About Earde

What is Earde?

Earde is a community forum and link aggregator built as a fast, open-source, European alternative to Reddit. It is structured around communities — self-governing spaces, each with its own moderators, rules, and culture. There is no algorithmic feed, no recommendation engine, and no engagement optimisation. Posts are ranked by community votes. The most recent activity surfaces to the top. That is the entire algorithm.

The name comes from the ancient Greek koinón (κοινόν) — a league of communities acting in common. That is the model: sovereign communities, federated under shared rules of conduct, with no central authority dictating what you see or think.

Why we built it

Reddit was a great idea that survived contact with venture capital. Over a decade it accumulated dark patterns: infinite scroll, autoplay video, feed manipulation, third-party ad networks, aggressive data collection, and a 2023 API shutdown that killed every serious third-party client. The company that built it is now publicly traded and answers to shareholders, not users.

We are not interested in that trajectory. Earde is built for people who want a text-centric discussion forum that does not treat them as inventory to be monetised. It is built in Europe, hosted on European bare-metal servers, and designed from the first line of code to be compliant with the GDPR — not as an afterthought, but as an architectural constraint.

We are also making a small technical statement. Earde is written in OCaml, a statically-typed functional language developed at INRIA in France. OCaml has been powering critical infrastructure in finance, verification, and compilers for decades. It deserves a turn on the web.

What we believe

  • Privacy is a default, not a setting. We collect your username and email. Nothing else. See the Privacy Policy for the full technical disclosure.
  • Communities should govern themselves. Each community sets its own rules and elects its own moderators. Platform-wide rules exist only to prevent serious harm, not to enforce a particular culture.
  • Text is a feature, not a limitation. Earde is designed for reading and writing. Images, video, and infinite scroll are not on the roadmap.
  • No algorithmic mediation. You see what your communities voted on, in the order they voted on it. We do not decide what is important for you.
  • Open source is non-negotiable. You can audit every line of code, run your own instance, and fork the project. There are no backdoors, no proprietary modules, and no dark-pattern UI patterns hidden in a closed binary.

Community guidelines

Earde communities are self-governing within the following platform-wide rules. These exist to protect users, not to police opinion.

  • No harassment, targeted abuse, or threats directed at individuals or groups.
  • No content that is illegal under the law of the European Union or the jurisdiction of the hosting country.
  • No spam, unsolicited commercial solicitation, or coordinated inauthentic behaviour.
  • No impersonation of real persons, organisations, or public figures.
  • No content that sexualises or endangers minors.

Violations of these rules may result in content removal, community ban, or global suspension at moderator or administrator discretion. Community-specific rules are set by each community’s moderators and displayed in the community sidebar.

Who runs this?

Earde is operated by Earde Network (provisional legal entity, European Union). The platform is hosted on bare-metal servers within the EEA. No user data is transferred to third countries. For legal and regulatory correspondence: legal@earde.eu.

Open source

The full source code for the Earde platform is publicly available. It is written in OCaml 5 using the Dream web framework and PostgreSQL. The codebase is intentionally small and readable — a few large, cohesive files rather than dozens of micro-modules. You can read it, run it, and improve it. Pull requests are welcome. Bug reports are appreciated. Forks are expected.

Contact

General enquiries: hello@earde.eu
Privacy & data protection: privacy@earde.eu — or see the Privacy Policy
Abuse & safety reports: abuse@earde.eu
Legal & regulatory: legal@earde.eu