Queer Haus was a project started by five friends in Berlin with a burning desire to explore an alternative to big centralised social media platforms.
The project was actively run during the pandemic from 2020 until about 2022 with weekly meetings. We organised digital hangouts and physical workshops to spread awareness of the fediverse.
The projects main focus was to create a safe online queer space by running a Mastodon server. To make it possible to foster a local community, we based our work on Hometown, an alternative that allows for local posting. We then added many customizations to make it both more colorful and easier to use. On the side we also ran a note taking tool, a video conferencing tool and a document server.
After the pandemic the project slowed down as everyone got busy with life. Then in 2024 a serious security issue was found in Mastodon, and we unfortunately did not have the capacity anymore to keep our many modifications up to date with upstream Mastodon/Hometown. So the service was shut down to protect the users data.
This project has always been done by volunteers on the side of day time jobs, so capacity is very limited. But there is still interest in the community to restart Queer Haus in some form or another. So if you are interested to join us on this potential new journey and especially if you have linux server skills, please reach out to us.
Want to connect? Join our telegram group: Queer Haus Support
or our encrypted Matrix chat room:
#queerhaus:matrix.org
Lots of love from Queer Haus ✨