Common Ground
An open stack for digital life without landlords: identity you mint yourself, records you keep for life, networks with no chokepoint, and money drawn from the shared fabric of your own community.
An authority at every layer
The internet today assumes an authority at every layer. Names assume a registrar. Certificates assume a Certificate Authority (it’s right there in the name). Login assumes a platform; for most of the world, “who are you?” is a question answered by two advertising companies. Money assumes a bank. Connectivity assumes an ISP, or a cellular provider.
Each of these authorities is an incumbent. And any incumbent eventually becomes a gatekeeper, and starts collecting tolls — payment extracted not for value created, but because of lock-in. Economists have a name for this: rent-seeking.
There’s no villain here, no conspiracy, no invisible they working nefariously to enshittify our world — only incentives, doing whatever it takes to win the game: capture the medium, then charge rent on what flows through it. And we end up with the situation we have today: renting access to our own social networks with the currency of our attention and imagination, captured by advertising companies.
And sometimes the game the incumbents are playing is not so benign. When a government wants a region silent, it doesn’t need to argue with anyone — it cuts the towers, chokes the ISPs, and the map goes dark. Every authority in the stack is also a head that can be cut off, or leaned on.
So we built the ground first
You can’t fix this with a better app on the same foundations. We tried — six different ways over twenty years. Every attempt leaked authority at whatever layer we hadn’t gone deep enough to reach. So we went all the way down — to the radios, the routing, the keys — and started building up from there: one integrated stack in which every layer answers to its user, and no layer has a landlord.
The ground
Lightning Mesh
connectivityCommodity routers form a self-organizing network with no controller, no registrar, no vendor. When the towers go dark, the neighborhood still has a network.
Mjolnir
computeRun your services on your own metal, on your own terms — the cloud without the landlord.
The person
IdentiKey
identityA key you mint yourself: property that no authority issues, and no authority can revoke. Lose it? Recovery through guardians you choose — recovery without custody.
recrypt
encryptionShare with exactly whom you choose, revoke when you choose, no server in the loop. Post-quantum.
Vault
storageYour record, kept for life, owned fully. Any S3-compatible host works — you can even use Amazon — because the host only ever sees ciphertext. In the age of AI this matters more every month: whoever holds your record trains on it, ranks you by it, and decides what you may retrieve. Yours should be yours.
What flows
Resource
moneyMutual credit: working capital drawn from a community's own flow of goods, not a bank's permission. We built this once for hundreds of real businesses; it's coming home as the financing layer of the food network below.
Papyrus
documentsThe living document as home base — for you and the agents working on your behalf.
DreamBall
thingsVerifiable, transmissible digital objects — up to and including the recipes for physical, manufacturable objects.
What it becomes
A food network that owns its own coordination.
Workshops that don't ask permission from scale. The layers are the alphabet; these are the first sentences.
See what free ground is for →What free ground is for
None of these are isolated, built for their own sake. This infrastructure is ground designed to build on.
When infrastructure stops asking permission, the people are empowered. A food network where farmers keep their own records, sell through their own channels, and finance each other’s harvests — no cloud bill, no bank, no platform tax. A workshop that makes real things for its neighborhood, from open recipes anyone can fork and improve, without a factory’s minimum run deciding what may exist. A network a whole town relies on that no one owns — because it’s made of everyone who contributes to it, owned by each member, composed into a shared commons.
The stack gives us the freedom and uncapturability to empower people with ownership, voice, and exit — an inclusive digital commons that we forge together.
Create the world you want to live in.
Proof, not promises
- Field-validated on a real OpenWrt router fleet
- Presented at DWeb Camp Berlin, July 2026
- Freifunk evaluating adoption
- Open source, AGPL-3.0, held by a nonprofit foundation
- GitHub ↗
Open doors
Bring your community
Co-living houses, farms, festivals, co-ops — if your community needs a network or a marketplace nobody can take away, we’ll deploy resilient community infrastructure with you.
Build with us
The repos are open, the protocols are documented, and the layers are designed to be implemented by anyone with the will to do so.
Fund the ground
We’re a nonprofit. Grants and patronage fund the commons; every paid service we run passes the exit test.