Overview

This page covers non-technical guidelines regarding affiliations, community projects, and publicity.

This app was built as a hobby and I don't have much of a desire to facilitate a further community - it's primarily "just another reader".

While I don't have much of any intention of micromanaging the community, I do want to set some expectations to ensure clarity and consistency and minimise risk of misrepresentation or further takedown of the project for the sake of its longevity.

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Affiliation Policy

No Official Host Recommendations

Alethia will never be affiliated with any singular host for "official" or "recommended" status. The project maintains strict neutrality regarding which hosts users should connect to.

This means:

• No host will ever be endorsed, promoted, or given preferential treatment by the Alethia project
• The app will not ship with pre-configured hosts pointing to specific third-party servers
• Documentation will not recommend specific community-hosted instances

No Affiliation with Community Archives

Alethia is not affiliated with any community-based archives of popular hosts. This includes:

• Curated lists of host URLs
• Community-maintained registries of sources
• Aggregated indexes of available servers

Users are free to create and share such resources, but they operate independently from the Alethia project.

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Hosting Guidelines

Alethia supports two hosting models: self-hosting for personal use and public hosting for community access. Each has different expectations.

Self-Hosting

Self-hosting is the recommended approach for most users. You run your own host instance for personal use, connecting only your own devices.

Benefits of self-hosting:

• Full control: Configure sources, rate limits, and caching to your preferences
• Privacy: Your reading activity stays on your own infrastructure
• No dependencies: Not reliant on third-party hosts that may go offline
• No restrictions: Run closed-source or modified code as you see fit

Self-hosted instances have no special requirements beyond following the API specification. You're free to run whatever code you want on your own infrastructure.

Granted though that for the average user, self-hosting may be too technical or resource-intensive, public hosts exist to fill that gap.

Public Hosts

Any host intended for public use (serving users other than yourself) should ideally be open-source. This allows:

• Transparency: Users can verify what the host does with their requests and data
• Trust: Open code builds confidence that the host isn't injecting malicious content or tracking users
• Community Review: Security issues can be identified and reported by the community
• Forking: If a public host goes offline, others can spin up alternatives

Comparison

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Community Projects

Permitted Community Resources

Community-based archives and indexes can exist under the following conditions:

1. Explicit Non-Affiliation Disclaimer: Any community resource must clearly state that it is not directly affiliated with the Alethia project
2. Index Purpose Only: Resources should present themselves as an index or directory for quick referencing, not as an official or endorsed list
3. Self-Sustained: The resource must not depend on the Alethia project for updates, hosting, or support
4. Compliance with Requests: The Alethia project maintainer reserves the right to request updates or removal of any community resource that misrepresents its affiliation, violates these guidelines, or otherwise causes harm to the project

Example disclaimer for community projects:

This resource is not directly affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Alethia project or its developers. It serves as an independent community-maintained index for reference purposes only.

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Publicity

GitHub Topic Tag

For additional visibility and discoverability, community projects related to Alethia should use the alethia tag on GitHub.

This helps:

• Users discover related tools and resources
• Developers find community extensions and implementations
• Maintain a searchable ecosystem of related projects

To add the tag to your repository:

1. Go to your repository's main page
2. Click the gear icon next to "About"
3. Add alethia to the Topics field

Browse community projects: github.com/topics/alethia

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Summary