One of the common misnomers around the migration away from toxic tech stacks is that the options are either 1) services managed by a company or 2) everyone #selfhosting themselves.
There is however an often overlooked 3rd option of community-scaled infrastructure. Here a group identifies their needs, plans & deploys to meet them. Much like a community garden, that infrastructure has people skilled & dedicated to its upkeep in providing for that group, working bees & skillshare as needed.
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Here are some examples of this at work, in this case the Slack alternative Mattermost:
1. Our own instance in DE, used for online training
2. My friend's instance served from under her desk, on which I teach her students in CA
3. An instance in CH hosting thousands of environmental defenders that I deployed
4 An instance we deployed in IS hosting a US immigration support NGO, resistant to ICE warrants
There is no one deployment for all here, each instance meets the unique needs of the group
Crystelle, co-director of Nīkau, said an interesting thing on this, noting that across history so many human cultures have necessarily localised expertise to meet the needs of their group, building in resilience - whether carpenter, physician, mason, blacksmith, gardener, hunter etc.
She argues that today, with a dependence on complex technical infrastructures readily abused by power, communities need to incorporate system administration & infosec into the skillbase held by the membership.
[...] This is not possible without a re-distribution of expertise, away from where it is largely held captive by the gov, corp and military sectors, often in high-paying jobs.
And not just stuffing services behind a public IP either, & hoping for the best, but deploying with security and server design best practices in mind. Without doing so, the infrastructure will in time be compromised &/or rot out, losing the morale of the membership.
This is a big part of why we're running the trainings
Ethical managed services by a coop or company can meet many needs, however a desire for increased autonomy & privacy will sometimes become a tension.
Activist communities attract adversarial pressure, so are strongly encouraged to self-host. They should do so in a jurisdiction as resistant as possible to cross-border warrants relative to their operating context. A frontline movement hosted on managed services implicates the org providing their stack, & risks downtime for those hosted adjacently
Julian Oliver