Free Our Groups — From Platforms to Protocols
Project Weave · 2026-07-01
Ask any organiser where their community lives and they will name an app — a Slack, a WhatsApp, a Discord, a Facebook group. Then ask what happens if that app changes its terms, its algorithm, or its price. The honest answer is: the community is trapped. The operator owns the door, the member list, and the memory.
Groups should be first-class, portable objects — not rows in someone else's database. Weave treats a community as something its members carry: the roster, the shared history, the trust relationships travel together. Move platforms, survive an outage, route around censorship — the group persists because it was never the platform's to begin with.
This is the shift from platforms to protocols. Not another place to gather, but a way for gatherings to belong to themselves.