#makinghistory

2025-07-10

What should be closed? And what should never be?

A conversation about ideology, sociology, and the #openweb. Let’s start with a basic liberal framework:

“Most social interactions should happen in the open. Some personal interactions should remain private.”

Seems reasonable, right? That’s the position many of us think we agree on. Yet when we look at how our technology, and by extension, our society, is being built, that balance is totally out of whack. Today, more and more of life is CLOSED:

Closed apps.

Closed data.

Closed […]

hamishcampbell.com/what-should

2025-07-09

Capitalism is a hostage situation -Not an economy

Our current #mainstreaming pat of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t life, it’s a trap, we need a way out. In our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t own,

Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,

Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,

Pay to breathe, because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over. That’s not a […]

hamishcampbell.com/capitalism-

2025-07-08

Real world tackling the #geekproblem

With rebooting the #openweb we run headfirst into the #geekproblem, a recurring pattern where: Technically brilliant people build powerful tools …but those tools remain socially unusable …or solve only geek problems, not the needs of actual communities. It’s not malice, often it’s idealism, but it creates a dead-end culture of endless prototypes, abandoned standards, and empty tech demos. Meanwhile, the real-world crisis deepens.The work we need is bridges building, let’s try this […]

hamishcampbell.com/real-world-

With your support, we can ensure that valuable digital content is safeguarded for future generations, growing the needed transparency, accountability, and the democratization of information. Funding Application: #MakingHistory – Archiving the Open Media Network hamishcampbell.com/funding-appl...

Funding Application: MakingHis...

2025-07-01

With your support, we can ensure that valuable digital content is safeguarded for future generations, growing the needed transparency, accountability, and the democratization of information. Funding Application: #MakingHistory – Archiving the Open Media Network hamishcampbell.com/funding-app

#Indymediaback Funding Application 2025-02-036 hamishcampbell.com/indymediabac... we still need help and focus on this programming project. Currently, we are working on the #makinghistory side of the common codebase.

#Indymediaback Funding Applica...

2025-06-30

#Indymediaback Funding Application 2025-02-036 hamishcampbell.com/indymediaba we still need help and focus on this programming project. Currently, we are working on the #makinghistory side of the common codebase.

2023-01-12

The Witches Cauldron: Making History

The Witches Cauldron: #MakingHistory is an open activist archive project that aims to create a data commons based on the #4opens framework and motivated by the PGA hallmarks. The project is about creating a metadata-enriched digital collection of items hosted on a redundant and federated network of hosts and servers around the world, starting with hosting the majority of the added content on the Internet Archive (archive.org). The project is open to anyone who wants to be a part of the […]

hamishcampbell.com/the-witches

2025-06-25

Actors, Power, and Collective Publishing: Rethinking Fediverse Architecture for Grassroots Media

We recently had an extended and thoughtful discussion on signal between collaborators working on #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory, a key issue emerged: how should we structure “actors” (ActivityPub identities) in a network where the focus is collective action, not individual performance? This question isn’t just technical. It’s political, and central to the success or failure of rebooting radical grassroots media within the #Fediverse.The tension is about balancing the individual […]

hamishcampbell.com/actors-powe

2025-05-21

The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil

We need to keep highlighting an old but still urgent tension: the intersection of technology and social change. Where one side leans heavily on practical, technical problem-solving. They want working code, functioning systems, and tangible results, not abstract debates. To them, critiques about capitalism shaping code sound like distractions from the "real work." The other side insists that technical problems are social problems. They argue that all code is written by people, shaped by […]

hamishcampbell.com/the-omn-isn

Adrian Wybrott (@LongmanF1):

Mega job by the whole team @McLarenF1 in Miami and back at MTC A double 1/2. #makinghistory 2 solid stops 2.2 and 2.3
Got to love America. Where else can you do this in your hire car t.co/7vz8bnMqHF

#F1 #F1bot #F1FEN

x.com/LongmanF1/status/1919752

Edwin G. CastroEdwinGroup
2025-04-24

In a powerful display of unity and service, students and volunteers from Tennessee State University came together at the Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee to make a tangible impact on food insecurity.
Organized by Edwin G. Castro’s nonprofit initiative, this event exemplifies the power of education, compassion, and civic responsibility. Participants contributed their time and energy to help sort and distribute food for families in need, reaffirming the Team 👥

Community in Action: Empowering Through Service at Second Harvest

Dev test work for #Makinghistory application hamishcampbell.com/dev-test-wor... The logic and workflow are all based on the #OMN project and have likely a 90% overlap with the #indymediaback project

Dev test work for Makinghistor...

2025-04-23

Dev test work for #Makinghistory application hamishcampbell.com/dev-test-wo The logic and workflow are all based on the #OMN project and have likely a 90% overlap with the #indymediaback project

2025-04-23

Dev test work for Makinghistory application

The #makinghistory project is a decentralized, open-source archiving and storytelling network designed to preserve and amplify grassroots histories. It’s founded on the idea that history isn’t written by the winners - it’s made by those who resist, build, and care. Using digitized collections like the CampbellFamily archive as a seed, the project invites communities to reclaim their narratives through shared, federated networks. This isn’t just another data repository - it’s a […]

hamishcampbell.com/dev-test-wo

2025-04-17

A letter from the margins of the #openweb

All the #OMN projects I’ve worked on over the years, from #OGB to #indymediaback, are not directly about social change. They are about creating the possibility of social change. A subtle, but critical difference. 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. Yet here's the mess that keeps being pushed over us. We are told this […]

hamishcampbell.com/a-letter-fr

2025-04-12

The #OMN is not a product — It’s a path you walk

The #OMN project is #DIY, it only works if we build it together. This isn’t a startup pitch. It’s not a platform that magically appears out of nowhere to fix everything. It’s not a product to consume, it’s a path you walk. The direction is participatory, not passive. You don’t get to sit back and clap… or boo from the sidelines. If you do, the system won’t collapse, but it sure as hell won’t grow. Let’s be direct, there is no saviour coder, no NGO white knight, no […]

hamishcampbell.com/the-omn-is-

2025-04-12

The #OMN project is #DIY, it only works if communities of people actually build it. This isn’t a path of passive consumption; it’s a participatory direction. If people choose to sit on their hands, or act the prat and critique from the sidelines, the system doesn’t collapse… but it doesn’t grow either.

That said, even if the building doesn’t happen right away, there’s still deep value in the memory, the documents, the ideas, the patterns. It’s compost for future builders. If we can’t get our act together now, the next group will dig it up, learn from it, and build better.

Right now, for me, #makinghistory archiving project is a still-doable foundation, a living memory layer that gives us something solid to stand on. Without memory, we spin in circles around the same old #techshit heap, repeating mistakes, retelling the same half-lost stories, and falling into the same traps. That’s not progress, it’s rot.

We’re now working on bootstrapping this archive project as the first step. If we don’t remember soon, many of us, and our histories, will be lost in the storm of #climatechaos. In the end, if we don’t build, we don’t change.

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.04
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst