Illustration of space with planets, galaxies, stars, spaceships, and astronaut

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 03 April, 2026 is out. www.thefulcrum.dev/t... #fediverse #OMN #WordPress #Leaflet #Linux #ActivityPub #ATProto #markdown #CSS #Holos #RSS #HTML #Bear #HTMX

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 […]

The #OMN: Simple Flows, Not Platforms

The #OMN is not a platform, it’s a way of thinking about media as flows of objects moving through a network.

If people can’t picture how the system works, they can’t govern it.

Think: pipes, flows, and holding tanks

Content flows. People shape the flow.

Metadata and the #OMN Path: Who Controls the Invisible Hand? Capitalism’s invisible hand has always relied on hidden data. In the digital age, that data is metadata the overlooked, under-the-hood information that tells us who, where, when, how often, and what next. It doesn’t matter what you say or do if someone else controls the context around it. That’s where the power lies. Let’s be clear: the battle for metadata is the battle for the future.Three Broken Paths Capitalism: Metadata is hoarded by the #dotcons. Google, Meta, TikTok—they […]

Why It Matters – If metadata is the new currency, then open metadata is the new commons. Metadata and the #OMN Path: Who Controls the Invisible Hand? hamishcampbell.com/metadata-and-the-omn-pat...

@shoq there are a few people working on this #OMN #indymediaback :)

What projects like #OMN can learn from history The lesson from the Leonid Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union is simple but brutal that stability is not strength. From the outside the system looked powerful – armies, rockets, space stations. But internally it had stopped being able to correct itself, criticism became dangerous, information was distorted, and the leadership focused on maintaining control rather than fixing problems. The result was a long, slow decay that only became obvious once collapse was already underway. For projects like #OMN and the wider #openweb, there are some clear lessons. A system must be able to criticise itself, when criticism is blocked, systems rot quietly. In political systems this shows up as propaganda and falsified reports, in tech projects it shows up as closed decision-making, defensive leadership with performative openness, leading to communities where criticism gets socially punished. The #4opens matter because they institutionalise self-correction: open code → people can inspect, open data → people can verify, open process → people can challenge decisions and open standards → people can fork and build alternatives. Forking is the equivalent of democratic opposition, without it, stagnation creeps in. What we can learn is simple don’t trade dynamism for comfort. What we learn from history, a big part of the Brezhnev problem was that the leadership chose predictability over adaptation. The same thing happens in tech ecosystems when projects shift from experimentation → brand protection, messy community → managed messaging leading to failing grassroots growth → to institutional control. You end up with stagnation. For something like #OMN, the messy grassroots stage is not a weakness, it is the source of vitality, it’s about having a space were we can compost the institutions that tend to prioritise survival over purpose. This is a universal pattern, over time, organisations start to exist to maintain themselves, not to achieve their original mission. You can see this in NGOs that avoid challenging power because they depend on funding, tech foundations that prioritise corporate partnerships and projects that optimise for grants rather than any usefulness. The danger for #openweb projects is #mainstreaming without accountability. When institutions become the goal, the commons become secondary. Back to history, we find that information rot is deadly, the Soviet system increasingly relied on false reporting maintaining the illusion of success. Tech ecosystems have their own version with inflated user numbers exaggerating adoption claims, marketing replacing real development leading to blocking #NGO conferences replacing working infrastructure. Healthy ecosystems need ground truth, it’s another reason the #4opens matter, they make it harder to fake progress. Real strength is distributed, the Soviet model concentrated authority at the top. That made correction impossible. The #openweb path is at best the opposite with distributed infrastructure, federated governance leading to multiple independent actors feeding the ability to fork and diverge. Resilience comes from diversity and redundancy, not central authority. Collapse often looks stable until suddenly it isn’t, the lesson from the Brezhnev period is that decline can look like stability for a long time. You see signs only if you look closely at empty shelves, falsified reports, ageing leadership squatting rigid institutions. In the current #dotcons web ecosystem the equivalents might be shrinking trust in platforms, centralised control of communication, developer burnout, communities drifting away from corporate spaces. The surface can still look powerful while the foundations are weakening. The practical lesson for #OMN is that we need to keep focus as anti-Brezhnev systems. That means building structures that encourage criticism, experimentation, decentralisation, transparency and community power over institutional control. The goal is not stability, its living systems that can correct themselves. Because once a system loses that ability, the future is already written – it just takes a while before everyone else notices. * * * ### Discover more from #OMN (Open Media Network) Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

What projects like #OMN can learn from history hamishcampbell.com/what-projects-like-omn-c... The goal is not stability, its living systems that can correct themselves.

Open Media Network searx - a privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine

The #OMN used to host a search engine web-wp.archive.org/web/20220910062534/https...

@strypey This is the #OMN project, it's a KISS path we do need to toll out to test and grow

Are we engaging with lived historical practice, or abstract risk models?
#OMN emerges from 30+ years of practical projects (Indymedia, squatting cultures, media activism, commons infrastructure). Critique that does not engage with this history risks becoming theoretical at best, academic at worst.

Are we evaluating #OMN as a replacement system, when it is a transitional one?
OMN is not claiming to “outcompete capitalism” today. It is creating the conditions where non-extractive paths can later exist.

Are we mistaking the absence of solutions for a refusal to address the problem?
Survivability pathways are currently absent because the tools do not yet exist. That absence is not a moral position; it is the reason the #OMN project exists.

Are we arguing about the end state, or about the first step?
To many critiques assume #OMN is presenting a finished survivability model. It is not. OMN is an affinity-group and tool-building phase, not the outcome of social change. These stages are being collapsed.

Original post on mastodon.social

Are we confusing “how things must work to exist” with “how we wish things already worked”?
A recurring tension is between present material reality and desired future conditions. This document argues that early-stage projects like #OMN must start inside existing constraints, not pretend they’ve […]

#FOSS “Just Fork It” Delusion – #OMN (Open Media Network) 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?

#FOSS “Just Fork It” Delusion – #OMN (Open Media Network)

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…

#FOSS “Just Fork It” Delusion – #OMN (Open Media Network) ✨ Check out this trending post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: ✅ **What You’ll Learn**: 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.

#FOSS “Just Fork It” Delusion – #OMN (Open Media Network)

✨ Check out this trending post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: ✅ **What You’ll Learn**: 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…

Open-Media-Network - Open Collective OMN is a project to reboot the original #openweb as a useful tool for progressive social change and challenge

@wjmaggos This is exactly what the #OMN project is for... what are you doing to make it happen #DIY

https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

DigitalDetox A simple app that sits on top of existing child lock / screen time APIs. No dark magic, spyware, behavioural profiling. Instead, simple:Just process, consent, and friction.

A new #OMN project unite.openworlds.info/hamishcampbell/DigitalDe... if there are some coders out there who wont to make it happen.

The new right weaponizing culture: The right goes post-liberal – #OMN (Open Media Network)

The new right weaponizing culture: The right goes post-liberal hamishcampbell.com/the-new-righ...

#OMN

Share: ________ _Your Party_ may not have a united leadership or a basic political programme, but it does finally have a plan for launch. Its founding conference, set for late November in Liverpool, will be populated by sortition. 13,000 party members will be enfranchised at random, with 6,500 attending on each day. The party membership as a whole will only get a symbolic, “confirmatory” vote on the final draft of the constitution. This constitution could, according to documents released in October, enshrine sortition as the permanent system for conferences. If we take this plan at face value, the founding leadership of Your Party, with all of its embedded control freakery, is intending to entrust its future to an idealistic, unprecedented process, putting its faith in a literally random assortment of members. More substantive arguments aside (and we’ll come to those), would-be proponents of sortition in _Your Party_ must begin by asking themselves: is that really plausible? ## Where has this come from? Most people active in the organised left, the Labour Party or the wider labour movement won’t have encountered sortition directly. So how can we explain its sudden appearance at the heart of the left’s new party? The crisis of our age is above all a crisis of democracy – in the economy and the state. Cosseted by the media and an electoral system designed to shut out political alternatives, our political class remains addicted to a regime of privatisation, outsourcing and austerity, despite a longstanding collapse in public support. Billionaire wealth and asset prices are the only safe bets; for everyone else, the reality is declining living standards, dysfunction and economic stagnation. Neoliberalism has degraded the left’s institutions and organised tendencies, and delivered us an increasing degree of atomisation. Sortition offers a neat procedural shortcut, offering to bypass unrepresentative democracies and the left’s own organisational scleroses. That is certainly Roger Hallam’s perspective. In a strident piece for the New Statesman, he argues that “voting and elections are not democracy – they are a means to the end of democracy”; and that “it is sortition or death”. If you don’t like sortition, he says, “you believe a few are called to rule, like the people who believe that only white people should rule, that only men should rule.” Citizens’ Assemblies are the most well-known form of sortition. A demographically representative set of citizens is selected at random to deliberate and make a series of recommendations. In Ireland, it was a Citizens’ Assembly that recommended the abolition of the constitutional ban on abortion. Depending on how you look at it, they are either a reincarnation of Athenian democratic principles or a beefed-up focus group. Extinction Rebellion, which was co-founded by Hallam, made a Citizens’ Assembly on Climate and Ecological Justice was one of the movement’s key demands. It would presumably have a much higher degree of ambition and authority than the Climate Assembly UK, which the government has already run, or the many citizens’ climate assemblies run by local councils since then. Momentum also experimented with the idea. When the organisation’s representative democratic structures were abolished in 2017, a ‘Members Council’, selected by sortition, was convened to advise the Momentum leadership. Like the promise of all-member referenda, it was an abortive gimmick. One of the Members’ Council’s first acts was to publicly disagree with the Labour leadership on immigration policy; funnily enough, it stopped meeting. ## Alien to mass politics Sorition has its formal origins in the ancient Athenian constitution, where selection by lot was the primary way of allocating citizens to public office. Built on slavery and the total political exclusion of women, ancient Athens was by no means a modern democracy, but it was also radical. Sorition’s better–read proponents often point to CLR James’s 1956 essay ‘Every Cook Can Govern’, which offers a spirited and coherent defence of the Athenian system. James points out its radical egalitarianism, prolific contribution to human civilisation, and the fact that the aristocratic class was determined to destroy it. James did not, however, advocate that the modern left immediately adopt sortition as its key demand and method of organising. More to the point, one would have to be wilfully naive to think that its appearance in _Your Party_ is down to the sudden conversion of senior Corbyn aides to the Athenian democratic ideal. The use of delegates to represent organised groups of members or workers did not become the norm because e-balloting was not available or sortition had not been heard of. The organised labour movement and socialist left has, for its entire development, used some form of representative democracy to make decisions because it aims at making deliberation happen, and at making it happen at the lowest possible level – in branches and workplaces – rather than among a self-selecting or randomly-selected tier of decision-makers. Most socialists claim to stand for the self-emancipation of the working class – and in a broader sense for mass politics. Open assemblies and conferences aim to enable universal participation. A well-functioning delegate democracy means that all members are invited to debate policy and strategy, and have real agency, at a local level. Even a semi-functioning delegate system, in which this or that political tendency might be overrepresented, at least serves the purpose of politicising the structures and linking members into decisions. Both delegate and One Member One Vote processes are systems of mass politics, because strategy and ideas can be shifted from the base. Sortition, on the other hand, leaves decisions to a random sample of people, and the rest of us become spectators. It assumes that we will be better represented by someone who is demographically similar to us than someone who shares our political perspective. When controversial decisions are made, structures must have enough legitimacy that the organisation can move on – the defeated side must be able to walk away knowing that it has put its case and (for now) lost a democratic vote. Big controversial decisions made by a literally random assortment of members will have no such legitimacy, especially if the conference process is viewed as a stitch-up. ## A stitch-up For the true believers, _Your Party’s_ shift towards sortition is a way to circumvent the baggage of the existing left and to empower the grassroots of the party at the expense of incompetent leaders. The obvious reality is that the leadership chose this system precisely because it has other ways to keep control. At the party’s regional assemblies, small groups have been invited to discuss topics and make suggestions – without any power to collectively deliberate or vote. Individuals can also suggest edits to the constitution online. Given the volume of “suggestions” and the lack of transparent process to record, let alone prioritise and consider them, we can only assume that they are destined for the bin. This is a performance of democracy, while the real decisions are taken elsewhere. On the conference floor itself, sortition will make the process more, not less, dominated by big names and the top table. Will Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and all of their bag-carriers be forced to enter the lottery to attend the conference? Obviously not. Some members will be more equal than others. With elected delegates (as is the norm in the labour movement) or open attendance for all members (as the Green Party, of which I am a member, does), one can guarantee that the left’s factions and leading activists will be present in some form. With sortition, the _Your Party_ leadership has created the possibility of a conference without many of the people who might organise to defeat it in a vote. ## Quick fixes Perhaps sortition will be a flash in the plan, and the founding conference of _Your Party_ will choose a less idiosyncratic constitution. But its appearance is symptomatic of a broader problem with the British left. Tens of millions of Britons yearn for a serious left alternative to the current political elite. But our strength has been degraded, and we have a crisis of organisational form. This has left us stuck in a loop of quick fixes. Some want the intervention of a “hyperleader”, as Your Party insider James Schneider put it in his interview with the New Left Review – someone like Jean-Luc Melenchon. “In Britain we don’t have that type of figure”, he lamented. “We have a kind of hyperleader in Jeremy, a person whose moral and political authority towers above anyone else’s, but he doesn’t act in that way. It’s not his style.” If it was not already obvious from the experience of high Corbynism, the farce of recent weeks has demonstrated authoritatively that basing your political institutions around the whims of left celebrities is a bad idea. Sortition offers a different, but equally chimeric, shortcut, offering to appeal over the heads of the left’s (supposedly tainted, failed) activists to a wider mass of (supposedly purer, simpler) supporters – a silent majority of “normal” members. Funnily enough, right-wing Labour politicians, conservative trade union bureaucracies and overprofessionalised NGOs can often be heard indulging in the same rhetoric. Perhaps we should not be too critical. Electoral politics is _always_ an attempted shortcut to some extent. But there is a difference between building an electoral politics that develops grassroots politics and the wider class struggle, and one which cuts against it. * Michael Chessum View all posts Share: ________

#sortation in monolithic vertical structures prometheusjournal.org/2025/11/04/against-sorti... is not what the federated, permissionless, trust based #OGB is about.

Mess and compost comes to mind #OMN

@DemocracyMattersALot yes, it's a mess we do need to compost, as the Democratic Party is full of #deathcut ists, what's the plan, where is the shovel #OMN

History isn’t something that happens to us; it’s something we make — or lose — together.

#OpenWeb #4Opens #OMN #OGB #IndymediaReboot

People need to care because this is the moment to step back into agency — to be part of history not as consumers or spectators, but as participants. The #OMN and #OGB frameworks give us the infrastructure to make that real.

Original post on mastodon.social

Right now, the same forces that buried our earlier waves — the #NGOs the “professionalisers,” the #dotcons — are at it again, turning commons into brands, movements into products. The #OMN is our refusal of that — a collective act of remembering and re-rooting, bringing back working practices […]

Original post on mastodon.social

Every generation inherits not just tools and systems, but narratives — who we think we are, what we believe possible. The #OMN project isn’t just technical; they are acts of imagination — working proof that people can build their own networks of trust and meaning outside of state and corporate […]

The #OMN, #OGB, and the #indymediaback reboot aren’t nostalgia — they’re the next generation of the commons defending itself.

Original post on mastodon.social

Most digital projects today, even the “good” ones, are built on dependency — on funding cycles, closed standards, and hidden hierarchies. #OMN breaks that by building around the #4opens (open data, open code, open standards, open process). This isn’t just a technical stance — it’s the foundation […]

Original post on mastodon.social

#OMN and its projects represent one of the few remaining native paths to rebuild a free, trustworthy, and cooperative grassroots #openweb — from the ground up, not from the boardroom down. In a time when every #dotcons platform, #NGO, and state initiative wants to manage people into compliance […]

They’re not theory — they’re survival skills for building the digital commons #OMN #openweb #FOSS

Trust is the foundation of moderation in decentralised networks like the #OMN – #OMN (Open Media Network)

Trust is the foundation of moderation in decentralised networks like the #OMN This is how moderation works in a decentralised network, not by pretending we’re neutral, but by showing up with care and accountability. hamishcampbell.com/trust-is-the...