Quorum

Visions of a New Internet

Mainstream platforms like Instagram (Meta), TikTok, Twitter (X), YouTube, Patreon, Spotify, and more are only becoming more centralized, more intrusive, more greedy, and more dysfunctional.

They don’t respect our privacy, they’re treated like competitive marketplaces instead of tools for human connection and communication, and the people who make them run are largely inaccessible. In their designs, they also draw on the worst parts of the human psyche in service to capital accumulation for a small few.

To top it all off, we don’t control them at all, despite being the reason they exist.

Imagine an online world meant to complement (not displace) in-person connection, designed around cooperation, and democratically maintained by all willing to be invested — and yes, this means the people doing the "dirty work" to maintain these platforms being able to operate without bosses and live with dignity too.

Meet Quorum

Quorum is a developing intentional community of software developers and packages for building federated, cooperative, social web services.

Where We Diverge (from Similar Projects)

• We value sociocracy, autonomy, and transparency in service to greater cooperation between humans, and human cooperation with our surrounding biosphere.
• We have a social-ecological “quadruple bottom line,” not a capitalist one. Our strategic outlooks are broader and much more long term. We do not think about tech in a vacuum. In developing technology, we account for the social, emotional, economic, societal, and ecological (and we also understand that all of these things are interconnected). 
• We place privacy at the forefront, and want to both normalize and streamline the process of helping people cultivate more intentional practices around how they engage with others online. What would our internet look like if most people assumed that cloud services retain all of their data? If they understood that deleting data on websites outside of their direct and immediate control is essentially “hiding” data publicly, and that cloud systems often take their time to actually delete data?

• Common core components of Quorum projects will be open-source software. Communities that use the software we develop will intentionally choose which components they get from Quorum, elsewhere, or are written internally.

• We intend to offer stronger brand customization and templating similar to Liquid (used by services like Shopify). People will be able to modify raw HTML because it runs on THEIR domain, not a cloud host’s.
• We also intend to support custom frontends against backend, headless API.
• We will not allow dark marketing patterns. There is no need to automatically subscribe people to newsletters any time they do anything on the web, let alone monitor their web activity elsewhere online in order to unleash targeted advertisements upon them. We assume people will follow the appropriate channels in their social media networks in order to find what they are looking for, and we will provide people with stronger knowledge management tools that equip them to take discovery even more into their own hands. In addition to all of these points, humans should be able to link to certain content without being unnecessarily shadow-banned or deprioritized by the algorithm.
• No enshittification (A.I. or otherwise)!

• Documented API and webhooks for custom internal integration
• ActivityPub
• ATProto
• Internal GraphQL
• Webhook managers

• People using our tools should be able to locally control personal data and be more conscious of when they are uploading to cloud platforms (along with what this could mean). We also want people to be able to seamlessly replicate posts, “newsletters,” pics, etc., to things like Bluesky, Instagram, and YouTube. This means being able to handle format conversions, resizes, transcodes, etc., and sophisticated distribution pipelines similar to what DistroKid provides for music streaming.
• We will keep data from cloud hosts (including web and data logs). Webhooks with user-authorized tokens will be run locally.

• This will include audited staff tools for admin, as well as intentional and source-verifiable algorithms for object collection data. (“Published objects in reverse-chronological order” is an algorithm.)

• We will not be exclusive stewards/owners of Quorum. There will be open space for both cooperation and friendly competition in hosting, maintenance support, or even software development.

Roadmap

We conceive of our web ecosystem developing through three central loci, beginning with our first applications:

• The Community Node - Project management software that offers user/circle management
• The Content Node - A Community Node (+ Data) like a 400M or Jaded Forum website with shows featured (similar to a self-hosted YouTube channel, but with more customizable design options)
• The Search Node - Audio and video streaming services aggregating and indexing multiple Content Nodes

As we develop more documentation and begin articulating our plans to the world, please sync up with us on GitHub, and feel free to reach out to us for more details via 400000000.co.

Thank you.