About

SOVRGN, in plain terms

A network of independent instances. Each one is a complete communications server — messaging, files, membership, moderation — run by whoever owns the machine it's on.

What it actually is

Communities today rent space inside somebody else's product. SOVRGN takes the parts of that experience worth keeping — communities, channels, invites, roles, the flow of a good conversation — and puts them on infrastructure the community itself operates.

Underneath, it is deliberately unexotic: SOVRGN owns instance identity, membership, roles, and moderation; Matrix owns message transport; IPFS owns file content; PostgreSQL indexes it all. The parts we didn't invent are the parts that make it possible to leave.

Where it stands

v0.6.0 — alpha

Messaging, files, invites, roles, and moderation work end to end. The desktop client connects to multiple independent instances at once. Instances negotiate capabilities, so an older one degrades by explaining rather than by breaking, and backups are portable and checksum-verified.

Channels are end-to-end encrypted by default where the deployment can support it — keys on members' devices, ciphertext on the server. Deployments that can't offer that get plaintext channels and an interface that says so; metadata is readable everywhere. Voice, video, mobile apps, federation, an instance directory and session revocation are still ahead, and there has been no independent security audit. The manifesto explains why that list is on the site rather than in a footnote.

Who builds it

SOVRGN is made by Formicaria. The whole platform is MIT licensed and developed in the open — there is no paid tier, no hosted plan you are being funnelled toward, and no feature held back for one.

Contributions are welcome, particularly from people running real instances for real communities; that is where the useful bug reports come from. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md.

The names

Name	Refers to
SOVRGN	The platform and the software you install
SOVRGNnet	The network of independent instances, and the repository and CLI name
`sovrgnnet.cc`	This site, and the reference instance Formicaria operates
Formicaria	The company that builds and maintains it

An instance is one installation. A community lives inside an instance and holds channels. The database still calls communities servers for historical reasons; the architecture page covers that.

Getting started

You need a spare computer — an old laptop, a Raspberry Pi, a mini PC — and about ten minutes. No domain, no accounts, no payment details.

Download View on GitHub