Last year I wrote three posts about FOSS sustainability. I focused on Project Maintainers and how sometimes project maintainers don't help themselves. I missed another massive elephant in the room. [1 -3]
The infrastructure that forms around projects.
Our online communities use various online platforms for different tasks.
For chat you have Discord, IRC, XMPP, Mattermost, Rocket Chat and Matrix. Although really we need to focus on two chat platforms. Discord and Matrix. Now Matrix like IRC and XMPP are protocols. In theory protocols means more freedom and people can host their own. It's easy.
For sheer ease of setup and practicality though people choose somewhere they can set up an account now. So it's either Discord, much loved by twitch streamers, or create an account on Matrix.org.
We see the same with our code forges as well. You have GitHub, Gitlab, Codeberg, SourceHut. GitHub is the leviathan, most code sits there, much in the same way that decades ago you'd make your code available on Sourceforge.
So if GitHub suddenly was taken down forever how would this affect various projects? It's a vital part of project infrastructure that if gone, would be a painful inconvenience.
A few years ago many projects had an experience like this when Andrew Lee took over. Several projects moved including Librecast. They were alarmed by this new owner who all of a sudden appeared. [4 - 5]
As we moved over to Libera.chat and elsewhere, Lee justified our reasons for moving by moving our old channels to ## as we left a message telling other people where we were.
It was inconvenient and a massive distraction. But we made the right choice.
At the moment we have massive political upheaval and a technical aristocracy who have control over our digital spaces where we post, or work.
We have a serious security issue to consider. We have an openly corrupt authoritarian President with his handmaidens of Silicon Valley all willing to facilitate fascism and subjugation of an entire country and beyond.
This is not business as usual the public and Governments alike need to acknowledge that and move off these platforms. Our Public Services and Governments also need to allocate some budget to support these systems. Not just by moving to these systems, but contributing money and support to the projects that create these systems. [3]
Maintainers are producing this code mostly for free in the long-term. They could do with some support. [1] This week we saw another maintainer decide to drop support for embargoed security vulnerability reports. They don't have the funding or the capacity to treat it any other way. For corporations to bitch and not even donate funds or time to help is rather parasitic. Yet another useful library where the maintainer gets peanuts and more demands rather than support. [8]
Of course it's not sustainable.
More and more of our communities both technical and non technical have invested a lot of time in learning the ways of the walled gardens of Web 2.0. It's not easy to move your community, nor is it easy to host your own. It will cost money, it will cost time.
The truth is our community areas always cost money. We didn't realise the ultimate cost was Democracy as we gave our Big Tech Oligarchs power over us. People are unwilling to leave Facebook. Even as Mark Zuckerberg removes moderation from his systems to placate the fascists.
They are eating blueberries rather than asking their communities to move. [9]
We want our independent community spaces back. But the question we need to answer is where can our communities move to?
We haven't answered that in part because we are more willing to fund political parties in a US election than pay money to help keep our independent digital spaces going.
We need to be very careful in our choice of where we host our infrastructure. We don't want to swap the centralisation dangers of US Clouds for the same, but in the EU. Let's just remind ourselves of the disruption that happened with the OVH fire. [6]
It's great that the EU is considering it's digital sovereignty, but I'd rather we had distributed rather than centralised resources. We need legislation to ensure that IPv4 is phased out and IPv6 support by our hosting and internet providers is mandatory. Because IP address scarcity is one of the things standing in the way for new hosting providers and digital innovation.
On occasion on Mastodon I have pointed out we do need to be supportive of our community infrastructure. The thing is that it's not just code and servers. It's people, it's organisations.
It's our distribution packagers, it's the Free Software Foundation and the Software Conservancy. It's the organisations that check our code is reproducible, it's folks like Radically Open Security. It's our moderators and folks who try to encourage the next generation to join.
For decades we've relied on VC money to build our walled gardens and our bill has come due as resources get repurposed for other reasons.
So it's time for a spruik on behalf of the folks who form a part of my community in the spaces where I communicate online.
Robin Riley shared Matrix.orgs' financial issues in February this year. The Matrix Foundation was spun out and for years the directors of Matrix had been paying the bills but they wished for the foundation to be able to make money for itself. [7]
Even if a project has it's own Matrix server there are a number of folks on their channels who's main hop-on point to the network is Matrix.org. Some projects are hosted by Matrix.org. There's a lot of community discussion that happens on these channels and the only way you can access them is by having an account on a Matrix server.
Matrix is often touted as an alternative to Discord. To be clear we need those alternatives to Discord, it's a proprietary platform and if it goes there will be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of community groups that will be screwed. They will lose that base.
One of the awesome things about Reproducible builds is that there are several Debian and GUIX packagers who are members of Reproducible Builds. We have the software supply chain to consider now and some of our packagers are funded through Reproducible builds. They test our code and enable it to be packaged in Debian. Which then funnels our software into other Distributions.
They need your help.
https://reproducible-builds.org/donate/
In order to find the next generation of coders, moderators, designers and writers we need to sponsor them in their training. Outreachy is one vector for that. They need about 8000 dollars per student and sometimes that cash needs to come from the projects. Although that does mean many smaller projects can't afford an intern. So how do they find the next generation of folks to keep the project going?
Plus Outreachy are specifically for inclusivity. I can't think of a better way to build our resistance and a future than finding a way for the next generation of FOSS folks. It will piss off the tech-bros as well. Let's get them in our ecosystem before the handmaidens of Fascism decide the best of the best need to hide again.
https://www.outreachy.org/sponsor/donate/
The EU is a mixed bag of folks who want FOSS and those who see nothing wrong with using FAANG companies and listening to their lobbyists. Look at the political landscape. Look at the physical landscape with Putin wishing to reinstate the Iron Curtain.
We need to build our independent infrastructure. But we need cash.
So I need a few things from folks.
Invest in your independent spaces, give instance owners and their moderators resources. Make it clear to your political reps that FOSS is a requirement. Build your communities and consider how you can help.
Otherwise you will lose your spaces on here to what the VCs decide is worth investing in.
[1] https://www.onepict.com/20240409-sustain.html
[2] https://www.onepict.com/20240512-elephant.html
[3] https://www.onepict.com/20240813-ecosystem.html
[4] https://ariadne.space/2021/06/13/the-end-of-freenode.html
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/19/freenode_staff_resigns/
[6] https://www.techradar.com/news/remember-the-ovhcloud-data-center-fire-heres-why-it-was-so-bad
[7] https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/crossroads/
[9] https://librecast.net/fluconf-2025/#good-people-doing-nothing