The premise is simple: we’re all better off in a world where trans people know how to build our own technologies to suit the needs of our communities. Trans people are better off when we are well-connected and are able to DIY. And it’s now more than ever important for us to learn how to DIY our tech the same way so many of us have DIY’d our hormones.

The most immediate threat I think many online trans communities are currently facing is deplatforming. Many have been lulled into a sense of dependency by large tech companies. Self-hosting seems like all too overwhelming, the fediverse seems overwhelming, the UIs are overwhelming, archiving data seems overwhelming, starting from scratch and building communities on new instances seems overwhelming, helping users who are less tech literate migrate to safe platforms seems overwhelming.

I would like to suggest this is a problem we can resolve. I think we could start small, and we could just share with each other various problems we see in our communities when it comes to technology—barriers to entry, designs that simply do not work, etc.—and the solutions we’ve found to help resolve them for each other.

Alternatively, if you’re having a problem or facing resistance getting people onboarded in your communities—post about it! Let’s have a chat. Maybe someone knows a matrix room you should be apart of. Maybe someone has dealt with a particular type of user apathy in a Discord they’ve modded & can provide some hard won lessons learned.

In the long run, I think this information could be collated into a wiki resource of sorts. Of course not trying to replace the many many resources out there for learning individual technologies. But more like a landing page for the trans community to get started fixing common problems.

However, I am of course still working on learning myself, so I think if this community grows it will be a function of who shows up and where things go.

Feel free to discuss or share feedback, it’s just an idea at this point.