Running it yourself — why that's the right call¶
locali is not software you subscribe to somewhere and it runs on someone else's server. You run locali yourself — on your own infrastructure, under your own control.
That is a deliberate choice. It gives control back — but it does not remove operational responsibility.
Because the data stays on your infrastructure¶
When residents or members of a club use a local information platform, data is created: memberships, reading habits, notification preferences. That data should not end up on the servers of a cloud provider you have no relationship with.
In a pure self-hosted setup, there is no central locali platform operator with automatic access to hub data. Which third-party providers are involved — such as your hosting provider, SMTP service, backup destination, monitoring, or external AI — depends on your concrete infrastructure. Operators need to consciously choose, configure, and assess each of these from a data-protection perspective.
Important: the personal data of your users belongs to them — not to you as operator. As operator, you are the data controller under GDPR. Data subject rights (access, deletion, portability) are your responsibility and must be upheld by you.
For municipalities and public institutions, this is not optional — it's a requirement.
Because you stay in full control¶
When you run locali, you decide:
- Which places exist?
- Who can join?
- Which sources are imported?
- How is content distributed?
- Who has admin access?
None of that is in the hands of a central platform operator. The hub and its configuration are yours — which third-party services are involved in running it is your decision to make.
Because you should be able to choose your infrastructure deliberately¶
locali was built for municipalities, clubs, and local organisations. Anyone running local digital infrastructure should be able to decide consciously where data is processed, who has access, and which dependencies are acceptable.
Self-hosting reduces dependency on central platforms: no service that can suddenly be shut down and no product roadmap you cannot influence. At the same time, it requires responsible operation — updates, backups, monitoring, and data-protection processes remain the operator's job.
Two paths — one principle¶
There are two deployment models, depending on your situation:
Standalone — for one organisation¶
A single municipality, club, or initiative runs its own hub. Everything runs on one server. Easy to understand, easy to maintain, easy to scale.
Platform — for several¶
An operator provides shared infrastructure — authentication, monitoring, routing — and each organisation gets its own, fully isolated hub on top. Makes sense for districts, umbrella organisations, or IT service providers that want to supply local communication infrastructure for multiple entities.
In both cases: the same software, the same data, the same control.
What you need for it¶
You don't need a dedicated data centre contract or specialised software. An ordinary Linux server — with a local hosting provider, in a German data centre, or in your own server room — is enough.
You also need a domain and an SMTP server for outgoing emails.
locali brings the remaining application stack: authentication, database, monitoring, and reverse proxy.
Ready for the next step?¶
The full technical setup guide — covering all steps for standalone and platform mode — will be published with the planned open-source release. Until then, alpha operators receive the guide directly.
Early Alpha
locali is still in active development. Setup currently requires some technical knowledge. Ideas, requests, or feedback? Get in touch — see Imprint.