Mahanu — Vision

Mahanu guide · For builders & learners · FAQ · Why Mahanu · Philosophy

Why this exists

We're building Mahanu first for ourselves: our projects — study, music, drawing, making things — as open-format files we own, on our own disks, with collaboration and history on top, working on our own time and together live when we want. Nothing out there was a good home for them, so we're building it. It's MIT and documented, so if it works for your circle too, you can use it, self-host it, or fork it.

What we want from it

A workspace where a small circle — a family, friends, a team — turns an idea into finished work and gets better at whatever they choose: gather resources, take notes, make plans, collaborate, build and ship, and show the finished work — a portfolio built by doing.

The project rule

The network has one scope rule, applied everywhere the platform exercises judgment:

A project is for its members to get better at a shared pursuit — a subject, a skill, a craft.

A study circle proving theorems, a garage band, an upcoming comics artist, a robotics team — all pass. Audience-farming, personality cults, and harm don't. It's enforced only at the surfaces the platform controls — card screening for the public directory, the assistant's refusal policy, and the gates of every future public surface (showcase, competitions, sponsorships) — never by reading anyone's private notes.

Hard calls

Any skill? Who decides what's worth getting better at? The judgment behind the rule lives in one document: philosophy.md. For enforcement, the binding floor is the Acceptable Use Policy — objective and safety-focused, not a quality or viewpoint test. The Reporting & Appeals Policy makes hosted-service decisions reviewable.

What we won't do

No engagement maximization, no behavioral advertising or behavioral data collection, no feeds of any kind, and never a product about personalities. The whole stack is MIT and self-hostable, which makes the harmful alternatives structurally hard to add — a promise enforced by architecture, not just good behavior.