The #OMN Framework: the Five Functions (#5f)

To build an #OMN site, we don’t start with platforms, features, or ideology. We start with flows.

Think of the network as a system of pipes and holding tanks, with different connectors at each end. Nothing magical, nothing proprietary. The goal is that every part, in the abstract, is understandable by a reasonably normal human being – not just developers, not just managers, not just “power users”.

This is important: if people can’t picture how the system works, they can’t govern it. Obscurity always centralises power. The entire #OMN stack reduces to five functions. Everything else is interface, aesthetics, and convenience.

1. Link / Subscribe to a Flow

Plumbing a pipe in. This is the act of connection. You link to a flow, subscribe to a flow, or splice one flow into another. The beginning or end of a pipe can connect to any of the other functions. Flows can be local, remote, personal, collective, trusted, or experimental.

This replaces the platform model (“you are here, inside us”) with a network model (“this is connected to that”). No algorithm decides what you see. You decide which pipes you connect.

1. Trust / Moderate a Flow

Letting water pass, diverting it, or filtering it. A flow can pass straight through untouched, or it can be routed into a holding tank, where moderation happens. Moderation here is not binary censorship. It is sieving: shifting content to different pipes, slowing or accelerating flow, contextualising rather than deleting, applying trust decisions socially, not invisibly. Trust is not global and not abstract. It is local, situated, and reversible.

Different communities can run different sieves on the same incoming flow – and that’s a feature, not a bug.

1. Rollback

Draining the tank. Rollback means the ability to: remove content back to a specific point in the flow, undo aggregation decisions, withdraw objects that should not have entered the system, recover from mistakes without pretending they never happened. This is essential for collective systems. Without rollback, every error becomes a power struggle. Rollback allows accountability without permanence-as-punishment.

1. Edit Metadata

Shaping how water is understood downstream. Content objects are not fixed. Metadata can be added to the trailing tail of an object. This does not rewrite history – it adds context: tags, trust signals, summaries, warnings, translations, relevance markers.

Metadata determines how content is sieved, aggregated, and displayed. This is the core function of news aggregation. In #OMN, meaning emerges socially through metadata, not algorithmically through engagement metrics.

1. Publish Content

Adding a drop to the flow. Publishing is simply adding an object to a flow. That object may be editable or immutable, contextualised or raw, personal or collective. The key point is that publishing does not automatically grant amplification or authority. Publication is contribution, not domination.

The Holding Tank: Storage

Behind all of this is a storage tank – a database. Nothing exotic. No “AI brain”. No mystical feed. Just stored objects moving through pipes, shaped by social decisions.

Why This Matters

That’s it. Those five functions #5f. Everything else – timelines, feeds, notifications, layouts, dashboards – is UX and UI. Think of it as macarons for news publishing: colourful, tasty, optional, and ultimately replaceable. The core stays simple because complexity is where capture happens.

#NothingNew by Design

There is nothing original here. This is how: plumbing systems work, electrical grids work, packet-switched networks work, and how neurons in our brains work. This is intentional. #OMN is rooted in #nothingnew because systems that survive are systems people already intuitively understand.

When tech mirrors human and physical systems, it can be governed by humans – not by elitists, not by opaque expertise, not by venture capital. That’s the point.

• Simple flows.
• Social mediation.
• Democratic control.

Everything else is noise.

https://hamishcampbell.com/belief-in-technical-decentralisation/