A short list, kept short so that breaking one is obvious.
We will not hide the cost of independence
Erycina exists because creators deserve more control over their businesses and their communities. That does not make operating a platform effortless, and saying otherwise would be a sales pitch rather than a principle.
If you own the infrastructure, you own the responsibility that comes with it. We document those responsibilities openly, build tools that make them easier to meet, and say plainly when Erycina cannot solve a problem for you.
Do not replace the platform can ruin me with the software project told me it was fine. Here is the map.
Authority sits where the consequence lands
Erycina owns payment truth. Heimdall owns entitlements. A tenant owns its own content and its own brand. Terminus can draft but cannot send. Each decision has exactly one owner, and the boundaries are written down so that a failure has an address.
A system where two subsystems can both decide the same thing will, eventually, decide it differently, and the person holding the consequences will be the creator.
The instance is yours, including when it is inconvenient
There is no Erycina server between you and your subscribers. No account we can suspend, no payout we can hold, no moderation decision we can make on your behalf, and no support queue that can restore your data when it is gone.
We cannot rescue you, and a project that could rescue you could also overrule you.
Nothing pretends to be finished
The software is under construction and the site says so, in specifics, on the front page. When production readiness arrives it will be described when it is true, not when it is nearly true.
Permissive licence, reserved name
The software is MIT licensed. Fork it, host it, sell hosting for it, build a business on it, and never ask permission.
The name is not part of that grant. “Erycina” is reserved for this project and its intended nonprofit steward. A fork is welcome to exist; it is not welcome to present itself as Erycina. Under a permissive licence the name is the only protection creators have left against a hostile or careless fork trading on trust they extended to this one.
Copyright is held by “Erycina Contributors” rather than by a company, so that it can pass to a nonprofit steward without needing a signature from every contributor.
The project hosts its own source
The canonical repository is self-hosted Forgejo at git.erycina.org, not GitHub. A read-only mirror may follow for discoverability; it would not become the canonical copy.
A project that tells creators to own their infrastructure should not keep its own source on someone else’s platform. That is either a principle or it is marketing, and the difference is visible in the DNS.