The Tale of the Three Linodians

If you’ve seen the homepage you’ve seen the tagline. Linodians is “an online community for those of us who geek out over self-hosted software, homelabs, and Linux”. While today I am “launching” this website and community, Linodians is a name that’s been around for over a decade, maybe two.

Prior Incantato

It’s been a spell since the last intro post I’ve written for Linodians. It has existed as two previous, failed incarnations.

The Intranet

It was late 2013 or early 2014, I don’t remember exactly. I was new at Linode, a VPS hosting company, and eager to contribute. I had gone through several weeks onboarding and was a little dizzy with the various resources we had to do our job. I decided to create a company intranet (remember intranets?) to consolidate a lot of those resources. For the name, what better to call it then what us Linode employees referred to ourselves as, Linodians!

The plan was for some of the smaller, one-off resources to be completely replaced by this intranet. The more substantial resources could be linked to from the intranet. A one-stop shop for employees, especially new ones. Not many people used it. To be honest, I didn’t push it too hard. I got busy with work, distracted by other ideas, and the project faded away into the background.

The Fan Site

A few years later I found myself in a developer relations role at CircleCI. In my new role I was in the business of building communities and providing value to developers. Still, with servers on the brain, I began to reenvision Linodians as a Linode fan site.

The idea was to have a hub and spoke model of blogs covering VPS news. The Linodians website would represent Linode, a different branded site representing DigitalOcean, and so on. The overarching brand name and main blog was to be Cloud Unpacked. This was all launched several years ago, sometime before the pandemic happened. I was even building some open-source tools, which are still around, under the Cloud Unpacked brand.

This was a fun setup but this too, failed. I honestly can’t even remember why. It might have simply been one too many projects and faded into the background. This happens to my projects a lot. 🤷

Fast-forward to 2025 and maybe… just maybe… the third time’s a charm.

A Cauldron of Community

We’re in an era of hyperscaling, data farming AI bots, and siloed Slack/Discord communities that just doesn’t satisfy me. Today I begin brewing what I believe will be a fun and hopefully lasting community. There’s several initial ingredients that should lead to success but there’s three I want to call-out:

1: Financial Backing

This should really be in quotes because I don’t currently have any money. What I mean to say is that I am working on a new SaaS company called Revidian Cloud. My hope is that as my SaaS brings in revenue, it can “fund” this community when needed so as to make it sustainable. Something previous projects lacked.

2, 3: Passion & Belonging

I started learning HTML and JavaScript over 20 years ago. I needed to make a living so began to design and build websites for money. Desiring recurring income, I learned Linux so that I can use the hosting provider Linode to host client websites. A few years of freelance struggles later, I got a job at Linode. Working at Linode is where the enchantment started.

It made my love for the Internet, networking, servers, etc quadruple. I learned a lot, got to see enterprise grade servers first hand, and had so much fun. What really surprised me was the sense of belonging I developed. My colleagues as well as a vast amount of Linode customers were very much like me. We all shared a hobby, an interest, a passion.

Launching Linodians

Linodians is the continuation of that passion. A blog to write about the intricacies of VPS-focused hosting providers like Linode or DigitalOcean. A place to share homelab tools with fellow geeks and have conversations. And my favorite, a place for Linux server documentation.

Sign up to the newsletter, forum, or socials to stay connected and “join” this new community. Share our social accounts and URL in order to help spread the word. I hope to see you around.