The reboot of the indymedia project

Meeting ActivityPub Conference 2020
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Hamish Campbell

We are a wide affinity group working to reboot the global indymedia network using modern federated protocols such as #activitypub. This reboot will be based on the OMN project code.
What is the OMN (Open Media Network):
The project is to shift power to the producers and consumers of media. It’s about good UI and simple empowering #KISS tools to move content, by categorising it with a grassroots folksonomy. This simple approach is balanced by shared site level syntax for the complex crew.
Working Project Site
Background
In the end it’s about bringing trust back into news.

Questions & Answers available!

Q&A Session – The reboot of the indymedia project
⬡ Hooray, the live Questions & Answers are available here

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Thank you @hamishcampbell for the ocean view and the clearly political content, including the opening (although I don’t have much appreciation for XR[1]) and the explanation of the death of Indymedia – very useful, once again, to understand social dynamics at work and the different perspectives that can diverge sometimes although they converge most of the time.

I appreciate the simple approach to the OMN tools: link/subscribe, moderate/flow, rollback, edit metadata, publish content. It keeps the service as simple as it can be, or as you say the project is more important for what it does not do. I share your insights on encryption: although I think it’s entirely indispensable for OPSEC, if encryption becomes the norm you cannot keep a public record, and all that historians will have to chew on in copies of Vogue and the Sears catalog: the story of the resistance will disappear from the record because all of it is encrypted.

The articulation of social and technical approach to OMN is also very instructive and useful. I’d be interested in talking more about distributed “moderation”, especially in the meaning of Agent-based content validation, where Agents are made of collectives of humans eventually assisted with some automated tools, but mostly to help a social, grassroots process to take place as closely as possible to the data source.

  1. I frown at XR mostly because of their lack of criticism of the concepts of “transition” (so-called ecological transition, and so-called energetic transition – which does not exist) and the forces at work behind them, or, as a friend puts it: XR? Ha! The Liberals. ↩︎

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Talking about trust based news flows https://wp.me/p9Vw7k-ga in the context of the #apconf #OMN

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I totally concur on with

The idea is to use human moderation flows as a feature to spread federation wider.

and also

If we build in automation then we will have lots of middling quality sites that are borderline useful. A signal to noise issue.

and

Less is more is a core of the project. The #geekproblem is the desire to improve the network with better tools.

The scalability issue seems to converge with the way of life: in order to build trust and scale up moderation, you need to meet the people or at least spend quality time with them – and I think this barely comes with online-only encounters, even if online interaction makes it easier to lower prejudice[1]. Certainly the Intermapping session can be a good place to mention this topic since both @pukkamustard and @natacha relate to local-first and collective agency.

  1. and even there, you certainly can build prejudice on the quality of expression or types of written interaction you happen to have with the person. ↩︎

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This kinda covers the same as the talk https://wp.me/p9Vw7k-he

Why PGA and 4opens matter:

The #4opens are a kinda of constitution that keeps the “post truth world” at bay. As long as you keep the #4opens in place and respect the diversity they hold in place.

Its a chicken and egg issue.

The #OMN is a social technology held together by the #4opens that pushes into being a digital commons. What we then do with this liberated space is up to us.

The rebooted #indymedia project is a radical media project motivated by the #pga hallmarks that can only be built as a trust based network in this #TAZ space.

Wikipedia is kinda your friend, arty view of #TAZ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone

And #PGA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples'_Global_Action

The advantage of rebooting an existing mature project is that it gets round the nihilism of the new in tech.

Am thinking that we need to drop back to more community focused tech rather than the current individualist implementations.

Thinking of news rather then social networking there.

Ideas on what happens were choosing to federate or not becomes core to building a web of content flows. Rather than federate to everything with some blocks.

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I use #XR as an example of changing public experience - they put climatechaos into the public domain. Their way forward is limited, and shifting rapidly to liberal creareist agenders.

Yes, its needed, encryption in a openmedia network is a 10% encryption to 90% open. The problem for the last years is that 90% encryption to 10% open has been pushed over radical tech projects, its been a real mess.

Good insite about our BLANK history as a current outcome.

Distributed moderation is what the fedivers is doing kinda, this is the subject of the BOF group on folcsonermys and catorgorys, come talk there.

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Update and working code https://indymediadev.openworlds.info/

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Nice work @hamishcampbell. I DM’ed you some feedback again :slight_smile:

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Outreaching for more crew for #indymediaback and #OMN rollout
http://hamishcampbell.com/index.php/2021/01/09/we-need-more-crew-to-make-this-rollout-work/

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One of the first things to do is create a good website with an overview of the project and its objectives. Above in this thread there is some context to your last post, but the link was also posted in the HTC forum as-is without context (I edited slightly to give this context, but best-practice not to just post a link and nothing else). In the blog post the only thing describing what this is about is:

If you would like to help with moving away from this current world/media mess please create an account

(And there was a certificate issue on https://indymediadev.openworlds.info/ but that may temporary, as now it is down. Maintenance I guess).

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Some history to help understand where we are now When We Were the Media

#indymediaback

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Q. A few comments on your excellent video.

Your page layout is driven by desktop. Nowadays, people think mobile first.

The rollback: an interesting idea.

A. Yep it’s the #nothingnew part of the project, the original IMC was ripped apart buy internal arguments and bad process, so we are rebooting the project before this happened so making minimal changes outa the box of UX and process, the needed changes can then come FROM “consensus” of the fresh crew running the rebooted instances.

The mobile expirence is swipe sideways to each of the menu items as columns. This is a reasonable compromise, as the original project had no mobile interface.

This is an example https://indymedia.hs2rebellion.earth/users/news you have to click past the SSL error to see the site, on mobile a single column interface, but the swiping is not implemented, so you have to click on the menu at the top. This test site is a RSS/AP aggregator #indymediaback

Q. Well, that is interesting. Seeing something is so much more impressive than just a video. What is the software platform? What web server are you using?
It is pretty easy to do https.
Is anyone actually using the software?

A. sadly, the 2-year working project was killed off by covid just as we were going to start the outreach at protest camps. The codebase is now abandoned, was based on epycion, but dev on this folk is now stopped/blocked. It is a good expirence though, Imagen if the swiping worked. The RSS and AP side works for input on these rollout test sites, we are still running 3 but needs a committed crew to restart #indymediaback

Was 6 months work for 3 people to put this working code together #DIY and a 2 year wider collective to do the work on the text and process to bring the original #indymeda back in the spirit of #nothingnew but the stress of dev and covid broke this as we were getting close to test rollout, been dormant since then.

We need to choose a new codebase and find a coding crew, most of the hard work is done, all the existing design, process and outreach text is in place to push this out agen as the native “news” part of the #fediverse

But its another year of nonpaid #openweb work… phwww… fighting agenst the pointlessness of the #mainstreaming is a hard sell, even though it’s blatantly and obviously needed.

http://hamishcampbell.com/2023/02/06/talking-about-the-indymediaback-project/ you need to click past the non-working SSL error to read the post.