Portability Is Power: Why Our Platform Lets You Take Your Data With You
Freedom means more than access—it means the ability to leave without losing everything you’ve built.
Why Portability Matters
Cory Doctorow—activist, author, and co-editor of Boing Boing—has long argued that “portability” is a key part of true digital freedom. The ability to leave a platform with your data intact prevents users from being trapped in corporate silos. At Community Internet, we believe that local ownership of infrastructure should extend to digital ownership of personal data.
That’s why we’ve built our BuddyBoss-powered member communities and LearnDash course environments to ensure that members can download a complete record of their information in a simple JSON export file at any time. This means your profile, posts, messages, tokens, and learning progress are never locked in. You can take them with you—whether you’re moving to another network, backing up your activity, or simply keeping a personal copy.
How We Do It Differently
Many mainstream platforms—from social networks to learning portals—make it difficult or impossible for users to export their own data. Even when they claim to offer “portability,” it’s often buried behind complex menus, limited to partial exports, or delivered in proprietary file formats that can’t easily be reused elsewhere.
Our platform takes a different approach. Every member has access to a “Download My Data” feature, built with WordPress’s native export functionality and enhanced by our tokenized identity layer. Your data comes in an open JSON format, a universal standard that can be read by countless tools, apps, and systems.
This ensures that you—not the platform—control your identity, your learning history, your messages, and your digital footprint.
The Risks of Locked Platforms
Why does portability matter so much? Because when platforms don’t allow you to export your data, they’re effectively taking ownership of it. Some users have tried to recover their own data through reverse engineering or scraping, only to discover that doing so may violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Under the DMCA, even trying to access your own information in a way that bypasses a company’s restrictions can technically be treated as “circumventing a digital protection measure.” In extreme cases, this could lead to legal threats, fines, or even criminal penalties.
In other words: the more centralized and closed a platform becomes, the more it turns your data into their property.
Portability Is Freedom
When you pay for membership or courses on our platform—whether in dollars or tokens—you’re not just gaining access. You’re participating in a system that respects your autonomy and mobility.
Portability ensures that your learning, your communications, and your creative contributions remain yours, not ours. This is how we honor the spirit of the open web and the movement for community-owned digital infrastructure.
At Community Internet, we believe that open-source tools like WordPress, BuddyBoss, and LearnDash represent more than just software—they represent an ethic: that your data, your learning, and your community should never be held hostage.
Call to Action
If you believe in this vision of a more open, user-controlled Internet, join our community—or build your own. Together, we can make portability the norm, not the exception.
Responses