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DIGITAL ISSUE 1: BIG INTERNETJes Ciacci: I would first like to say that technology is political—it's not a neutral thing. We are not a web services provider because that's the object we use to do politics. We care about communications. Big Tech companies don't. They care about the business of data, and they use communication as a means to maximize capital gain. That’s different. We work on our own terms: We only use Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS) in our tools, we do decision-making with our members, we have annual democratic elections, and we have working groups to think about the political movements we want to be more involved in.
The main services that our members use are web services, emails, and mailing lists. We have two instances2 of Jitsi, which is a web conference platform. One is installed with an interpretation feature so we can facilitate real-time conversations between English and Spanish speakers. This instance is what we are using to talk right now at i.meet.mayfirst.org.
We maintain a cloud called Nextcloud for all our members.3 So you can use that to store documents.4 There are different features in the Nextcloud instance that we maintain, such as file sharing and storing, calendars, contacts, forms, etc. We also have a chat platform based on XMPP,5 which is quite old for many people, but we use it regularly.
There are services that we provide that are less widely-known, but are still quite important, like different database management systems. Without a database you cannot have anything on the web. [laughs] We provide an Icecast instance, which is used to do streaming.
We also have a wiki at help.mayfirst.org. We try to document how to troubleshoot and use all our services. Documentation is always a big endeavor—both to build it and maintain it. And in our case, it's in both Spanish and English. One of our working groups, TIAS (Technology, Infrastructure and Services Team), and workers are in charge of this project but there are only three workers in May First.
I had assumed the May First team was much larger.
It’s not because we don’t want more people. It's because May First is almost 100% funded with the dues paid by members.6 We don't have any grants or external funding. Most of our income goes directly to salaries, colocation, and interpreters. Only one of our workers is full-time, one is part-time, and one is a volunteer worker also working part-time.
As a bi-national cooperative, I'm curious if there are logistical, political, or even cultural challenges operating between Mexico and the United States that you face. I'm interested in how this arrangement serves as an asset—particularly how it facilitates certain types of partnerships, opportunities, and solidarity.
Well, the first thing I can say is that's a challenge [laughs].
I'm sure!
But it's a nice challenge. I can say that May First is still a work-in-progress because we’ve learned a lot since we became a bi-national cooperative, or a bi-national organization, since in the beginning we were not a co-op.
We became a bi-national organization around 2011. There were colleagues working on tech infrastructure and services in Mexico but after many years they could not maintain that labor anymore. So when they decided to conclude the cycle of La Neta, the name of their group, they looked for other technological groups to make an impact in the same way. They joined May First and all their members went directly into the May First infrastructure. We maintained that collaborative relationship and worked to understand how we can build political movements. We have been developing that relationship and changing the cooperative into what it is now since 2015.7 Usually the tech part is easier than the human, political part, like everything else [laughs].
Approximately 80% of our members are based in the US and 20% in Mexico. The rest are mainly in Latin America. We know that 20% of our members are from Mexico because they pay their dues in Mexican pesos. So that’s easy to know [laughs]. The rest pay in US dollars. We don't collect data from our members so sometimes we don't know the member percentage very well. But at least 20% of our board members need to come from Mexico.
NOTES
1. See May First Movement Technology’s website: https://mayfirst.coop/en/.
2. An instance is a specific installation or deployment of a software application (in this case, Jitsi web conference platform) that runs independently with its own configuration and features.
3. A cloud is secure online storage that runs on servers, allowing you to access and share files from anywhere while maintaining control of your data.
4. Nextcloud defines itself as "a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services." May First has hosted and maintained their own instance. For more information, see May First Movement Technology's web page "About Nextcloud": https://help.mayfirst.org/en/reference/about-nextcloud
5. XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is a decentralized messaging protocol that enables instant communication across servers, online status checks, and contact management. It includes privacy protections against corporate surveillance.
6. For further membership information , see May First Movement Technology's web page “Membership Benefits”: https://mayfirst.coop/en/member-benefits/
7. In June 2019, the membership of May First approved bylaws officially converting the organization into a nonprofit membership organization and effectively becoming a cooperative.
8. Note from the May First team: These stats vary from week to week, but typically between 55 and 66% of email traffic goes to Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. The rest probably goes to other corporate providers! But the big three are the only ones we track.
The servers are in the US and are operated mostly by our workers. We prioritize having the data center in proximity so if we want to change anything, we can go in person to do the work.
If you look at email traffic, about 60% of emails go through Big Tech. They decide who's going to be in their inbox and who's not. So every time Google, Yahoo, or Hotmail makes any changes in their infrastructure regarding emails that don't come from those three providers, we need to make a lot of adjustments to ensure our emails get through so people can continue communicating with them. We are part of a network with other small service providers called infra.red, and we've been talking about how to make these changes so our groups maintain communication with their usual contacts.8
So while these protocol updates might improve security for Big Tech platforms, they create hurdles for smaller providers who have to keep adapting to maintain their services.
I understand that there’s a lot of scams and spam. As an email provider, you have to do your work. I am also fond of trying to be as autonomous as we can be, even with something as small as opening an email.
One of the most recent May First Tech podcasts was "Can the Feds Get My Data?" I know that the FBI seized a server from one of your facilities. I'm wondering about the kinds of strategies—whether they're technical, legal, or collective—that you think about to protect your data and to provide this infrastructure.
We are going to resist, first of all, and we are going to talk with our members to collectively plan our response. We typically have the support of the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to help respond to legal inquiries.
In the privacy policy we try to make it explicit that we delete the data of our members when they are not members anymore. If you cancel your membership, after 6 months, we are going to delete everything we have coming from you. Please do your backups [laughs]. If someone knocks and asks for something, we don’t have it in many cases.
Good to know. Setting a reminder to back-up my things.
People ask us, "Why do you still have your servers in the U.S.?" First of all, because we have a politically-aligned lawyer here in the U.S. if anything happens [laughs]. Second of all, to put your servers in other parts of the world is not going to be a very successful strategy. The U.S. has cooperation agreements with many governments around the world. So if the U.S. government actually wants that data, they're going to get it.
Also with regard to privacy, we recently applied a subtitle feature to our Jitsi instances. This feature is based on large language models but is not synchronized. This means that the data from the subtitles stays local and isn't transmitted elsewhere. It only works on our servers and we don’t record anything. It's an experiment. We don't know how well it's going to work, so we rely on our members to give us feedback. If you use it and you find difficulties, just let us know. We try not to automate things that are sensitive.
Yeah. Last year we declared May First as an Apartheid Free Zone (AFZ).9 We don’t use Amazon Web Services or Google Services. We only use free software and try to have as much control of our infrastructure as we can, both in terms of the physical infrastructure and the data we collect and the things that we do with that.
We’ve researched the obstacles as a movement to avoid using Google.10 I say this all the time to those who want to join this work: "You need to have a plan." You need to be sure of your beliefs. You need to understand the political impact of using Google, particularly in this moment when they continue to maintain military contracts with the Israeli government.
You need to understand why you are doing what you are doing. Why do you want to do what you want to do? I cannot separate that question from any other political decision that I take in my life. When someone says, “I want to de-Google,” I say, “Yeah, so be patient.” That's the first thing I say because you will need to learn something different from whatever technology you have been taught as normal. So let's try to de-Google the normal.
Yes, disconnect (patiently) to reconnect. If de-Googling the normal means cutting this proverbial cord with deliberate disentanglement, we have to question what gets linked, or re-linked, in this process.
It means you’re going to need to learn something different. If you have all of these tools but only use a few because your schools, your government, and your institutions use them, then that becomes your “normal.” That's the only environment you are used to. I really like when people say “I want something that does exactly the same thing as Google, but is nice, fast, and aligned with my values.” And it's like, we can’t.
[Laughs] At least not yet. I hope that in the future we'll learn there's no "new normal" that's universal for everyone. Maybe there are decentralized platforms that only exist in a certain time and place. I’m thinking about the bulletin board systems (BBSs) used by grassroots movements and the Zapatistas for organizing. Or about the concept of Web Zero. We can look back at our digital past in order to go forward, too.
Yeah, we need to change the way we think about these concepts. We don't call ourselves an alternative to Google. We are not an alternative because we don't want to be Google. This is not our goal. We don't want to be a monopoly. We don't want 80% of the web’s traffic to pass through our May First servers. We want to be one of the nodes in the technical-political ecosystem who actually serve their own community. But just one of the nodes. We are going to cover our necessities in a different way because we have a different political perspective. And that has a lot of implications—a lot of technical implications.
We work towards this vision in every decision we take. We are going to care about communications. We are going to care about the politics of communications. We do. Our work is based on that.
https://outreach.mayfirst.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=1333
10. May First Movement Technology, "Cutting the Cord: Addressing the movement's dependence on Big Tech by growing our autonomous technology ecosystem,” 2025
https://mayfirst.coop/en/post/2025/cutting-the-cord/