While the internet started out as a promise of openness and democracy, in recent years it has mostly fallen into the hands of tech giants. Roel Roscam Abbing attempts to contribute to the original, federated idea through an experimental collaboration between the arts and three software developers. These three are working on free software to replace commercial web services such as Facebook and Whatsapp. “What all three projects have in common is that they are based on the idea of ​​federation and that good design has been decisive for their (relative) success. This presents interesting opportunities for activist art and design practices to relate to and even play a contributing role.”

This plan for alternative media suits Roscam Abbing, artist and researcher into the network society. He has an interdisciplinary practice with lectures, software, installations,
publications. Pretty Fly For A Wi-fi (2014) was about amateur and DIY cultures, Spacekeet (2017) about amateur satellite reception. His work has been shown internationally at festivals and exhibitions in Linz, Washington, New York, Berlin. He is involved with Varia, the center for everyday technology in Rotterdam, and collaborates a lot. This appealed to the R&D committee, which partly for this reason considered it a project that can grow and that can open up networks.

The results will be published and fed back to the online communities described in the plan. Roscam Abbing organized a number of public events and working sessions about this project at, among others, the homebrewserver.club: a collaborative club of
people who host their own projects. He presented the project at numerous specific conferences, where it prompted so-called 'developer sprints'. This was further put into practice by setting up and managing a Mastodon server, post.lurk.org where a
community arose of people with a background in network and media art who, out of an interest in self-organization, are looking for online platforms outside of Facebook and Twitter.