Somewhere along the way, the web became something we rent. Our photos live on servers we don't own. Our messages pass through companies we've never met. Our communities exist at the pleasure of a board of directors on the other side of the planet.
We didn't sign up for this. None of us did. It just happened, one convenient default at a time.
Zippytal is an attempt to hand the wiring back. Not by yelling at the platforms. By building the alternatives, and making them good enough that leaving feels like an upgrade.
A video call you host yourself. Messages that only you and the person you're talking to can read. A community space that belongs to its community. Files that live on machines you chose. And underneath it all, a tiny open source daemon. The Zippytal Node. It turns any computer you own into part of a private, sovereign, federated web.
This only works if it's free. Not freemium, not trial, not 'free until we get acquired'. So the tools are free. Forever. Apache 2.0. Fork them, run them, fix them, outlive us.
We still have to eat. So we do two things that align with the mission instead of against it: we build products for entrepreneurs who want the same quality of engineering we bring to the ecosystem, and we teach people how to build things themselves.
If you're tired of being the product, you're in the right place. Welcome home.