March 2026 community update
Celebrating the mid-point between solar solstices with 2000+ words of updates on the (many) happenings in our corner of radical technology co-operativism.
Intercontinental kite-flying once again
Co-op Cloud kite-flying, our weekly-ish drop-in community call, has been dropping the “ish” and returning back to a solid weekly cadence thanks to @Amras, who has been holding down facilitation of the 12 UTC slot.
@Amras also suggested – and took the lead on – publishing kite-flying updates to Mastodon, which seems to be going great so far as a FOMO-reduction strategy for folks who couldn’t make it. Check out the last few here: social.coop/@coopcloud/116129279860686075, social.coop/@coopcloud/116172519571821630, social.coop/@coopcloud/116257290094441122. As per usual, the notes are publicly shared, if you want the full enchilada 🤓
Thanks to everyone who’s been showing up! If you’d like to join us, find us at alternating times of 12 UTC / 19 UTC on Thursdays – look out for announcements on our Fediverse account @coopcloud@social.coop, and/or add this kite-flying.ics as a “web calendar” link to your favourite calendar software.
Gratitude also to Co-op Cloud Federation members Sutty for donating their Jitsi instance for kite-flyings, and to Sutty’s @fauno for lighting a fire under getting that public kite-flying calendar link going again.
A warm welcome to the new CCF members
Speaking of federation members, we’re beyond delighted to welcome two new awesome members to the Co-op Cloud Federation 💅
Democratic Tech Fund
The DTF is a new initiative, dedicated to:
[..] creating cooperative alternatives to surveillance capitalism. No debt burden. No extraction. Just technology that serves democracy. Technology that serves communities and that communities take ownership of. We’re building up the Democratic Tech Fund as a member-based federation. It’s work in progress and we welcome you to join us.
Learn more about the DTF on democratictech.fund. They recently organised an event in Amsterdam in the so-called Netherlands and met other fedi members. Here’s a brief report with some nice photos: social.coop/@dweb/116103031959174179. Here’s a link to the resolution: #36.
Merri-bek Tech
Merri-bek Tech is building local web serving across our neighbourhood in order to provide affordable alternatives to big tech, while improving our local resilience in the face of the climate crisis.
Learn more about Merri-bek Tech on merri-bek.tech. We’ve especially appreciated their clear and well formulated documentation on how they make use of Co-op Cloud over on lores.tech. You can also see more local updates by following hachyderm.io/@jadehopepunk. Here’s a link to the resolution: #38.
Events and talks 🎤
Spätzle coding night #2
Klasse & Methode have announced the 2nd edition of Spätzle coding night in Stuttgart which is open for everyone to attend. See the announcement here. They’ve been extra busy working on LAUTI, read more about it in their latest blogpost here.
Escuela Común #2
Escuela Común is back for a second round! It’s once again incredibly inspiring to see the level of organisation and commitment going into this project. We’re signal boosting updates as we see them coming in, for example this from from Sutty member @edu.
As previewed in our last Co-op Cloud update, abra can now speak Spanish (more on this below) and the new translations are being put into use directly with the educational work going on within Escuela Común #2.
Convergences in “New York City”
After an idiosyncratic meetup of some area co-operators at a recent kite-flying, folks have been coming from far and wide to the Lenape / Mohican land known as New York City for a series of Co-op Cloud Convergences (our own C3 😉) at the extremely radical and lovely space Ridgewood Commons. The first introductory event and the second backup-themed gathering happened in January and February, respectively, and the third event, “Co-op Cloud Spring Lightning Talks”, is coming up this weekend.
Workshop @ Cybersivxs Hacklab in Chiapas
The global movement continued building further last weekend with the first (as far as we’re aware!) Co-op Cloud event in Mexico, at the Cybersivsx Hacklab in Chiapas.
Unxs 15 personas se reunieron para aprender cómo crear un servidor con docker/coop-cloud – aprovechando de la nueva traduccion de abra 😀. Además, intercambiaron ideas como publicar codigo libre abiertamente con las medidas y la infraestructura de Co-op Cloud.
Si quieren ver el programa o intentar un taller parecido, que chequen allí la agenda
EN: Some 15 persons came together to learn how to setup a server, using the newly translated abra. Furthermore ideas were exchanged, how to publish free software with the infrastructure of Co-op Cloud. If you want to offer a similar workshop, just check the program here (in Spanish)
Bonfire @ FOSDEM
The Good People of Bonfire (Co-op Cloud Federation members since the earliest days!) were presenting at FOSDEM this year. Amongst many wonderful twists and turns, Bonfire gave Co-op Cloud a signal boost. Fedizen @wakest was doing some solid live-tooting reportage and documented their great talk, which you can watch in full here: Bonfire: Modular Communication Tools on the Open Social Web.
Bonfire recently announced their 1.0 release (congratulations everyone 👏), if you haven’t read their update blogpost yet, we highly recommend it: Bonfire Social 1.0 is here, back the community‑funded roadmap.
Chaos Communications Congress
CCF members, comrades and allies Autonomic, Local-IT, Klasse & Methode, queer*it and more met at 39C3 in Hamburg and organised a Co-op Cloud Assembly! It was a wonderful few days and lovely to spend time together hacking, hanging out and in some cases, meeting for the first time in-person. Let’s do it again 😄 Klasse & Methode also presented at the Tech from below talk.
Neighbourhood-first software
@Jade from Merri-bek / LoRes Mesh gave a wonderful talk titled Neighbourhood-First Software: the open web without expecting everyone to self-host. We signal boosted this on the fedi here and it received a warm reception! It’s a highly recommended watch 💟 If you’re inspired and want to get involved, come find us in #neighbourhood-first-software:autonomic.zone in our Matrix community.
Radical administrator: interviews in progress
Thanks everyone who responded to our open call for a financial administrator for the CCF. We’ve closed the call and are now in the process of meeting those who applied online. We’re very much looking forward to getting our collective finances in order 💸
Fiscal host change: complete ✅
In other finance news, thanks to the hard work of @Ammar from Resist Tech Monopolies, the migration to Platform 6 as our fiscal host is complete! The budget on our Open Collective account now reflects the reality of our common fund ✌️
New Co-op Cloud website
@edu and @diatom presented the website group’s work at kite-flying (full notes here). This work is ongoing as part of resolution #35. We’re all looking forward to seeing what comes next and, of course, to the new website 👏
New abra version v0.13 is out
abra v0.13 was released into the wild! Here are the release and migration notes. We’re very thankful to @iexos for the new recipe release command changes in #682. After a few weeks of real usage, it seems like we can say it is relatively stable at this point.
New abra work is being prioritised in the usual Abra “next” project board. Feel free to get involved and send us feedback, reports, tips, etc. We’re always looking to hear from abra users about the challenges they face in day to day usage.
¡abra habla español!
abra now speaks Spanish! Laboratorio Popular de Medios Libres was announcing the good news on the Fediverse and wrote about their perspectives in this great article: Abra now speaks Spanish: a key tool for digital sovereignty in Latin America.
We are muy emocionades to report that we achieved our goal of providing a “full” translation, supporting translating all abra commands, sub-commands and flags. All translations are managed, edited and synchronised via our own self-hosted Weblate instance: translate.coopcloud.tech.
We employed many, many hacks and work-arounds getting this implemented due to the generally lacking integration of the venerable GNU Gettext system in the Go ecosystem. There are surely more hacks to come! We’re hoping to upstream all our feature proposals and fixes so that translation support is smoother for other implementors.
Muchísimas gracias once again to the Calyx Institute for funding this work.
New recipes 🌈
Fresh from the Co-op Cloud kitchen, a really astonishing-even-to-us number of new recipes 😍The recipe config commons continues to grow and be maintained by an increasing number of individuals and organisations 🎉
As as result of the gathering at the CCC (mentioned above), there has been a collective push to implement The Maintainers Proposal and to motivate each other to take up active maintenance duties for specific recipes with clear guidelines and expectation management for everyone who relies on them. This has resulted in new documentation and in-recipe repository conventions which are covered in more detail below.
OK, back to the new recipes. Here we goooooooooo 👇
heyform, an open-Source form builder, by@3wctuwunel, a high-performance Matrix homeserver, by first-time packager@moosemowerpdfding, a self-hosted PDF manager, viewer and editor, by@3wcheadscale, an open-source alternative to the corporate Tailscale VPN control plane, by@3wcbluesky-pds, a self-hosted server for ATProto, by@notplantstimeoverflow, a time banking free software, by@decentral1setinyauth, a tiny SSO provider, by@devydavebore, a modern, simple TCP tunnel* in Rust, by@mayelumap, custom OpenStreemMap builder, by@marlonaffine, a privacy-focused, local-first, open-source, and ready-to-use alternative for Notion & Miro, by@valcobalt, a media management tool, by@marlonsearxng, a metasearch engine, by@marlonlasuite-people,lasuite-driveandlasuite-meet, the “La Suite Numerique” user management, file-sharing, and meeting systems, by@notplantstellaweb, a self-hosted platform for collecting reports of human rights abuses and ecological destruction from the Tella app, by@3wckiwix, an offline access server for wikipedia, ifixit, project gutenburg and other reference sites, by@Jademila, a simple, self-hostable membership management for small to mid-sized organizations, by Local-IT.- An updated and more reliable version of
moodle, a learning management system, by@stevensting nodebb, a better forum platform for the modern web, by@p4u1copyparty, a portable file server, by@marlongitlab-runner, an executor for Gitlab CI tasks, by@Brookeakaunting, an open-source Quickbooks alternative, by first-time packager@maximumultraistcontainer-reqistry, a self-hosted container repository, by@faunopdc, a public data cleanup tool, by@marlonlores-node, a LoRes Mesh node, by@jadedraupnir, a Matrix moderation bot, by first-time packager@linnealovespie
And there’s more! Here are some belated announcements for recipes that happened before our last update:
4get, a metasearch engine, by@Brookeforgejo, a Gitea alternative, split out from the Gitea recipe and updated by@fauno(and others)mrbs, a meeting room booking system, by@stevenstingroundcube, an email web client, by@Simonopenemr, an open source electronic health records and medical practice management solution, by@marlonbitpart, a messaging tool that runs on top of Signal to support activists, journalists, and human rights defenders, by@Brookenode-red, a low-code programming for event-driven applications, by@cyrneldirectus, a (headless) CMS / backend system for managing data and creating APIs, by@valweblate, a web-based continuous localization system, by@3wc
Important new Traefik features
Traefik is the recommended (but not the only!) reverse proxy option for Co-op Cloud deployments, and we’re delighted to see two major security-focussed improvements to our configuration of it.
Tor .onion service support
@vaznasty added support for serving your Co-op Cloud deployment as a Tor onion service. See the docs and the new coop-cloud/onion recipe for more 💓
Anti-Scraper-Aktion with Anubis
It’s now possible to configure Anubis to protect your Co-op Cloud deployment from malicious scraper bots from hell. See the docs for more. Thanks @fauno for the implementation ♥️
On this topic, here’s also a nourishing read from @fauno with perspectives on the broader political context of this change: AI, original accumulation, autonomous infrastructures.
New and improved documentation
Last, but assuredly the opposite of least, thanks to the awesome comrades who’ve been helping fill vital gaps in our project documentation:
@sarahfrom Merri-bek Tech,who put together a handy guide about how new members can join the federation: Joining the Co-op Cloud Federation.@d1, and the collective hive mind, who cranked out the Swarm mode almanac explaining Co-op Cloud’s relationship to Docker Swarm. If you’re interested in working on this future-brain, exploring alternatives to Swarm, join us in#coop-cloud-tech-future-brain:autonomic.zonein our Matrix community- A Whole Bunch of People who wrote and edited the new recipe maintainers HOW-TOs: How to Become a Recipe Maintainer and the Recipe config upgrade checklist. One example of this being put into practice is in the Traefik recipe:
MAINTENANCE.mdandPULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md.
Get Radical with us 🚩🏴
That’s a lot going on but we’d still always love to see more folks get involved 🎉
If you’re thinking about setting up a technology co-op, you have a software stack sitting around waiting for you to pick up now; we have the technology! It’s built by tech co-ops for tech co-ops.
If you’re curious but don’t know where to start, get in touch anyway!
— @3wc, @d1, @linnealovespie @Simon, @stevensting, @val, @wtebbens and others