What is this?

The page you are looking at is served by a Xiaomi Poco F1, logged in to a wifi network that was already there, getting more than enough energy because it found a nice and sunny spot.

The brand and model of the phone are not important, it's just to say: It's a regular and once very common phone, mid- to high range when it came out in 2018. It was widely hailed for its price and performance, and sold more than half a million times in the first few of months after its release. Most likely many of these phones are discarded by now — millions of CPU cores and petabytes of RAM.

compost.party is the result of a decision to not discard it though, to run a full Linux distribution on it instead. And so while the atoms stay the same, if you look attentively you can see this as a site of ongoing reconstruction.

postmarketOS brings organisms doing the busy work prodding at the individual parts, probing them, documenting them, writing drivers, telling others about it, munching away. Producing a soil that is rich enough for phone-like tasks: sending messages, making appointments, and getting your life together.

compost.party takes some bits of that and feeds them to the critters and bacteria around it, its inhabitants and users. Not the dialer user interfaces and calendar apps, but a server to show static websites (including the one you're reading right now), crontabs to start tasks at regular intervals, code to recycle old posts from the fediverse… a truly universal machine metabolizing and reconfiguring bytes, to be reshaped just as we please.

Call for participation

If you have an idea for something that you'd like to run on compost.party, please write us at yeah@compost.party. No matter your previous experience, we'd love to hear from you and gladly help you set things up.