❓FAQ

Frequent Axalotl Questions

Is Hylo in beta? What stage is this project in?

Hylo is in beta, with a lively member community of early adopters. The platform is live in production, fully functional on web and mobile (iOS and Android), with well over 100 active groups containing hundreds or thousands of members. In early 2025 we launched a UI/UX "Redesign" with significant performance and product enhancements. We welcome input from everyone using Hylo, and encourage open source contributions like submitting feature ideas or even writing code! You can participate in the conversations about Building Hylo in this Hylo group.

What are the values underpinning Hylo?

Our values are Stewardship, Co-Creation, Adaptation, Wellbeing, Liberation, and Agency. We embed our values at every level of Hylo's stack. Learn about them here.

Who maintains Hylo?

Hylo is maintained by Terran Collective, a California Bay Area community of care and practice dedicated to amplifying cooperation among people regenerating our communities and the planet. Hylo is operated as a fiscally-sponsored 501c3, and Terran co-stewards Hylo with Holo Ltd (the makers of Holochain) who make the technology available under the permissive open source Apache License 2.0. We are in the process of assembling an advisory board and establishing an independent legal entity for Hylo. Our goal is to transition to a structure that protects Hylo as a technology commons with a participatory governance model that formally includes stakeholder voices.

Is Hylo environmentally sustainable?

Yes — Hylo is hosted on Heroku which is part of Salesforce. Salesforce has achieved net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and uses 100% renewable energy for its global operations.

How stable is Hylo?

Hylo is very stable with little downtime and high redundancy. We are able to scale up our servers as needed to cover increased traffic (but please give us a heads up before onboarding a large group!)

What IT security standards to you have in place to protect member data?

All user data is encrypted and passed through a secure connection via HTTPS when a user is active on Hylo. We recently completed an audit of our user authentication code, and we follow best practices for session management, password storage, etc. We have two-factor authentication for new account creation.

Where is Hylo hosted and is it GDPR compliant? What data security and protection standards does Hylo follow?

Hylo is hosted on Heroku, with some data storage on Amazon AWS servers as well. We are using servers based in the United States and we are under US jurisdiction. In the future, it would be possible to spin up federated versions of Hylo in other regions such as the E.U. Hylo is G.D.P.R. compliant.

Digital Ocean hosts a proxy service that is involved in directing Hylo traffic to the appropriate servers. There are only a couple of trusted team members that have access to the production databases. We use 2FA to access our hosting services and use a company password manager. Users can contact our team for help managing their account via Intercom, and our policy is to only look at user data when asked to do so by those users. Users have the option to Deactivate or Delete their accounts in Settings.

How is Hylo funded?

Work on Hylo is funded through donations, foundation grants, and paid partnerships with aligned non-profit organizations. Some recent partners include NoVo Foundation, OpenTEAM, Salmon Nation, Zebras Unite, and People-Centered Internet. We are seeking additional funding partners to allow us to grow the Hylo community and deliver what is needed. We also receive support through monthly contributions from members of our community - you can donate here.

Hylo's long-term plan for financial sustainability is to create a tandem for-purpose business that receives revenue from premium features, a percentage of paid group memberships and courses, and memberships in the Hylo Commons. The core functions of Hylo will remain free to use.

How is Hylo governed?

Hylo practices Sociocracy-inspired governance with decisions made by our staff across a General Circle, Product/Design Circle, Dev Circle, Community Circle, and Purpose Circle. We practice consent-based decision-making, and frequently seek input from Hylo members in product decisions. We receive oversight from our advisory circle and our fiscal sponsor, Empowerment Works.

Do the Hylo web application and mobile apps support multiple languages e.g. using it in Spanish?

Hylo web and mobile have basic internationalization with English and Spanish as the two supported languages currently. We'd love to get help from our community to translate Hylo into more languages! Let us know if it would benefit your community to have a version of Hylo in your language.

How can I make open-source contributions?

Our Contribution Guide is on Github here.