Disclosure

How the bargain works.

Vinculum runs on sharing: your machine can answer other people's questions, and theirs can answer yours. Everything below follows from that, written plainly so there are no surprises later. Last updated 18 August 2026.

If you lend a machine

You can see what you're serving: The weights run on your hardware, so the text passes through it in the clear — that is simply how local inference works, and it is the same fact stated the other way in "If you ask a question" below. Nothing about your machine's work is hidden from you.
Your machine sets its own limits: Your machine records a content setting: safe-for-work by default, with anything beyond it opt-in and off until you turn it on. Be aware that this is not enforced yet. Requests are not checked or filtered today, so your machine may be sent any request the network receives. A filter that blocks clearly illegal content for everyone is planned, and this page will say so when it exists.
You are always in control: Serving uses the hardware you are lending, and the electricity that goes with it. Sharing is off until you switch it on, and switching it off takes effect on the current job.
Work is spot-checked: The hub seeds known-answer probes into the job stream. A machine that returns junk loses credits, and a machine that keeps doing it loses its place in the network.

If you ask a question

Network replies run on a member's machine: The member who serves your request can see what you sent, which is exactly why Local Mode is there for anything private. Every reply in the app is tagged with where it ran, so you always know which of the two you got.
Local Mode is the private option: Replies run on your own machine and nothing leaves it. It is free, it does not expire, and it works with no network at all.
Built on goodwill, not a service level: Replies come from volunteered consumer hardware, so expect queue waits rather than commercial-API speed, and no guarantee that a given model is free at a given moment. That is the trade for a network nobody pays for.
Growing, and honest about it: The counter on the front page is the live number reported by the hub, never a projection. Joining early means shaping what this becomes.

Credits

Credits are how the network keeps score between people who give compute and people who use it. That is the whole of it.

Credits have no cash value and cannot be transferred, sold, or withdrawn.
Earning credits is not income. Lending a machine is a contribution, not a job.
The free tier stays free. Earning by contributing always works, and Local Mode never closes.
If credits are ever sold, money buys queue priority — never features — and part of it pays out to the machines that served the work.

What we hold

Your identity is a keypair: Generated on your machine on first run. No email, no account, no signup. Credits attach to the key, which also means that losing it loses them.
This site collects nothing: No cookies, no analytics, no third-party scripts, no fonts fetched from anyone else. The front page makes one request — asking the hub how many machines are online.
The waitlist is an address and a date: An address and the date it arrived. No name, no IP, no tracking identifier — there is nowhere in the record to put one. It is used for a single email when the app is ready, and is not shared with anyone.
Leaving the list: Email privacy@skyn3t.nl from the address you want removed and it comes out by hand, promptly. That request is not logged or kept anywhere — the waitlist table stays exactly what the row above describes, an address and a date, never a history of who left.

This page describes Vinculum as it is being built, and will be updated as that changes rather than quietly left behind. Questions about anything here are welcome — write to privacy@skyn3t.nl.