home.social

#mainstreaming — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #mainstreaming, aggregated by home.social.

  1. A fluff view of current tech we need to compost

    You know, when people are heading over a cliff, I'm more than happy to be "left behind". This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” is actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, as Elena Rossini says with the same #dotcons logic - PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). This tech mess illustrates, if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb - it’s […]

    hamishcampbell.com/a-fluff-vie

  2. A fluff view of current tech we need to compost

    You know, when people are heading over a cliff, I'm more than happy to be "left behind". This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” is actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, as Elena Rossini says with the same #dotcons logic - PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). This tech mess illustrates is if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb - it’s […]

    hamishcampbell.com/a-fluff-vie

  3. A fluff view of current tech we need to compost

    This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” → actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, with the same #dotcons logic. PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). What this tech mess illustrates is if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb - it’s #closedweb in a mask, ignoring existing commons is an easy to see the red flag. Why is this a mess? […]

    hamishcampbell.com/a-fluff-vie

  4. A fluff view of current tech we need to compost

    This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” → actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, with the same #dotcons logic. PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). What this tech mess illustrates is if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb - it’s #closedweb in a mask, ignoring existing commons is an easy to see the red flag. Why is this a mess? […]

    hamishcampbell.com/a-fluff-vie

  5. A fluff view of current tech we need to compost

    You know, when people are heading over a cliff, I'm more than happy to be "left behind". This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” is actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, as Elena Rossini says with the same #dotcons logic - PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). This tech mess illustrates, if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb - it’s […]

    hamishcampbell.com/a-fluff-vie

  6. The Meta-Mess of the “Open” Social Web

    Signal, Noise, and the missing ground - We have a signal-to-noise problem, that if we’re serious about “paths to growth,” we need to be honest about the paths and people pushing us down paths we’re actually walking. The problem was never just the #dotcons platforms. It’s what we build instead - and more importantly, how and why we build it. Right now, too much of the #openweb conversation is caught in narrative loops of reframing stagnation as growth, critique as progress and […]

    hamishcampbell.com/the-meta-me

  7. The End of the “Peace Dividend” and the Return of History

    #Identitypolitics, is what happens when liberalism turns inward and fragments - call it mad liberalism. #Culturewar is what happens when that same liberalism hardens and lashes out - bad liberalism. Both look like opposites, but they come from the same place. The uncomfortable part is both were pushed onto the "left" as the way to fight #neoliberalism the very system that’s been tearing apart the social fabric for decades. Instead of building collective power, we pushed endless identity […]

    hamishcampbell.com/the-end-of-

  8. 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 […]

    hamishcampbell.com/actually-so

  9. 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 […]

    hamishcampbell.com/actually-so

  10. 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 […]

    hamishcampbell.com/actually-so

  11. 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, […]

    hamishcampbell.com/actually-so

  12. 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 […]

    hamishcampbell.com/actually-so

  13. #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 […]

    hamishcampbell.com/omn-groundi

  14. #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 […]

    hamishcampbell.com/omn-groundi

  15. #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 […]

    hamishcampbell.com/omn-groundi

  16. In the #OMN hashtag story, #PGA (Peoples' Global Action) represents the kind of horizontal, grassroots, anti-capitalist international organising that prefigures the #openweb - a network of movements that refused both corporate capture and top-down politics, built on direct action and solidarity across borders rather than #NGO bureaucracy or #mainstreaming compromise.

    hamishcampbell.com/?s=PGA

  17. In the #OMN hashtag story, #Oxford functions as a grounded local instance of normal tensions - a city that embodies the contradiction between elitist institutional power (#mainstreaming, #NGO culture, #deathcult economics) and genuine grassroots community, used as a real-world grounded path for #openweb organising and the #4opens approach.

    hamishcampbell.com/?s=Oxford

  18. #classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism - the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes - and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit, a conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.

    hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

  19. #blinded refers to being so captured by #mainstreaming tech orthodoxy and ideological "common sense" - particularly #neoliberalism and #dotcons culture - that you no longer see, or refuse to see, the harms those systems cause or any alternative paths that exist outside them.

    hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

  20. A fresh look at the mess we need to compost

    In every activist space, grassroots project, every loose collective, you get people who bring mess in the wrong way - sniping, backbiting, constant undermining. Call it ego, trauma, status games, burnout… it doesn’t matter. What matters is, this friction is normal, it’s part of the #mess we can’t avoid. The mistake is thinking we can eliminate it. You can’t, but you can design for it. That’s where the #OMN path is useful: don’t try to “fix the people,” build processes that […]

    hamishcampbell.com/a-fresh-loo

  21. “Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

    The servent of the #nastyfew wispering to the #deathcult ists liberals From a #OMN perspective, the mess isn’t just the wording - it’s the ideology embedded in the wording, and how that shapes behaviour over time. “Digital sovereignty” sounds harmless, progressive in a liberal policy context. But if you run this through a #KISS ideological lens, its more mess rooted in control, borders, and authority - concepts historically tied to state power. That’s why it’s so easy for the […]

    hamishcampbell.com/digital-sov

  22. “Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

    The servent of the #nastyfew wispering in the ear of the #deathcult ists liberals From a #OMN perspective, the mess isn’t just the wording - it’s the ideology embedded in the wording, and how that shapes behaviour over time. “Digital sovereignty” sounds harmless, progressive in a liberal policy context. But if you run this through a #KISS ideological lens, its more mess rooted in control, borders, and authority - concepts historically tied to state power. That’s why it’s so easy […]

    hamishcampbell.com/digital-sov

  23. “Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

    The servent of the #nastyfew wispering to the #deathcult ists liberals From a #OMN perspective, the mess isn’t just the wording - it’s the ideology embedded in the wording, and how that shapes behaviour over time. “Digital sovereignty” sounds harmless, progressive in a liberal policy context. But if you run this through a #KISS ideological lens, its more mess rooted in control, borders, and authority - concepts historically tied to state power. That’s why it’s so easy for the […]

    hamishcampbell.com/digital-sov

  24. “Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

    The servent of the #nastyfew wispering to the #deathcult ists liberals From a #OMN perspective, the mess isn’t just the wording - it’s the ideology embedded in the wording, and how that shapes behaviour over time. “Digital sovereignty” sounds harmless, progressive in a liberal policy context. But if you run this through a #KISS ideological lens, its more mess rooted in control, borders, and authority - concepts historically tied to state power. That’s why it’s so easy for the […]

    hamishcampbell.com/digital-sov

  25. “Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

    The servent of the #nastyfew wispering in the ear of the #deathcult ists liberals From a #OMN perspective, the mess isn’t just the wording - it’s the ideology embedded in the wording, and how that shapes behaviour over time. “Digital sovereignty” sounds harmless, progressive in a liberal policy context. But if you run this through a #KISS ideological lens, its more mess rooted in control, borders, and authority - concepts historically tied to state power. That’s why it’s so easy […]

    hamishcampbell.com/digital-sov

  26. People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty

    What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea - people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively - is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible. So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of […]

    hamishcampbell.com/people-proc

  27. People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty

    What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea - people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively - is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible. So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of […]

    hamishcampbell.com/people-proc

  28. People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty

    What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea - people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively - is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible. So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of […]

    hamishcampbell.com/people-proc

  29. People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty

    What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea - people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively - is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible. So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of […]

    hamishcampbell.com/people-proc

  30. People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty

    What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea - people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively - is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible. So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of […]

    hamishcampbell.com/people-proc

  31. 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, […]

    hamishcampbell.com/the-dotcons

  32. Rebuilding Journalism as Commons (not a product)

    https://hamishcampbell.com/news-culture-on-the-fediverse/ It should be obvious that we need a path back to good journalism - journalism that sheds light on facts, connects the dots, and lets people trace those dots back to sources. This is what allows us to share, question, and discuss within our own trusted communities, and then spread that knowledge outward through federation, always linking back to the source. Right now, the #mainstreaming path is broken. It’s sometimes hard for people […]

    hamishcampbell.com/rebuilding-

  33. 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 […]

    hamishcampbell.com/gates-vs-br

  34. The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb

    YOU can’t do social change or challenge without annoying people If you think you can, you’re probably play-acting - and part of the problem - does that annoy you? If it does… maybe sit with that. 🙂 Food for thought, #4opens is a shovel for composting. The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb. The tech - like ActivityPub - grew out of that culture. It wasn’t built by #mainstreaming interests. Now money is flowing in, and with it comes risk of […]

    hamishcampbell.com/the-value-o

  35. What We Can Learn from Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders

    In #mainstreaming and alt political cultures there’s a constant call in messy times for “strong leaders” to cut through the chaos, but this is the wrong path. What Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders actually show is something more uncomfortable and more useful that real change doesn’t come from strong individuals - it comes from movements we don’t fully control. They were signals, not saviours. Both figures emerged on the left because something deeper was already shifting with […]

    hamishcampbell.com/what-we-can

  36. The Digital Commons: The Ground We Already Stand On

    At #NOAW event I talked a lot about the digital commons so thought it might be useful to write a post grounding this. The digital commons are not a future vision, it’s something we already have. At its simplest, the digital commons are the widely used #4opens digital resources of software, knowledge, data, and culture created collectively, governed by communities, and made available for public (re)use. This is the native path of the #openweb it's been around for a long time, it might be […]

    hamishcampbell.com/the-digital

  37. Thinking of workshops to run at “Nodes On A Web” #NOAW unconference

    Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, […]

    hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of

  38. Thinking of workshops to run at “Nodes On A Web” #NOAW unconference

    Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, […]

    hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of

  39. Thinking of workshops to run at “Nodes On A Web” #NOAW unconference

    Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, […]

    hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of

  40. Thinking of workshops to run at “Nodes On A Web” #NOAW unconference

    Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, […]

    hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of

  41. Thinking of workshops to run at “Nodes On A Web” #NOAW unconference

    Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, […]

    hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of

  42. Disciplined curiosity beats IQ, Oxford

    There is a persistent myth pushed in our culture that intelligence - high IQ, academic credentials, elitist education - leads naturally to clear thinking. My organic experience suggests the opposite, what matters is disciplined, skeptical, freethinking curiosity. Without that, intelligence simply becomes a tool for defending whatever assumptions people already hold. This is one of the reasons many academic environments produce people who are, bluntly, credulous. Not because they lack […]

    hamishcampbell.com/disciplined

  43. Shovels, Hashtags, and Revolutions: Roots of the #openweb

    It’s obvious to everyone paying attention that the relentless push of #mainstreaming over the last forty years has not made society healthier or more stable. Quite the opposite, the result has been accelerating social disintegration and the rapid expansion of #climatechaos. When the current trajectory continues, the consequences are catastrophic. Over the next fifty years we are looking at millions dead and billions displaced by climate breakdown, ecological collapse, and the political […]

    hamishcampbell.com/shovels-has

  44. Policy churn, selective memory, and the mess on repeat

    There’s a familiar pattern in foreign policy debates: outrage at the current regime, amnesia about how it got there. Yes, the current government of #Iran is repressive. It crushes dissent, restricts freedoms, and enforces authoritarian rule. None of that needs soft-pedalling, but if we’re at all serious about understanding the world - rather than just reacting to #fashernista headlines - we also have to look at how situation came to be. In 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister […]

    hamishcampbell.com/policy-chur

  45. Public Money, Private Hype: From Blockchain to AI – and the #FOSS Path Less Taken

    In tech funding, over the last decade, the #EU poured hundreds of millions of euros into the #blockchain mess. The promise has proven to be illusion, we built no working transformation: trustless systems, frictionless governance or new economic layers for Europe. The reality? By any honest social metric, 99.9% of that public funding was poured straight down the drain. Now we are lining up to do the same with AI. Another wave of hundreds of millions, based on another cycle of hype, feeding […]

    hamishcampbell.com/public-mone

  46. 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 […]

    hamishcampbell.com/why-good-fa

  47. The #NastyFew Are Not Hidden – They’re Integrated

    The #NastyFew are not hiding in the shadows, they’re integrated. The so-called “Epstein files” are not the record of one predator. They are a snapshot of how #mainstreaming works at elitist levels, a map of proximity around the people who default-run the mess we call society. Billionaires. Prime ministers. Cabinet officials. Tech founders. Bankers. Cultural icons. From Bill Gates to Elon Musk. From Reid Hoffman to Peter Thiel. From Ehud Barak to Prince Andrew. Different countries. […]

    hamishcampbell.com/the-nastyfe

  48. Most people sense that something is off

    Meany people see the world degrading, enclosure accelerating. They see climate, politics, media all bending toward extraction. And even when they can see the trajectory, they feel powerless, so they cope by optimise their careers. They scroll. They argue. They consume. They retreat into irony. From birth, we’re trained into one core assumption: There Is No Alternative (#TINA). Not because it’s true, but because every dominant institution reinforces it: Schools train compliance. Media […]

    hamishcampbell.com/most-people

  49. The tension that’s pushed back into the fediverse the last few years

    DRAFT Scale changes everything as human behaviour does not stay the same as groups scale. The instincts that helped small tribes survive - loyalty, signalling belonging, defending boundaries, competing for status, consolidating influence - functioned well within natural limits. In small groups, feedback was immediate. Consequences were visible. Power was constrained by proximity and material reality. But when those same instincts operate at contempery social scale, inside complex […]

    hamishcampbell.com/the-real-te

  50. Composting the myths: power, hidden religions, and why the #openweb matters

    Let’s look at an example of how belief systems shape political reality. Some people still deliberately conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This confusion isn’t neutral, it shapes how discussions are framed, who gets silenced, and which political paths remain possible. Let’s be clear: Anti-Semitism is racism. It targets Jewish people as a people. It is hate, exclusion, and violence, and it must be opposed wherever it appears. Anti-Zionism is political opposition to a state […]

    hamishcampbell.com/mess-can-be