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Why Acorn exists

Every community meets and organizes online somewhere. Most live on platforms you have no meaningful control over — Discord, Instagram, Slack, and the like. That means your community is subject to someone else's rules, moderation, algorithms, and privacy policies.

Acorn is how you build and run an online community for your people to grow, connect, feel safe, and make decisions together — one you and your people actually control.

What you get, on every plan

  • Feeds you shape — create feeds and control whose posts show up in them.
  • A place on the open network — your community connects to the wider network of apps built on AT Protocol, so your members aren't walled in.
  • The ability to leave — every plan is built so your community can move on if it ever wants to. See Leaving Acorn.

How it fits together

Two things, plus the data underneath them:

  • Your dashboard is your control room — where you, the steward(s), create and curate feeds, invite and manage members, set moderation rules, and (on Organization & Custom plans) customize the look of your community.
  • Your community client is where members actually interact — reading feeds, posting, following each other. On Organization & Custom plans it's styled as your own; on Free, Community & Collective plans, members use Blacksky's shared client. Available via browser, with a mobile app.
  • Your data lives on a PDS (Personal Data Server). For the Free, Community & Collective tiers it'll live on Blacksky's, or on your own with Organization & Custom. See Pricing for exactly what differs.

The open network underneath

Acorn is built on AT Protocol, an open network that, by design, lets you leave a hosting provider while keeping your relationships intact. Think of it like switching mobile phone carriers — you keep your number and your contacts even though the network carrying your messages has changed.

That's the real difference between owning a community and renting one. On Big Tech, leaving means losing everything. With Acorn, your community data and spaces are portable, so whether you want to go to another provider or move to infrastructure of your own, we make it easy.

See Leaving Acorn for what moves with you.