Who can join
Two personas, and only two
Every surface in the product serves one of them.
Citizen. The customer. Can log in to join Community Mode, publish fixes, and be trusted by other citizens — or can stay the anonymous default user and never log in at all. Reading and reasoning locally never requires an identity. The principle written into the specs is identify, don't gate.
Admin. Configures an install and stewards communities. Login is required and the surface is behind a role claim. Admins approve; nobody else does, at any level of standing.
What you can do without an account
Nearly everything that is reading, and all of the reasoning.
On a public install, a logged-out visitor gets a public read tier covering the whole movement. The write controls inside the pages are what carry the gate — and they render normally, they are never greyed out. Clicking one takes you to sign up, remembers what you were doing, and returns you to it. An invitation, not a wall.
On your own machine, the default user can use everything.
Anonymity never caps the ladder
A fully pseudonymous citizen can reach the top trust rung and full merit weight. Merit here is about work produced, not identity disclosed.
This is deliberate. Requiring people to expose themselves in order to be heard selects for those who can afford the exposure — which is a filter no political movement should want, and a particularly bad one for a movement about people with power over other people.
What supporting costs, and what it buys
There is a paid supporter tier. It funds the work and unlocks a supporters area.
It buys zero merit weight. Stated as a rule, in those words, in the specification — so that nobody can later introduce weighted influence for money as an obvious product improvement.
Merit is earned by information: verified work, corroboration, tenure, a published corpus anyone can re-derive, and accuracy that held up over time. Never by money, invitation, or an admin's favour.
What standing buys
Attention, never authority. A trusted citizen's proposal sorts higher in the review queue. It is never auto-approved, and no merit score approves, publishes, or overrides anything.