A server is a computer that makes files available via the internet or through a local network. Servers provide various services or resources to other computers, known as clients, over a network, facilitating communication and data exchange between devices. These services can range from hosting websites to storing files or managing network resources.

#computer in your back pocket/ server on a phone!

postmarketOS is an alternative operating system based on the resource-efficient Alpine Linux distribution. PostmarketOS is developed especially for older smartphones, dealing efficiently with their comparatively limited processing power. Being able to install this Linux distribution on a device allows users to access and use many of the device’s functionalities, potentially expanding its lifespan to 10 years (1).

permacomputing By repurposing 2nd hand smartphones into functional general-purpose computing devices we are putting some of the permacomputing principles, like care for all hardware – especially the chips into practice.

Permacomputing offers an aesthetic that is rooted in making constraints visible by exposing and embracing the limitations of e.g. obsolete devices, such as embracing small filesizes that can be parsed by devices with limited processing power or bandwidth.
Permacomputing aestetics focuses not only on the technically dimensions involved, but also addressing its cultural, political and social dimensions (Mansoux, Barok, Howell, Heikkilä 2023)(2).

WHAT IS A FEMINIST SERVER?
Servers can have (feminist) attitudes reconnecting technology with community, shifting the focus from tools to social needs and feminist approaches to develop new ways of relating to and shaping network technology grounded in values such as care, complexity and collective liberation.
An example is 'A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers,'(3) a publication by Varia, a collaborative project focusing on intersectional, feminist, and ecological servers. This project explores how servers can embody the values and principles that challenge mainstream technological practices for example by being collectively maintained.
Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak and Jara Rocha call this digital discomfort, a counterstrategy to the supposedly seamless operations of digital infrastructure (Cell for Digital Discomfort 2022a). In a collaboratively authored Wishlist for Trans*feminist Servers they urge to "strive for seamfulness, and response-able relationality" and to "practice digital discomfort and take walks on the rough side." (Cell for Digital Discomfort 2022b)

It is important not only to critique, but also to provide a new language and counterexamples or alternatives to demonstrate that computing can be done otherwise, as Marloes de Valk reminds us: "without articulating computing's embedding in larger systems, such as local and global economies, it runs the risk of becoming more aligned with a privileged lifestyle than with activism" (De Valk 2025: p.131-132)

&&&Don't do it alone! Join a group or create one.

Ongoing/further research and practice; However, the social and political ambitions around permacomputing are much larger than merely becoming a new method of more sustainable artmaking, as detailed by Mansoux in Artists Running Data Centers: But then you end up with the typical "hello world syndrome". What do you do then? You've got your community server running on a phone. …] What would it mean if they stopped being self-serving? […] If all these skills were employed to support communities that actually need alternative infrastructure and active servers to be able to communicate and chat together, all this knowledge would not end up in showing a Raspberry Pi at Ars Electronica, but in doing work that has an impact. (Bevilacqua & Mansoux 2024, p.91)(3)