Cicadas

Cicadas are people providing and consuming electronic media resources.

We are a network of friend-to-friend connections cultivating a conscious and cooperative electronic world. Our community prioritizes freedom, self-sufficiency, and Earth-conscious technology.

Cicadas is a cooperative that creates and provides resources for peer-to-peer and internet based electronic communication.

Rather than being "the cloud" (other corporation's computers), Cicadas is a fog… mostly our own computers. Computers living all over our homes and in our pockets, extending our nervous systems out to everything they touch 😊.

At present, we collaborate on a few network services including:

• web hosting
• matrix chat with end-to-end encryption
• email
• light file storage
• blog hosting (via writefreely)
• git repository hosting
• wireguard virtual private network

Meeting schedules have been informal. We intend to meet at least quarterly, and more often as our schedules allow and business demands.

Geographically, we are principally located in Lincoln, Nebraska and in Los Angeles, California. There is one VPS running at a Linode data center in Dallas, TX.

We are tired of the slow erosion of democracy, the destruction of the natural environment, and the ever-increasing surveillance of citizens.

We want to slowly build a strong culture of mutual aid, technical knowledge, and ethical practice around issues of centralized software platforms and their relation to privacy, politics, and the environment.

Finally, we want everybody to be able to either meet their own technology needs, or to be personally acquainted with somebody who can help those needs be met.

See Why Cicadas Matters To Me by Grant for more.

Through discussion and consensus building, we share the burden of providing and maintaining computing infrastructure and networked application services. This means sharing installation, configuration, and maintenance labor. But it also means sharing hosting costs and, when hosting storage in our own homes, energy consumption costs.