Servers
Every server in our digital garden, aside from our cloud gateway in Digital Ocean and our Jellyfin VPS, was free. We believe that the computer of the future is made of trash. As the Windows 10 killoff renders 220 million devices e-waste, and datacenters are basically e-waste factories, corporate asset depreciation can work in our favor. How can we make low cost and unstable hardware useful through collective stewardship?
Bstudio
Tartlet: Webserver
Active sites: Resonant Love, Secret Server Club, Hyperwhisper dot net, Hal's Website, Nat's Website
Tartlet was originally a part of Whisper's Memory Terminal computer. It is now not only a purse-sized computer, it is a computer which is itself a purse. We customized this server with dual NVMe drives to act as a (cute) resilient mobile archive. This server traveled with us over the summer, and served offline versions of Spines, Temporary Archive, and Resonant.love over local networks wherever we went.
FREE: App Server
Active sites: Spines, Temporary Archive, Etherpad, Secret Server Club's Git Server
The first free computer in our free stack, recently liberated from the death throes of Windows 10, and living her best life running Bodhi Linux. As of October, FREE hosts all of our web applications, including Spines, Temporary Archive, Etherpad, and our Git instance.
In her previous life, she served as a speculative archive in installations around Los Angeles at LAST Projects, Pacific Design Center, and Durden & Ray, running Whisper's Carrier Bag software to navigate an archive of thousands of exported posts, field recordings, and screenwalks of collapsing virtual worlds.
Chiffon: RESTING
Chiffon is a gaming PC graciously given to us by Jamen from Killscreen/ Gameplay Arts, which served all of our websites through the summer with zero interruption! She is currently taking some much needed rest and recovery from the deep indignity of having Windows installed an her.
Plot
Secret: Webserver
Active sites: Resonant Love, Secret Server Club, Hyperwhisper dot net, Hal's Website, Nat's Website
Secret is the first server initiated by Secret Server Club, and now provides redundancy for all of our static websites, so if either we or Plot lose connection, the sites will stay up. Upcoming projects: Icecast radio station, distributed storage experiments.
Cloud
Dustcloud: Gateway
We don't have access to a public IP address at our studio, and we solved this originally with Cloudflare tunnels, which are extremely convenient and free, but come at the cost of Cloudflare decrypting your traffic, and placing stringent limits on file transfers. Friends from Gateway Co-op recommended using a single VPS in the cloud as a gateway to route traffic from our local services. Dustcloud operates on the same principal, but with a slightly different tech stack. See Gateway Co-op's excellent guide here, and documentation of our approach here.
Jellyfin: Media Server
This server actually plays a meaningful role in our love story! The day we met, Whisper offered to invite Hal to her media server, where she hosted the full discography of DeForrest Brown Jr.'s Assembling a Black Counterculture. On our first date, we sat at Couch Computer and dug through the archive together. A few months later Whisper invited Hal to move her music into the server. We saw this something like the digital equivalent of moving in together- a way of sharing intimate digital space.