Manifesto
From the Dutch word koppeling. Two meanings, both true here. The first: a connection between two or more things. The second: a car's clutch — the part that doesn't create motion, it engages power that's already there. Kopling is both. It connects people, and it engages the energy they already bring — sharing what's happening, welcoming someone new, keeping a conversation going — rather than replacing it.
Mission
Kopling exists to support honest interactions between people — through community software that's simple to run and built to extend.
Doctrine
Our settled beliefs about the product and how we build it. Every feature and every decision is checked against these five.
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1. People, not users.
In this manifesto, in our docs, in our product, and in the UI, we say "people" — because the person behind an account has real emotions, struggles, and hopes. This applies to all writing about Kopling.
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2. Engagement is a result, never a target.
Engagement is what happens when people enjoy talking to each other — it's a result, not something we chase with tricks. We won't order feeds to keep people scrolling, send notifications just to pull people back, or reward outrage. We track whether questions get answered and new people feel welcome — not how much time people spend on the site.
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3. Small communities never carry the weight of scale.
A group of eight friends and an org of eight thousand can both run on Kopling. What one needs to feel simple and warm, the other needs to feel controlled and auditable — meeting both is a design problem, not a tradeoff between them. Features built for scale — SSO, audit trails, granular permissions — are additive: switched on when needed, invisible when not. The friend group never has to see, learn, or pay for what the enterprise needs, and the enterprise's requirements never make the software slower or more confusing for anyone else.
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4. Moderation deals with harm, not with being human.
Someone venting on a bad day is coping, not breaking a rule — what we act on is harm to other people, not the bad day itself. We assume good intent by default, and we design for the rare exception without treating everyone like a suspect. People who are removed for harm can still come back with dignity. Spam and bots aren't a rare problem — they happen constantly, especially once other communities can connect to ours — so stopping them is part of the core software from day one, not something added later.
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5. AI serves people; it never replaces them.
AI never pretends to be a person — not in what Kopling ships, and not in what's allowed in the registry, no matter how good the intention behind it. What we do offer: extensions for moderation help, drafting, translation — support that keeps participating in and running a community simple and accessible, not a replacement for the people doing it. The same standard applies to building Kopling itself: agentic development is fine, as long as the result is genuinely reviewed — by a person, or by AI trusted to do that job well.
Promises
Every community eventually asks the same question: what happens if the people running the software change their mind, get bought, or shut down? Here's what we commit to.
- The code stays free to use, copy, and run — no matter who's making decisions. If Kopling ever goes a direction your community doesn't want, nothing stops you from forking it and continuing without anyone's permission. That's the real protection here, not anyone's good intentions.
- Your community's data stays on your infrastructure, not ours — self-hosting means nobody outside your community decides who can access it, train on it, or sell it. And portability is built in, not assumed: Kopling ships the tooling to export everything in full, so people can actually take their data and leave, not just own it in theory.
- Money buys thanks and visibility. It never buys influence over technical decisions or moderation.
- Decisions, and the reasoning behind them, are public by default.
As people take on real, ongoing responsibility, we'll proactively invite them to join a Technical Steering Committee — the goal is a complete committee within a year or two.
