announcements/posts/migrating-our-community-to-self-hosted-platforms.md

title	date	summary
Migrating Our Community to Self-Hosted Platforms	2025-01-22	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. 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. 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. We also have a self-hosted Sharkey instance for smaller posts. Sign-ups are restricted to our family and polycule, but you can connect with us via any Mastodon-compliant instance!

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! 💜