Community-IO
Private betaA safe online place for a community to gather
Somewhere for like-minded people to find each other and stay found — run by the people whose community it is, not by an advertising business.
Where it came from
It didn't start as a product.
It started in 2004 as one community, built because nothing off the shelf would have it. Then another. They are still running, more than twenty years later, with the same members growing older inside them.
Community-IO is the platform underneath those years, pulled out and made into something we can hand to somebody else. Every part of it exists because a real community needed it at some point and we had to go and build it.
What twenty years teaches you
- The moderators are volunteers who have jobs. Tools built for a trust-and-safety department are no use to them.
- A community that has to grow to survive stops being the thing people joined.
- People stay for a decade. Their data outlives every fashion in how to store it, and they should be able to take it with them.
- If the business model is advertising, the members are the product. So it isn't.
What's in it
A place to gather, and the means to keep it.
Somewhere to talk, and somewhere to write
Private messages, comments, and live chat, ordered by when people actually spoke rather than by what an algorithm thinks will keep them scrolling. Longer writing gets its own home — chaptered, voted on, and still readable years later.
Moderation that keeps up
Every image and video is scanned on the way in, and every label the scan returns is kept — so when a community changes its mind about where a line sits, the old uploads can be judged again by the new rule without paying to look at them twice.
Who gets in
New members arrive in a review queue that has already done the reading: accounts that look linked to each other, addresses that don't survive contact, somebody turned away before under another name. Where a community has to know its members are adults, MerlinID answers that without keeping anybody's documents.
Ad space the community owns
There's no ad network in here and nobody is being followed around the internet. What there is, is a set of defined placements a community can sell directly to businesses it picked — scheduled, with its own impression and click counts — so the money goes to the people doing the work instead of to an intermediary.
Members' photos and writing live on Canadian infrastructure we rent directly rather than on a hyperscaler's terms — image moderation is the one exception, and that call goes to the United States and comes back as labels. Anyone can take everything they've written and leave, or ask to be erased and actually be erased. Both are machinery that already exists rather than a promise to get round to it.
Where it's up to
A private beta, paid for by the people in it.
Community-IO isn't something you can sign up for and buy today. It runs for a small number of communities while the edges come off, and the members who want to back it buy a Pro membership — not because we've locked anything worth having behind it, but because they'd rather the thing they use every day were paid for by the people using it than by an advertiser.
Pro is bought once, for three, six or twelve months. It doesn't renew, there's no standing authority against anybody's PayPal account, and there is nothing to remember to cancel — when the months are up it just stops, and buying more is a decision rather than a default.
Pro is a start rather than a finished plan. More is coming for it — communities of your own inside the platform, first among them — and everyone who took it out early gets those as they land.
If you look after a community that deserves better than a group on somebody else's platform, tell us about it. That's the whole application process.
Who runs it
The same small company, on the same pager.
Community-IO is built and run by Eadiefleet, a small family run software company in London, Ontario. It bills on its own and runs on its own, but it is covered by one set of policies with everything else we make, and when something breaks you reach the people who wrote it.
- Runs on
- Web
- Status
- Private beta