An Embassy is a community that stewards part of the digital commons — its pages, its people, and, almost incidentally, its hosting. Embassies are the unit of care in the Local First Embassy strategy.
## Not an Ops Role
The old pattern burns volunteers: one person becomes "the server admin" and the commons hangs on their goodwill. An Embassy inverts this. The community is the unit. It moderates its own conversation, welcomes its own newcomers, tells its own story — and its kit mirrors, pins, and indexes the clusters it has adopted without anyone holding a pager.
## What an Embassy Provides
- A mirror of every cluster it stewards, served from its own kit and accounts - A pinning node in the Federated Pinning Service - A search index and an agentic indexer for its neighbourhood - A local Guide server for Federated Authoring — members author at home and publish outward - Moderation and welcome, at a scale where names are known
## Bounded by Design
Membership is capped — see Palava — and growth happens by founding new embassies, not enlarging old ones. Each embassy holds its own accounts and its own flag, so no failure, billing surprise, or dispute reaches past its walls. Redundancy comes from the many, not resilience of the one.
# See