Setup Homebox

Welcome to the Homebox setup. We will walk you through the initial setup of your Homebox to make the most of what we've created.

What was Homebox created? In brief, there have been way too many innovations in technologies that we've become attached to as part of our daily lives that we just can't live without. With the success of these products, companies are continually looking to extract as much profit from you as possible. Your labours of good to help contribute to a healthy world through your comments, pictures, videos, etc.. have been mined by uncaring companies to maximize their profits leaving everyone else behind. We believe that in order to support a better future for our planet, we need to move the power that these companies have away from the Monopolies that are running our digital lives. We want to put the power back into your hands to decide what you share and to whom. Our lives of families and small peer communities need a place to foster which aren't constantly being monitized for profit.

We aren't perfect, and the product is a long way from being the ideal vision, but our goals are:

Project Goals

• 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 as possible to allow
• 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 support) should respect the privacy and authority of the people who use 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 happy with, the Homebox code and APIs will be made available.

Project Non-Goals

• 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. Our technologies are expandable to allow for other software to be run and deployed if that's your objective, but we can't guarantee that all internet capable software will be able to work on Homebox.
• Homebox is not intended to be a large scalable piece of software. We've developed the technologies so that you can take most individual pieces of software out to deploy them independently into larger scale purposes, but this is not the primary intent. It's not the primary intent of Homebox to support large, complicated software installations. If you need industry best-practice 99.999% uptime software, you're likely looking for a different, probably commercial enterprise platform.
• 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, all the power to them.
• Not all software in Homebox will always be free. Some online features which are used to make the software easier to use may eventually become licensed in order to help pay for costs of running the service. Our pledge is that there should always be the ability to use alternative (though not always as simple) solutions to achieve the same outcomes as a licensed feature.
• Homebox is not a "light" software stack. It is nested on a small mountain of programs, and some of those programs like to 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.

Open Source Software

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!

Getting Started