How a Community Server Works — who owns what

· What actually happens when you put the platform on your own VPS: what the host controls, where the money goes, what the foundation does and does not do.

The Server tier is the arrangement the foundation was built for. It is easy to describe: you rent a virtual machine, the platform is installed on it, and from that moment the community running there is yours. Below is what that means in practice.

What the host controls

  • Who joins. You decide whether the server is open to anyone or to an invited circle, and you hand out the tiers below Server to your members.
  • What it is about. A server can be a town, a trade, a genre of books, a language, a hobby — the software does not assume a topic.
  • The rules. Moderation, publishing policy, what is allowed. The foundation writes software, not community law.
  • The advertising. If there is any, you sell it. There is no revenue share and no house advertising injected into your pages.
  • The data. It sits in a database on your machine. You can back it up, move it, or take it elsewhere.

What the foundation does

We develop the software and keep it working: the engine, the panel, the templates, the search-related plumbing. Improvements arrive for every installation, so a server does not drift into an unmaintainable fork the way a custom-built site usually does.

What we do not do: we do not host your community, do not moderate it, do not take a percentage, and do not sit between you and your members. If the foundation disappeared tomorrow, an installed server would keep running.

What it takes

A cloud VPS of modest size, a domain name, and someone willing to look after it — the same skills as running any small server. If nobody in the community has them, a hosting company or one of the partner studios can do the setup and the routine maintenance; that is a paid service, and it is separate from the software itself.

What a server looks like when it runs

The clearest example is qwetru.ru: one installation carrying dozens of sites — shops, studios, personal pages — each with its own domain, its own owner and its own content. See the platform and live sites for the full map, or start a community for the practical steps.