Have they poked some holes in the paywall for native #openweb folks, or is it still on the path to be a #NGO chatting class event?
We do need gatherings, we used to do VERY good ones for #Fediverse organising, would be good to get back to this focus, can these guys be a part of this #4opens path do you think?
@fediforum is the place for the open social web community to meet, learn, interact and organize.
Find out more thru their page and register for the Online Conference happening soon this June 5-7, 2025 via https://fediforum.org/events/
By focusing, we can make a tangible difference in the #openweb space and reduce the noise of pointless #techchurn that currently wastes time, focus and resources. The pushing of doomed projects https://hamishcampbell.com/the-pushing-of-doomed-projects/
A letter from the margins of the #openweb 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. https://hamishcampbell.com/a-letter-from-the-margins-of-the-openweb/
Collaborative futures “Go Outside”
A brief literary diversion to get back to our coding and #UX design. In the book News from Nowhere, William Morris invites us to dream, but more than that, he asks us to build. Written in 1890, this visionary novel imagines a world beyond capitalism: no money, no bosses, no state, just people living together in beauty and cooperation, with practical labour, shared resources, and a deep reverence for the land. For the Open Media Network (#OMN), Morris’s imagined future is not a quaint […]https://hamishcampbell.com/collaborative-futures-go-outside/
"E, se um dia te fartares da aplicação que usas para reunir os teus conteúdos favoritos e quiseres explorar outra, basta exportares a tua lista e abrir nesse novo leitor. Chama-se a isto “portabilidade”, mas também se poderia chamar “liberdade”.
No @fumacapt , acreditamos que a informação deve ser livre, acessível e gratuita. Se não quiseres depender de algoritmos que escolham por ti, teres o teu próprio leitor de RSS feed pode ser uma solução."
https://fumaca.pt/a-internet-do-futuro-tem-25-anos-por-fred-rocha/
If you need to understand mess - have a look at the mess making here https://fosstodon.org/@Anachron/114420616122585644 how can we see the signal from the noise in this flow?
What is native to the #openweb
You could creatively use a tool like the #4opens maybe? But likely need more than this - what is the more that we need to compost mess?
The future isn’t in their servers.
It’s in our hands.
They track. We trust.
They monetize. We decentralize.
They extract. We empower.
Mastodon isn’t just a platform.
It’s a protest. A poem. A pulse.
A quiet revolution happening in plain sight.
No ads.
No algorithms.
No masks.
Just voices — unfiltered.
Just people — unbought.
Just us — awake.
William Morris – Bridging Vision and Practice in News from Nowhere
Morris, in his life and book, doesn't only critique capitalism and dream about its collapse, he offers a compelling vision of what comes after. Imagines a society without money, coercion, or hierarchical governance. Power is radically distributed, labour is voluntary and meaningful, and the commons is at the centre of life. It’s not a managerial future, it’s an organic one, shaped by lived values. This mirrors the path of the #OMN, building tools, processes, and networks that support […]https://hamishcampbell.com/william-morris-bridging-vision-and-practice-in-news-from-nowhere/
The #4opens vs. liberal tokenism in #openweb tech https://hamishcampbell.com/the-4opens-vs-liberal-tokenism-in-openweb-tech/ The #4opens isn’t just an appeal to values, it’s a functional way of judging developers and projects. #KISS
Today’s Ohmbudsman is live.
Highlights include:
Total Defense in the Nordics
U.S.–China education fracture
China arms its space station
ASUS routers compromised
EU security hub in Black Sea
Telegram is dieing
Telegram partnering with Elon’s #AI to distribute #Grok inside chats is a clear line crossed. This matters because private data ≠ training fodder, bringing Grok (or any #LLM) into messaging apps opens the door to pervasive data harvesting and normalization of surveillance.This is an example of platform drift: Telegram was always sketchy (proprietary, central control, opaque funding), but this is active betrayal of its user base, especially those in repressive regions who relied on […]"Google isn’t satisfied with its monopoly on the questions we search.
Google wants to use AI to monopolize the very answers themselves.
As one Google executive recently explained: “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore. What’s cool is a quadrillion dollars.”
Google plans to use AI to consume and replace the open web.
I believe demolishing independent sites like mine was Google’s first step in clearing ground so it has space to rebuild search from the ground up for an “AI-first” future.
Google envisions a future where “Google does the Googling for you,” its AI and ads do the answering – and users never need to leave Google.
Google will just source information from a handful of sources and partner websites that it controls and selects – effectively creating an information cartel.
If Google can use AI to censor a travel website from the web arbitrarily and without opportunity for appeal – it can do the same to any source of information it wants.
And American citizens and Internet users everywhere will be worse off for it.
So while you may not really care about the plight of some random travel website getting censored, everyone should care about the way Google is deploying AI to build a censorship cartel that lets it control the flow of information online.
What follows is a lengthy summary of my experiences and my opinions as an independent publisher trying to survive in a monopolist’s information economy.
To start, let me explain how we got to this point where Google has the power to do this:"
https://travellemming.com/perspectives/ftc-letter-google-censors-indie-publishers-with-ai/
#Development #Launches
Good Internet Magazine · A print and digital magazine for the non-corporate web https://ilo.im/1623f6
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#Magazine #OpenWeb #IndieWeb #SmallWeb #Business #Website #Blog #Design #WebDesign #WebDev
“Use and abuse” is a good strategy for dealing with the #dotcons while they continue to dominate our digital and social infrastructure. Why? Because refusing to engage with these platforms outright is the equivalent of shouting into the void - or living in a cave. And caves, while romantic to a certain type of purist, are never effective social solutions.
The truth is this #dotcons are still where the #mainstreaming people live, and mainstream attention is power, even if borrowed. As radicals or progressives, using their platforms to push counter-narratives, while simultaneously undermining their legitimacy and building our own #openweb independent infrastructure, is both necessary and strategic. Think of it as exiting from within by using their reach to grow the seeds of our native alt-path.
"I don’t doubt that Google has been thinking about this stuff for a while and that there are people at the company who deem it strategically irrelevant or at least of secondary importance to winning the AI race — the fate of the web might not sound terribly important when your bosses are talking nonstop about cashing out its accumulated data and expertise for AGI. I also don’t want to be precious about the web as it actually exists in 2025, nor do I suggest that websites working with or near companies like Meta and Google should have expected anything but temporary, incidental alignment with their businesses.
(...)
But I also don’t want to assume Google knows exactly how this stuff will play out for Google, much less what it will actually mean for millions of websites, and their visitors, if Google stops sending as many people beyond its results pages. Google’s push into productizing generative AI is substantially fear-driven, faith-based, and informed by the actions of competitors that are far less invested in and dependent on the vast collection of behaviors — websites full of content authentic and inauthentic, volunteer and commercial, social and antisocial, archival and up-to-date — that make up what’s left of the web and have far less to lose. Maybe, in a few years, a fresh economy will grow around the new behaviors produced by searchlike AI tools; perhaps companies like OpenAI and Google will sign a bunch more licensing deals; conceivably, this style of search automation simply collapses the marketplace supported by search, leveraging training based on years of scraped data to do more with less. In any case, the signals from Google — despite its unconvincing suggestions to the contrary — are clear: It’ll do anything to win the AI race. If that means burying the web, then so be it."
Challenging “liberal trolls” and #encryptionist blindness https://hamishcampbell.com/challenging-liberal-trolls-encryptionist-blindness-for-the-broader-openweb/ the path of the #openweb depends on striking a balance between openness and security, grassroots experimentation and mainstream scalability, and decentralization and coordination.
The Mess – If You Don’t Value Things, You Destroy Them
DRAFT We live under a system, global capitalism, where value is determined not by care, connection, or any collective well-being, but by market logic. If something is not valued in that narrow logic, it is treated as waste. If you don't actively value the alternatives - you will "accidentally" destroy them. This applies to tech, culture, nature, and community.Tech has a problem of misplaced value, people still keep using #mainstreaming tools - the platforms and apps of the #dotcons - […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-mess-if-you-dont-value-things-you-destroy-them/
