HILDUS exists for one idea: communities should belong to the people who build them.
The Problem
The web taught millions of writers, bloggers and merchants to gather audiences on platforms they do not control. The platform sells the advertising, owns the data, sets the rules and keeps the profit; the community does the work. It is a good deal — for the platform.
What We Do
The foundation works out the ideas and develops the common software for intellectual communities: personal pages, websites, online stores, book clubs and forums, the way subreddits gather people around a topic — and, for an organisation that wants a space of its own, the whole platform installed on a machine it controls. Two platforms carry the ideas into practice: Shopnseo shapes them for commerce and search, Qwetru for writers and bloggers. Neither is aimed at making money and neither publishes a price list — they name the tiers and say what is in them.
The foundation itself sells nothing and hosts nothing. Money starts a level below it: each platform has regional representatives — shopnseo.ru for Shopnseo, qwetru.ru for Qwetru — who sell a subscription to the control panel — the thing that lets a person create a page or a site of their own — and independent partner studios that install and set up a site on the customer's own hosting for a one-off fee. Reading a community and taking part in one is free everywhere on the platform. What is paid for is creating your own.
The One Difference
The foundation provides the software; the audience, the content and the revenue belong to the people who earned them.
Why «Intellectual Communities»
Because the software is built for people who make things with their heads: authors publishing books chapter by chapter, bloggers who own their archive, merchants who earn organic traffic instead of renting it, readers who want to belong to a place rather than feed an algorithm. The name of the foundation says the same thing — see what HILDUS stands for.