The Home in motion¶

Most of what has happened to the Home happened slowly, from the inside. It grew from a spreadsheet and a shared laptop to a tenant holding 200,000 records, and that growth is told in three chapters, from the early years through scale to what an established Home looks like. None of it arrived as an event.

Some changes are not like that. They come from outside, on a date, and the Home has to answer them whether the budget is ready or not. Each is logged here with the date it arrived and a link to the full account.

Autumn 2026: the listing, and taking back the stack¶

In August 2026 a government abroad added an Italian collective to a list, and any bank, registrar or host that dealt with the collective had to choose between dropping it and answering for it. The collective ran mailing lists and blogs and chat for people who did not want to route their lives through companies that answer to that government. The list touched no server. It turned everyone else’s paperwork into the weapon.

The Home read the essay about the listing and drew its own estate on the whiteboard, the way Purple Lantern, a one-woman company with seven static sites, had. The Home’s drawing came out worse. A US tenant sat under the mail, the files, the chat and the logins. The testimony the field workers bring back, the thing that makes the Home quietly interesting to people who never signed anything, sat behind one login on infrastructure a company abroad could switch off at will.

So the Home moved off the tenant, layer by layer, onto European providers. The full account, one page per layer, is taking back the stack: the public .am name kept and a .eu added beside it to carry the logins, the mail at a German provider and the chat at a Swiss one, the files and the self-run identity provider on machines in Germany, and the one layer still on the road. The pages in this section that describe the tenant-era estate now carry a line at the top pointing to where each layer went.

What surprised the Home¶

The move was meant to be about leaving a country. Most of what it taught was closer to home.

The grant had looked like a gift. Read in full, it was a licence to occupy that its landlord could end at any time, for any reason. The relief the finance team had cried with, years before, was written in the same document as the clause that could close the tenant in an afternoon.

One landlord became four, and four bills arrived where one grant had been. The finance team cried again, briefly, and then did the sums. Under the tenant, nobody had seen the mailbox, the file share and the login as separate costs, because they had all been one cage.

The move did not make the Home sovereign. Reading the providers’ own pages, the architect found the same company, Hetzner, sitting under the files, the identity provider, the donor ledger and the bank, on four separate contracts, none of which mentioned the others.

Bestiary did not move, and for now could not. Its vendor offered no home that was not Microsoft’s, so the residents’ records stayed on a Windows server the Home now keeps in a box with a label on it, counted honestly as the largest dependency the move left standing. The search for a resident system that is not Microsoft’s is the layer still on the road.

And the part nobody expected to write down: moving the testimony from a foreign tenant to German and Swiss companies did not put it further from reach. It put it under courts that Ankh-Morpork’s allies can reach more easily. The Home could not afford sovereignty and had never been asked to want it. What it gained was a clearer view of who could say no to each door, which was more than it had known before.

The record continues¶

This page is where the next upheaval is recorded when it arrives. The Home’s history so far has been mostly its own doing.

Last updated: 09 September 2026