What is Citinet?
Citinet is a federation of community-run “hubs”: small, self-hosted clouds that a neighborhood, building, school, or group can run for itself instead of renting space inside a corporate platform.
Each hub is a real piece of software running on real hardware (often a single computer someone in the community owns and operates) that gives that community its own private notes, messaging, file storage, local marketplace, map, and directory. No hub depends on Citinet’s own servers to function day to day; the hub is the server.
Why hubs, not one big platform
Section titled “Why hubs, not one big platform”Most online communities live inside someone else’s platform: a company’s servers, a company’s rules, a company’s algorithm. Citinet takes the opposite approach: every hub is independently owned and operated by the community that runs it. If you’re a member of a hub, your data lives on that hub, governed by whoever runs it, not by Citinet as a company.
Citinet’s own infrastructure is intentionally kept small: just enough to make it easy to start a hub (an automatic setup wizard, an automatic HTTPS certificate, a directory so hubs can find each other). Nothing your community depends on once the hub is running. See Core Concepts for how that split actually works.
Two ways people use Citinet
Section titled “Two ways people use Citinet”- As a member of a hub someone else runs: see the User Guide to get started.
- As an operator running a hub for your own community: see the Hub Admin Guide to set one up.
Nothing stops the same person from being both.