I just lost my job as a full time WordPress developer for an international leisure ferry travel company in Seattle due to COVID. So I thought, “you know what’s going to be on everyone’s mind? Teleconferencing and the privacy nightmare that comes with it. Now would be a great time for everyone to feel empowered to take full responsibility for their own privacy.”

So I started looking piecing together the idea of a tiny device that could piggyback on your cellular connection and provide GPS tracking, social checkins, VPN, and all of that stuff that we love so much and just don’t realize the only reason we’re not carrying something like that around with us already is that there’s no money to be made in it.

It took me some time, but I got Matrix/Synapse server working in a docker container on my desktop machine. Once I figured out what you could do with it, I had a videoconferencing server hosting a meeting of me and two other nerds very quickly. It was super fragile though, so I kept looking for something cleaner.

I wish I’d found FreedomBox sooner! It’s so easy! I’m probably going to order the hardware just because, but I’d love to see that thing get a spec bump!

This is running on a VM, but I’ll be moving it to a Raspberry Pi very soon now that I have had such success today.