This is worth read, I expect most co-ops in the UK have a potentially dangerous dependency on US based tech infrastructure:
Thanks for sharing!
At Village One we’ve never had a big reliance on US infrastructure (e.g. from the start we’ve avoided Google services), but we’ve recently started to replace some of our previous tooling with self-hosted open-source alternatives. Even as a developer I always found self-hosting rather intimidating, but then we stumbled upon YunoHost, which is a linux distro focused on making self-hosting easy. They have a catalog of apps you can install through a GUI, with just a few clicks, and it also handles updates for you – it’s like an app store for self-hosting. Apologies for not adding clickable links, for some reason I’m getting an error.
YunoHost is among the operating systems you can choose for a Scaleway Dedibox – again, no strong sysadmin skills needed, you can just book a new server in e.g. Amsterdam, choose YunoHost as the OS, route a domain to it, and you’re good to go. Scaleway is a VC-funded startup, so not ideal, but at least it doesn’t use AWS under the hood and is based in France.
We’re now using self-hosted Mattermost (for a community, instead of slack/discord), Seafile (instead of Dropbox/Drive) and HedgeDoc (as a markdown-based alternative to Google Docs), all for less than 20 EUR / month, regardless of the amount of users on our team.
Of course the devil is in the details here, e.g. how to do backups correctly … it’s still work, someone needs to actively maintain the infrastructure, but everything comes with trade-offs.
Thought this may be interested for some people who haven’t gone down the self-hosted route yet … took me a few days to piece all this together, but we’ve happily used this setup for a few months now.
Related
Lessons from Movement organizations that are leaving Google Behind
Webinar Thursday, May 29th, 2:00 pm NY time.
Register here:
https://outreach.mayfirst.org/civicrm/event/register?reset=1&id=98After nearly a year in the works, May First is happy to announce the
release of our publication /Cutting the Cord/, documenting the
obstacles movement organizations face when moving off of Google’s
services. Please check out the booklet:
May First Movement Technology (and help us get
the word out).We also invite you to discuss the report at our webinar:
https://outreach.mayfirst.org/civicrm/event/register?reset=1&id=98 on
Thursday, May 29th*, with *Palestine Legal (https://palestinelegal.org/)
and Climate Justice Alliance (https://climatejusticealliance.org/). Both
organizations are making significant moves to reduce their dependence
on Google and will be sharing their reasons for this work and their
experiences.We will provide simultaneous interpretation between Spanish and English.
Register: https://outreach.mayfirst.org/civicrm/event/register?reset=1&id=98
Just registered.
I’m in the middle of getting the infrastructure used by Sensorica transferred away from the Google tech-stack.
I can see how it was convenient and simple to use 15 years ago, but it’s not resilient or safe now.