Just about all tech and political projects are pointless “A river that needs crossing political and tech – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over complexity”

A solution to this churning is “nothing new” as most of the issues we face have already been solved or at least mediated. #nothingnew and #4opens is a way of stepping away from the current tech mess. The politics is a bit more complex.

What is not pointless is an interesting challenge for tech and politics. To start this conversation, you HAVE to use the #4opens to remove 99.9% of the #dotcons #NGO and #fashernista fluff.

The is NO conversation before you do this. When this is done you need to look at the #geekproblem, which is both a curse and a delight.

The #OMN is built from the experience of 30 years of working at the coal face of grassroots media and tech, its a path people can take to start the composting.

There’s an old rot in the heart of European tech policy – and it’s not just from the corporate lobbies. It’s also sprouting from the well-funded, #NGO-flavoured corners of what should have been grassroots. A contradiction that tells us everything we need to know about how broken the current #EU #mainstreaming crew and paths are.

Take #Eurostack for example, on paper, it looks decent: a collaborative push toward European digital sovereignty, resilience, and open-source infrastructure. The slogan is right, some of the tech might be right. But the people who will be driving it? And the people that will food onboard to push it thought That’s where it falls apart.

The same revolving-door #NGO actors. The same consultant-heavy think-tankers. The same polite funding circles that treat power as something to be managed, not challenged. These are not builders, these are managers of decline, politely sanding the edges off radical tech to make it presentable to policymakers, while completely ignoring the communities that could actually make it work.

And then we have #NLnet, which still has some grassroots soul left, but let’s be honest, the #geekproblem rears its head. Some of the funded projects are brilliant in technical terms but exist in complete social isolation. Beautiful protocol paths that no one will use. Decentralized stacks with zero real social onboarding. Tools solving problems that are themselves geek-invented, not in any sense real-world urgent.

So what do we get? Corporate-captured “open” projects that simply entrench the status quo, with a shine of progressive #PR (hello #Mozilla). Funded grassroots tech that is overengineered, fragile, and oblivious to social or political context it’s built for. Endless talk of “digital commons” by people who’ve never participated in one.

The result? More #techno-solutionist dead ends, more paper victories, more funding poured down the drain, to tame, abstracted versions of real solutions. And worse, a complete blind spot for why the #openweb is in crisis: it’s not a lack of good tech, it’s a lack of courageous, messy, trust-based social organising.

Too many of the actors at the table are blinded by the #deathcult of neoliberal governance. They don’t want alternatives – they want reforms that keep their seats at the table warm. This isn’t conspiracy talk. It’s about structural failure: the very people tasked with change have made comfort and compliance their operating system. That’s why the best thing we can do with this EU mess is compost it.

Let’s be clear: We’re not burning bridges with #NLnet or even #Eurostack. We’re building parallel paths with stronger roots, clearer intentions, and radical memory. We’re rebooting native projects like #indymediaback and the #OpenMediaNetwork not because the EU can’t help, but because it won’t, unless it’s dragged there by working alternatives. Until then, the #mainstreaming “solutions” paths will remain #PR for a status quo that’s rotting and failing with decay. Pastime for you to help to compost the lot, and grow better from the mulch.

https://unite.openworlds.info

In our media and tech projects, we’re walking two very different paths – often without any or partly realising the tension between them. On one side, we’re seceding under capitalism. That means navigating funding applications, #NGO partnerships, grant cycles, and institutional compromises. It’s where projects get trimmed down to what’s legible to funders. It’s survival, maybe even minor success, inside the system.

On the other side, we’re seceding toward the change we want and need. Building alternatives with radical trust, open governance, mutual aid, and grounded peer-to-peer systems. It’s messy, difficult. But it’s actually outside the system, what we used to call prefigurative politics, what we now build as #openweb infrastructure, federated networks, and horizontal institutions.

These two paths are not the same. And if we pretend they are, we lose. What we need is a #4opens bridge between them:

Open data to keep control in the commons.Open source to prevent black boxes of power.Open process so anyone can inspect and challenge decisions.Open standards to build actual interoperability - not walled gardens in disguise.

But here’s the problem we are currently blind to – that bridge doesn’t stay up on its own. It has to be maintained through deliberate political will, through active resistance to co-option, through remembering why we started building in the first place.

The mainstream will always try to absorb the open, turn it into a sandbox, a product, a brand. That’s the nature of #mainstreaming and #NGO logic. We’ve seen it again and again – #FOSS, #indymedia, #activism – all turned into funding pipelines and branding opportunities if not defended.

So our task is not just technical, it’s political infrastructure work to hold the bridge. Guard the open paths, so that we can compost what’s broken. And always build forward.

“It’s fascinating to see how the  #OpenWeb ideology was formed in the late aughts... Open Web evangelists criticizing early Facebook for being too private is an incredible heap of irony.”— [Someone missing the point entirely]

Let’s be clear: this is a historical and political mess, and one worth composting. The original #openweb vision, was wide, from the original European social vs the American libertarian, the person quoted is talking his view from inside the #blinded USA path rather than the original #mainstreaming of the more social European path.

The idea on both paths was never about exposing personal data, that’s a strawman born of today’s #dotcons-common-sense, where everything gets flattened into privacy = good, openness = bad. A deeply ahistorical take, infected by the post-Snowden wave of #encryptionism that conflates liberation with hiding, and assumes the only threat is surveillance by “them,” never enclosure by “us.”

The actual #4opens path—Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Process – is still a radical project rooted in trust, transparency, and collective power. It is about creating shared public spaces and protocols to collaborate, self-organize, and break the silos both big, built by emerging tech monopolies and small built by our encryptionists dogmas. This original path draws from traditions of anarchist publishing, community radio, and autonomous tech. And yes, it explicitly distinguished between publishing and privacy.

Early Facebook wasn’t “too private.” It was already a walled garden – a corporate trap disguised as a community. The real critique from #openweb folks was that it centralized control, commodified interaction, and locked users in. That’s why people built alternatives like #Indymedia, #RSS networks, (sudo)federated blogging, and early #P2P social tools.

To say the openweb led to surveillance capitalism is like blaming bicycles for car crashes. What happened wasn’t openness going too far, it was openness being abandoned, subsumed, and bastardized by closed platforms under the guise of “convenience” and “safety.”

And now, some are trying to rewrite that history to serve the logic of today’s bloated encryption silos and #NGO-funded moderation regimes. This is not just wrong, it’s dangerous. Because without remembering what native open tech looked like, we’ll keep mistaking the problem for the solution.

So yes, this quote, and the worldview it represents, is a mess. But we don’t throw it in the fire, we compost it, break it down, extract the nutrients, and grow something better from the rot. The #openweb was never about exposing people, it was about building shared power. Don’t confuse that with the platforms that sold us out, and don’t mistake critique for irony when it’s actually prophecy.

I would start to say, with care, that #Mastodon is now heading in the wrong direction. Not because it’s inherently bad, or malicious, or “captured” in some conspiratorial sense. But because it’s become too dominant, tipping the scales far away from the diversity and messiness that a healthy #Fediverse needs.

This isn’t about blame, it’s about balance. To keep the #openweb alive and meaningful, we need to nurture other codebases, other, paths, cultures, and radically different governance paths alongside Mastodon’s dormant trajectory. Let’s acknowledge where Mastodon succeeded: It has been a gateway into the Fediverse, by mimicking Twitter, it provided a familiar experience that let mainstream users, journalists, #NGOs, and even some governments dip their toes into decentralization. It helped break the suffocating monopoly of Twitter/X. This was useful, necessary even. We needed a bridge.

But now? That bridge is being pushed/mistaken for the destination. And worse, it’s reinforcing the patterns we were trying to escape. Instead of blossoming into a diverse ecosystem and experimental tools, the #Fediverse is shaped by Mastodon’s design limitations and its pushing institutional gravity. That’s the problem, it’s not just a project any more, it’s becoming a bottleneck.

With #NGO-centric thinking shaping many of the newer Fediverse-adjacent events (like #NGI forums or EU funding discussions) which are now populated by the same #NGO/#dotcons crowd and comfortable liberal institutions that avoid risk, fear grassroots control, and domesticate the web for funding reports.

So, Mastodon isn’t “bad” and it played its part well. But its institutional path is now out of alignment with the nature of the Fediverse: the #4opens, radical transparency, permissionless innovation, and native grassroots culture. This is a poisoned balance, not because Mastodon is wrong, but because its gravitational pull is now preventing new paths from taking root.

What’s the alternative? Push for federation that supports collectives, not just individuals. Rebuild spaces for group publishing (like #Indymediaback) and shared authorship, not just influencer-following. Keep pushing the #4opens: Open data, open standards, open governance, open code – not just a logo and a code of conduct. Remember that a monoculture is always a point of vulnerability. Diversity isn’t optional, it’s the core strength of the #openweb.

So yes, Mastodon is a problem on balance, even as it was a solution before. But still, we don’t need to burn the bridge – but we do need to compost the monoculture and grow a thicker forest around it. Because decentralization means divergence, not convergence to one project’s roadmap #KISS