As we are entering the last weeks of the 2025 we wanted to wish you all the best in upcoming 2026 as well as amazing end year celebrations! We wish you all and ourself another 10 years of open source and ethical alternatives to corporate internet. And the next year to be as fruitful and joyful as we hope it will.
The Time We Share
In the world we currently live in, the most common thing that all living beings have and share —time— has become a scarce, exchangeable, and marketable resource. We work, produce, consume, and rest within a system that measures, regulates, and captures that time, turning it into an economic unit. What was once a shared, vital flow is now managed like a commodity. And as everything seems to speed up, we find ourselves with less and less time of our own.
We're surrounded by platforms that present themselves as spaces for connection, collaboration, or entertainment, but their real business is the time of the people who use them. They don't provide services: they extract attention, data, free labor, and creativity and turn it into profit. Every interaction, every click, every message generates economic value for someone else. In this unequal exchange, we as users don't just give information, we give hours of our lives. Meanwhile, those who manage these infrastructures have built a well-oiled system of time trafficking: a gigantic transfer of human energy to corporations that give back nothing but dependency and precariousness. In this context, self-hosted, self-managed, open, and community-driven projects don't just propose a different technological model but also a different relationship with time.
Our project was created to open a different kind of space: a self-managed platform offering free and open-source services. We believe technology can be a common good, not a commodity. We organize without advertising, without selling data, and without relying on investors. But that doesn't mean we're outside the system we live in: no project, however collaborative or noble, fully escapes the structures that organize economic and social life.
Software can be free, but people's time is not. Maintaining infrastructure, ensuring security, supporting users, fixing issues, documenting, learning, coordinating, improving, this all requires human time. Today, five people keep this project alive, almost entirely on a volunteer basis. Some of us receive a small fee for our voluntary work, which depends directly on donations. It's not enough to live on, but it allows the project to continue.
This is not about putting a price on what we do; it's about recognizing that the time we dedicate is not an abstraction. It's time that we could have spent on our families, on ourselves, and it has value because we invest it in building something common. Donating or getting involved is not an act of charity; it's a way to redistribute time, to support spaces where not everything has to be measured in terms of profit or productivity.
In a world that turns every minute into a commodity, supporting projects that seek other ways of organizing is a concrete form of resistance. Every contribution, every act of participation, every gesture of collective care helps keep a space open where time can once again be what it always was: something we share.
This year, we may not reach the budget we had originally planned. As the core team, we take responsibility for not having driven a fundraising campaign with enough momentum, and we are already working to do better next year.
We would like to sincerely thank everyone who has donated over the years. Your support is what keeps the project alive and independent.
If you haven't had the chance to contribute this year, we invite you to consider making a small donation — even just the cost of a cup of coffee. The future of independent platforms like ours depends directly on the financial support of the community.
If you want to see more information about our financial situation, visit our website.
Finally, we would also like to express our affection and appreciation to the Undernet.uy project and its administrator Santiago (@santiago@mastodon.uy) for the impressive work he has been doing for 10 years now! Cheers, Santiago! Here's to many more years of Undernet and more independent, self-managed, community-based projects that continue to resist.
Happy solstice and Happy New Year, disrooters! See you in 2026!