Welcome to the Bridge Seat
A professional but not-for-profit fediverse hosting service for Aotearoa
We are a group of freelance technology workers based in Aotearoa (NZ). We believe in the original vision of the web as a public service utility. We also believe that to realise that vision in the social media era, the web needs a shared social layer. One that isn't just a way for tech corporations to farm us for our data, and sell it to the highest bidder.
The fediverse is one attempt to create that social layer. A decentralised social network made up of servers running Mastodon, and a range of other Free Code software, connected together using a social web protocol called ActivityPub.
But to realise the potential of the fediverse, we believe the technology it depends on needs to become more accessible, to people from all walks of life. So we are in the early stages of setting up a worker-owned platform cooperative, under the working name Bridge Street Cooperative, to host services based around the fediverse and other decentralized digital technologies.
Seat photo by Russel Wills, used under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Our goal is to enable groups with limited tech skills and limited budgets to have their own fediverse servers, under their own domain name. While also providing a decent living for the tech workers who run the services, to ensure they are reliable and sustainable. We plan to offer fediverse hosting as a managed service, with a range of monthly prices and service levels. In the medium-to-long term, we also plan to offer training for anyone motivated to learn how to host their own servers, or willing to pay their staff to learn.
In recognition of the importance of data sovereignty, we want to offer onshore hosting with a locally owned company, regulated by New Zealand law. But we're aware that because running datacentres in Aotearoa is a new industry, onshore hosting currently costs a a lot more than offshore options. We hope that as more local companies like ours start using onshore hosting in Aotearoa, the industry will grow and prices will come down. But in the meantime, we also want to offer a budget hosting option, for people and groups who are on a tight buget, or who want the cheapest price possible and don't care (yet) about data sovereignty.
Long term, we also want to be giving back to all the projects whose Free Code software we use, whether financially, with code contributions, or in other ways, depending on the needs of each project. We're aware there are a number of other fediverse hosting companies in existence, and new ones forming, and we're happy to cooperate with our competitors too, where it makes sense. For example, working together on making transfer of servers between hosts as seamless as possible for all our customers; like-in, not lock-in (Hat tip to Dan Randow of OnlineGroups.net who coined this phrase).
Our initial services will be based around Mastodon, since that's the software most people interested in the fediverse are familiar with right now. But once we get our hosting and business infrastructure in place, we can branch out to any and all software people want to use, for the fediverse (ActivityPub) and other decentralised networks like matrix and XMPP. For example, we can see potential for hosting PixelFed for people wanting an alternative to InstaGrim or TakTok, or a video service using OwnCast or PeerTube for livestreamers who are frustrated with platforms like ThemTube and Twitch. Beyond fediverse software, we also see potential in hosting Matrix or Snikket servers, as chat platforms for people frustrated with the lack of interoperability between walled gardens like Slack and Discord.
To get started, we've been kicking the tires on a couple of upstream hosting vendors, and we're almost ready to get our first beta services up and running. We hope to get a website up in the next months or two, to invite beta testers to join the tire-kicking. We also hope to have a pricing schedule worked out by the end of the year, so we can launch our first paid services early next year.
This SubStack newsletter is part of our attempts to get the word out to two kinds of people, who we hope will soon be flooding us with requests for our services. Firstly, people in Aotearoa who prefer a locally-owned hosting company, who can be more responsive to local needs. Secondly, not-for-profit groups anywhere in the world, from social clubs and community groups, to social enterprises and other cooperatives, to NGOs and public service agencies. It makes sense to us that people involved in these groups will be attracted to the idea of using a not-for-profit hosting service as a replacement for using corporate-controlled services, even those that are free-of-charge.
If this is you, or someone you know, watch this space!
We will also be using this SubStack to share ideas and tips about ethical tech, that we hope will be useful to our future customers. So if that might be you, please subscribe. If you’d like to support our work on this community education effort, you can also pay for a subscription.
Onwards to a cooperative digital future!