#open-web — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #open-web, aggregated by home.social.
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You rarely get anywhere simply by renaming things. All you do is lose the historical thread, then recreate the same mess under a new name.
This is one of the sins of liberalism and the “post-politics” crew: #stupidindividualism, where everyone reinvents the wheel instead of building on shared history and community.
The #deathcult is simply a metaphor for the invisible power of #neoliberalism. These metaphors and hashtags are ways of making mainstream thinking visible and making it dirty.
But they only work if a community or affinity group uses them together, consistently and collectively.
Otherwise, we just fall back into the same old #stupidindividualism we are trying to change and challenge.
#OMN #OpenWeb #Commons #4opens #Mainstreaming #Neoliberalism
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Composting the Mess is a metaphor for grabbing a spade and getting to work.
We take the mess we've created, the #techshit, failed ideas, broken systems and bad habits, and turn it into something productive.
Not endless complaining. Transformation and regeneration.
Compost the old mess so it can nourish new growth in the #openweb
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Making #mainstreaming thinking dirty is part of the work. Metaphors like #deathcult and #stupidindividualism make the failures of mainstream thinking visible, and, hopefully, less attractive.
But the metaphors only work if people use them together. We need affinity groups that turn shared language into shared action, building alternatives rather than just complaining about the mess.
Culture changes when people organise, repeat the ideas, and build something different. Make the old thinking unattractive.
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There’s a strong need to stop complaining about the situation and start building alternatives.
Metaphors and critiques should be rallying cries for action, not just more content. We need to move beyond criticism and do the hard, messy work of creating something better.
That’s what #OMN is turning critique into constructive, community-based action.
Stop complaining. Start building.
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Build affinity groups, communities that share critical views and are committed to building alternatives. #Hashtags help rally and connect people, but the real work is the relationships and actions we build together.
The #OMN needs tangible projects — constructive, community-based alternatives that move beyond the failures of the past.
Use shared metaphors and hashtags to galvanise people, but don't stop at posting. Turn critique into compost: something that can nourish new growth.
The goal is simple: build real community, build alternatives, and grow something better together.
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I kind of like the strong metaphor of house slaves and field slaves, these people are the metaphorical house slaves. The greybeards and the second sell-out of the #openweb https://hamishcampbell.com/the-greybeards-and-the-second-sell-out-of-the-openweb/
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Bom artigo de Bela Lobato na revista brasileira Super Interessante sobre a "indie web".
(via o blogue da @anarodrigues, que também fala no artigo)
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THE FEDIVERSE CERTAINLY HASN'T
ABOLISHED ARSEHOLES 💎I spent part of this morning answering a fairly large pile of comments on my posts. And somewhere between my breathwork, lighting the fire and drinking my coffee, I noticed something.
NOBODY WAS BEING HORRIBLE.
People disagreed with me. People corrected things I said. People brought different experiences and different political views. There were jokes, arguments, questions and tangents. But almost none of that peculiar tension I became accustomed to on the big closed social platforms.
YOU KNOW THE FEELING.
Someone says something mildly contentious, and suddenly twelve strangers are preparing for the next Battle of Facebook. I haven't experienced much of that here. Perhaps I've simply been lucky. The Fediverse certainly hasn't abolished arseholes. Give humanity sufficient time, and I'm confident we'll manage to decentralise those too.
But I wonder whether something structural is happening? The giant platforms discovered that anger, fear and outrage are extraordinarily good at keeping human beings engaged. Conflict isn't necessarily an unfortunate side effect of the system. It can be profitable.
Here, there isn't one enormous corporation deciding what billions of people should see next in order to keep them scrolling. And perhaps that changes the temperature of the room.
THERE'S ANOTHER POSSIBILITY TOO.
Maybe our communities become partly what we practise in them. If disagreement is treated as conversation rather than combat, people begin behaving accordingly. I don't need everyone here to agree with me.
IN FACT, THAT WOULD BE TERRIBLY BORING.
I just rather like being somewhere where disagreement doesn't automatically require a body to reach for a flamethrower. So far, the Fediverse feels less like an audience being managed... and more like people talking.
I hadn't realised how much I'd missed that.
@3goodthings @DigitalCoup @meditation @economics_that_works @startrek
#Fediverse #Mastodon #SocialMedia #OpenWeb #Community #flamethrower #ARSEHOLES
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Mythos and traditions are not only old stories, they are ways groups organise meaning, values and collective action. So if we want to build better social systems, we should consciously grow our own #mythos, stories, values and rituals. Shared culture gives people a sense of purpose and helps bind a movement together. #OMN #commons #openweb
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WHAT IF ADDICTION WAS THE BUSINESS MODEL? 💎
A huge court case is about to test something far more important than whether Facebook and Instagram contain harmful material.
It asks whether the platforms themselves were designed in ways that encouraged compulsive or addictive use among young people, especially children.
California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are arguing that Meta built features into Facebook and Instagram that drove engagement at the expense of young users, while Meta strongly denies the allegations.
And look at what the states want changed.
Algorithms. Autoplay videos. Likes. Stories. Infinite scrolling.
Not just the content.
THE DESIGN.
There is an uncomfortable parallel here with gambling.
For years, we told gamblers to control themselves. Gamble responsibly. Know when to stop.
Eventually, we began asking a different question.
WHAT WAS THE INDUSTRY DOING TO MAKE STOPPING SO DIFFICULT?
Australia is wrestling with that question now as it tries to regulate gambling harm. And it isn't easy, because you are regulating businesses that make money when people keep playing.
Now look at social media.
The endless scroll. The little rewards. The notifications. The constant nudges. The possibility that the next swipe will show you something wonderful, outrageous or irresistible.
KEEP GOING.
Just one more.
For years, we’ve talked about social media as though the problem was mostly what appeared on the screen.
Maybe we were looking at the wrong thing.
Maybe we should also have been looking at the machinery underneath it.
Because these features aren't decorative. Engagement is fundamental to how these companies make their money.
Meta says the potential financial exposure could be as high as $1.4 trillion. The states put the figure much lower, around $200 billion. Either way, the case could force fundamental changes to how Facebook and Instagram actually function.
Perhaps the next great argument about social media won’t be:
“What should we allow people to post?”
Perhaps it will be:
SHOULD WE ALLOW PLATFORMS TO BE DESIGNED TO KEEP US HOOKED?
We eventually learned to ask that question about gambling.
Perhaps it's time we asked it about social media.
@3goodthings @DigitalCoup @meditation @economics_that_works @startrek
#Meta #Facebook #Instagram #SocialMedia #Technology #OpenWeb
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Jacques & Nicole from France just supported FediBoard with $100.
Merci beaucoup à vous deux! 💖
Every contribution keeps this independent project alive and the open web growing. 🙏 -
THE FEDIVERSE DOESN’T JUST NEED TO BE BETTER.
IT NEEDS TO FEEL BETTER 💎I’ve been back using Mastodon seriously for a couple of months, and I’d forgotten how good the open web can be. No algorithm deciding what I’m allowed to see. No billionaires rearranging the furniture. No Facebook jail, and best of all, conversations with actual living people.
But there is one thing I think matters enormously if we want more people to come here and, crucially, stay here.
Speed.
MASTODON CAN FEEL VERY SLOW.
Click. WAIT.
Open a thread. WAIT.
Load notifications. WAIT.It sounds trivial. It isn’t. People have spent years using apps where everything responds almost instantly. When they arrive somewhere new, and it feels sluggish, they don't think, “Ah, decentralised architecture.”
They think, “This is clunky.” And they leave.
The encouraging bit is that Mastodon is being actively developed. The development team has grown considerably. Mastodon 4.6 arrived in June, 4.7 is already in beta, and there is continuing work on the backend, web interface and infrastructure.
But I wonder whether speed should be treated as a feature in its own right? Not another button. Not another clever option.
JUST MAKE THE BLOODY THING FAST.
Because the Fediverse doesn't only need to be freer than the corporate social networks.
IT NEEDS TO FEEL BETTER TO USE.
That may be the one thing that persuades people to stay.
@3goodthings @DigitalCoup @meditation @economics_that_works @startrek
#Mastodon #Fediverse #OpenWeb #SocialMedia #Technology #people #social #networks #billionaires #decentralised #architecture #living
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The Politics of Ignorance https://hamishcampbell.com/the-politics-of-ignorance/ preserving the #openweb is not a technical hobby, it is part of preserving our collective ability to think.
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The Politics of Ignorance
One of the important ideas in the sociology of science is also one of the easiest to misunderstand: knowledge is socially produced. This does not mean that scientists simply make things up, it means something much more practical. Science is a human activity, it requires people, institutions, money, equipment, archives, universities, laboratories, communities and time. What we choose to investigate - and what we choose not to investigate - is therefore shaped by society. That means there is […] -
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 on this site - the important question for the #OMN is therefore not only […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-language-around-climatechaos-is-changing/
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While I like the new client-side media processing (https://make.wordpress.org/core/2026/07/22/client-side-media-processing-in-wordpress-7-1/) feature coming today in WordPress 7.1, I really don’t like that it’s (at least for now) a Chromium only feature. So neither Safari nor Firefox can handle media processing on client-side at the moment. A real bummer for the open web …
https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2026/no-client-side-media-processing-in-non-chromium/ #Chrome #Chromium #Firefox #OpenWeb #Safari #WordPress -
“the #hackers were AI agents — software that can perform multi-step cognitive tasks without human involvement. #OpenAI had built them using a combination of models, including a powerful new one that is as yet unreleased. Their success in their designated task made waves across the world.
Last month the agents were able to break free of a test environment without internet access, crawl the #OpenWeb and eventually #hack the systems of the popular #software platform #HuggingFace — without the knowledge or permission of any human operators.
They also displayed an entirely new ability — to #communicate and #cooperate to complete a #task. The #AIAgent swarm left messages for one another on an internal message board they assembled, sharing code vulnerabilities to help orchestrate their escape”
Can anyone confirm this?
#TheGibson / #AI / #AIStories <https://archive.md/9q3uH> / <https://www.ft.com/content/a9947be4-5c0c-47ee-acae-a2aeaf01a0a0> -
Pasted from ChatGPT or Claude lately? The em dashes, curly quotes, and invisible Unicode characters are still in there.
AI Text Cleanup runs entirely in your browser. Five toggleable rules. A before-and-after strike-through view so you see every artifact it found.…
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Religion, mystery and the #openweb
https://hamishcampbell.com/religion-mystery-and-the-openweb/
🫧 via https://bubbles.town/entry/44769475 -
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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"There are genuine opportunities to align the interests of AI and accessibility, but that alignment cannot be taken for granted. Plaintext documentation optimized for a language model is not the same as well-structured HTML for a screen reader. If the benefit for accessibility is assumed rather than intentionally designed, the result may be superficial or illusory.
However, the public must not accept that incidental accessibility benefits arising from AI development are an unqualified good. Not only is this assumption flawed, but it accepts a hierarchy that disability advocates should be challenging. The implicit premise is that disabled people’s needs require a commercial co-signer before they merit action. When a society is unmoved by decades of advocacy from disabled communities but springs into action when a tech company needs the same accommodation, it reveals whose claims on shared resources are treated as legitimate and whose are treated as optional.
And as AI companies begin to frame machine-readability and robotic infrastructure as accessibility stories, as some already do, the risk of accessibility-washing grows. Starship Technologies, whose delivery robots reportedly blocked a wheelchair user from curb cuts, maintains a dedicated accessibility page touting the robots as a service for disabled customers. Similarly, Agentic AI companies may create agent-friendly content that introduces new accessibility barriers, while claiming credit for accessibility work they are not actually doing."
https://www.techpolicy.press/the-web-is-being-made-accessible-for-ai-not-people/
#AI #AIAgents #LLMs #Accessibility #AgenticAI #Chatbots #OpenWeb
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Most people are #mainstreaming the #deathcult - it has become the default way of thinking, living and organising for many people.
But that default cannot continue. The damage is becoming harder to ignore. We need to challenge the assumptions, build alternatives and make change normal.
The mainstream is not neutral. Change is needed. #OMN #openweb #4opens
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The #OMN cannot be based on the assumption that humans will simply “do the right thing”.
They won’t. And if the system depends on that, it will fail.
The challenge in the era of the #deathcult is building systems that expect mistakes, conflict and bad behaviour, while making it easier for communities to see, challenge and repair them.
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What is the Fediverse, and why should bloggers care?
You keep hearing the word. Fediverse. Maybe in a tech article. Maybe someone told you to leave the big platforms...
https://fediboard.com/blog/what-is-the-fediverse-and-why-should-bloggers-care
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What is the Fediverse, and why should bloggers care?
You keep hearing the word. Fediverse. Maybe in a tech article. Maybe someone told you to leave the big platforms...
https://fediboard.com/blog/what-is-the-fediverse-and-why-should-bloggers-care
#fediverse #openweb #opensocialweb #activitypub
What is the Fediverse, and why... -
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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PAULINE HANSON’S TALENT:
TURNING FEAR INTO VOTES 💎I watched a YouTube video today called: Why Did America Choose a White Supremacist for President?
What struck me was not simply what it said about America. It was what it might be saying about us.
America did not suddenly wake up one morning and become Trumpist. The ground was prepared. People were genuinely struggling. Housing was difficult. Wages were inadequate. Communities were changing. People were frightened, angry and increasingly distrustful of institutions.
Then along came a political movement with a wonderfully simple explanation: YOUR LIFE IS HARD BECAUSE OF THOSE PEOPLE.
Immigrants. Black people. Muslims. Women. Queer people. “Woke” people. Elites. Foreigners. Anyone except the economic and political systems that are actually producing much of the insecurity.
That is the bit Australians should be watching.
Because our problems are real too. Housing really is unaffordable. People are really struggling with food, electricity, and rent. Young people really are wondering whether they will ever own a home. Regional communities really do feel neglected.
And when people are frightened and angry, there is enormous political power in giving them somebody to blame.
One Nation understands this. Pauline Hanson is now talking about a “monocultural” Australia. One Nation talks about putting “Australians first” and increasingly presents immigration and multiculturalism as explanations for problems Australians can see and feel every day.
And people are listening.
One Nation is no longer some amusing little protest party on the edge of Australian politics. Recent polling has put it at roughly a quarter or more of the national primary vote.
That should get our attention.
But there is an even greater danger. Trumpism is not really a political party. It is a political method.
Create grievance. Find an enemy. Tell people their country has been stolen from them. Promise to give it back. Attack institutions that get in the way. Keep people angry enough that they stop asking who is actually benefiting.
One Nation may currently be the most obvious Australian vehicle for that politics. But if Labor or the Coalition begin copying it because they are frightened of losing votes, the infection spreads far beyond One Nation.
Australia is not America. Our history is different. Our institutions are different. Our political culture is different.
But we are not magically immune to fear, racism, resentment or demagoguery.
America should not simply be something we stare at in disbelief. It should be a warning.
This stuff does not arrive wearing a sign saying:
FASCISM STARTS MONDAY.
It arrives saying:
I UNDERSTAND WHY YOU’RE ANGRY.
And then it quietly tells you who to hate.
@DigitalCoup
@economics_that_works
@meditationhttps://youtu.be/QRvjkt9p_eI?si=59Oo8P7Pk4dUL4FT
#Australia #OneNation #Fediverse #OpenWeb #BigTech #PaulineHanson #Trumpism #Democracy #Politics #people #anger #FASCISM #Labor #YouTube #Economics #Housing #CostOfLiving #Meditation #Breathwork
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DEATH, GOD, &
A VERY SMALL SPIDER 💎I am increasingly aware that I will leave this world. I don’t know when. I don’t know how. Perhaps within the next decade. Perhaps sooner. Who knows.
And strangely, there is less fear in that now. Most of the fear seems to belong to what I imagine is unknown.
If death is simply the end of Robin and the end of this consciousness, then there will be nobody there to be bothered by it. It will simply be over. And if there is something beyond this life, another realm, another dimension, another form of consciousness, then I suppose I will recognise it when I get there.
I don’t know. And I am quite happy not knowing.
Human beings have created manifold books, religions and pictures of God, spirit, heaven, continuation and eternity. Perhaps some of them point towards something true. Perhaps some are simply beautiful ways of comforting ourselves in the face of death.
But every picture I can make of what comes next is still a picture being made here.
I don’t want to manufacture comfort. I want clarity. I want to meet whatever happens without having already decided what it is supposed to look like.
Maybe there is something. Maybe there is nothing. Either way, reality does not require my opinion.
And while I am sitting here contemplating this enormous mystery, a tiny spider appears beside me. He is absurdly small. I stop, look at him, laugh, and decide he can stay.
And suddenly, there it all is. Death. Consciousness. God. Eternity. And a tiny spider wandering across my morning.
The fire is on. The coffee is good. People are interacting with things I have written. The spider is minding his own business.
Life has not stopped being ordinary just because I know it ends. I rather like that.
None of it means anything until I give it meaning. And this morning, the meaning I choose is very simple.
Gratitude.
@3goodthings @DigitalCoup @meditation @economics_that_works @startrek
#death #mortality #afterlife #consciousness #spirituality #ACIM #clarity #gratitude #presence #ordinarylife #mystery #life #openweb #human #person #spider #Economics #Housing #CostOfLiving #Meditation #Breathwork #Fediverse #OpenWeb #BigTech