LibreHosters Meeting

Engage SFYW
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There’s a LibreHosters Meeting organized in Amsterdam next month.

I have opened a pad with answers to their questionaire. It’s reproduced below. Feel free to discuss it…

LibreHosters Questionaire

Petites Singularités Answers

  1. what is your nickname?

    hellekin (( hellekin ) (@how@s10y.eu) - Une fois pour TOOT! A Mastodon in Brussels / @how:disroot.org)

  2. what is the name of the collective you are going to talk about to answer these questions?

    Petites Singularités / 2017

    Stemming from different experiences, including Lorea.org & Dyne.org.
    Long experience with virtualization, email, web hosting…
    Recently set up a PirateBox for the ZAD.

  3. In the present, how many admins are there in your collective? How many of these are volunteers, how many are paid?

    Only one volunteer.

  4. What services do you offer?

    Discourse / Mastodon / PirateBox / Custom

  5. Roughly how many users do you have?

    About 200 (~ 20 active)

  6. What kind of users do you aim for?

    Activists, commoners, resistance networks.

  7. What backup mechanisms do you use in case your servers catch fire?

    Luck.
    I have experience setting up secure remote encrypted backup solutions.

  8. Do you charge for services? / How do you fund to cover expenses?

    Charging for custom solutions, depending on the project.
    For now it’s mostly self-funding.

  9. If you are a volunteer, would you work comfortably within a network where collectives employ people?

    Paying people may not be the most important of criteria for collaboration. Ethics is more important. Alliances in free software are good, and people need to eat.

  10. If you are a in a collective that employs people, would you work comfortably with collectives with only volunteers?

    It depends. How do these volunteers eat? I spent for years of my life working for free, squatting and eating freegan. Is that a sustainable model we want to push? Besides, volunteer work needs not be gratis work. So I’m fine working with volunteers, if they’re conscious about what they’re doing. But if that replaces work, I’m not so sure.

  11. How do you decide, how are hierarchies within your collective?

    We’re small, so decision-making is an ongoing conversation. We usually trust each other to make the right choices, usually by affinity with the techniques we want to use and aims we want to achieve. We centralize all our decision-making on our private Discourse.

  12. Would you sign these manifestos?

    I agree with both, and I’m pretty sure our collective agrees too but we don’t have a collective position on these manifestos. I used to have /var/log mounted as a tmpfs. We support Contributopia.

  13. what you would want from the project of this syndicate / network of tech collectives?

    • Configuration files and documentation
    • A dedication to free software, with a special regard to collective freedoms
    • Men disempowerment / Women empowerment
    • Common projects (e.g., PUBLIC, INCOMMON.cc, supporting Contributopia.org & CHATONS)
    • CDN / VPN / shared infrastructure
    • Cooperative funding

  14. Would you work comfortably in this network if the network itself employed worker/s?

    Sure, that’d be less work for the rest of us.

  15. Where are your servers hosted?

    Mostly Hetzner.de.

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See https://libreho.st