#indymediaback — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #indymediaback, aggregated by home.social.
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Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip. In most social/political movements, the hard questions - how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve […]https://hamishcampbell.com/actually-solving-things-and-why-this-matters-for-omn/
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Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip. In most social/political movements, the hard questions - how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve […]https://hamishcampbell.com/actually-solving-things-and-why-this-matters-for-omn/
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Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip. In most social/political movements, the hard questions - how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve […]https://hamishcampbell.com/actually-solving-things-and-why-this-matters-for-omn/
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Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most blinded people quietly skip. In most social/political movements, the hard questions - how we organise, decide, share resources, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/actually-solving-things-and-why-this-matters-for-omn/
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Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip. In most social/political movements, the hard questions - how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve […]https://hamishcampbell.com/actually-solving-things-and-why-this-matters-for-omn/
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#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)
#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies - not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective […]https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-grounding-the-roots-as-a-story/
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#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)
#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies - not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective […]https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-grounding-the-roots-as-a-story/
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#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)
#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies - not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective […]https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-grounding-the-roots-as-a-story/
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Based on the #OMN hashtag story: #indymediaback is a call to revive and rebuild the radical, grassroots, community-controlled media networks that flourished in the#Indymedia era - open, decentralised, and owned by the people publishing them - as a direct alternative to both the corporate #dotcons and the hollowed-out #NGO media landscape that replaced them.
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The #dotcons, #mainstreaming, and Build to Walk Away
Three years ago I was trying to explain something simple in language liberals might actually hear. They talk about “platform capitalism.” Fine. But I’ve been calling it the #dotcons for 20 years - because that’s what it is - a con. The last 30 years of tech hasn’t just drifted into this mess. It’s been shaped, step by step, enclosure by enclosure, into systems designed to extract value from us. What we now call the internet is, in large part, a machine built to manipulate, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-dotcons-mainstreaming-and-build-and-walk-away/
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Why you should help
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. […] -
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 […]https://hamishcampbell.com/gates-vs-bridges-the-obscure-politics-of-the-geekproblem/
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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 […] -
A bit of #OMN history and where the current paths come from
For a long time the focus has been on solving two linked problems - both of which are actually #nothingnew. The first is grassroots publishing and organising. The second is network coordination between communities. Neither of these problems started with the internet, and they certainly didn’t start with Silicon Valley. Projects like #Indymedia and community organising networks solved these problems culturally long before modern platforms existed. They worked through shared practice, trust […]https://hamishcampbell.com/a-bit-of-omn-history-and-where-the-current-paths-come-from/
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EU tech strategy, composting the mess
As #climatechaos accelerates, European politics will not stay where it is now. History suggests that periods of instability push politics to the right, because right-wing politics tends to be driven by fear and control. If that trajectory holds, then the digital infrastructure we build today needs to be resilient in a more hostile political environment tomorrow. This matters for the EU’s current technology strategy. Most policy thinking still focuses on industrial competitiveness - AI […]https://hamishcampbell.com/eu-tech-strategy-composting-the-mess/
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Oxford: Rising With The Flood
This story was sparked by worrying about water quality in the UK, on the map above, it's sewage everywhere https://www.sewagemap.co.uk/ The turds are active now, the red is active recently. The story is about this nasty mess set a few years before the longer Oxford story of refuges. The characters are idealised/generalised versions of existing people, #Oxfordboaters, student journalist and collage bureaucrats I have met at meany events. the rowers come from watching this film. The setting […] -
Why good faith is a technical requirement for #FOSS
If you’ve spent years in #FOSS, you’ve likely developed a strong allergy to vague political language. You care about licenses, reproducibility, governance models, and whether something actually runs. Good. That discipline is why free software exists at all. But here’s the uncomfortable question, what if the biggest blocker to the #openweb right now isn’t technical debt - but social debt? And what if “good faith” is not a moral nicety, but a core infrastructure requirement? The […]https://hamishcampbell.com/why-good-faith-is-a-technical-requirement-for-foss/
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Yes, its messy stepping out of the churn
Everywhere we look - what we see, touch, and use - we are living inside systems shaped by decades of economic and technological assumptions. This isn’t only something happening “out there”. It has been normalised and internalised over the last forty years. The dominance of #stupidindividualism, combined with rigid economic dogma, influenced how we design technology, how we organise communities, and how we imagine progress itself. The outcomes are now starkly visible: #climatechaos, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/yes-its-messy-stepping-out-of-the-churn/
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Europe, the Fediverse, and the story we failed to tell
A bunch of native #openweb people spent real time, energy, and focus pushing the #EU toward the #Fediverse. This wasn’t theoretical, it wasn’t speculative, it wasn’t a #NGO whitepaper or a #VC funding pitch. It was practical outreach, grounded in working technology and lived experience, aimed at reducing Europe’s dependency on centralized corporate platforms. One concrete moment of this work was the webinar organised between the European Commission and the ActivityPub community: […]https://hamishcampbell.com/europe-the-fediverse-and-the-story-we-failed-to-tell/
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A bunch of native #openweb people spent time, energy and focus pushing the #EU toward the #Fediverse:
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/webinar-with-the-european-commission-and-ap-community/1507
That webinar mattered. It showed that EU institutions were open to #ActivityPub as a way to reduce dependency on centralized corporate platforms.
This is exactly the kind of work we need more of, not less. So what went wrong?
Instead of building on this momentum, the grassroots fell to mess and attention drifted back to the familiar #dotcons. Which, in the end, is just more #techshit to compost later.
SocialHub itself documents this blocking story, but there’s little aggregation or narrative continuity
The missing piece: our own history. This story still hasn’t been properly told:
We are very bad at telling our own history. And that failure has consequences.
When people don’t know: that #EU–#Fediverse outreach already happened, that viable alternatives already exist, that these paths were actively neglected,
So that they fall — again and again — for the #dotcons mess, believing it’s the only “realistic” option.
This is exactly why #OMN, #indymediaback, #makinghistory, and #OGB matter.
Before we argue about funding, platforms, or scale, we need: Media to tell the story properly. History to remember what already worked. Governance to keep power visible and contestable
Only then can Europe regain any path to grassroots digital agency without reproducing the same capture dynamics under a different flag.
If we don’t tell our story, someone else will, and it won’t be told in our interests.
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The Trump show is noise when we need to be focusing on signal
Let's look at a current issue that is in the news. The Americas have long been treated as a natural U.S. sphere of influence. From early Monroe Doctrine interventions to modern political pressure, the region has been viewed as a geopolitical backyard. Today, with Trump and MAGA pushing renewed U.S. dominance, countries in the region face stark choices: resist, align, or integrate into alternative power structures. The elitist foreign policy message is blunt: secure U.S. primacy in its […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-trump-show-is-noise-when-we-need-to-be-focusing-on-signal/
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We fucked up… and that matters because we still have agency
Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: we fucked up the last 20 years of #openweb tech. Not “they” fucked it up. Not only #BigTech, not only venture capital, not only governments and surveillance states. We did, especially those of us who were closest to the tools, the protocols, the decisions - the geeks, developers, architects, and maintainers who shaped how this stuff actually worked in practice. That matters, because it means we still have direct power over what happens next. […]https://hamishcampbell.com/we-fucked-up-and-that-matters-because-we-still-have-agency/
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Progressive Mainstreaming
Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult - it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters. But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people off their knees to challenge the altar to stop the sacrifice. It rearranges the seating in the temple, feeding the deeper problem, obedience. Progressive […] -
Progressive Mainstreaming
Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult - it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters. But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people off their knees to challenge the altar to stop the sacrifice. It rearranges the seating in the temple, feeding the deeper problem, obedience. Progressive […] -
Progressive Mainstreaming
Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult - it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters. But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people off their knees to challenge the altar to stop the sacrifice. It rearranges the seating in the temple, feeding the deeper problem, obedience. Progressive […] -
Building, what comes next?
#mainstreaming people are wilfully blind and alt people tend to be pessimistic, it's a problem. Historically, real social change doesn’t arrive by waiting for collapse. It arrives because people are active, they build alternatives in advance, strong enough to bridge the mess when existing systems fail and lose legitimacy. This isn’t theory. It’s how change has always happened. If you are interested in a better outcome, we need to remember, build first, collapse later is the lesson that […] -
Chatsworth Rd: Stalls and Code
A DRAFT story about markets, misfits, and taking back the commons (Tagline: “They came for the avocados. They left with revolution.”) by Hamish CampbellOutlineTHE MARKET STIRS Chatsworth Rhythms Setting the scene: It’s a Saturday in East London. The smell of jerk chicken, sourdough, and incense wafts over Chatsworth Road. A young stallholder, Luna (17), sells upcycled clothes and zines with radical poetry. Her best mate Jaz (18) roasts coffee in a converted horse trailer. The street […] -
A Tolkien view of #OMN
A central thesis of Tolkien’s books is that evil provides the means of its own defeat. Sauron forged the One Ring that destroyed him. Shelob impaled herself on Sam’s blade. Smaug exposed his belly to Bilbo and revealed the weak point that brought him down. Tolkien’s world is full of this pattern: the seed of destruction lies buried inside the will to dominate. Power over others always carries its own undoing. But there’s a second truth, less often spoken. Good must still act. The […]https://hamishcampbell.com/a-tolkien-view-of-the-omn-project/
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OMN projects are tools for YOU to change and challenge the world we live (and die) in
The Open Media Network (#OMN) is an “anything in, anything out” network powered by a mediated trust system. Instead of one corporation or #NGO controlling the flow, the commernerty decides what happens to the data that moves through it. At its core, the #OMN is a data soup: tagged data objects flowing through channels. These flows are shaped by trust. You consume and share based on your trust relationships, not on algorithms designed to manipulate you. Key features are built-in, not […] -
@davew that would be usefully, at the #OMN we need codebases to push out #indymediaback and #WordPress with the #activertypub plugin would work if it also supported "ethical" #RSS in aggregation.
#Hashtag based news feeds, and some consensuses' wiki info pages for process.
Keep me in the loop of what you're up to.
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Without trust and working flows, there’s no value at all, no matter how secure, encrypted, or elegant the tech stack. The #OMN with #indymediaback and #makeinghistory are paths hamishcampbell.com/the-omn-with...
The OMN with indymediaback and... -
Without trust and working flows, there’s no value at all, no matter how secure, encrypted, or elegant the tech stack. The #OMN with #indymediaback and #makeinghistory are paths https://hamishcampbell.com/the-omn-with-indymediaback-and-makeinghistory-are-paths/
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The OMN with indymediaback and makeinghistory are paths
Most of the mess, and most of the #blocking, comes down to the same old story - ownership and control. Who holds the keys? Who decides? Who gets locked out? Instead of wrestling in that cage, the #OMN takes a simpler path: we walk away. We put a class of media into the commons, governed openly through the #4opens: open data, open process, open source, and open standards. That means no one can close it down, hoard it, or fence it off for profit. The value comes from the shared pool, not from […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-omn-with-indymediaback-and-makeinghistory-are-paths/
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Trust is the foundation of moderation in decentralised networks like the #OMN
In the world of decentralised, peer-to-peer, and federated networks, from the Fediverse to grassroots projects like the #OMN, moderation works differently. It's not a matter of top-down control or terms-of-service written by #process lawyers. Instead, the basic unit of moderation is trust - and this shifts everything we think of as "common sense". Yes, we need practical moderation tools - blocking, filtering, reporting, curation - the whole established toolkit. But more importantly, we need […] -
Hopelessness is a deeply conservative reaction to change and challenge
In the face of mounting crisis - social breakdown, political polarization, ecological collapse - many people turn inward. And in this turn, they mistake passivity, irony and detachment for resistance. But hopelessness is not radical, it’s deeply conservative. It says: “Nothing can change.” “Everything is corrupt.” “Why bother?” This isn’t rebellion, it’s surrender. And it’s the exact emotional state that power systems - what we call the #deathcult of neoliberalism - need […]https://hamishcampbell.com/hopelessness-is-a-deeply-conservative-reaction-to-change-and-challenge/
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Why most radical tech is pointless, and why #indymediaback isn’t
Almost everything built in today’s alt-radical tech scene is, bluntly, pointless. Despite good intentions, most of it ends up feeding the endless cycle of #fashernista churn, flashy new platforms, bleeding-edge protocols, or encrypted communication tools nobody uses, built by isolated teams disconnected from real-world needs or history. This is the #geekproblem: a culture where novelty is fetishized, and social usefulness is an afterthought, if it appears at all.
Examples:
Secure […]
https://hamishcampbell.com/why-most-radical-tech-is-pointless-and-why-indymediaback-isnt/
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Real world tackling the #geekproblem
With rebooting the #openweb we run headfirst into the #geekproblem, a recurring pattern where: Technically brilliant people build powerful tools …but those tools remain socially unusable …or solve only geek problems, not the needs of actual communities. It’s not malice, often it’s idealism, but it creates a dead-end culture of endless prototypes, abandoned standards, and empty tech demos. Meanwhile, the real-world crisis deepens.The work we need is bridges building, let’s try this […]
https://hamishcampbell.com/real-world-tackling-the-geekproblem/
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Rise and Fall of Grassroots #OpenWeb
To understand where the #Fediverse and the #OpenSocialWeb are heading, and how not to lose our way, we need to reflect on where we’ve come from. The history of grassroots #openweb activism offers both inspiration and hard lessons.Foundations are built by real people, social movements start local, they begin with people on the margins – those directly affected by injustice – taking action with the tools they have. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, tech projects like #Indymedia were the […]
https://hamishcampbell.com/rise-and-fall-of-grassroots-openweb/
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The Fediverse is opening, but there is a cost
With the #Fediverse gaining #mainstreaming attention, we’re entering a familiar cycle, with the influx of well-funded #NGO-branded projects trying to "fix" the #openweb by reshaping it in their own narrowing and to often blinded dead end paths. Take this year’s #chatteringclass event, #FediForum. Alongside breathless praise, last years focus on #Threads joining the #opensocialweb space, we’re seeing the launch of shiny new tools: #BonfireSocial, #Channelorg, #Bounce. That promise […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-fediverse-is-opening-but-there-is-a-cost/
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The wall of funding silence
In the current sprouting landscape of #openweb infrastructure, it’s not just code that gets ignored, it’s the possibility of change itself. Projects like #makeinghistory, part of the wider Open Media Network (#OMN), aren’t asking for much. They’re not flashy, they’re not political in the #mainstreaming sense. They just quietly build the back-end tools that allow people to document their histories, publish from the grassroots, and hold space for the memory of struggle that shape our […] -
The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil
We need to keep highlighting an old but still urgent tension: the intersection of technology and social change. Where one side leans heavily on practical, technical problem-solving. They want working code, functioning systems, and tangible results, not abstract debates. To them, critiques about capitalism shaping code sound like distractions from the "real work." The other side insists that technical problems are social problems. They argue that all code is written by people, shaped by […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-omn-isnt-just-about-media-its-about-building-the-social-soil/
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The #OMN View – The Dogma of Anti-Dogma: Rainbow Gatherings
In the alt paths we need to talk about a circler familiar mess: when movements that are open, non-hierarchical, and anti-authoritarian end up recreating the hierarchical problems they set out to escape. This is the “dogma of anti-dogma”, and you see it everywhere, the example I am using here is in groups like the Rainbow Gatherings. The Rainbow Gatherings have deep roots in 1970s counterculture. Born from the peace and ecology movements, it emerged with a back-to-the-land, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-omn-view-the-dogma-of-anti-dogma-rainbow-gatherings/
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Composting the#techshit funding
Not surprised. This is probably the 10th time we've applied to the #NLnet / #NGI fund over the years. Just heard back: our proposals for #OGB (Open Governance Body), #indymediaback, and #MakeingHistory were not selected - again. “We are very sorry that we cannot offer you support for your good efforts.” Sure, I, appreciate the polite brush-off again. But after so many rejections for solid, urgently needed tech projects that actually fit the funding goals, it's time to name what's […] -
#NLnet #NGI Not surprising - think this is the nearly ten applications we have put into this fund over the last years.
"we have identified the projects we will be further investigating for the February 2025 NGI0 Commons Fund open call. I'm sorry to have to inform you that your project "Open Governance Body #OGB" (2025-02-032), "#indymediaback" (2025-02-036) and "#Makeinghistory" (2025-02-040) unfortunately were not among those selected.
Again, we are very sorry that we cannot offer you support for your good efforts. We hope you are not discouraged, and are able to secure funding elsewhere .
And do trust that we have your funding need and the outline of your project in the back of our head from now on, and so we might come back to you if an opportunity arises (unless you asked us to destroy your contact details in the application form, in which case we will do so)."
Well, let's keep applying for these native #openweb projects. But looks like the is no #mainstreaming support for alt activism tech - we have to do this our selves you can support this work here https://opencollective.com/open-media-network
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Compost lies using #4opens horizontal networks
Pull conflict into shared space (#openprocess #4opens #trustflows). Poison thrives in private channels, so you gently but consistently move things: from DMs → into group threadsfrom whispers → into meetingsfrom vague → into specific This doesn’t eliminate conflict, it grounds it. Sunlight doesn’t solve everything, but it stops the worst rot. From “how do we stop bad behaviour?” To “how do we stop bad behaviour from breaking the commons?”. The #4opens makes many people […] -
Dev test work for Makinghistory application
The #makinghistory project is a decentralized, open-source archiving and storytelling network designed to preserve and amplify grassroots histories. It’s founded on the idea that history isn’t written by the winners - it’s made by those who resist, build, and care. Using digitized collections like the CampbellFamily archive as a seed, the project invites communities to reclaim their narratives through shared, federated networks. This isn’t just another data repository - it’s a […]https://hamishcampbell.com/dev-test-work-for-makinghistory-application/
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Messy language feeds back into messy culture
Most people 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. […]https://hamishcampbell.com/messy-language-feeds-back-into-our-culture/
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A letter from the margins of the #openweb hamishcampbell.com/a-letter-fro... I am still digging #makinghistory #OMN #indymediaback #OGB #RIPENCC #NGI #NLnet
A letter from the margins of t... -
A letter from the margins of the #openweb https://hamishcampbell.com/a-letter-from-the-margins-of-the-openweb/ I am still digging #makinghistory #OMN #indymediaback #OGB
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A letter from the margins of the #openweb
All the #OMN projects I’ve worked on over the years, from #OGB to #indymediaback, are not directly about social change. They are about creating the possibility of social change. A subtle, but critical difference. We don’t claim to have the answers. What we do offer are tools, networks, and processes that make it easier for people to imagine that the world can be different, and then help them to take the first step. Yet here's the mess that keeps being pushed over us. We are told this […]https://hamishcampbell.com/a-letter-from-the-margins-of-the-openweb/