Leaving Acorn
Most software wants to make leaving hard. Acorn is built the other way round: your community is yours to take.
Why you can leave at all
Three things you already own make it possible:
- Your domain. Your community's address is a domain you control at your own registrar. Acorn never holds it. Point it somewhere else and it goes.
- Your data server. Your community's posts, feeds, members, and their content live on your own data server, in the standard format every AT Protocol host uses. Nothing important sits in a private Acorn database.
- The open network. Your community and every member are real accounts on AT Protocol. Other hosts speak the same language, so your community can move to one of them, or to a server you run yourself.
All of this is how Acorn is built from the ground up.
What actually moves
When you leave, three things travel together:
- Your identity — your community's address and its account on the network, so you keep the name your members know.
- Your data — the posts, feeds, follows, and relationships, exported from your data server and imported wherever you're going.
- Your members — each has their own account under your address, and they come with you rather than starting over on a stranger's platform.
What it takes today
- Keeping your domain is easy — you already hold it, so this is just pointing it at your new home.
- Your data is portable by design — it's stored in the standard AT Protocol format, which means it can be exported and loaded into another host.
- You control your account's keys Acorn holds the cryptographic keys that authorize changes to your community's identity, but you hold a pair too. They are available for download as well as sent to your account after you go through the signup process.
The point
The technology that Acorn is built on makes it so that you can leave by default. We've built it this way so that the only way we can keep you is if we keep providing you with a service that you actually want. The most important part of a community is the people – the technology used should only in service of that.