Owning the Stack: {B/qKC}’s Raspberry Pi, YunoHost, IPFS, and CollectionBuilder Walkthrough
I recently interviewed Nasir Anthony Montalvo about how they expanded on their Cultural Memory Lab project and the technical underpinnings that make it work. The conversation is a celebration of a major milestone: {B/qKC} (A Black Queer Archive) launched a new website on February 1 as part of Black History Month, and it is powered exclusively by DWeb technology, including IPFS. If you want a concrete, real-world example of what community-controlled infrastructure can look like when it ships, this is it.
Six months after the Cultural Memory Lab wrapped, we are seeing exactly what we hoped for: lasting implementation, continued learning, and real-world shipping powered by the DWeb. Nas did not just complete a cohort project and move on. They kept building, kept documenting, and kept translating new technical skills into something their community can actually use. That follow-through is the hard part of most innovation programs, and it is also the part that matters most.
This is also a living example of Billy Bicket’s cohort implementation model working the way it is designed to work: deep buy-in, strong peer and expert support, and momentum that continues even after the formal program and funding window closes. The Cultural Memory Lab did not just transfer knowledge; it helped create durable confidence and relationships that made the next steps feel possible. The result is a project that moved from “we should decentralize this” to “here is the site, live, and here is how it works.”
In the walkthrough video, Nasir Anthony Montalvo and TechSoup’s Elijah van der Giessen break down the stack in plain language. The site is hosted on a Raspberry Pi running YunoHost, which makes self-hosting approachable through strong documentation and a friendly admin interface. Archival media is stored and served via IPFS, using content identifiers (CIDs) so files are addressable by what they are, not where a vendor happens to keep them. And the public-facing website is built with CollectionBuilder, a metadata-driven static site approach that turns a CSV into a full collection interface, with IPFS links plugged directly into the item records.
Huge credit to Nasir and the broader Cultural Memory Lab community for carrying the work forward, and to our partners in the DWeb ecosystem, especially Gray Area and the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, for making this kind of community-controlled infrastructure possible.
Watch the technical walkthrough, explore the live archive, and dig into the project documentation. If you are building for a nonprofit, a community archive, or a mission-driven media project and want to decentralize and truly own your infrastructure, consider this a practical blueprint, and an open invitation to try it, adapt it, and share what you learn.