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.
Supporting our workbench on Ko-fi is what pays for the free hosting we give to charities and community groups.
What exists today, and what is being built next.
-- --- .-. ... . -.-. --- -.. -.--
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.