About Nassella

Nassella is intended to be the first product from a new worker's cooperative. The co-op and the product are the work of Thomas Hintz.

The goal of Nassella is to make it easy for anyone to self-host web applications, like NextCloud (Google cloud alternative) or Ghost (the open-source substack alternative used to host this site). Nassella aims to provide everything needed to host a robust set of web applications without needing to have the know-how of a nerdy system adminstrator. It is planned that Nassella will include automatic: DNS configuration, operating system updates, hosted application updates, logging, alterting, backups, and hosting migration.

I have been hosting my own web applications for 15+ years now on top of also managing web applications for startups and corporations. I am deeply familiar with how to reliably and securely run web applications but I don't want the benefits of that to only be available to those like me that know things like Linux firewalls and sysctls. I realized that using a set of more recently available tools, it would be possible to automate everything that was needed in a way that others could also get the benefits of self-hosting, without needing to be a hosting expert.

Nassella also aims to meet my values which means: respecting users. One of my core principles to make sure that you, as the user of the software, always have control over the software and nothing about the software design, architecture, or algorithms removes your control or is used to manipulate you. This includes a commitment to copy-left open source software and not developing manipulative algorithms. Nassella is also intended to be the first product of a workers cooperative that will have the same values.