Community Bits is a workshop for small, sturdy tools — the kind that do one thing well, cost nothing to use, and run on infrastructure we own outright. Free for everyone, and free to host for charities and community groups who need it.
Supporting our workbench on Ko-fi is what pays for that hosting.
What exists today, and what is being built next.
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A telegraph key in your browser. Tap out Morse and it decodes as you send; anyone else on the channel hears it in real time, at proper 1:3 timing. Public and private channels, a log of every transmission, and no account needed. Built as a test of how fast a real-time app could go from idea to live domain on our CairnServer infrastructure — it took a day.
Next: Morse over MeshCore. The same key, carried over a long-range radio mesh instead of the internet — so a community can still reach each other when the network, the power, or the phone masts are gone. Morse is the right payload for that: a message survives conditions that would drop voice or data entirely.
Everything here runs on CairnServer, a control plane we wrote from scratch to make a single server behave like a platform.
No cloud platform, no per-seat pricing. Nine Rust services manage web, mail, firewall, containers and certificates on hardware we rent by the month.
Running another small app on a server that is already paid for costs nothing. That is the whole reason these tools can stay free without ads or accounts.
A privileged broker with exactly four operations, an integrity monitor watching for out-of-band edits, and audit logging on every change. Boring, on purpose.
Charities, community groups and nonprofits get a CairnServer of their own, hosted and run at no cost. No membership, no application form — just ask.
Case by case, and we say yes to most: registered charities, community groups, mutual aid, schools and clubs.
Worth saying plainly: CairnServer is built and sold commercially by Monoform Digital. Third-sector organisations get the same thing free. It costs almost nothing to run one more instance on hardware already paid for, which is why this is a real offer rather than a discount off a price nobody in the sector could afford anyway.
One thing shipped and a lot of bench space left. The code and the next builds appear on GitHub, and the tools stay free for everyone.
Servers, domains, and the time to keep them running — there is nothing else it goes on. Right now it would also fund the mesh work: radio hardware to test against, and the time to build it.