One Community Per Name & Place

Karmyq treats a community's name plus its location as its identity. "Mutual Aid Network" in Portland and "Mutual Aid Network" in Austin are two different communities — but there is only ever one active "Mutual Aid Network" in Portland.

Why this matters

A neighborhood only works if everyone gathers in the same place. If the platform let people spin up a second "PDX Service Providers Network" every time they went looking for it, members, requests, and trust would scatter across a dozen near-identical shells — each one looking empty, none of them the "real" one. The value of mutual aid comes from concentration: the more activity lives in one community, the more useful it is to everyone in it.

How it works

When you create a community, Karmyq first checks whether an active community with the same name and location already exists (matching is case- and whitespace-insensitive):

• If it exists, you simply join it — no duplicate is created. You land in the community everyone else is already using.
• If it doesn't, your new community is created as usual.

A private community with the same name and place won't auto-join you; instead Karmyq points you to it so you can request approval.

What this preserves

The rule applies only to active communities. When a community is archived, or split into two, or fused with another, its former name is freed — so names can be reused over a community's natural lifecycle without ever allowing two live communities to compete for the same identity.

For the engineering details — the identity key, the idempotent create endpoint, the partial unique index, and the one-time de-duplication of historical data — see ADR-062.