United States Supplier Policy

In an effort to create a truly non American social platform, Sonata is forbidden from using any paid supplier from the United States.

This includes:

  • Web hosting including cloud services
  • Outsourcing and hiring
  • Paid API usage
  • Free services where user information would be disclosed to providers (e.g. Google analytics, Google Fonts)

No restrictions are placed on the following:

  • US users - everyone remains welcome on Sonata
  • US based unpaid volunteers (e.g. moderators)
  • Usage of open source software created or maintained in the US (e.g. MYSQL)
  • Contributions towards Sonata open source projects by US based individuals
  • Donations, contributions or purchase of service by US individuals or companies, providing that no level of ownership of Sonata is subsequently held by these sources. (i.e., Sonata cannot become a publicly trading company or sell any part of itself to US investors, but it can sell a monthly subscription service to someone in the US.)
  • Purchase of US trademarks and any other intellectual property requirement
  • Purchase of US based companies or IP, on condition they are relocated immediately out of the US
  • Contracting of US firms where this is required to protect against an attack or threat against Sonata (such as a US attourney for US based legal issues)
  • Support for US based services when instigated by Sonata users (e.g. users sharing links to Youtube and Sonata converting this to an embed)
  • Usage of APIs that allow Sonata to offer a service that would otherwise be impossible (e.g. re-posting user content when directed by a user to a US based platform or sending SMS authentication messages to US based users)

Case by case decisions are made for services in which their owning companies are registered in multiple countries, including the US or where there are no viable alternatives. Currently we allow the following:

  • Discord (Registered in the US and the Netherlands. No viable alternative exists for thier service. Sonata remains forbidden from paying Discord any money for their service.)
  • Github (There appears to be no viable alternative as contributors are strongly incentivised to be active on Github. Sonata must not pay Github any money for any part of their service)

As this is a new policy (April 2025), Sonata is still in the process of moving all suppliers away from US providers. This is expected to be completed before Sonata fully launches.

Current progress:

  • Google fonts > Bunny fonts (Complete)
  • Google analytics > Self hosted Umami (Complete)
  • Cloudflare:
    • Turnstyle > self hosted Altcha (Near Completion)
    • WAP > Self hosted load balancing (Not needed initially)
    • Country of origin > Internal IP2Location (Near Completion)
  • Constellix DNS > Scaleway DNS
  • Mailgun/Amazon SES/Sendgrid emails > Scaleway transactional email
  • Backblaze > Scaleway glacier

This policy may be reviewed every 5 years (next review possible in March 2030) Clarifications and restriction exemptions may be added at any time, as long as they keep to the overall mandate of this policy.