Rewilding the Web

A button on my phone.
One word: “Migrate.”

I pressed it.

From Bluesky to W, hosted in Europe,
and I kept what mattered.
My posts, my follows, the years of conversation:
still reachable.

The ones who stayed could still find me.
The networks interoperate.
I left the forest and kept my friends.

The free software movement made one promise,
a long time ago: “free as in freedom.”
A path is that promise kept:
freedom of movement between networks,
without leaving your life behind.

And it is arriving.
Even the largest platforms feel it now.
“A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable,”
Satya Nadella has written.

So, Big Tech may pave the path itself.
Of course, it will.
A path costs the landlord next to nothing,
especially when it runs in circles.

But a path is not yet a living system.

Here, under one word — “Rewilding” —
is the part the platforms will never hand us.
Ecologists know how a degraded landscape bounces back.
You need redoubts, places kept wild on purpose.

We have those:
the sanctuaries of the early web,
the federated commons,
though for now you need
a kind of privilege to enter them.

You need paths, so life can reach them.
Those are arriving.
And you need one more thing.
The one everybody flinches at.

You need the carnivores.

Not the wolf on the warning label.
The ecologist’s wolves:
the pack whose presence rearranges a room.

You know the Yellowstone story:
the wolves came back in 1995,
and the story spread that they changed the rivers.

Ecologists still argue how much of that is true.
Strip away what is disputed, and the hard kernel holds:
the wolves changed where the elk would linger.
The elk stopped grazing the banks bare.

The willows came back.
And the birds that could never fight
for their own ground
came back with them.

The carnivore the web needs
is us, organised.
Not the pile-on.
Not the lone wolf howling into the feed.

A pack is something else.
Ten people, finding the uncommon ground between them.
Then ten thousand, setting a public agenda:
showing up where the decisions are made,
from Taiwan to California.

It does not break the platforms.
It changes how they move — toward care —
because they can no longer fence in those
who are free to leave.

This is the part of “Rewilding”
no one can buy, download, or order for us.
The redoubts are being built.
The paths are opening.
The wolves, we become ourselves.

And becoming them was never the point.
Only what their presence brings back.

The wolf returns
for the weakest in the valley, not the strongest:
the willows, the songbirds, the banks made whole again,
for the ones who could never leave.

So, press the button, when it comes.
Then ask who still cannot.

A path is only real
when the grandmother
whose whole world is one family chat
can walk it too, and keep her neighbours.

We still have to build
the handrail she can hold.
Do not arrive alone.

The river came back.
It never came back for the wolves.
It came back for everyone who could not leave.