Ten years ago, when we started the project, we set ourselves a simple, clear task: bring authors and merchants together, unite their audiences, and give them the rights to what they create and sell — so the audience and the revenue stay with them, not with the platform. The project's name came later:
HILDUS stands for Human Intellect Linking Digital User Societies.
Word by Word
- Human Intellect — not «high IQ», not artificial intelligence. The ordinary, remarkable intelligence of people who write, make, sell and read. Our software uses AI extensively, but it serves the human running the community, never the other way around.
- Linking — the heart of the mission. Software is worth building when it connects people into something they could not be alone.
- Digital User Societies — not «users» of a product, but societies of users: communities with their own hosts, their own rules and their own economy, running on servers their hosts control.
Why It Matters
A name is a promise. Ours promises that the foundation's software will always put the creator — the writer with readers, the merchant with customers, the organisation with a space of its own — at the center, leaving the audience, the data and the profit in their hands. The foundation itself sells nothing and hosts nothing. It develops the software for the Shopnseo and Qwetru platforms, built on its ideas. Qwetru is built for authors, Shopnseo for merchants. Both run on the same HILDUS principles. Moving between the author platform and the trading platform, or working on both at once, causes no trouble — for authors or for users.
Reading a community's threads after signing up is free, as a rule. To keep bots and trolls from wrecking a space, and to keep engagement with the audience meaningful, popular communities may charge for the right to comment and argue in forums — the community's own author or merchant sets the fee, and it can be purely symbolic. Communities can join forces: if a user has already proven, in one community, that they are not a bot, another community may admit them free of charge — at its own host's discretion. What is paid for is creating something of your own: a page, a site, a community around your work. See how the levels fit together.