Academy Network

Free education. Forever, for everyone, impossible to shut down.

Academy Network is a free library of exhaustive, step-by-step guides, from building a transistor to building the machines made of them, organized so that a complete beginner can start at level 1 of any subject and climb as far as human knowledge goes, without gaps and without paying anyone.

It is not a website. It is a desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and everyone who runs it is the library: content is replicated across the devices of the people reading it, peers find each other over the Tor network, and nobody (including us) can take it down, spy on what you read, or put it behind a paywall. The app itself is a small, free download.

What is this?

The internet can teach you almost anything, if you already know where to look. Information is scattered across a million sites, tutorials stop at the easy parts, and the deep material sits behind tuition. Academy Network puts practical knowledge in one place, one structure: every guide fits into a hierarchy where each level builds only on the levels below it, and every guide is reviewed by knowledgeable volunteers before it is published to the official index.

Think of it as Wikipedia for doing rather than knowing, with the editorial care of an encyclopedia and the resilience of a peer-to-peer network.

Download

Academy Network is one small app (around 12 MB) for Windows, macOS, and Linux, with no account, no configuration, and no Tor setup. The Download page has the installers, how to verify a release is genuine, the system requirements, and what happens the first time you open it.

How it works

• Nobody can shut it down. When you run the app, your computer becomes a node, and every node holds the whole library. There is no server to seize, no company to pressure, and no single machine whose loss matters. Reading is instant and works completely offline; media is fetched from peers who have it, and the more a thing is read, the more copies exist.
• Nobody can watch you read. Nodes reach each other only as Tor onion services, so your address is never visible to anyone. And because you already hold a full copy of the text, reading sends no request at all. There is simply nothing to log.
• No accounts, no real names. Your identity is a key your computer creates locally and silently. Contributors earn reputation on that pseudonym over time: the work builds the name, and the name never has to lead back to you.
• Built to outlive us. The protocol is openly specified, the code is open source, and any user can export the entire library to plain text files with one click. Even if this website and every founder disappeared, the network and the knowledge keep running.

That is the short version. The network page walks through the machinery end to end: the transport, the replication, how media survives, how nodes sync and find each other, and why the whole thing resists capture.

The hierarchy

Every subject is a ladder. Level 1 guides assume you know nothing and teach the smallest building blocks: how a transistor works, what a cell is. Each level above may only use what the levels below already taught. That rule is strictly enforced by review, which means there is always a path from "I know nothing about this" to the frontier of the subject.

There is one definitive guide per topic. To change it, write something better. Alternative techniques live as methods inside the guide, and a better method can be promoted to become the main one. Translations are first-class: a guide in another language is linked to the original, never a fork. And while a human translation doesn't exist yet, the app can machine-translate any guide on your own machine: small translation models fetched from peers like everything else, no cloud service, clearly labeled as unreviewed.

The guides form a web, not a pile. Every mention of a concept links to its guide, so you can fall down the rabbit hole from "build a house" to "pour a foundation" to "mix concrete" without ever hitting a dead end. A blue link means the guide exists. A red link means it doesn't exist yet, and every red link on the network feeds a public wanted-guides list: the community's to-do board, ranked by how many guides are waiting on it. Every guide also shows what links back to it.

Editors and verifiers

Anyone can submit a guide or an improvement. Publication is decided the way an encyclopedia would decide it: a randomly drawn jury of verifiers votes within a time window, and every vote must include written reasoning that goes back to the author. Verifiers earn their place by being certified by other verifiers in the subject, not by appointment, and the community can recall one who reviews in bad faith. Majority approval publishes; anything less returns to the author with feedback, not a rejection stamp.

Editors maintain the official index that every copy of the app displays, but they are bound delegates, not owners. They cannot silently censor, stack the jury, or block a removal: every node checks the rules, and if the editors are ever captured or absent, the community can vote them out and seat new ones. It is curation without gatekeeping, structure without a landlord. See Governance for exactly how the community keeps control.

The community

Software is the easy half of a knowledge commons. The hard half is the community: the editors, the arguments on talk pages, the watchlists, the endless red links pulling people in to write. Academy Network is built to grow that kind of community, without the servers:

• Every guide has a talk page. A public discussion thread, forum-style, where readers report problems, writers plan improvements, and reviewers explain their thinking. Signed by pseudonym, permanent, readable by everyone.
• Recent changes. A live feed of everything happening on the network: new guides, edits under review, votes coming in, publications. Open it and you can feel whether the place is alive.
• Watchlists. Follow the guides you care about and see their changes highlighted. Your watchlist lives only on your machine; nobody else can see what you watch.
• Wanted guides. The red-link list is the front door for new contributors: pick something the community is already waiting for, write the first version, and you're its duke.
• Earned trust, no real names. Reputation attaches to pseudonyms: write good guides, give good reviews, and your standing grows. The name people trust is the one you write under, not the one on your ID.

Get involved

The source lives at git.academynetwork.net, the project's own self-hosted Git server (no third-party host). Anyone can sign up, open issues, and send changes; merging is decided by community review under public rules, not by a maintainer. Read what guides belong on the network and how writing and review work.

Hosting a seed node

Because there are no servers, the network is only as strong as the machines its users keep online. The single most useful piece of infrastructure you can donate is a seed node: an always-on node on a cheap VPS or a small home server. It costs a little disk and a little bandwidth, and nothing else.

The first seed is live, and you can add yours today. The project's founding seed is already answering over Tor, and every node added makes the network stronger, faster, and harder to take down. On a Debian or Ubuntu server, download the setup script, read it, then run it:

wget https://academynetwork.net/seedhost.sh
less seedhost.sh
sudo bash seedhost.sh

The script is short, commented, and does nothing hidden (read it first; that is the rule for any script you run as root). It builds the node from the public source, sets it up as a hardened system service that starts on boot and restarts on failure, and prints your node's own onion address when it is up. Re-run the same script any time to update.

You don't register it anywhere, and nobody has to approve it. Once your node connects, the network finds and uses it on its own: peers pass known-good addresses to each other, so within minutes your machine is serving guide text and media and helping new users reach their first peers. Every extra always-on host makes the whole network faster, more durable, and harder to take down.

A small set of the most reliable long-running hosts are also built into each app release as bootstrap seeds: the first addresses a brand-new install tries. The project runs the first of them to get the network going, and as the community grows, volunteers take these over, so no founder and no single machine is ever load-bearing.

One thing to know before you volunteer: a node keeps and serves a full copy of the network's text, so running a public seed carries the same responsibilities as running any node. Check your VPS provider's terms (some restrict Tor services) and your local law, and read Legal first.

Have a question this page did not answer? The FAQ covers what it is, how it is different, who controls it, how it is funded, whether it is legal, and how to help.