A Local First Embassy is a small community — never more than 42 members — that adopts a corner of the digital commons and hosts it from home. Embassies keep the federated wiki, the Anarchive, and the Guide readable forever, as a by-product of ordinary community life. > Lots of copies keep stuff safe
## A Community First
An Embassy is a social unit, not an ops rota. It gathers around the pages it loves — moderating, welcoming, writing, remembering. The hosting comes with the house: the same small kit that serves the community's own conversation also mirrors the clusters it stewards. Nobody volunteers to run a server. A community adopts a neighbourhood of the commons, and the infrastructure follows. See Embassies for the model.
## The 42 Rule
An Embassy never grows past 42 members. At most it reaches three times 42 — the size of a Palava. Beyond that it splits: two embassies, two kits, two flags. The federation scales by fission to hundreds or thousands of embassies, and every one of them stays at conversational, moderatable scale.
## The Kit
Each Embassy runs a small home computer — a Raspberry Pi class machine — carrying a mirror of the clusters it stewards, a pinning node for the Federated Pinning Service, a search index, and a local Guide server for Federated Authoring. Pages are kilobytes of JSON; a single kit carries a whole cluster with ease. See Fedwiki Pi for the lineage.
## Lots of Copies
The pattern is older than the web's clouds. LOCKSS networks — public libraries, museums, and archives replicating each other's collections — have kept digital material safe for decades on exactly this principle. Libraries make natural institutional embassies: a pinning node, a mirror, and a digital commons hub, funded as public infrastructure. The Permanent Federation is the horizon: a commons that survives any single host, any single funder, any single company.
## Links
# Assets
local-first-embassy
# See