The Commune box

The vision for Commune is to fully enable people with a physical box they own at home. Not a product yet. This is how I run my own instance right now.

I want to help people push their ideas forward independently and maybe make a living from that alone (Build in Public). You shouldn’t need to rely on me or any cloud company to run your wiki, analyze your notes, or make money from your work. As your wiki grows, computation costs grow with it. There’s no way to make that affordable if I’m doing all the computing. The only sustainable path is running it at home.

It’s just a computer. Maybe a purpose-built device, maybe you repurpose one you already have. Data sovereignty for individuals means you own all of your data. Your wiki self-hosted. Local-First Software means AI analysis and search run locally through something like Ollama. Agent flows you can see and manage.

No constant pinging to Apple or OpenAI servers. Updates get pushed to your box. You stay in control. This is what Owning your data infrastructure eliminates the need for specialized middleware and roles looks like in practice.

The way in is simple SaaS. Get in the door, build your wiki, learn the system, join the community of wikis, become discoverable. But as your wiki grows, computation costs increase. Eventually the box becomes more economical and it’s a one-time purchase.

I have no idea how to build physical products. But I think building the SaaS first, building the community around these atomic notes, might attract people interested in helping with this part of the project.

AI shapes voice dumps into atomic notes works because capture happens locally. Private AI outperforms cloud AI because all context stays on the box. No cloud provider sees private notes. No data mining. No optimization for engagement. Subscription unlocks depth into the mind is how readers pay for depth.