Hypha is a non-homogenous group of individuals.

The people taking part in Hypha meetings are joined by the curiosity to explore technology with both curiosity and critique.

Hypha meetings have been informal. We discussed subjects that emerged naturally from our lived experience.

Our understanding and relationship with technology differs from person to person. This created a space of diverse opinions. We have held space for our differences, and we have held each other through learning about the things that we struggled with.

We also gathered to watch and discuss movies - curated documentaries about hacking culture. These stories sparked further explorations.

Mastodon

We discussed whether or not to start a Mastodon instance.

We are excited by the idea of learning how to deploy and moderate and instance.

We are reluctant to deploy a platform without understanding whether it answers a real need that we have.

In our community, a lot of organizing is still done around Facebook and Instagram. We talk about the gated gardens that they represent. We also discuss the security and privacy risks.

At the same time, we talk about the mental burden associated with switching our processes and our tools.

We are still exploring the potential of the Fediverse and Mastodon.

Maintenance work made visible

We talked about the principles of the feminist server.

We explored our own energy and our enthusiasm for doing deployment and maintenance work.

We discussed what it means to participate in the work needed to deploy and maintain infrastructure, especially when members have varied levels of comfort when it comes to the technical process involved.

We feel that we need more exploration before we launch into deploying our own online spaces.

We feel that not having any online spaces that we deployed and maintain is a visible translation of the need that we feel for more exploration before we commit. The lack of something - made visible.

Secure communication

We talked a lot about secure communications, and about keeping our data out of the hands of Big Corps.

We use Signal to chat and organize our meetings.