A working history of how one temple built, lost, and rebuilt its own technology — by hand, one step at a time, and never once hiring it out.
The temple’s technology was built up quietly — by hand, over the better part of two decades, never with much of a team or a budget. And it does not start where most people think. It starts in 2008, with a website hand-hosted off a machine at home, meant to hold the temple’s sacred songs. That first site lapsed; the temple went quiet online for most of a decade; and then, from 2020 on, it was rebuilt — bigger, and brought home piece by piece — into the stack it runs today: a self-hosted chat server, a fleet of published sites, a git-native translation pipeline, an AI directory assistant, a radio station — and much else besides.
What follows is that record, reconstructed from receipts, registrar emails, multiple email inboxes, a decade of chat history, and the temple’s own file archive — then checked against memory and corrected where the two disagreed. The single thread, from that first page to everything since: no one was ever hired to build it — it was made 腳踏實地, feet on the ground, one honest step at a time.
On 24 May 2008, the temple's official shared Gmail was created and announced that same afternoon to the earliest circle: the Transmitting Teacher (點傳師), a 前賢, and 德恩壇. Within three weeks there was a website, hand-hosted off a home machine through a dynamic-DNS account, with Lunarpages as the registrar. On 16 June he soft-launched it and asked the Transmitting Teacher what he thought.
The Transmitting Teacher pushed back on privacy. The next day, its maker locked the whole site behind a password — and, in doing so, wrote down exactly what it was for:
同德的信箱：道場官方 Gmail 帳號 （三週後 · 2008-06-15） Your DynDNS Account "tongde" has been created. two personal @tongde.org mailboxes now live · signed by a 前賢
The domain was renewed twice and then lapsed on 7 June 2011. The first era ended quietly; tongde.org would stay out of the temple’s hands for fourteen years — the effort was ahead of the support and momentum to sustain it, and there was, as yet, no pressing reason for the temple to be online.
The temple’s digital presence had effectively gone dark from mid-2015 — four silent years — and the revival, when it came, was pandemic-forced. The first move was an ad-hoc Zoom class on 30 March 2020 (“Dao Seminar this Saturday — online”), broadcast to some forty members. A Slack workspace followed that summer — the temple’s first real institutional collaboration platform, the backbone it would organize itself on for four years, until it deliberately moved off it to self-hosted Mattermost. Only in September 2020 did tongde.us get registered and a WordPress site go live on an AWS Lightsail instance in Ohio — a multisite install that would come back to bite the next migration. The coordination tools came first, out of necessity; the website caught up after.
By November the site was live under its real domain, Amazon SES was wired for mail, and a tutorial had been written for the members — “如何申請 tongde.us 帳戶.” The temple was back, this time on rented cloud instead of a machine at home.
Almost none of this stack was bought at list price. Starting in December 2020, with a TechSoup account as the validating gatekeeper, the temple assembled its software on nonprofit terms. In a note to the team that month:
It mostly worked — Google Workspace, Microsoft, Adobe, Canva, Zoom, Box, and eventually TuneIn all came through. But one door didn’t open, and the reason it stayed shut turned out to matter more than any of the ones that opened:
Unfortunately, your organization is categorized as a religious organization, which aren't eligible for Slack for Nonprofits.
The same status is a key at some doors and a lock at others:
Hold onto the Slack bar. Three years later, it becomes an architecture.
First the website moved hosts. The 2020 WordPress site — that multisite install — was migrated to Hostinger in early 2023; Hostinger’s automation rejected it twice (“Website is based with WordPress multisite”) before it was finished by hand. AWS wasn’t torn down at the cutover, though — the Lightsail box was kept running as insurance, and only decommissioned on 16 February 2025, once its successors were solid.
Then the two big surfaces came home. In March 2024, the temple migrated off Slack to a self-hosted Mattermost server; that November, its public sites moved from WordPress to Ghost. The Mattermost move had a stated motive — and it points straight back at that Slack bar:
… we do not qualify for your nonprofit discount, being what would be classified as a "religious organization." … this data export is our attempt to reclaim ownership of all of our available data at Slack, and move it all to a self-hosted instance of the open-source competitor Mattermost, a project that I am coordinating.
The full hosting arc, end to end — the temple keeps climbing back toward running its own infrastructure, the same instinct as that first home-hosted site in 2008:
Everything downstream — the archive, the translations, the podcast, the radio — begins with capturing a class. That layer got serious hardware between 2022 and 2023, years before the temple had a pipeline sophisticated enough to do much with the recordings. The raw material was being banked before the refinery existed.
| Instrument | Arrived | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Mevo Start 3-Pack | Sep 2022 | three wireless cameras, multi-cam class recording |
| Meeting Owl 3 | Jan 2023 | 360° camera at 德恩壇 (an NY unit was bought & returned) |
| Zoom → Box | ~Nov 2023 | auto-transfer recordings off Zoom into the archive (Zapier) |
| Mevo Multicam | Jun 2025 | live multi-cam switching moves behind a subscription |
| Zoom → Box (n8n) | Apr 2026 | the recording pipeline migrates off Zapier to self-hosted |
Since Claude Code arrived in February 2026, much of the temple’s technology is now built hand-in-hand with an AI: a research-grounded, git-native translation pipeline; a layer-toggle teachings reader with per-line reader flags and votes; a directory-quality workflow run by an on-server assistant; a self-hosted mail server; automations moving off Zapier onto n8n; and bridges wiring SMS and LINE into Mattermost.
And on 2 July 2026 — the day this exhibit was compiled — a small approval closed an eighteen-year loop:
The temple’s first website, in 2008, was a locked page meant to hold sacred songs. Its newest service is Tong De Radio — a 24/7 station any member can now ask a smart speaker for by name. The 聖歌庫, rebuilt as broadcast. Full circle.
PUBLISH teachings · karaoke · books · en / zh (Ghost) · podcast · radio COMMUNITY Mattermost · LINE DATA Directory · Teachings DB · Classes · Itinerary (Airtable) EDITORIAL Workbench · edit (HedgeDoc) ADMIN Google Workspace · Zoom · Canva · Microsoft 365 STORAGE Box — Tong De Root UTILITY go (YOURLS shortener) · the apps. / it. launchpads themselves
Read across eighteen years, the same three moves keep recurring:
In our own hands. Nearly every migration is the same instinct — bring it in-house and run it ourselves. Asana → ClickUp, WordPress → Ghost, Slack → Mattermost, Zapier → n8n, Airtable → git. The home-hosted site of 2008 and the self-hosted fleet of 2026 are the same reflex, thirty-six domains and four hosting eras apart.
One line on the paperwork cuts both ways. The single best lens on the whole stack: a key at TechSoup, Google, Canva, and TuneIn — a lock at Slack, whose “no” is the documented reason the temple self-hosts its chat today. The eligibility rule didn’t only save money; in one case it decided an architecture.
Communication reaches across a border. Much of the community is in mainland China, so a quiet, sustained thread runs through the Mattermost years — renaming the team slug, migrating channels, verifying the server works from inside China without a VPN. The infrastructure is shaped by who it has to reach.