What is the Gateway Co-op?
The Gateway Co-op is an experiment in collective stewardship of digital infrastructure. We are using a gateway server (explanation here) as a test case for exploring dynamics about collective stewardship, as well as to provide a practical utility — to facilitate publishing from home servers to the internet even in the most difficult or oppressed conditions.
What Is A Gateway?
In short a gateway is a server that helps provide a connection to local servers on the public internet, without revealing their IP address to the public (more details are here).
This is similar to corporate services such as cloudflare tunnel, but ours is run by a small co-op of hackers, artists and activists, and uses TLS-passthrough with sni-routing so that no monitoring of traffic is possible.
We see the gateway as a tool, and also as a meeting point.
How Do I Use The Gateway?
Send us an e-mail at gatewaycoop@commoninternet.net with your signal username, and then we will correspond via signal to send you the authentication key you need in order to connect your server to the gateway.
The use of the gateway is on a donation basis, and we manage our finances through Open Collective.
After we send you the authentication keys via signal, a tutorial on how to connect your server to the gateway is here.
Who Is Already Using The Gateway?
A page with an opt-in list of projects making use of the gateway is here.
Is This A Globally Federated Network Of Tech Co-ops Exchanging Services Based On Bioregional Contexts?
That's not a bad idea.
Who Is Currently In Gateway Co-op?
We don't publicly reveal all of our members or operations, but we have a public document describing our basic decision making protocol here.
What Are Alternatives To Gateway Co-op?
Tailscale funnel also provides tunneling with TLS passthrough for free, but does not support a custom domain name. If you are ok with a ts.net subdomain for your project, this is a good option.
Cloudflare tunnel is the most popular alternative, but they don't do TLS-passthrough for the free plan, and they spy on your traffic (more info here).
The cloudflare free version is very "SSL added and removed here!":
There is an enterprise version of cloudflare that provides TLS-passthrough as well as a paid service with inlets.
Alternatively, we also provide documentation on how you can run your own gateway server here.
How Can I Contribute?
Firstly, we are looking for a web designer to help make a new version of this website. This current version and logo was just sort of a first draft, and we would love help. If you have experience and interest in this, please send us an email at gatewaycoop@commoninternet.net or get in touch another way.
Becoming a user of the gateway and a contributor to the open collective will also help the project gain more resilience.
A longer explanation of the project is here.
