The Signal Stack

While this class is a deep-dive into how to self-host, its not my expectation that self-hosting is actually the best option for most people. Even if you have the technical knowledge and time to self-host your own infrastructure, this is less resilient than using infrastructure that is managed collectively.

Its more the hope that through learning about self-hosting, you can better understand the technology you use, understand self-hosting in the context of the open source movement in general, and practice more discernment in the tools you choose to use and to propagate in the world.

So with this in mind, this last tutorial is a recommended "stack" of tools for different contexts, as of the year 2025.

The Signal Stack

context: a group of people need to collaborate on a project over time

the stack: signal group chat with a pinned link to other infra, e-mail list via may first, nextcloud via may first for file-sharing, etherpad via etherpad.org, spreadsheets via nextcloud, bluesky and mastodon for social media, calendar via nextcloud, forms via nextcloud

This simple stack can cover a wide range of groups and collaborative processes and doesn't rely on surveillance capitalist tech. It costs ~50 dollars per year for a May First membership, and this money goes to a good cause. A chance to spend money on tools that work towards a future you want to live in.

Continued Research For Future Stacks (What Could The Stack Include in 2035?):

Open source moves at a slower pace than the corporate world, but it still moves, and much more is possible today than it was ten years ago. I still remember using Signal for the first time in 2016, when it felt like only my most hackery friends were using it. Now when I meet someone new it's not uncommon for them to offer to connect on Signal. So what non-extractive stacks could be possible in the year 2035? It probably still will not be perfect, but maybe more could be possible than there is currently, and Open Source could eventually seem like a slow-growing set of tools and practices that were refined and passed down over thousands of years.

Some things I could imagine in a stack in 2035:

More P2P and local-first applications.

Open source alternatives to:

  • partiful
  • doodle
  • forms
  • tech-coops that host additional more intricate software (outline, matrix, etc.)