Shooting new roots

Sometimes things move slowly, and sometimes they suddenly move quite fast. Over the last few weeks we did what we have been talking about for many months: we moved our self-hosted Nextcloud instance from a VPS hosted by Gandi to our own hardware.

We had several reasons for this move. The first is that our dependence on Gandi, and the monthly bills that came with it, always felt a bit at odds with our original plans. From the start, it has been the goal of OpenTech(AUC) to make visible what generally remains invisible: having a physical machine running our services serves this goal much better than a VPS in france.

The second reason for our move is that although our original NixOS set-up on the Gandi VPS worked well, we didn’t have a broad base of maintainers who could work with it. As this guide also emphasizes, we can’t have a set-up that is “technically decentralized” but “socially centralized”. The CoopCloud recipes are a lot easier to maintain, which makes it easier to share the moderation among ourselves.

The third reason follows from the second reason: although our Nextcloud instance is still our “flagship”, we wanted to run more services for our community. This is possible with NixOS, but CoopCloud made this a lot easier (for us). As a result we now also run a PeerTube, a Bonfire, a Cryptpad and a Forgejo server. Our Keycloak server makes it possible for students and staff to use the same account to login to each of these services.

Finally, we were inspired by the work of eCommons. They use CoopCloud to help the cooperative movement in Amsterdan self-host. By following them in their embrace of CoopCloud, we hope to be part of this bigger movement in our hometown.

Although we made a lot of progress in a short time, we are of course (never) there yet: for example, our physical machine is not yet running in our university building. To make this work we will have either work with a VPN tunnel, or we need to convince the university to give us a local IP address.

We also have to spend more time on capacity building in our collective, so that more people know how to manage the CoopCloud set-up. We hope to be part of a wider city-wide project of capacity building, possibly together with the people of eCommons and maybe even as part of the Democratic Tech Fund.

We will keep the Fediverse up to date!