This isn’t just misinformation. It’s structured narrative control.

Why the old models won’t come back, we can’t simply “fix” legacy media. It is structurally tied to advertising, concentrated ownership, and political influence. And we can’t rely on heroic individuals either, that path is too fragile, too dangerous, and too easy to suppress. If journalism is going to survive, it won’t look like the past.

A different path: journalism as networked commons. At #OMN, we’re outlining a different approach decentralised, collective path. Think of it as a second coming of #Indymedia, but more resilient, more sustainable, and better integrated with current networks.

This is where the #openweb and the #Fediverse matter. With protocols like ActivityPub, we already have the foundations for distributed publishing, shared visibility, and cross-community discussion. But tech alone isn’t enough, the missing layer is trust and flow. To rebuild journalism, we need to focus on how information flows socially, not just how it’s published.

This is where #OMN comes in:

  • Content flows between communities
  • Trust is applied locally, not imposed globally
  • Metadata (tags, context, sources, warnings) travels with stories
  • People can trace information back through the flow

Instead of one “authoritative source,” we get many sources, with visible relationships between them, shaped through community trust and discussion. This is journalism people can actually use to follow a story back to its sources, add context and local knowledge and share and challenge it within trusted spaces.

That’s how we rebuild public understanding – not just publish articles – but from product to process. Journalism should not be a product to consume, it needs to be a process we participate in. When it’s treated as a product it’s optimised for clicks, shaped by incentives and in the end controlled by owners. When it becomes a process it becomes collective, accountable and thus resilient.

So composting the mess, we’re not starting from nothing, we have the ruins of legacy media, the lessons of projects like #Indymedia and the living infrastructure of the #Fediverse. This is compost, from it, we can grow something new – grounded in the #4opens, simple enough to understand (#KISS), and social at its core, not just technical.

The real question isn’t “How do we save journalism?” It’s: How do we rebuild the social systems that make truth-telling possible? Because without those paths, journalism doesn’t just struggle –
it disappears.

Oxford – Boaters & Landowners: A Simple Path Forward (#KISS)

In Oxford we are currently at a recurring stress in how river space is shared between boaters, landowners, and other users (such as rowers and towpath communities). The direction we take will shape not just access, but the character and sustainability of the boating community itself.

Best vs Worst Outcomes

Best outcome is a consensus synergy between boaters and landowners.

* Builds trust and cooperation

* Encourages better self-management within the boating community

* Strengthens a shared sense of stewardship over the river

Worst outcome is the spread of static, paid moorings.

* Prices out existing boaters

* Replaces a living community with “posh houseboats”

* Leads to the destruction of the current, diverse boating culture

A Practical Middle Path

Rather than conflict or heavy regulation, we propose a simple, collective approach based on shared good practice. What would this look like in practice? A lightweight, voluntary “covenant” of good boater behaviour:

* Leave at least 2 metres between moored boats to allow safe exit from the water

* Keep boats and the towpath tidy and welcoming for all users

* Respect visitor moorings – do not overstay

* Avoid leaving empty boats unattended over winter

* Share the river space, including moving boats when needed for rowing events

This Approach:

* #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): simple guidelines over complex enforcement

* Collective responsibility: community-led, not imposed from above

* Open process: visible, understandable, and adaptable

This does not legally bind boaters, but it:

* Encourages better collective behaviour

* Demonstrates responsibility to landowners and authorities (e.g. EA)

* Reduces pressure for restrictive regulation

Role of Landowners & Trusts

For balance, landowners also have a role to play:

* Provide at least two visitor moorings on their stretch of river

* Set a recommended capacity (not rigid limits) for boat numbers

* Engage in ongoing dialogue with the boating community

Open Questions for Discussion

* How do we encourage adoption of this covenant without enforcement?

* What is a fair balance between flexibility and responsibility?

* How can boaters and landowners maintain ongoing communication?

* What practical steps can we take now to move toward this “best outcome”?

This is a light-touch, community-first aimed at avoiding the worst outcome while building toward the best. If we act collectively and simply, we can preserve both access and community – without defaulting to exclusion, pricing out, or over-regulation.

Why do this – Boaters & Landowners

Framing the problem matters, we’re in a familiar pattern pressure builds → calls for regulation → community gets squeezed. This draft is about interrupting that cycle, the aim is simple:

* Give “them” something (landowners, authorities, rowers)

* Strengthen “us” as a visible, responsible community

* Untick the boxes that they use to justify intervention

* And in doing so, slow or deflect heavy-handed regulation

Not by confrontation (yet), but by being seen to act. The strategy is instead of waiting to be regulated, we act collectively to show responsibility to create a visible “good enough” standard. This gives everyone something to point to and say “Something is being done.” That alone often reduces the push for stricter control. Yes, there are multiple directions we could take:

1. Do Nothing (Status Quo)

* No shared standards

* Continued friction with landowners and other users

* High likelihood of imposed regulation

Low effort, high long-term risk

2. Top-Down Regulation

* Paid moorings

* Strict enforcement

* External control of boat numbers and behaviour

High control, loss of community, exclusion of existing boaters

3. Soft self-governance (Proposed path)

* Voluntary guidelines

* Visible collective responsibility

* Ongoing dialogue with stakeholders

Low bureaucracy, preserves culture, reduces pressure

4. Formalised self- organisation

* Boater associations or councils

* Agreed codes with some internal enforcement

* Recognised representation in negotiations

Stronger voice, but risk of internal gatekeeping and drift into bureaucracy, in the end the current community would be priced out anyway.

5. Hybrid Model

* Light self-governance + minimal agreed regulation

* Shared responsibility between boaters and landowners

* Periodic review rather than fixed rules

Balanced, but requires trust and ongoing effort and is unlikely to have a good outcome due to shifting priorates we have no power over.

So filling the gaps (What’s missing). To make the “soft self-governance” path credible, we need better visibility – A simple public-facing statement of principles, something landowners and authorities can point to. I suggest we create a open collective (I can look into this https://opencollective.com/search?q=UK&isHost=true&country=GB )

Encouraging good behaviour through norms, quietly discouraging behaviour that causes conflict. Framing boaters as stewards, not problems by emphasising contribution to river life and culture

Some questions for feedback:

* Does this feel like enough to shift perception?

* What would make landowners actually trust this approach?

* Where does this fall down in practice?

* What’s missing that would make this work on the ground?

* Which path do people actually think is realistic?

Gates vs Bridges: the obscure politics of the #geekproblem

In the #geekproblem mindset, crossing a protocol flow is a gateway were in #openweb terms, it’s a bridge. That difference is not technical – it’s social – the difference between CONTROL and TRUST. A gate is something you lock, permission, authentication, enforcement were a bridge is something you cross, connection, flow, relationship. In the physical world, we don’t put gates on bridges as a default, but in software, we keep rebuilding them, and then wondering why things fragment.

  • RSS is a bridge.
  • Closed APIs are gates.

This should be obvious, but it keeps getting lost inside coding culture.

This isn’t just a #mainstreaming problem, if this critique only applied to Big Tech (#dotcons), it would be easy, but it doesn’t. From 30 years of building in alt-tech spaces – hundreds of projects, no bosses, no corporate control – the same pattern keeps reappearing. Control creeps in, what’s striking is that this cuts across both mainstreaming “professional” engineering culture and radical, horizontal, “alternative” tech spaces. That’s why it’s an overarching #geekproblem, the shared cultural bias toward CONTROL in both code and community design.

The deeper issue is social blindness, at the root of this is something uncomfortable – A lack of joined-up social thinking – when a relatively small technical minority designs systems based on limited social experience, abstract models of human behaviour and little grounding in historical or grassroots movements.

When these systems scale globally, the result is tools fail to support humane, collective use, and undermine trust instead of building it, they reproduce the same power dynamics they claim to escape. This feeds the wider #dotcons worldview – even when the intent is “alternative”. It’s not just “the spirit of the age” it’s a worldview of a narrow culture that has become infrastructural. We’re all, to some extent, still operating inside this #deathcult logic, even when we think we’re critiquing it.

So a good first step is looking at who is funding the problem, this is where foundations and FOSS funding bodies need to look closely. A lot of funding unintentionally reinforces gate-based architectures, complexity that centralises control and abstract innovation over lived social practice. We keep funding new gates, then asking why the #openweb doesn’t grow. It #KISS that if people cannot mentally model a system, they cannot govern it, if they cannot govern it, power centralises every time.

A different path is bridges and flows. Projects like #OMN and #indymediaback take this different approach of start with flows, not platforms, building bridges, not gateways. The focus is on keeping systems simple enough to understand (#KISS) to grow trust as social and visible, not hidden in code. Using the #4opens as grounding, not branding, we understand none of this is new, that’s the value of #nothingnew. As I keep pointing out it’s how RSS worked, early Indymedia worked and large parts of the existing Fediverse still work (when not over-engineered).

On #blocking and conflict – Yes, it’s sometimes necessary, but often it’s a symptom of deeper failure of rigid, internalised worldviews, lack of shared mediation tools and systems designed for exclusion rather than negotiation. It’s easy to block, it’s much harder to build bridges, so the real question is how do we design systems that reduce pointless conflict without exhausting the people inside them? Food for thought (and compost).

We’re all carrying some of this mess, it’s fine – it’s compost. But if we don’t consciously shift from gates to bridges, we’ll keep rebuilding the same broken systems, just with nicer branding. As bridges scale trust – Gates scale control, to mediate this mess, the hard question we need to ask the #mainstreaming is which one are they funding?

#openweb #4opens #OMN

Let’s try and simplify the #OMN

The #OMN Framework: The Five Functions (#5F)

The #OMN is simple flows, not platforms, it’s a way of thinking about media as flows of objects moving through a network. People shape the flow, you can find a more technical view to read after here. A human-scale, federated media infrastructure built on #FOSS practices and the #4opens:

  • open data
  • open source
  • open process
  • open standards

It doesn’t start with features, apps, or ideology, it starts with flows. Imagine the network as:

pipes and holding tanks

Content (objects) flows through them, communities decide how that flow is shaped. Nothing magical, nothing hidden. This matters because:

If people can’t picture how a system works, they can’t govern it.
And when systems become opaque, power centralises.

So #OMN reduces everything to five simple functions:

1. Publish

(Add a drop to the flow)

Publishing is simply adding an object:

  • a story
  • a post
  • media
  • data

to a stream.

  • No automatic amplification
  • No built-in authority
  • No algorithmic boost

Publication is contribution, not domination.

2. Subscribe

(Connect the pipes)

Subscription is how flows connect:

  • people
  • groups
  • topics
  • instances

This replaces:

  • platform logic → “you are inside us”
    with
  • network logic → “this connects to that”

No opaque ranking, you decide which pipes you connect.

3. Moderate

(Filter and route the flow)

Moderation is not censorship. It’s sieving.

Flows can:

  • pass through
  • be filtered
  • be slowed or prioritised
  • be contextualised

Trust is:

  • local
  • visible
  • reversible

Different communities can apply different filters to the same flow.

This is a feature, not a bug.

4. Rollback

(Drain and reset the flow)

Rollback is how systems recover:

  • remove past content from your stream
  • undo aggregation decisions
  • correct mistakes
  • respond to abuse

Without rollback:

  • errors become power struggles

With rollback:

Accountability becomes procedural, not punitive.

5. Edit Metadata

(Shape meaning downstream)

Content is not rewritten – it is contextualised.

Metadata can include:

  • tags
  • summaries
  • trust signals
  • warnings
  • translations
  • relationships

This is where meaning is created.

Not by algorithms, but by people.

The Holding Tank

Underneath it all is:

a simple storage layer

  • a database
  • stored objects
  • moving through flows

No “AI brain” or hidden feed logic, just data shaped by social processes.

Why This Matters

Most current systems bundle everything together:

  • identity
  • publishing
  • distribution
  • moderation
  • monetisation

This creates centralised control, even when systems claim to be “open”.

OMN does the opposite:

It separates the core functions.

This makes the system:

  • understandable
  • auditable
  • forkable
  • governable

#NothingNew by Design

This model isn’t new, it mirrors systems we already understand:

  • plumbing
  • electrical grids
  • packet-switched networks
  • version control

That’s intentional.

Systems people understand are systems people can govern.

From Platforms to Commons

The #5F is the smallest possible set of actions needed to run a media network:

  • Publish
  • Subscribe
  • Moderate
  • Rollback
  • Edit

Everything else:

  • feeds
  • timelines
  • notifications
  • UI/UX

…is just interface, nice to have but not essential.

The Point Is – The OMN is not about building a better platform.

It’s about building:

infrastructure for a democratic digital commons

Simple flows.
Social mediation.
Human control.

Not control systems, but trust systems.

In One Line

#OMN is plumbing for the #openweb. #KISS

To simplify the Open Media Network (#OMN), we focus on its core goal: creating a human-scale, community-governed media infrastructure that isn’t controlled by big corporate platforms. As we outline to understand and “simplify” the #OMN is a simple workflow:

  • Write: Creating the content.
  • Tag: Categorizing it, so others can find it.
  • Publish: Making it available on the web.
  • Federate: Sharing it across different trusted networks.
  • Archive: Ensuring it remains accessible over time.

The “#4opens” Framework is built on four principles designed to keep power in the hands of communities and users rather than central authorities:

  • Open Data: Information belongs to the community.
  • Open Source: The code is free to see and change.
  • Open Process: Decisions are made transparently.
  • Open Standards: Systems can “talk” to each other without gatekeepers.

Key Concepts for Simplification

  • Keep It Simple (KISS): The system should be so simple that anyone can mentally model how it works. If it’s too complex to understand, it’s too complex to govern.
  • Social over Technical: Prioritise how people use the tools over how “elegant” the code is, to mediate the #geekproblem (tech that’s too hard for normal people to use).
  • Composting the Past: Instead of starting from scratch or repeating old mistakes, the #OMN is about taking the “wreckage” of previous projects and turning them into “fertile soil” for new, federated networks.
  • Trust-Based Networking: It moves away from global algorithms and toward small, connected “nodes” of people who trust each other (or not).

You can build any application from this foundation – that’s the point of keeping the core this simple. On top of the basic #OMN #5F, we’re developing a set of seed projects:

  • #makinghistory – tools to keep grassroots and mainstream history alive, linked, and evolving across the #openweb
  • #indymediaback – a reboot of grassroots news, open publishing with modern federated infrastructure
  • #OGB (Open Governance Body) – lightweight, federated governance for coordinating people, decisions, and trust
  • #digitaldetox – a horizontal tool to step away from addictive, manipulative platform dynamics

Interoperability is default, not an afterthought, nothing is locked in, instead of building another isolated platform, we plug into the existing ecosystem, extend it to compost what doesn’t work. This is how we grow the #openweb by building better flows inside what already exists, not by replacing everything.

These aren’t separate silos, they’re expressions of the same underlying flows. The system is native to the Fediverse, built on ActivityPub. That means content flows in from existing platforms and codebases and flows out to existing networks and apps.

Compost metaphor – is memorable, not just technical. The focus on process over platform is clear and important. The move to simple steps works as onboarding and the insistence on #KISS + #nothingnew is the right first step.

#OMN is not an app, it’s a process + tools to move from isolation to commons.

The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb

YOU can’t do social change or challenge without annoying people If you think you can, you’re probably play-acting – and part of the problem – does that annoy you? If it does… maybe sit with that. 🙂 Food for thought, #4opens is a shovel for composting.

The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb. The tech – like ActivityPub – grew out of that culture. It wasn’t built by #mainstreaming interests.

Now money is flowing in, and with it comes risk of dilution of culture, capture of direction and loss of the commons. As more #mainstreaming users return to the #openweb, we need better tools and processes to handle the mess this brings.

And yes – sometimes the problem is us – when people inside our own spaces act badly, we need ways to respond, mediate, and move forward – without falling into cycles of negativity. That’s part of the work, part of #OMN.

The #Fediverse is native to #openweb thinking, it works. It will likely destroy billions of dollars of #CONTROL, and create billions in actual human value in return. But like the early #openweb, it can also be captured and pulled back into the same old control systems, this is the balance.

So the question is, are you on the side of CONTROL or TRUST?

Our obsession with control is doing real damage, it’s fed by dead-end ideology (#postmodernism), and amplified by #fashernistas pushing surface over substance.
Yes – it’s messy. Yes – it’s complex, but ignoring that just makes it worse.

#stupidindividualism and the #deathcult are building an inhuman world, we can do better – but only if we’re willing to do the uncomfortable work.

Individual fears