What was Homebox created?

There has been great strides in computer software which have disproportionately favored a hand-full of large companies. We surrender our privacy and dignity for the low price of a "free" product.

What we're seeing more and more is that this deal is getting progressively worse. This long-standing practice has been given a clear Cory Doctorow when he coined Enshitification.

This mission of this project is to put the power of your data back into your hands. This means creating a platform which allows you to make decisions on how your data is used, ideally keeping your information private.

• Make creating and hosting internet software easy. We will work hard to make your experience of setting up and using Homebox as easy as possible. This is the primary goal of the project, and the North star of the project should always be to make the experience of you and your community as easy as possible.
• Make sure Homebox is as open and transparent as possible to allow for interested community members to independently verify the integrity and security of your private data.
• Make sure that we can't spy on you or your communities. Sometimes this point can't be perfectly utilized, and in those cases, we should always provide the choice of losing features vs. losing potential privacy.
• Opt-Out by default. We (and the software we make use of) should respect the privacy and authority of the people who run their own Homebox, not the other way around.
• We believe in the mission of open source software, and once the project reaches a maturity we can be proud of, the Homebox code and APIs should be released open source under a permissive license.

• We don't plan to support all software. The core pieces of software we support are chosen to achieve specific goals while achieving simplicity and for our community. If there's a piece of software that you find valuable but doesn't align the project goals, you can choose to install that software yourself.
• Homebox is not intended to be "enterprise" or "internet scale" software. We've developed the product to be simple, but with that simplicity comes cases where a person can't rely on very high uptime promises. As Homebox is aimed at home users and small businesses, we can't rely on the level of expertese that dedicated support teams can accomodate. If you need industry best-practice 99.999% uptime software, you're likely looking for a different, probably commercial enterprise platform to use instead.
• We won't support integrations with large online platforms. We welcome community collaborations that make this possible, but that is not the Homebox mandate.
• We won't be the do-"Everything" or "enterprise" software stack. If companies want to build add-ons to Homebox for their own commercial interests, that's nice, but we don't want to rely on and companies that have conflicting interests from our mandate.
• Not all features of Homebox will always be totally free. Some online features will likely require financial support in order to keep alive for the long term. Our pledge is that there should always be the ability to use alternative (though not always ideal) solutions to achieve the same outcomes as a non-free feature.
• Homebox is not a "lean" software stack. Homebox makes use of a small mountain of programs, and some of those programs use a bunch of CPU/RAM/network/disk. If you're an experienced software developer / IT professional, you're likely to make better choices making something on your own. Homebox is not for the professional engineer (though we hope you're delighted by our "just get things done" ethos to deploying our software). This solution is really for as many people as possible to see past the cloud/monopoly hegemony and see a world of self-hosted, community-supported communities, and we're only going to get there with broad accessibility and appeal.

Lastly, we want to thank the mountains of open source software projects that have been built which have allowed us to make this project as great as we hope it turns out being. We really couldn't do it without you!