About

It started because a student station kept falling over

In early 2023 a campus station in Frankfurt was regularly knocked off air during its own flagship show. Too many listeners, not enough upload. A member of the university's network group set up a relay on spare capacity as a favour. Word travelled, other stations asked, and the favour turned into a small piece of infrastructure with a domain name.

Three years later it carries forty-one stations across six countries. Nothing about the arrangement has become more formal, and we are not in a hurry for it to.

Who runs it

A rotating group of five or six volunteers, most of whom work in university network operations or at small independent providers. Nobody is paid. There is no office, no legal entity and no board — decisions get made in a mailing list thread, and the person who cares most usually does the work.

We deliberately do not publish individual names. Several volunteers do this alongside employment at organisations that would rather not be seen to endorse anything, and the project functions perfectly well without personal branding.

How it is funded

Bandwidth and hardware are donated by host partners — three university networks and two independent providers. The only recurring cash cost is the domain registration and a monitoring subscription, together somewhere under a hundred euros a year, split informally among the volunteers.

We do not take donations from the public. Handling money would mean forming a legal entity, and a legal entity would mean accounts, filings, and a reason for someone to eventually want a salary. So far the total absence of a budget has been the project's most effective governance mechanism.

What we will not do

• Carry commercial or advertising-funded broadcasters.
• Sell, resell or rent capacity to anyone, at any price.
• Provide general-purpose hosting, storage or transit.
• Retain records of who listened to what. See privacy.

Where it goes next

Two more nodes are likely before the end of 2026, most plausibly in the Balkans, where several stations currently connect over long and unreliable paths to Vilnius. Beyond that there is no roadmap, because there is no strategy — the network grows when somebody offers a machine.

The most common question we get from commercial operators is what our growth plan is. There isn't one. That is the point.