What is the Communitarium Project?
The Communitarium Project is an effort to create shared spaces—both online and (eventually) offline—where people can collaborate, deliberate, and take action to challenge the status quo. It is an evolving experiment in building a digital commons for meaningful engagement, exploring alternative models of collective ownership and governance.
The Communitarium Project is an attempt to create online and real-world spaces where people can come together not just to talk, but to think, plan, and act in ways that challenge the status quo and explore alternative futures. It is not another social media network, nor is it simply a forum for discussion. Rather, it is an experiment in constructing a shared infrastructure for collective learning, deliberation, and action—a digital commons that could serve as a base for both ad hoc and ongoing efforts to engage with the world and work toward meaningful change.
Why Now?
We are living through a period of deepening fragmentation and enclosure—not just in the realm of politics and economics, but in how we think, communicate, and organize. Social media platforms, designed to extract attention and data rather than foster genuine collaboration, have further atomized discourse and reduced political action to fleeting moments of engagement. At the same time, the forces of technofeudalism have transformed much of the digital sphere into a landscape of walled gardens, where participation is structured around the logic of consumption rather than shared ownership.
The Communitarium Project is an attempt to address this predicament. It seeks to explore alternative models—ones in which participants are not consumers but co-creators, owners, and maintainers of the spaces in which they operate. It envisions networked commons rather than isolated platforms, where deliberation is oriented toward meaningful engagement with the world rather than endless self-promotion or reactive outrage.
Core Principles of the Communitarium Project
- Deliberation with Purpose – Unlike social media, which rewards rapid, emotionally charged engagement, the Communitarium fosters structured, thoughtful deliberation. It is a space for long-form discussions, collaborative research, and careful planning for real-world action.
- A Commons, Not a Market – Participation is not about amassing followers or crafting personal brands but about contributing to a shared project. Information, ideas, and tools are meant to be developed collectively and made accessible to those who need them.
- Action-Oriented Collaboration – The goal is not just to talk about the world but to change it. The Communitarium aims to provide tools and structures for coordinating efforts—whether that means organizing local initiatives, developing counter-institutions, or strategizing long-term projects.
- Mutual Accountability – Members of a Communitarium instance are not isolated individuals but part of a collective. Anything published from within this space carries the reputation of the community, and participants are answerable to that community for their contributions.
- Networked but Grounded – The Communitarium does not seek to exist purely as an online phenomenon. Its purpose is to enable real-world connections and material action, using digital infrastructure to facilitate meaningful offline engagement rather than replace it.
Exploring Platforms: Hubzilla and Beyond
Hubzilla had been considered as a possible foundation for Communitarium-oriented online spaces because it is one of the few federated platforms that allows for true autonomy, flexibility, and self-governance. Its unique features—including nomadic identity, federated access control, integrated knowledge-sharing tools, and group-oriented functionality—making it an intriguing candidate for fostering the kind of community-driven, action-oriented spaces the Communitarium Project seeks to explore.
But Hubzilla proved difficult to administer, leading to problems in the initial installation that have been difficult to fix. Hubzilla, it seems, will require a higher level of expertise than is currently available to this project.
So we are next turning to the streams repository, a descendant of the Hubzilla project designed to be simpler, more streamlined...and mostly public domain.
The streams repository is such an unusual project that it is worth quoting from its README at length:
The streams repository is a fediverse server with a long history. It began in 2010 as a decentralised Facebook alternative called Mistpark. It has gone through a number of twists and turns in its long journey of providing federated communications. The fediverse servers Friendica and Hubzilla are early branches of this repository.
The first thing to be aware of when discussing the streams repository is that it has no brand or brand identity. None. The name is the name of a code repository. Hence “the streams repository”. It isn't a product. It's just a collection of code which implements a fediverse server that does some really cool stuff. There is no flagship instance. There is no mascot. In fact all brand information has been removed. You are free to release it under your own brand. Whatever you decide to call your instance of the software is the only brand you'll see. The software is in the public domain to the extent permissible by law. There is no license.
If you look for the streams repository in a list of popular fediverse servers, you won't find it. We're not big on tracking and other spyware. Nobody knows how many instances there are or how many Monthly Active Users there are. These things are probably important to corporations considering takeover targets. They aren't so important to people sharing things with friends and family.
Due to its origins as a Facebook alternative, the software has a completely different focus than those fediverse projects modelled after Twitter/X. Everything is built around the use of permissions and the resulting online safety that permissions-based systems provide. Comment controls are built-in. Uploaded media and document libraries are built-in and media access can be restricted with fine-grained permissions – as can your posts. Groups are built-in. “Circles” are built-in. Events are built-in. Search and search permissions? Yup. Built-in also. It's based on Opensearch. You can even search from your browser and find anything you have permission to search for. Spam is practically non-existent. Online harrassment and abuse are likewise almost non-existent. Moderation is a built-in capability. If you're not sure about a new contact, set them to moderated, and you'll have a chance to approve all of their comments to your posts before those comments are shared with your true friends and family. For many fediverse projects, the only way to control this kind of abusive behaviour is through blocking individuals or entire websites. The streams repository offers this ability as well. You'll just find that you hardly ever need to use it.
Because federated social media is a different model of communications based on decentralisation, cross-domain single sign-on is also built-in. All of the streams instances interact cooperatively to provide what looks like one huge instance to anybody using it – even though it consists of hundreds of instances of all sizes.
Nomadic identity is built-in. You can clone your identity to another instance and we will keep them in sync to the best of our ability. If one server goes down, no big deal. Use the other. If it comes back up again, you can go back. If it stays down forever, no big deal. All of your friends and all your content are available on any of your cloned instances. So are your photos and videos, and so are your permission settings. If you made a video of the kids to share with grandma (and nobody else), grandma can still see the video no matter what instance she accesses it from. Nobody else can.
Link your scattered fediverse accounts and their separate logins, with one channel and one identity to share them all.
Choose from our library of custom filters and algorithms if you need better control of the stuff that lands in your stream. By default, your conversations are restricted to your friends and are not public. You can change this if you want, but this is the most sensible default for a safe online experience.
There are no inherent limits to the length of posts or the number of photos/videos you can attach or really any limits at all. You can just share stuff without concerning yourself with any of these arbitrary limitations.
Need an app? Just visit a website running the streams repository code and install it from your browser.
Nobody is trying to sell you this software or aggressively convince you to use it. What we're trying to do is show you through our own actions and example that there are more sensible ways to create federated social networks than what you've probably experienced.
This approach seems even more in line with the goals of the Communitarium Project than did Hubzilla's, albeit at the price (currently) of offering fewer of the CMS features. These, however, can be provided by companion federated platforms under the same umbrella, as the need for them arises. In the longer term it can be hoped that the project becomes successful enought that it can attract developers and designers skilled enough to build new affordances from the materials provided by the streams repository.
What Comes Next?
The first step is building and testing potential Communitarium instances, ensuring that they are structured to facilitate meaningful collaboration rather than mimic the patterns of traditional social media. From there, the work begins to refine these spaces, create necessary tools, and connect people who are looking for something beyond the isolated, reactive nature of contemporary online engagement.
The Communitarium Project is not a ready-made solution—it is an invitation to co-create, experiment, and adapt. I (and, hopefully soon, we) will be working on building the facilities which will allow interested individuals to join this effort, the first step is to join this effort and begin thinking about how we can use these spaces to coordinate, create, and engage with the world in new ways.