#indymediaback — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #indymediaback, aggregated by home.social.
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The language around #climatechaos is changing
For years, climate breakdown was treated as distant, a problem for activists, scientists, future generations or places somewhere else. That blinded view is now harder to sustain. Heat, fires, floods, crop failures, infrastructure disruption, rising insurance costs and the growing difficulty of simply keeping homes and communities safe are making climate disruption part of our everyday life. As we are talking about tech here - the important question for the #OMN is therefore not only how do […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-language-around-climatechaos-is-changing/
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Religion, mystery and the #openweb
I am not religious, but that does not mean religion is something that can only be dismissed as irrational, stupid or obsolete. There is a useful distinction between believing in a religion and understanding the social, cultural and philosophical work that religion has historically done. This matters for the #OMN because we are interested in how human beings make meaning, build communities and organise themselves when they don't have complete knowledge of the world. We don't know everything - […]https://hamishcampbell.com/religion-mystery-and-the-openweb/
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OMN: Activity, culture and why Soviet experiments matter
One of the interesting things about the history of the #Fediverse is how many of its ideas come from places that, at first glance, seem completely unrelated to social media or network technology. #ActivityPub is a good example - the word activity carries a much older intellectual history, including the work of Soviet psychologist Alexei Leontiev, who developed what became known as activity theory. His work grew out of the cultural-historical psychology of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, and […]https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-activity-culture-and-why-soviet-experiments-matter/
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The individual, is not, the starting point for the #OMN
One of the most useful ways to understand the mess we are in today is to ask a deceptively simple question - what comes first - the individual or the network? #Mainstreaming economics startes with the individual, were sociology, anthropology and related traditions start somewhere else - with relationships, institutions, communities and the social structures into which individuals are born. This difference matters enormously, when we start thinking about technology, politics, economics and […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-individual-is-not-the-starting-point-for-the-omn/
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The #openweb needs diversity, not monoculture
The problems we face in the #openweb are often presented as technology problems. Which protocol, platform, licence, federation path, software? Which standard? These questions matter, but they are not the foundations of the problem. A lot of what we are seeing is really a cultural clash. Different parts of the alternative tech world have different ideas about what technology is for, who it should serve, how much control is acceptable, how open something needs to be, and how much compromise is […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-openweb-needs-diversity-not-monoculture/
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This summer #climatechaos
This summer, heat, fires, the soon to come winter floods and insurance withdrawals will make #climatechaos harder to treat as something happening somewhere else. For years, climate breakdown was framed as an activist issue, something discussed by environmental groups while mainstream politics carried on with business as usual. That is changing, people are experiencing the consequences: extreme heat, flooding, damaged homes, rising insurance costs, failing infrastructure and growing […]https://hamishcampbell.com/this-summer-climatechaos-is-mainstream/
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Grassroots #openweb infrastructure is need for a different future
For 50 years we have worshipped the #deathcult - endless growth, extraction, competition and individualism - and now we are living with the damage that this has done to our society and the living world. The current hard shift to the right won't fix any of this, it simply empowers the #nastyfew to surf the apocalypse while more and more of us are left fighting over the scraps. Blind hatred and political ignorance are not solutions. Neither is pretending that the past 50 years of "common […]https://hamishcampbell.com/grassroots-openweb-infrastructure-is-need-for-a-different-future/
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20 years of #dotcons selling libertarian individualism has pushed aside the collective politics that once made the #openweb revolutionary.
For 20 years the #geekproblem helped turn "left tech" into the #closedweb. That's a disaster we can't keep repeating.
No prat fights, we need alternatives: #IndymediaBack, #OMN, #OGB, #MakingHistory. To rebuild collective power.
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#IndymediaBack is a reboot of the original #Indymedia: decentralized, grassroots media built around open publishing and activist participation.
The point isn't nostalgia, it's learning from the old #fashernistas/#geekproblem split and avoiding another round of tribalism and control politics.
The reboot is about rebuilding the path toward decentralized structures and an #OMN that supports direct democracy, open publishing and anti-authoritarian organising.
This time we also have hashtags, metadata and the semantic #openweb to connect the media commons.
The challenge is simple: don't repeat the old mistakes. Build trust, keep it open, and don't let control become the culture.
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One of our mistakes is treating every #fashionista project as if it were native #openweb.
Too often, grassroots ideas are picked up, systematised, and reshaped into something acceptable to #mainstreaming institutions. The tools may remain "open", but the social process and governance shift.
The #Fediverse shows both sides of this. It has revived the #openweb, but it also carries the assumptions of the wider culture. Without care, we reproduce the same hierarchies, gatekeeping, and #geekproblem we were trying to escape.
The answer isn't rejection, it's composting, use the #4opens to ask simple questions:
Is the data open? Is the code open? Are the standards open? Most importantly, is the process open?
If not, we're probably looking at another layer of #mainstreaming rather than genuine commons. Let's balance the repeating inherited agendas and start building native grassroots alternatives please.
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Four years ago I said:
"Hey #fashernistas and #chatteringclasses, stop obsessing over #Musk."
Since then, Musk has bought #Twitter, renamed it X, lurched through one controversy after another, to become a central path in the culture wars, and turned himself into the story. Millions have spent years reacting to him.
Meanwhile, the real issue hasn't changed. The problem was never one billionaire. In tech, it was always our dependence on centralised #dotcons and the #mainstreaming attention economy.
Don't let personalities distract you from building alternatives. #indymediaback #OMN and #OGB are all #KISS grassroots projects focused on growing the #openweb and the commons.
Get off your knees, step away from the #mainstreaming news cycle, and build a future instead.
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The early #openweb grew from a #DIY culture. People did not wait for permission. They built websites, shared code, created independent media, made tools, organised communities and experimented with new ways of communicating.
The power was not just in the technology. It was in the surrounding culture:
Do it yourself.
Share what you learn.
Build with others.The problem is that DIY can stop at the first step. A lot of radical spaces become focused on identity, aesthetics and scene-building - the #fashernista layer - while missing the second part - Organisation.
The challenge is creating structures that survive. The #OMN idea is about reconnecting these two things: DIY + organisation.
The creativity of the #openweb with the practical need to build networks, memory, trust and shared infrastructure.
A living commons, the future needs people who make things, maintain things and connect things. The internet was never just about tools. It was about people building together.
#OMN #openweb #4opens #commons #fediverse #DIY #indymediaback
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Grassroots #openweb activism has a history of rising, falling and adapting. The UK has seen waves of independent media, digital organising and networked activism - each learning from what came before.
The challenge is #rebooting an #openweb that stays native, open, decentralised, creative without becoming locked into the control systems it is trying to escape. We need pragmatic approaches that protect people while keeping spaces open for collective action.
Activism has challenges, groups can lose their original purpose when funding, institutions and professionalisation reshape their culture. Staying independent and connected to the communities that created the movement is hard - but necessary.
The last 40 years of political drift, from #neoliberalism to today’s hard rightward shift, shows the cost of failing to build strong alternatives.
The #OMN is part of this ongoing work of open media, decentralised networks and the connection between technology and social justice.
The future needs both the technical and the social - tools, culture, memory and movements.
#KISS build the commons. Keep the networks open.
#OMN #indymediaback #4opens #openweb #fediverse #commons #activism #opensource #socialjustice
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Social justice movements don’t start from the top. They grow from the ground, from people and communities affected by injustice who organise, experiment and build change.
To grow these movements wider, we need spaces that allow open and unexpected connections. The #openweb and #fediverse matter because they create room for communication, outside corporate and state control.
Projects like #OMN and #indymediaback are about rebuilding these grassroots networks as commons.
History matters too. Movements need memory. If we forget past struggles, working practices and victories, every generation has to start again. Projects like #makinghistory preserve the knowledge that lets future movements learn and grow.
There is also the constant challenge of co-option. Funding and institutions slowly reshape movements, changing their culture and priorities. Staying independent is difficult - but history shows it is possible.
We need both the spiky and the fluffy paths, change comes from growing alternatives while pushing back against the systems that create the problems.
#OMN #indymediaback #4opens #openweb #fediverse #commons #activism #socialjustice
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The commons and the problem of power
"After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries… to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned." Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall The starting point is simple, Marx was right […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-commons-and-the-problem-of-power/
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The challenge now is diversity, not picking one winner. I’d argue #Mastodon is drifting in the wrong direction - not because what it is doing is wrong, but because balance matters.
Mastodon has become very good at outreach into the #mainstreaming world. That is useful, and it is a valid path. The problem is when one path becomes the whole #Fediverse.
The #openweb was never meant to be one codebase, one culture, one governance model. It grows through diversity of value.
The issue is that Mastodon is now carrying more #NGO thinking, more institutional habits, and more mainstream assumptions. That doesn’t make it bad - but it does mean it is less healthy as the only “native” path.
The answer is not attacking Mastodon. The answer is growing the wider ecosystem: more codebases, more diversity, more grassroots governance, more messy creativity.
A healthy Fediverse needs many roots, not one trunk.
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#FOSS governance is digital #feudalism - coders as gatekeepers, projects organised around personal authority.
The lesson from history is simple, never trust a king, even a well-meaning one.
The #meta problem is that we keep repeating old power patterns inside new technology. The libertarian “just fork it” answer feels increasingly pointless in this stage of the mess. We need better collective governance, not just more individual exit routes.
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Technology is never just a tool
Let's be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument - “you just dislike this because…” - instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed. The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty […] -
The tools we need to compost the #deathcult
The current mess and tragedy is that the tools we need most are often the first things that stressed, messy, #elitist systems defund, discredit, and dismantle. Why? Because these tools threaten the psychological certainty that people cling to when the world feels unstable. The ability to sit with uncertainty, to question assumptions, to admit complexity. These are not weaknesses, they are survival tools. Yes, this is a mess we need to compost, the #nothingnew path to work on this is about […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-tools-we-need-to-compost-the-deathcult/
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Rainbow Culture: The Dream, the Mess and the Commons
The first thing many people notice about a Rainbow Gathering is what is "missing". There are no ticket booths, no commercial stages, no vendors selling branded experiences, no cash registers. Thousands of people gather in a forest to create temporary villages and cities to share food, build kitchens, make music, care for each other and then disappear again. The absence of money can seem like a strange fantasy, but the deeper story is that it is not a just a rule, the refusal of commerce was […]https://hamishcampbell.com/rainbow-culture-the-dream-the-mess-and-the-commons/
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The Rainbow Lesson: Building Commons Beyond the Market
One of the things missing from conversations about rebuilding radical networks is that we defult to looking first at the technology. The #OMN question is different - What are the social systems that allow alternatives to survive? A useful example comes from the history of the Rainbow Gatherings. To an outsider, the strangest thing about a Rainbow Gathering is likely the hippies, the second is the absence of money. Thousands of people gather in forests, share food, organise care, create […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-rainbow-lesson-building-commons-beyond-the-market/
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There is some talk about recreating radical media networks.
Before we reboot #indymedia or build new altmedia networks, we need some simple, clear understandings of why they failed before.
And I use “simple” and “understandings” deliberately - not “the answer” or one single explanation.
Because the different views of why #indymedia and altmedia failed are not a side issue. They are part of why they failed.
Different groups saw different problems:
Was it technology?
Was it governance?
Was it burnout?
Was it funding?
Was it culture?
Was it the wider shift to the #dotcons?A reboot cannot ignore tensions. It has to create a bridge between the different lessons, otherwise we rebuild the same problems.
The goal is not to recreate the past.
The goal is to take the useful seeds, compost the failures, and grow something that fits the next phase of the #openweb.
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Q: No comments is the way to go, but the concern is that the same moderation fights will just move into the editorial work?
A: The answer is to distribute the editorial process and build the collective on trust.
If publishing power is spread out, there is less of a single gate to fight over.The mistake is the path of solve social problems by adding more rules, more controls, more moderation systems - creating more sticks for people to pick up and hit each other with.
A healthy #indymedia path needs shared responsibility, open processes and trust between contributors.
The aim is not to control the commons.
The aim is to grow one.
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When Technologists Forget the Warning
The thing about #techbro culture is that some of the most #elitists people grew up loving stories that warned us about the #techshit they are building. They read the dystopias, watched the films, they understood the dangers of unchecked capital, concentrated power, surveillance, artificial intelligence, inequality, and corporate control. Then many of them decided “Great idea. Let’s build it.” as the #geekproblem made them think they knew better. This is what our #fashionista class call […]https://hamishcampbell.com/when-technology-forgets-the-warning/
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Rethinking Grassroots Tech Funding
Building beyond the #deathcult - Our current model of #tech funding and developer agendas is not neutral. The way we fund technology shapes the kind of technology we build. For the last 20 years, the dominant tech culture has followed the same path: venture capital growth platform monopolies extraction of attention and data endless scaling short-term metrics private ownership of public infrastructure This has produced #techshit - technology built because it can make money, not because […]https://hamishcampbell.com/rethinking-grassroots-tech-funding/
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In the era of #climatechaos, people #blocking social change in tech are not just slowing things down - they are helping maintain systems that are driving social and ecological breakdown.
The question is - what do we build instead?
Different paths already exist. #4opens #openweb #OGB #indymediaback #OMN are examples of social tech trying to move away from the failures of #mainstreaming and towards more open, collective ways of organising.
The challenge is mediation: separating signal from noise, building alternatives, and creating space for change.
Take a moment. Think. Then act.
Don’t become part of the blockage. Thanks.
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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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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.