Staying should be a choice.
All principles · 09 / Credible right of exit
Unifyhub must never depend on captivity.
In practice
Your identity
Your history
Your work
Test
If leaving Unifyhub destroys the community's ability to understand or reuse its own operating record, the system is depending on lock-in.
Read the full principle
Principle
Autonomy is real only when communities can leave without losing their identity, history, data, relationships, or operating memory.
Meaning
Unifyhub must never depend on captivity. If the ecosystem promises community agency, it must provide practical paths for export, self-hosting, migration, identity portability, and alternative implementations.
Exit rights make the product more valuable, because they force it to be valuable: trusted, operated well, and worth staying with on its merits.
Leaving should never turn years of decisions, member roles, policies, audit records, or work history into a dead archive. A credible exit path includes usable exports, documented formats, migration guidance, and enough implementation freedom that another system can pick up the community record and continue.
In practice
Export by default, in documented formats.
Migration guidance published rather than negotiated.
Identity and policy models portable across implementations.
Self-hostable reference implementations where appropriate.
Product pressure
This principle favors:
export by default
migration paths that are published, not negotiated
identity and policy models that port across implementations
stable API terms and compatibility commitments
data contracts that survive product replacement
Test
If leaving Unifyhub destroys the community's ability to understand or reuse its own operating record, the system is depending on lock-in.