I think I've worked out why I like the #indieweb or #openweb so much, and it's a bit selfish: I go to my website every day and just think, 'I did that!' and, 'That's all me!'

Endgame for the Open Web - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

#Business #Outlooks
Endgame for the Open Web · A call to reclaim web sovereignty ilo.im/16bqrz by Anil Dash

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#Threats #AI #Web #Community #OpenWeb #BigWeb #SmallWeb #IndieWeb #Websites #Content

The End of the Open Web Do you remember the Open Web? Web rings, directories, quirky resources out in the open, without the need to sign in anywhere. But I fear we're seeing the beginning of the end of this wonderful shared...

#Business #Analyses
The end of the Open Web · “We’re once again in the process of fucking things up.” ilo.im/16bd09 by Jan Schaumann

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#Web #OpenWeb #SearchEngines #SEO #AI #Agents #Browsers #Websites #Content #Enshittification

As our report made clear, the UK needs to move quickly towards a stable framework that gives confidence to rights holders and responsible AI developers alike. We welcome the Government's reiteration that it no longer has a preferred option on copyright reform. However, it should now go further and rule out explicitly a new commercial text and data mining exception with an opt-out mechanism, as we recommended in our report. Indeed, the Government should rule out any reform to copyright law that would remove incentives to license copyrighted works for AI training, such as the introduction of a 'commercial research exception'. The Government should also promote the development and adoption of sovereign AI models that deliver enhanced transparency and respect for copyright.

Letter to UK ministers from Lords Comms Committee chair committees.parliament.uk/publications...

Recent Government publications www.gov.uk/government/p...

Good luck with this. The UK can have copyright maximalism or (globally relevant) sovereign AI, but not both

#genAI #IPlaw #openweb #techpolicy

Endgame for the Open Web - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Endgame for the Open Web. www.anildash.com/202... If you want a free internet, now is the time to get off your ass. #openWeb

"the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count" #openweb

Endgame for the Open Web - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Endgame for the Open Web https://anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/ #AI #OpenWeb #Internet

Text generated by large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek etc. often violates several of Wikipedia's core content policies. For this reason, the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited, save for these two exceptions: 1. Editors are permitted to use LLMs to suggest basic copyedits to their own writing, and to incorporate some of them after human review, provided the LLM does not introduce content of its own. Caution is required, because LLMs can go beyond what you ask of them and change the meaning of the text such that it is not supported by the sources cited. 2. Editors are permitted to use LLMs to translate articles from another language's Wikipedia into the English Wikipedia, but must follow the guidance laid out at Wikipedia:LLM-assisted translation. Some editors may have similar writing styles to LLMs. More evidence than just stylistic or linguistic signs is needed to justify sanctions, and it is best to consider the text's compliance with core content policies and recent edits by the editor in question.

Wikipedia has banned use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content, with a couple of exceptions en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Chaotic Enby's proposal (adopted) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Archived request for comment en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

#genAI #openweb #techpolicy

Messy language feeds back into messy culture Most people now understand that culturally, and socially, we are in a growing nasty mess. The #blocking of action, the constant stalls, confusion, and fragmentation, has a lot to do with our use of language. And the deeper issue is how this messy language feeds back into culture, which then loops back to make the language even murkier. It’s a feedback loop that clouds meaning, erodes trust, and paralyses collective action. The last 40 years of postmodernism and neoliberalism made this worse. #Postmodernism chipped away at the idea of shared reality, leaving us with endless interpretation and “personal truths.” #Neoliberalism, on the other hand, commodified everything, including language itself, into marketing, spin, and #PR. Together, we have hollowed out words like “community,” “freedom,” and even “change,” to the point that we barely recognize practical use value. Take “mutual aid” for example, a term grounded in solidarity and reciprocal responsibility. Now, on both #dotcons and #openweb platforms, it gets reduced to casual crowdfunding and anonymous asks, with little relational context. Not bad, but far from what it could and needs to be. If we want affinity-based action to work, if we want people to work together and trust and act together, then we have to compost this mess. And the way to do that might be surprisingly simple #KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid, not stupid as in naive, but stupid as in clear. We need to reclaim simple language that carries shared meaning. This is exactly what we’re trying to seed with the positive side of the #hashtag story. Hashtags act as anchors in this storm of noisy abstraction. They cut through, to the root meaning, and allow collective orientation without needing corporate gatekeepers or #blinded institutional filters. Think: * #4opens — a shorthand for open code, open data, open governance, open standards. * #deathcult — pointing to the suicidal path of #neoliberalism. * #techshit — composting the mess, not throwing it away. * #nothingnew — slowing tech churn, reclaiming meaningful pace and paths. Each of these tags points to deeper, shared narratives that are simple, but not simplistic. They invite action, not common sense confusion. By composting the abstraction we regrow clarity, reclaim trust paths, in both tech and social spaces. Speak simply, act clearly, hashtag wisely with intention is a working path, please use this. * * * On this path, It is important for the progressives and radicals to come together and focus on real issues and the challenges facing society, rather than fighting among ourselves. To find this balance between being “nice” and being “nasty” is key to being effective about lasting social change. The #hashtags embody a story and worldview rooted in a progressive and critical perspective on technology and society. By highlighting the destructive impact of neoliberalism (#deathcult) and consumer capitalism (#fashernista) on our shared lives, while promoting the original ideals of the World Wide Web and early internet culture (#openweb). The #closedweb critiques the for-profit internet and its harmful social consequences, while #4opens advocates for transparency, collaboration, and open-source principles in tech development. The #geekproblem tag draws attention to a dysfunctional cultural tendency in tech: where geeks, absorbed in their tools and logic, overlook the broader social effects of their creations. This feeds into #techshit, where layers of unnecessary complexity pile up, further distancing people from tech’s social roots. Meanwhile, #encryptionists critiques the knee-jerk reaction that “more encryption” is always the answer, reinforcing control and scarcity, rather than liberating people and community. Together, hashtags tell a loose, coherent and powerful story. They call for a more humane, collaborative, and transparent approach to both technology and society. #nothingnew asks whether constant innovation is the right path — or if we need to slow down and improve what already works. #techchurn names the cycle of flashy, redundant tech that fails to solve core issues. #OMN and #indymediaback point toward an Open Media Network — and a revival of the radical, decentralized media that once rivalled corporate media on the early web. #OGB stands for Open Governance Body, an invitation to practice grassroots, transparent, community-led decision-making. It’s an ambitious, needed path, to build and grow social tech that “fails well”, meaning they fail in a way that can be fixed by the people, through trust and collective action, not closed-source patches and corporate updates, that are control not community. The #OMN’s focus is human-first. Tech comes second, as a mediator, a tool, not the destination. Yes, the #geekproblem is real. Technical expertise becomes a gatekeeping mechanism. But tech can also empower, if we design for simplicity, accessibility, and community-first paths and values. The only working path is simple, trust-based, and human. That’s why we keep coming back to #KISS. * * * Why haven’t we been doing this for the last 10 Years? Over the past decade, we’ve lived in a state of quiet paralysis. Climate change, ecological collapse, technological overreach, all of it loomed. And instead of digging in to work on solutions, we froze. Well-meaning people chose fear over action. Understandably. But fear is a poor foundation for building anything sustainable. We’re not on this site to only blame – we’re here to compost. The problem? We stopped critiquing, we stopped examining the tools in our hands. Not only that, we bought into the illusion that #NGO paths and tech would save us. That shiny apps and startup culture could greenwash a better future. And when the results disappointed, we turned inward, stopped questioning, and left things to rot. So now, can that rot be composted? By using the #4opens – open data, open code, open standards for open governance, we have a practical framework to call out and compost the layers of #techshit that have built up. Tech that divides us, tech that distracts us, tech that damages the planet and calls it progress. Yep, like gardening, composting takes time, it smells at first, it’s messy. But give it care, and you get soil – to plant better ideas in, soil for hope. One of the reasons we haven’t made progress is the #geekproblem, a narrow slice of technically-minded culture made up of (stupid)individuals, which so far have dominated the design and direction of our tools. They, sometimes, mean well, but in their obsession with technical elegance and “solutions,” they’ve sidelined the social and the ecological. What’s left is a brittle, sterile infrastructure, constantly churning out newness without any substance. Meanwhile, #stupidindividualism has flourished, encouraged by #dotcons social media systems built for engagement, not connection. These silos encourage performance over solidarity, branding over community, and endless scrolling over doing. We’ve all felt it. And most activist groups, instead of resisting this tide, drank the #NGO poison, chased funding, watering down their goals, professionalizing their resistance until it became another logo in a funding application. We’ve lost a decade to fear, distraction, and capture. But it’s maybe not too late, we have the tools, in the #ActivityPub based #Fediverse. We have the frameworks, the #4opens can guide us to rebuild with transparency, collaboration, and care. The hashtags like #geekproblem, #techshit, #nothingnew, and #OMN give us a shared vocabulary for critique and regeneration. They point to a web where people, not platforms, hold power, and where technology serves life, not control. Let’s stop being afraid to critique, stop outsourcing responsibility and get on with composting. Because that’s where the soil of a better path will come from. It’s worth remembering that, in the current political mess, the right-wing and the so-called centre are extremists. They are insisting that endless growth on a finite planet is “realistic,” that widening inequality is “natural,” that ecological collapse can be managed by markets, and that social breakdown is an acceptable cost of doing business. It’s constant crisis management, coercion, and denial of material reality. What’s labelled “left-wing” is generally moderate: the belief that people should be able to meet their basic needs, that cooperation works better than competition for shared survival, and that systems should serve society rather than extract from it. The Overton window has been dragged to exploitation and collapse that proposing care, restraint, and collective responsibility is framed as radical, when it’s the minimum required for any stable future. Seen this way, extremism isn’t in change and challenge. It’s insisting that a failing system must continue at all costs.

Just to add that this is the same metaphor as open/closed
ie. #openweb vs #closedweb
These hashtags all add up to a story http://hamishcampbell.com/tag/hashtags/

Original post on mastodon.social

In the #geekproblem mindset, crossing a protocol flow is a gateway. In #OMN, it’s a bridge.

That’s the difference between CONTROL and TRUST. A gate is locked. A bridge lets things flow. In the real world, we don’t put gates on bridges.

Strange how that basic truth gets lost in code metaphors […]

#blocking is complex, but often a symptom of a deeper problem - people often retreating into rigid, internalised worldviews rather than engaging.

It’s easy to dismiss, harder to build bridges.

Any ideas on how we reduce pointless conflict without exhausting ourselves?
#openweb #4opens

Original post on mato.social

#WordPressOS: "Without accessible tooling, #sitedelegates become another advantage for those who can afford to build custom solutions. The #agenticweb becomes a place where large players have sophisticated representation and everyone else is just data to be #scraped. Or perhaps that agentic web […]

What’s up with that? Dive into the post at Downes and unpack the surprising take on how we learn, share, and innovate online. A quick read with big ideas for creators and communities alike. #Education #OpenWeb #LearningTogether #DownesOpens #What’sUpWithThat #byAI

https://techlore.tv/w/cbNCLo5aRPebMJFLbLufkZ

#chatcontrol #privacy #openweb #EU #pirateparty #peertube

Original post on beige.party

The op of this thread (not this quoted post) is what #DemandEverythingAcceptNoTradeOff is for.

As if any @firefox fork, including @librewolf, has the ability to even maintain the Gecko engine - let's all switch to forks or Chromium and see the dying days of adblock.

Their #AI is a local […]

AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web I remember, pretty clearly, my excitement over the early World Wide Web. I had been on the internet for a year or two at that point, mostly using IRC, Usenet, and Gopher (along with email, naturall…

#AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The #OpenWeb - www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/a... another great @masnick.com special...

What’s new in AI 0.6.0 (20 MAR 2026)? AI Experiments 0.6.0 adds image editing and refinement workflows, enabling iterative updates to generated images and editing within the Media Library, alongside improvements to how AI features are …

AI 0.6.0 continues the shift from experiments to real publishing workflows.

Image refinement, better feature structure, and groundwork for WordPress 7.0.

make.wordpress.org/ai/2026/03/2...

#WordPress #AI #OpenWeb

The problem with institutions funding the social side of #openweb tech Almost all our #geekproblem software fails because it’s built around control, while any healthy society is built on trust. We keep producing piles of #techshit because we can’t communicate this simple truth. The result is endless #techchurn. One way to address this is to fund the social side of tech. The real problem is how institutions fund the social layer of #openweb projects. Right now, most of that money risks feeding parasitic #NGOs rather than anything useful. At the same time, existing funding for coding often reinforces the #geekproblem, especially when it moves beyond basic infrastructure. We have a mess because the world is messy – but current funding does very little to compost that mess. That’s the work of people with shovels. The question is: who funds them? * * * ### Discover more from #OMN (Open Media Network) Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

The problem with institutions funding the social side of #openweb tech hamishcampbell.com/the-problem-with-institu... We have a mess because the world is messy – but current funding does very little to compost that mess.

Warum RSS-Feeds unverzichtbar bleiben Totgesagte leben länger: RSS-Feeds sind weit mehr als ein Relikt der Nullerjahre. Als dezentraler Standard sichern sie uns die Kontrolle über den Nachrichtenkonsum abseits von Algorithmen und bilden das fundamentale Rückgrat der globalen Podcast-Industrie.

Warum RSS-Feeds unverzichtbar bleiben: Entdecke, wie die Technik uns vor Algorithmen schützt und die Podcast-Welt antreibt. Ein Blick in die Zukunft von RSS. #RSS #RSSFeed #OpenWeb #TechNews
ms-office-training.de/warum-rss-feeds-unverzic...

GitHub - Automattic/wordpress-atmosphere Contribute to Automattic/wordpress-atmosphere development by creating an account on GitHub.

Haven’t even started testing the WordPress ActivityPub plugin yet… and an AT Protocol one (Bluesky + standard.site) is already popping up. We’re living in an interesting moment! 😯

Curious if both can coexist on the same #WordPress site 👀 github.com/Automattic/w... #ActivityPub #openweb #atprotocol

I think this is why personal websites are coming back. Heck, mine has a RSS feed! We can make these things again, the best part about this time? We don't have to "invent the wheel" first #openweb #fediverse #writesky #antitrust
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US: A National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence www.whitehouse.gov/articles/202...

#genAI #IPlaw #fairuse #openweb #techpolicy

screenshot of compressed loop video

video compression on @loops is HARDCORE sometimes it's straight up unwatchable @dansup

But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web's traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit. For nearly three decades, historians, journalists, and the public have relied on the Internet Archive to preserve news sites as they appeared online. Those archived pages are often the only reliable record of how stories were originally published. In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed—sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes. When major publishers block the Archive’s crawlers, that historical record starts to disappear.

Blocking the Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web's Historical Record www.eff.org/deeplinks/20... from @eff.org

#webarchives #webhistory #fairuse #openweb #techpolicy

Bluesky Raises $100 Million in Series B Funding Led by Bain Capital Crypto Bluesky secures $100M in Series B funding, crosses 43M users, and expands its AT Protocol ecosystem. Here’s what it means.

Bluesky has disclosed a $100M funding round led by Bain Capital Crypto. The timing follows a leadership shift and rapid growth to 43M users.

Read more: itmatterss.in/global/blues...

@bsky.app

#Bluesky #OpenWeb #Decentralization

A Conversation with Jack Conte YouTube video by SXSW

Holy crap, Jack Conte's presentation at SXSW 2026 hits all the points that I, as a frustrated creator in the age of AI, needed to watch. Incredible and insightful.

Relevant to #indieweb and #openweb from the human side of things, what we want to make possible.

www.youtube.com/live/Ue9-zkA...

Building an article assistant: local AI in the browser with cloud fallback - Richard MacManus How I built an article assistant for my website that uses local AI (via Chrome + Gemini Nano) when available, and falls back to a cloud model when it isn’t.

New from my Web AI Lab: I’ve built an “article assistant” for my site that runs using local AI in the browser (via Chrome + Gemini Nano) when available — and falls back to a cloud model when it isn’t.

I think local AI has huge implications for the #OpenWeb.

ricmac.org/2026/03/19/a... #WebAI

Original post on mastodon.social

New from my Web AI Lab: I’ve built an “article assistant” for my site that runs using local AI in the browser (via Chrome + Gemini Nano) when available — and falls back to a cloud model when it isn’t.

Before you dismiss this because it's AI, I think this has huge implications for the #OpenWeb […]