Join Community

A Sovereign works alone, but it can also join a community node. Joining is optional. It gives you shared infrastructure: a larger database, cloud-strength models, community-curated books, and the ability to collaborate on projects with people you trust.

The community node is not the centre of the system. It is an extension. Your local Sovereign remains the owner of your corpus and your conversations. The node is a place to share what you choose to share and to draw on resources that are too large for one laptop.

What a community node gives you

A shared database that backs up projects and makes them shareable.

Larger models you might not run locally on your own hardware.

Community-curated corpora and books beyond the starter library.

Shared project canvases for working with other members.

Authentication and access control for shared resources.

A node is typically run by a small group, a family, or an organisation that wants the benefits of shared models without surrendering individual ownership. The connection is over a private network, usually Tailscale, and it is never open to the public internet. A single node can serve up to about a hundred and forty people, depending on the hardware.

The community model is not a cloud service. There is no company between you and the node. You know the administrator, or you are the administrator. The relationship is direct, and the rules are set by the people who run it.

What stays local

Even after joining, your corpus files stay on your machine. Only what you explicitly share leaves. Your conversations are private by default, scoped to you through row-level security. Your embedder stays local. You can still run a local model beside the community one.

The join script enforces this. It never overwrites LOCAL_LLM_BASE_URL with a remote address. Local chat stays local. The community node is a guest in your Sovereign, not the landlord.

How to join

Ask your node administrator for an invite.env file. Then run bash scripts/join-community.sh /path/to/invite.env from the Sovereign distribution folder. The script merges the community keys into your local .env, recreates the LiteLLM proxy with community deployments plus local fallbacks, and leaves the local chat front door in place.

After joining, the Library can still display your local books. Community books are mounted separately, not copied wholesale onto your laptop. The large library lives on the node; your personal library lives with you. If you leave the node, your local Sovereign keeps working exactly as it did before.