COMMUNITY // ABOUT
About / Manifesto
ToolsLibrary is a cypherpunk mutual-aid project: a tool-lending and skill-exchange platform for local communities, built to collect no personal data and run on self-hosted hardware.
Why this exists
The average power drill gets used for about thirteen minutes in its life, yet every household is expected to buy one, store it, and eventually throw it away. Multiply that by every tool in every garage and you get a lot of duplicated, idle equipment, while neighbors two doors apart drive to a big-box store to hang a shelf.
The obvious fix is sharing. The hard part is trust: who lends a $400 impact driver to a stranger? Our answer is cryptographic. Members are known by a self-chosen handle and a public alias, passwords are bcrypt-hashed, recovery keys are single-use, and a Trust Score rises with every on-time return and drops with every damaged one. The score is computed from lending behavior and visible to everyone.
The platform itself is part of the argument. It runs on a self-hosted Fedora CoreOS server, in a rootless container, on a SQLite file, with zero telemetry. Community software can be pleasant to use and surveillance-free at the same time.
Right to repair
Every drill, saw, or sander thrown away over a $4 part is a waste of money and materials. We share tools so people can fix things themselves, and we share the skills needed to repair the tools too. Repair is a political act: it refuses the upgrade treadmill.
Anti-surveillance capitalism
Most platforms harvest your identity and sell your attention. This one is built so it cannot. There is no email field, no phone number, no IP logging, no analytics, and no third-party CDN. You can borrow a circular saw from your neighbor without a corporation building a profile of your life. Privacy is part of the architecture here.
Local resilience
When supply chains stutter, a neighborhood that can fix its own fence and rewire its own lamp gets by. A tool library turns the equipment sitting idle in garages into shared infrastructure.
Decentralization
The code is AGPLv3 and self-hostable in a single rootless Podman container on a single machine. No cloud account is required and there is no platform lock-in. If this instance ever disappears, any community can fork the source and run its own node.