quite.spaceThree sentences carry this whole page. Private spaces are mathematics — nobody, including us, can look inside. The public layer is curated — a shop window has a keeper. The infrastructure has rules — our relays are ours, yours are yours. Everything below is these three sentences, expanded.
What is open
The source is at github.com/drrainlab/quite.space, and the licensing seam is deliberate:
- The client and the protocol are permissively licensed. Take them, embed them, build your own client, ship a competing app — that is the point. A protocol you cannot reimplement is not a protocol; it is a hostage situation.
- The relay server is AGPL. Run it for yourself freely. But anyone who offers relay hosting as a service must open their modifications. The network stays inspectable even where it is commercial.
What is not in the repository, and never will be: our relay keys, operational configs, and the curation lists of the official catalog. That is not secret sauce — it is the operational half that makes our instances ours. Yours would have your own.
Every capability in the app — radio profiles, public spaces, instruments, media custody — is built from the same open pieces. There are no dual-use secrets here, nothing that a reader of Briar, Meshtastic, or Matrix source has not seen before. What we add is engineering care, and care is not a weapon.
What we sell, and what we never will
The code is free. What can honestly be sold is availability: relays with uptime and a pinned key, mirrors, media custody, hosting for what you would rather not run yourself. A person with one phone will not run their own relay — they may pay for ours simply working. That is the entire business model, and it survives full open source by construction: you can always leave, taking everything, because nothing of yours lives only with us.
What we will never sell, because we never have it: your content, your relationships, your attention. A relay sees sizes and timing — that is already in the network page — and there is nothing else to monetize even in bad faith.
About misuse
Every communication tool is used by people you would not invite home; the mainstream messengers have carried worse for a decade at a scale we will never reach. Pursuing criminals is the work of the institutions built and empowered for it. Building tools that do not betray the innocent is ours. Those two jobs are different, and confusing them produces systems that betray everyone equally.
What is ours, precisely, and already built:
- Official relays are our infrastructure. Terms of service, rate limits, and the right to refuse service — the same rights any operator has. A relay refusing to carry someone loses them nothing that they cannot rebuild elsewhere; that is what “the constellation is open” means in both directions.
- The official catalog is a shop window, and it is curated. A public space that turns vile does not enter it, or leaves it. Delisting is not censorship of the network — the space keeps existing on its members’ devices — it is the keeper of a window deciding what the window shows.
- Private spaces have no lever, and that is not an oversight. Any mechanism that would let us inspect or suppress a private space would be a backdoor with a friendly name, and it would betray everyone honest first — the dissident before the criminal, the family before the gang. We declined to build it. We will keep declining.
So the honest formula, the one we would say to a journalist and to a regulator alike: we hold levers exactly where levers are ethically possible — our infrastructure, our shop window — and we hold none where a lever would be a backdoor.
What this means for you
- You can verify every claim on this page — the manifesto’s line is load-bearing: verify that you don’t have to trust us.
- If our relays refuse you, or we disappear entirely, your spaces survive: run your own.
- If you see the network claiming more than it can prove — that is a bug of the first order: field notes.