❄️What Makes Hylo Different?

Choosing a community platform is a huge decision! This page will help you explore whether Hylo is a good fit for your group.

Why Hylo?

Hylo is a prosocial community platform for purpose-driven groups. Hylo is different from other community platforms, and not just because we’re free, open-source, and not-for-profit.

Hylo is created for peer-to-peer, networked collaboration.

The transition to a world that works for all will require unprecedented collaboration—and powerful tools designed to support that work. For-profit, venture capital-backed platforms are not up to the task, as they:

• Are profit driven—not relationship driven. The big social platforms are designed to extract your attention and data, turning you into the product for sale.

• Are built for individual companies and brands—not for peer-to-peer collaboration. These platforms have no ability to create conversations that unite multiple groups in a shared context.

Learn more about the values underpinning Hylo here.

Hylo is designed to help purpose-driven communities thrive.

Hylo is designed to empower communities to build a world that works for everyone. It differs from other platforms in three main ways:

1. Hylo enables collaboration across nested networks.

Hylo advances cooperation across groups, networks, movements, and landscapes. This happens through Hylo’s unique nested network architecture that allows composable group relationships. Each individual group on Hylo is an integrated whole and—at the same time—part of a larger whole. Community creators have the ability to create unlimited nested subgroups, as well as link their group to other networks they’re a part of. This ability to overcome silos and collaborate across networks is critical, as no one group can regenerate the planet single-handedly.

Nested ("Holonic") network architecture: composable group relationships, making each group a whole part of a larger whole and enabling collaboration across groups, networks, and even movements.

2. Hylo is free, open-source, and participatory

Hylo is stewarded by Terran Collective, a community of care and practice that builds systems and tools for a regenerative future. We are building Hylo as a tech commons, forever open source and free to use. Hylo runs as a non-profit and is resourced through donations and paid partnerships with values-aligned organizations. Our roadmap includes a plan to decentralize Hylo’s backend and data to make it more secure, resilient, and environmentally-friendly.

Terran Collective partners with Holo, the makers of Holochain, to steward Hylo.

3. Hylo is designed for place-based organizing.

Hylo focuses on local, bioregional organizing. Our unique geographic map feature helps people understand their shared landscape and makes it easy to connect with other people and opportunities nearby. Hylo also makes it easy to share events, projects, resources, discussions, requests, and offers based on location, and tagged with relevant topics.

Hylo's geographic map helps people understand their shared landscape and makes it easy for people to find other people, projects, and opportunities based on their own location.

We hope this is helpful! Please reach out to [e-mail] if you’d like more help assessing if Hylo is right for you. This page is adapted with permission from “Learn More About Hylo”, an article written by Tjin Tjoelker for the Regeneration Ecosystem community.