For more information, email us (team at bridgeseat.nz), or check out our online newsletter.
Seat photo by Russel Wills, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
We are a group of freelance technology workers based in Aotearoa (NZ). We believe in the original vision of the internet as a public service utility. We also believe that realising that vision in the social media era requires the web to have a shared social layer. One that isn't just a way for corporations to farm us for our data, and sell access to our eyeballs to the highest bidder.
One attempt to create that social layer is known as "the fediverse". A decentralised social network, made up of thousands of independent servers running Mastodon and a range of other Free Code software. All connecting with each other using a social web protocol called ActivityPub.
But to realise the potential of the fediverse, the technology it depends on needs to become more accessible, to people from all walks of life. So inspired by the platform cooperative movement, we are in the early stages of setting up a worker-owned cooperative, to host services that enable people to communicate across the fediverse and other decentralised digital technologies.
Why "Bridge Seat"? Because the fediverse is a bridge to the world and our goal is to make sure you have your own place to sit when you're crossing it.
Our goal is to enable groups with average 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, ensuring0 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 our customers hosting in a datacentre as close as possible to where they live. For customers in Aotearoa, that means 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, the industry in Aotearoa will grow and prices will come down. But in the meantime, we also want to make offshore hosting options available for kiwis who are on a tight budget, or who want the cheapest price possible and don't care (yet) about data sovereignty.
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 TikTak, 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.
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).
We will be using an online newsletter 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 will soon be able to pay for a subscription. Watch this space!
The newsletter and this website are 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!