Communities
The datacentre is yours.
Run Freehold on your own devices, or share a node with people you actually live near: your local library, a co-op, a club or your family.
Why share?
Better together, if you want it.
You can run Freehold entirely on your own devices, and that is a first-class way to use it. A community node is for when you would rather share: share the hardware and the costs, share the skills, and look after it with people you know.
Your rules still decide what leaves your devices, and the node is run by people you know, under rules your community agrees.
Local libraries
Already places for shared resources, shared knowledge and public service. Looking after the community's data fits right in.
Co-ops
Owned by their members already. A node is one more thing members share.
Clubs, faith groups and associations
Existing trust, existing ways of making decisions.
Families and friends
One small server, shared between people who already trust each other.
Community-owned compute
It matters who owns the datacentre.
Big AI datacentres are being built near towns like ours. The town gets the noise and the extra demand for power and water. The profits, and the data, mostly go to a handful of large American tech companies.
Freehold turns that around. A node in your local library, co-op or village hall is a datacentre your community owns, runs and decides about.
| Their datacentre | Your community node | |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns it | Big tech companies and their investors, mostly American: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI and the like | Your local library, co-op or neighbours |
| Where the money goes | To shareholders, mostly in the US | Stays local |
| Where your data goes | Wherever they send it | Nowhere you haven't agreed to |
| What your area gets | Noise, and more demand for power and water | Shared skills and a say in how it runs |
| Who decides | Their boards and investors | Members |
A datacentre can be bought back one day. Your data can't.
From your phone to your town
Run it where it makes sense.
Freehold is designed to work at every scale. Start wherever suits you and move along when you are ready. Your rules will be able to say which of these may handle which parts of your data.
Rules for where your data is processedPlanned
- 00
Your devices
Your phone, laptop or home server.
Everything stays with you, and you look after it.
- 01
Family and friends
A small server at a relative's or friend's house.
Run by people you trust, on terms you agree between you.
- 02
Your community
Your local library, co-op or community centre.
Shared costs, shared skills, local decisions.
- 03
A federation
Several communities, or a council service, pooling resources.
Lower costs for everyone, and each community keeps its say.
- 04
Commercial cloud
A mainstream cloud provider.
There if you need it today. Freehold meets you wherever you are on the way to running things yourselves.
What it costs
Shared local costs, shared local benefits.
We have estimated running costs for a healthy, active community, from the project's own planning documents. The money pays for hardware, power and a local operator, not a distant company's profits. Real costs will depend on hardware, power and local wages.
- Your own devices
- Free
- Family node
- ~$20 a month, shared
- Community node
- ~$10 per member a month
- Federation
- ~$5 per member a month
The more members share a node, or the more communities pool together, the less it costs each person.
It's already happening
Communities already run their own infrastructure.
Guifi.net
A community-built network in Catalonia with tens of thousands of nodes.
El Servidor del Barri
A neighbourhood server in Barcelona running email, files, passwords and calendars.
Community Box
Local cloud services for rural communities in the UK.
These projects inspire Freehold. They are not affiliated with it.
How we're doing
Be one of the first.
There is no ready-made community node kit yet. Today a developer can run every part of Freehold on their own machine. Making it easy for a local library or co-op to run is the next big step, and we want to build it with the first communities, not for them.
What we're planning
- Step-by-step guides for setting up and running a node
- A reference setup you can copy
- Do-it-yourself and one-click ways to deploy
- Guides for organisations choosing hardware and services
- Community node kitPlanned
- One-click installPlanned
- Rules for where your data is processedPlanned
Get in touch
Could your community run a node?
If you're part of a local library, co-op, club or any group that might host one, we'd love to hear from you. The first community nodes will be shaped by the first communities.