Colyna
Publishing, audience and commerce on owned infrastructure.
Colyna is a self-hosted web platform. One instance runs the journal, the reader accounts and the shop of one creator or expert business, on its own domain and in its own database.
01
What Colyna is
Colyna brings together what a small publishing business usually rents from several platforms: a place to publish, a relationship with readers, and a way to sell. It is a single server-rendered application written in Go, with all durable state in one PostgreSQL database and media in S3-compatible storage.
Each business runs its own instance. There is no shared platform account between them, and no external backend service the application depends on.
Colyna is meant for independent creators and experts who publish, build a readership and sell products or paid content, and who want that business to run on infrastructure it controls.
02
Building blocks
Journal and threads
Articles written in Markdown, organised by topic and into ordered series, with RSS, a sitemap and structured data. Interface in English and German.
Reader accounts
Registration with email verification, sign-in, password reset, data export and account deletion that keeps order records without personal details.
Shop
Products, cart and orders with stock reservation. Card payments through Stripe Checkout are being integrated.
Measurement
Cookieless first-party counts of visits by channel, source and campaign. Advertising and analytics tags load only after consent.
Operation through an API
Content, products and site settings are managed through a JSON API, so changes can be scripted, reviewed and deployed.
Agent commerce
Planned: selling articles and products to AI agents through open payment protocols.
03
Principles
- Owned infrastructure
- An instance runs on servers its operator chooses. Content, readers and orders do not depend on a platform account that can be closed.
- One place for data
- Everything durable lives in one PostgreSQL database, which can be exported, backed up and moved as a whole.
- Privacy by default
- No third-party trackers without consent. Reader data exports exclude credentials and session tokens.
- Changes as code
- Content and configuration go through an API and reviewed deployments rather than manual edits on a live system.
04
Status
Colyna is in research and development.
- Working
- Journal and threads, reader accounts, shop and measurement run and are covered by automated tests.
- In progress
- Card payments through Stripe.
- Planned
- Agent commerce: selling articles and products to AI agents.
05
Who builds it
Colyna is built by Alexander Ertli, a software engineer in Hamburg, Germany, who works on developer platforms, hosting and delivery. He also maintains Contenox, an open-source desktop app for AI-assisted software engineering.
Enquiries about Colyna go to hello@contenox.com. The legal notice and privacy information are on the legal page.