2026-04-12 tech circle minutes

Meta
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The following roles have been confirmed:

Minutes

The meeting took place 2026-04-12T17:10:00Z→2026-04-12T18:10:00Z. This is the first tech circle meeting for selecting who should hold the process roles.

Attendance

In attendance:

Since the circle is just starting up, @exodrifter is playing the interim facilitator and secretary. @halfcourtyeet is not in attendance because they voluntarily withdrew from the circle.

Selection

@exodrifter points out that there are four process roles but only three people, and says that it’s fine for some people to perform multiple roles.

  • @outfrost suggests that the delegate and either the facilitator or secretary role can be combined, because the workload of delegate does not have a very active role during meetings while facilitator and secretary do.
  • @lunarequest suggests delegate and facilitator be combined, because the facilitator has more work to do before meetings and the delegate has more work to do after meetings.
    • @outfrost says that it’s not clear that the workloads are not necessarily timed, because the upper circle might have meetings at any time.
    • @lunarequest says that it doesn’t matter when the meetings happen, but that the flow of information will naturally work out that way.

@exodrifter proposes that the delegate and facilitator roles be combined:

Selection for leader:

  • @exodrifter nominates herself because she runs most of the services. Since the circle is so small, she suggests a term of 6 months.
  • @lunarequest nominates @exodrifter because she runs all of the services except for the status page, also for 6 months due to circle size.
  • @outfrost nominates @exodrifter because she has shown the most initiative in setting up services for people to use and has an affinity for keeping people accountable, making sure the ball is rolling, and keeping a good overview on what’s going on in the organization. Suggests for 3-6 months, with a shorter term if we wanted the option to course correct earlier.

@exodrifter proposes herself as leader for 6 months:

Selection for delegate and facilitator:

  • @exodrifter nominates @lunarequest because she wants to see others gain experience with the process roles and @lunarequest is already in the admin circle, with a term of 6 months.
  • @lunarequest nominates herself because she’s already in the admin circle, for a term of 6 months.
  • @outfrost nominates himself, for having a decent sense of flow in meetings and making sure that all points and questions are addressed, for a term of 6 months.

Change round:

  • @exodrifter says that she doesn’t have a particular choice for this role, and would be happy with either @lunarequest or @outfrost filling the role.
  • @outfrost originally wanted to do facilitator and not delegate, but is open to it.
  • @lunarequest says that she doesn’t want to fill the secretary role because she won’t enjoy it.
  • @outfrost says they would be okay with filling the secretary role.

@exodrifter proposes @lunarequest for delegate and facilitator and @outfrost for secretary, both for 6 months:

@outfrost asks if the role begins the day following the meeting

  • @exodrifter says that they were going to do the day of the meeting.

Open Discussion

@exodrifter asks what kind of appetite people have for running more services.

  • @exodrifter is already running discourse, forgejo, matrix, discord matrix bridge, irc matrix bridge, draupnir (matrix moderation bot), distrust (discourse oidc provider service). She is already at the limit of how much she can self-host on her own as things stand, and the servers alone cost about $40/mo. She could run more if she received financial support for the community.

    • @outfrost thought it only costed @exodrifter $20/mo and says that we should set up community donations.

      • @exodrifter says she hasn’t done this yet because t/suki is technically owned by exodrifter LLC, and she feels weird about doing donations because exodrifter LLC also does other things. However, she doesn’t have the money to hire legal counsel to advise on incorporating t/suki.
      • @outfrost suggests that @exodrifter publish financial transparency reports as a solution for this
      • @lunarequest suggests that in the long-term future, t/suki could exist as an entity and contract exodrifter LLC to run the servers.
      • @exodrifter says she will open the topic of donations with the community circle.

    • @exodrifter says that one of the reasons the cost is higher is because she has selected a host that she believes runs a more protective service.

      • @exodrifter says Hetzner won’t allow adult content.
        • @lunarequest says Hetzner is located in a region of Gemany known for being incredibly prudish and misuses German law.
      • @exodrifter says she currently uses Atlantic despite their cost, because they have been a reliable host for her in the past, their service agreement is clear in allowing all legal use of their services, and has seen them support open source projects in the past.
      • @exodrifter runs through a cost breakdown of the servers.
        • @outfrost asks for a map of all the services and how they are connected. @exodrifter agrees to make it.

    • Alternative host ideas:

    • @exodrifter wants to return to the original question.

  • @outfrost wants to run a collaborative docs editor and is interested in trying HedgeDoc as well as Mumble, so it can be used as an alternative voice server.

  • @lunarequest would be happy to run anything that can use the spare resources of the status server as long as the new service is low maintenance and only really needs to be updated once in a while.

@lunarequest asks what should be done in emergency situations, for example if a major CVE comes out against the matrix server and it needs to be updated immediately.

  • @exodrifter says she could set up more user accounts on the server
  • @lunarequest says we could use Shamir’s Secret Sharing to make it so that multiple people need to come together before they can access a server to perform some admin work. This also prevents a single bad actor from using their access credentials to mess up a server.
  • @outfrost wonders what the threat model is for t/suki. Who should we trust and not trust?
  • @outfrost wonders what the emergency response guidelines should be given events of different severity
    • @lunarequest suggests we could write a document outlining specific examples and what the response should be.
    • @outfrost suggests we could make kill switches which would prevent requests from being routed to affected services.

Closing

TODOs:

  • Draft threat model, this is assigned to @outfrost
  • Draft finance report, this is assigned to @exodrifter
  • Test HedgeDoc on catgirl.cloud, this is assigned to @outfrost
  • To revisit in the future:
    • Decide how infrastructure work is distributed
    • Draft emergency response guidelines
      • @lunarequest suggested that this should be done after the threat model is written, as it will influence the writing of the emergency response.

@lunarequest will schedule the next meeting, as facilitator.

Retrospective:

  • Everyone agrees the meeting went well.
  • @outfrost expected a conversation about how infrasture work will be divided, but @exodrifter wanted to talk about what additional infrastructure work needs to be done.
    • Agreed that there isn’t anything actionable to do about this particular point.
tech circle
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The map of services requested by @outfrost has been created:

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