Self-hosting Erycina

Freedom from platform control comes with responsibility for your own platform.

Before you deploy

Erycina is open-source software. It is not a legal or regulatory shield.

When you run Erycina on your own infrastructure, you are operating the service. Depending on where you and your users are, what your service does, and how you structure it, you may have obligations relating to privacy and data protection, content moderation and illegal-content reporting, copyright, age assurance, consumer protection, taxation, payments, information security, record keeping, and other areas of law.

A hosted platform may handle some of these on your behalf. Self-hosting means you handle them yourself.

Erycina provides software. It does not provide legal advice, compliance certification, or immunity from liability.

What we will not tell you is that self-hosting makes you personally liable for everything. That is not accurate enough to be useful. Hosting liability frameworks such as the EU’s Digital Services Act attach conditions to hosting-provider protections rather than removing them, and how they apply depends on what your service actually does.

The accurate version is worse:

You become responsible for determining what legal obligations apply to the service you operate.

That is scarier in the right way, because it is true. No project can calculate your legal position from your compose file.

There is an interactive checklist that takes a description of your intended deployment and produces a list of areas it raises, with the reasons it raised them. It runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.

Hosted platform versus self-hosted Erycina

This table is deliberately simplified. Legal responsibility depends on your jurisdiction, your business structure, your deployment, and what your service actually does.

Where the responsibility boundary sits

                    ERYCINA PROJECT
                 Open-source software
                          │
                ┌─────────▼─────────┐
                │   Your Erycina    │
                │     instance      │
                └─────────┬─────────┘
                          │
          ┌───────────────┼────────────────┐
          ▼               ▼                ▼
     Your server     Your payment      Your users
      & backups        provider        & content
          │               │                │
          └───────────────┼────────────────┘
                          ▼
                   YOUR OPERATIONS

Erycina does not sit between you and your users. You operate the instance.

This is an architectural statement, not a disclaimer. There is no Erycina server in the path of your subscribers, no account we can suspend, no payout we hold, and no support queue that can restore your data. That is the point, and it is also the cost.

Treat your database as highly sensitive

Your instance may contain private messages, intimate photographs and video, payment-related records, identity documents, information about people’s sexual preferences, and the purchase history that ties all of it to real names.

Under the GDPR, data concerning sex life and sexual orientation is a special category of personal data with a higher bar for processing. Whatever regime you are under, the practical reading is the same:

Assume a database dump is a serious security incident, not an inconvenience.

You are responsible for deciding what you collect, why you collect it, how long you keep it, who can access it, how it is secured, how users exercise their rights over it, what actually happens when data is deleted, and what you do the day your server is compromised.

Erycina is built to make some of that easier. Originals, protected derivatives, proof-of-age records, model releases, and processor credentials are structurally separated from the public tree, and only reviewed material is ever published. It cannot make the decisions for you.

AI-assisted features create additional considerations

If you enable Terminus, messages may be processed by an AI system in order to identify boundary crossings, summarise conversations, calculate attention patterns, and suggest responses.

You remain responsible for determining whether and how that processing is lawful where you operate. People interacting directly with an AI system may also need to be told that they are.

Erycina’s answer to that is structural rather than legal:

When Terminus takes over, it says so, and the human stops speaking as the creator.

It identifies itself, it speaks as itself, and no message it drafts reaches anyone without an operator approving it.

Payments and tax

Erycina does not become your merchant of record. You choose payment providers that permit your business and your content, and you live inside their acceptable-use policies, underwriting requirements, identity verification, chargeback procedures, and geographic restrictions.

A payment adapter existing in Erycina does not mean a provider permits every use of that adapter. The Stripe driver, for instance, refuses explicit offers before any request leaves your server, because Stripe does not permit that business. That is a fact about Stripe, not a feature we added to be difficult.

Erycina also does not determine your tax obligations. Selling digital services across borders to consumers commonly creates VAT obligations in the buyer’s country; the EU’s One Stop Shop exists so that eligible businesses can register in one Member State and report those supplies through it rather than registering in each.

More detail on the payment boundary is on the Payments page.

Three ways to run it

Self-hosting is not the only shape this can take, and being clear about the differences matters more than selling any one of them.

Self-hosted. You operate it. Everything on this page is yours. Available today.

Managed deployment. You own the instance and the infrastructure account; someone else helps operate it. The responsibilities are still substantially yours, and the arrangement should say exactly which ones are not. Not offered yet.

Erycina Cloud. Erycina operates the service and takes on the additional responsibilities of being a service provider. This does not exist, and this page will say so until it does.

We will not hide the cost of independence

Erycina exists because creators deserve more control over their businesses and their communities. We do not think that means pretending that operating a platform is effortless.

If you own the infrastructure, you own the responsibility that comes with it.

So we will document those responsibilities openly, build tools that make them easier to meet, and tell you plainly when Erycina cannot solve a problem for you.

We would rather make self-hosting slightly intimidating at the beginning than let someone find out six months in that they misunderstood what they had taken on.

Read the principles this comes from, or work through the checklist.