---
title: "Migrating Our Community to Self-Hosted Platforms"
date: "2025-01-22"
summary: "Why we chose to move away from anything and everything that we can't control ourselves."
---

Hey friends,

We've been watching events unfold in our political climate, including tech leaders supporting a president that aims to oppress members of our LGBT+ community. As such, we've made the decision to migrate away from public community platforms and start self-hosting our own instead.

## What does this mean?

Well, there's a few things:

- First and foremost, the bulk of our communication is being moved to our [forum](https://chat.nhcarrigan.com). If you need to get in touch with us for *anything*, this is probably the best place to start. Additionally, conversations here are searchable and indexed by many crawlers.
- Our chat is migrating over to [IRC](https://irc.nhcarrigan.com). To protect the privacy of our community members, we do *not* run a bouncer. Which means anything you send can only be seen by users who are *currently online*. This ephemeral nature makes it nice for informal chatter, but leaves the forum as the best place for long-term conversation.
- For personal updates, we maintain our own [blog](https://blog.nhcarrigan.com). We also have a self-hosted [Sharkey instance](https://fedi.nhcarrigan.com) for smaller posts. Sign-ups are restricted to our family and polycule, but you can connect with us via any Mastodon-compliant instance!
- And finally, all of our code repositories are now on our own [Gitea instance](https://git.nhcarrigan.com). Note that anyone is welcome to sign up to file issues or comment on discussions, but repository creation is disabled so interested contributors will need to reach out for access.

## What if I don't want to join any of those?

That's fine! We'll still maintain a minimal presence on platforms like Discord and Bluesky. But our core focus for building our community is going to be on our self-hosted solutions, where we know our marginalised members are safe and can be protected.

We do hope to see you in our new home on the forum! 💜