@mttaggart @vfrmedia @philcowans right and like, if you're trying to serve marginalized communities, that's inherently risky because people's existence is politicized and that's beyond their control
and if you're not, what are you even doing
@ireneista @mttaggart @vfrmedia - so I think my take on this is more community first, tech second. Like, if the output is basically a support network and a set of tools to help individuals and community organisations self host, then I think I'd be quite happy with that.
Or maybe the solution is lower level services, e.g. shared server management with tools to make it easy for individual users to spin up their own Mastodon instance on their own domain.
VPNs are possibly a bit of a special case, and maybe the DEFCON folks reached the right conclusion there when they decided just to support Tor.
@philcowans @ireneista @vfrmedia Yeah my thinking was more shared infra and the ability to spin up services for oneself. But I also agree that this is something akin to the size of old key-sharing parties. It doesn't scale—intentionally.
@mttaggart @philcowans @vfrmedia it's not scale that we're concerned about. scale is not the blocker we are identifying.
@ireneista @philcowans @vfrmedia I understand. That was more in response to the DEF CON conversation. I think and hope I understand your concerns.
@mttaggart @philcowans @vfrmedia yeah, we do think you do. sorry if that was intense, the feelings we're having are about us, not you, don't worry.
@ireneista @philcowans @vfrmedia Not at all. I deeply share your concerns, although I am not living them as y'all are. I wish I had better answers.
@mttaggart @philcowans @vfrmedia all anyone can do is our best 💜✊
@ireneista @mttaggart @vfrmedia - btw, there's this:
Which I think is the closest I've found. I also feel that https://toot.wales/ and https://join.cosocial.ca/ are somewhat similar in scope.
Tech-wise, there's https://coopcloud.tech/ - @coopcloud.
Jun 27, 2026, 9:30 PM@philcowans @ireneista @mttaggart @coopcloud
things like that are definitely feasible, provided you set expectations to all users they aren't going to protect you from the NCA, so don't do anything on those networks that would attract them! (to be fair not /that/ difficult to do if folk are sensible)
@philcowans @mttaggart @vfrmedia that's where we're at, as well
we went and read the linked thread, it does agree with our own conclusions both for generic infra and for VPNs
@philcowans @mttaggart @vfrmedia but yes, your goals around community seem like the right ones to us, we just don't know how to do useful things with that
Jun 28, 2026, 12:40 PM> "support network and a set of tools to help individuals and community organisations self host"
we have yet to articulate this with @coopcloud but i do believe we are going in this direction
the solidarity network is crucial to emphasise which goes beyond hollow top-down claims of "reuse" and "community"
unity upon strategic tool use has major benefits which stands in stark contract to the dominant reinvent the wheel tech hype cycles...
@d1 @philcowans @mttaggart @vfrmedia @coopcloud that's good to hear, and we definitely hope it goes well