Appux is a project to offer a collection of internet services to my local community, free of charge. So far this includes:
I'm also considering:
To be clear, it's an old-school setup: A collection of computers in my bedroom. It's an unpaid volunteer project, a labor of love; there's no high availability this or site reliability team that. There are nightly encrypted offsite backups, but if a server goes down and I need to replace it, or I have to reconfigure the network, or there's a prolonged power outage, it's gonna be unavailable for a bit.
The mission of Appux is to help people gain more privacy in their communications and digital works; the main strategy is to allow people to divest their data from large corporate silos such as Facebook, Google, and Apple by giving them alternative software that places user privacy and control as a top priority.
My vision is for a large number of "community sysadmins" (to riff on a phrase from elsewebs) to provide similar services to their communities and establish this as a real alternative to corporate data-farms.
Appux will only serve a relatively small number of users, even if I expand the hardware offerings and connectivity several times over. One volunteer is not enough. If you would like to start a similar service, please get in touch! I'm sharing my code as I develop this service, and hope to write some blog posts as I learn from my own experiences and those of others.