This blog post was originally posted on infrastructures.us in April 2024. The original version is archived on the Internet Archive. This version has be updated and edited as of July 2026. Refer to footnotes for known changes.
Entering this space | the whys, whats and hows
journeying through the Tech industy >.<
So the past 6 years (2018-2024) (sheesh), I’ve worked in the Tech industry working everything from product manager to recruiter, becoming well versed in what the Industry actually is. And I can definitively say… i didn’t like what i saw. Egos and profit-driven mentalities led to inefficient, insecure and unsafe products that used or relied on by the masses. that alone made me curious about all of the platforms I utilize in the digital realm.
pandemics
them boom, the pandemic started, lockdown happened and my entire world changed. working from home full-time completely changed the way I interacted with my dreams, my body, my politics and my relationships. so many of us were driven to the ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭* ̀ˋ ɪɴᴛᴇʀɴᴇᴛ to work and relate and tbh… i really loved it. I reckoned with the fact that, at heart, I’m a home-body! in that first year, i began to understand that I’m not just an individual, i’m a product of the collective. But when we moved into 2021 and the vaccines rolled out, the world attempted to return to pre-2020 lifestyles, but i was pretty set on grappling with moving through an ongoing pandemic. the realm in which my relationships lived felt like traveling between 2 dimensions: one in which covid is a blip in our history and one in which it continues to be a catalyst for the apocalypse (word to Octavia Butler’s Parable series). The consequences of this?
web 3 rabbit hole
^ yea, that happened. and i would have never known that this basically exists w/o the capitalist incentives if not for samara (thank you ♥) via the fediverse. all i knew was that it offered an alternative to the metas and the x’s (fka twitter) that marketed autonomy, ownership and privacy.
and that’s what sold me, it’s what started the seeds of wanting to curate a digital space for / with my friends. a couple years later and I’m learning more about the true meaning of decentralization. and i started to conjure a concept in my head of what this may look like for my community: digital villages. the rabbit hole shifted and i dug deeper into research to shape this idea, and I ended up getting funded to pursue it. straight from my proposal, here’s the idea:
The Digital Village is the digital manifestation of the connections + relationships we maintain in the physical realm. We are taking lessons from the realities of and responses to the pandemic. sometimes, it is inconvenient and unsafe to be together in person, but there is still desire to remain connected. Creating a platform that addresses this need while remaining as independent as possible from the digital-capitalist and digital-fascist supply chain is essential to our our collective survival.
The Digital Village seeks to operate outside the larger digital world as a means of protecting our privacy, practicing hyper-local community building and move beyond digital spectacle as a means of surviving capitalism and fascism. As such, this project explores decentralization of digital platforms, utilizing private and secure digital resources, federated social networking, p2p platforms and practices in an attempt to disrupt the digital-capitalist and digital-fascist supply chain to make a lasting impact that disrupts Big Tech, it seeks to operate with the larger digital system by offering research, work, art and Inspiration to those who share similar values systems and are seeking to build their own village and survive the current world.
podmap v1 - who are my people? how do we align on my core values?
but in order to get ^there^, i need to feel grounded in what my community even is. the idea of community has felt so nebulous lately. as an organizer, I hear the word thrown around sooo much (myself included (ง •̀_•́)ง) and i just really wanted some direction as to what community even is… what community I belonged to. so i did a thing i always heard about in the movement world, but actually never did myself, ~podmapping~1
v1 is below:
The images shows a “Podmapping Key” section defining symbols for solid circles (pods), overlapping circles (shared pods), dotted line circles (people/households), and larger solid circles (networks, communities or infrastructural resources), alongside an “Extra Considerations” section with two questions asking about covid strategies and digital tool communication.
A map of various yellow-lined circles in various sizes. Some are shaded in, overlapping and/or feature dotted outlines. These circles represent my pod-mates and pod resources and their relationship to me. I am featured as a pink solid-lined circle. Each pod-mate has a pink sticky-note naming the digital spaces of communication for each. A larger pink sticky names that the most popular methods of communication are signal, instagram, text message and discord.2
Experimenting
buying a raspberry pi!! + the annoyances that came with it
it took me until like the halfway point in class, but after research and doubt and confusion and more research, I decided to physically host my server at my house. i got a raspberry pi (a lil mini computer you plug right into your router) to install yunohost (an operating system that makes self-hosting as easy as possible). looking at my lil baby, i feel proud to have taken the step this journey. holding the hardware in my hand made me feel more empowered and technically capable.
the ~annoying~ part that came with this tho, was being marketed (and buying) a cable that wasn’t necessary for setup. so I went to walmart to buy an actual ethernet cable that would let me plug the pi into my router, but it was locked up for “security”. A $7 cable! being locked up!! it just felt really goofy to me to be hindered in this way in my very Black community. WHO CARES IF SOMEONE STEALS A $7 CABLE WHEN YALL STEAL FROM PEOPLE EVERY DAY. this conditional caging of tech pissed me off but made me determined as ever to continue on this path.3
so. i finally had everything i needed to bring my server online. i beeped booped bopped on my computer and just felt so much gratitude that i did the thing. the question was… what am I trying to do on this new living thing that I brought into the world. Initially, I wanted to start up a media server, and this whole caging ordeal at walmart made me feel even more indignant about it. It got me thinking about how to share art (and thus, a piece of the world) with my community? how can we utilize our funds to tangibly support creators we love and respect? i really wanted to do something with that, but also, i lacked the skills to ensure security and privacy in an industry that can really crack down on us in collaboration with my ISP. so i decided to smart smaller with a personal/communal project… M3dia Club!
M3dia Club is a podcast, sure, but even more so, it’s an audio-blog, for me, by me + oftentimes with others. I’m considering this an archive of books, movies, tv shows, video games, articles, all kinds of mixed media that I enjoy and will continue to enjoy in the years to come. For me, this club is an opportunity to practice intentionality with my consumption and creation of media in a way that pushes me towards a collective vision of the future!
originally, M3dia Club was a personal project for me to be intentional with what media i’m consuming and have intentional reflection/discussion around it to help shape my past, present and future. and it still is that, but interrogating the “solidarity” in Solidarity Infrastructures, made me realize that media and discussion is a huge way that I connect with my pod mates, not just myself or the world at large. so I want this to be communal, a way for us to connect to each other and have fun! the digi-ware I chose for this task was Castopod, a federated podcast hosting app on the ActivityPub protocol that turns your podcast into a social media platform. Ideally, folks on Mastodon and other ActivityPub apps can interact with my M3dia Club site without having to download a brand new application (WIP).4
…and then I lost my password (╥﹏╥). which honestly, is fine lol. The practice of building, losing, wiping and re-building is a practice in and of itself that I’m grateful for.5
ok so now what? | reflections on server building and podmapping
so i’ve secured the hardware, stood up the server, downloaded the applications, migrated my content… how do i get folks to interact with / migrate to / even just look at m3diaclub.nohost.me? coming into this class, i had a big questions around migration. with so many (including my community!) operating within the walled gardens of Big Social Media, what does it take to get folks to take the leap to something new, somewhere where not too many of us are? in the organizing community, I see the critiques stream in of Elon’s takeover of Twitter, concerns of shadow-banning on facebook and instagram… but we are still there (myself included).6 and this is how I started forming the theory that in my community, it takes a foundation of political alignment and vulnerability in our relationship to migrate together. political alignment in the sense that we are fed up enough about our current digital platforms that we be moved to action. And vulnerability meaning that we cultivate a space to make mistakes and navigate the uncertainty of new tech together.
returning to my podmap
grounded in this theory, I returned to my podmap to add new layers to my community map
podmap v2 - this isn’t just about me, exploring ALL our connections
the inspiration for this podmap version came from this map shown in class, mapping the differences between distributed, decentralized and centralized servers:
This image shows three types of network structures: a centralized system with a single central node connected to multiple nodes, a decentralized system with several central nodes each connected to multiple nodes, and a distributed system with numerous interlinked nodes without a central node.
i wanted to draw lines of connection between all the pods that have established relationship to each other and see if it looked like any of the above. Below is the result:
A diagram centered around “Chelle” with various connected nodes labeled as “signal” and “text” linked to different platforms like Discord, Facebook, and email. seems to be a combination of different kinds of servers!
podmap v2.2 - am i… a server? controlling for political alignment
A detailed flowchart diagram showing various interconnected nodes with different labels and colors in green, yellow, purple, and pink, centered around a node labeled "Chelle."9
podmap v2.3 - am i… a server? controlling for vulnerability
A flowchart diagram with “Chelle” in the center connected to various nodes labeled with different communication services like “signal,” “text,” “email,” “Facebook,” and "Discord."10
podmap v2.4 - am i… a server? controlling for where political alignment and intimacy overlap
A network diagram centered on “Chelle” shows various interconnected nodes labeled with different communication methods such as signal, email, text, IG, and Discord.11
To continue thinking on…
maintainence + care
Outsiders sometimes make the mistake of focusing on the rusty bridges and broken pipes — the “defective objects” themselves — whereas local fixers are more concerned with “the social and political relationships in which [those objects are] embedded…
…We should always ask: what, exactly, is being maintained? “Is it the thing itself,” Graham and Thrift ask, “or the negotiated order that surrounds it, or some ‘larger’ entity?” 22 Often the answer is all of the above. Maintenance traverses scales.
by Shannon Mattern
and as a piece of that, load balancing:
A load balancer acts as the “traffic manager” sitting in front of your servers and routing client requests across all servers capable of fulfilling those requests in a manner that maximizes speed and capacity utilization and ensures that no one server is overworked, which could degrade performance. If a single server goes down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining online servers. When a new server is added to the server group, the load balancer automatically starts to send requests to it.
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Footnotes:
- Pods: The Building Blocks of Transformative Justice & Collective Care
- The featured image was recreated and captured in June 2026, it may be different than the original blog post should it ever return online.
- For Big Corporations Like Walmart, Wage Theft Penalties Are Just the Price of Doing Business
- Thoughts from 2026 edit: I’ve since sunsetted the Castopod server as I ventured into exploring other open-source technologies. I would like to return to it at some point, though. Perhaps as an archive of DJ sets, perhaps to return to the audio-blog itself. I struggled with Castopod – Mastodon connectivity and would like to resolve that in its next iteration.
- Thoughts from 2026 edit: Word to Legacy Russell’s, Glitch Feminism and celebrating our failures.
- Still trapped in the digital walled gardens in 2026 (╥﹏╥). But I’ve also deepened my understanding of ~my~ community and relationships with some pod-mates to start experimenting together and not just with myself!
- The featured image was recreated and captured in June 2026, it may be different than the original blog post should it ever return online.
- The featured image was recreated and captured in June 2026, it may be different than the original blog post should it ever return online.
- The featured image was recreated and captured in June 2026, it may be different than the original blog post should it ever return online.
- The featured image was recreated and captured in June 2026, it may be different than the original blog post should it ever return online.
- The featured image was recreated and captured in June 2026, it may be different than the original blog post should it ever return online.