In the age of Big Data and artificial intelligence, internet access is often assumed to be ubiquitous and therefore no longer a pressing concern. Such assumptions, however, overlook the lived realities of many communities for whom internet connectivity remains unreliable, expensive, or collectively negotiated. In response to these conditions, the field of minimal computing offers a critical intervention. Minimal computing foregrounds computational parsimony by advocating for the use of the least amount of technical resources necessary to achieve a project’s goals. Within Digital Humanities (DH), this approach has become closely associated with sustainability and accessibility, most notably through practices such as static site generation.

Yet even minimal computing workflows can reproduce structural inequalities when their infrastructures rely on platforms that are inaccessible, ethically compromised, or extractive. For communities that must crowdsource their internet bill, hosting and maintaining web servers locally is often unfeasible. As a result, many DH projects turn to GitHub Pages as a “free” solution for hosting static websites. Since its acquisition by Microsoft in 2018, GitHub has been criticized for its collaboration with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), its increasing integration of proprietary AI tools, and its role in consolidating control over scholarly and cultural code infrastructures. These issues are particularly pressing when working with culturally sensitive data, where questions of data colonialism, ownership, long-term access, and digital sovereignty are central.

This paper argues that Codeberg, a non-profit, community-led alternative grounded in free and open-source principles, offers a more ethical and sustainable hosting solution through Codeberg Pages. Despite its strong alignment with DH values, Codeberg remains underutilized in the field. The paper contributes to DH praxis by providing a step-by-step guide for building and hosting static websites on Codeberg Pages using widely adopted tools such as Jekyll. By foregrounding practical implementation, the paper aims to lower technical barriers while encouraging infrastructural choices that reflect ethical commitments.

The methodological discussion is grounded in a cooperative project between the University of Namibia (UNAM) and the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) at the University of Luxembourg. The project seeks to develop an accessible and sustainable digital community archive centered on the social history of the Old Location in Windhoek, Namibia. Until its demolition in 1968, the Old Location was the country’s largest racially segregated Location and a vital cultural and social hub for Namibia’s Black population. The forced relocation of residents to Katutura in 1959 led to protests violently suppressed by the South African colonial government, marking a crucial moment in Namibia’s independence struggle and women’s history. Despite its significance, accessible non-colonial sources on the Old Location remain scarce.

Direct engagement with local communities is therefore central to the project, particularly through the digitization of private archives held by former residents. This data will be made accessible through a digital community archive, hosted on a server at UNAM. To further ensure a sustainable knowledge transfer, we’re offering a six-week-long block seminar for students at UNAM, teaching students the minimal computing practices proposed in this paper.