A channel is a set of editorial rules applied to everything offered to it, and anyone with an account can make one. A channel may only be STRICTER than the published standard: an owner cannot lower a bar, add a permission, or reach a rule that protects a person, which is checked when the rules are saved and again when they are read. Every edit publishes a new version and the old one stays readable, so a ruling made under it can still be looked up. It is a prototype: channels can be created and their rules published, and no channel has yet selected a broadcast of its own.
Channels
A standard defines conformance, not uniformity. There is a standard for a wrench, and wrenches come in dozens of sizes and shapes: a 10mm combination and a 24 inch pipe wrench both conform, neither is a version of the other, and the job picks the tool. Channels are that. A gym and a borough assembly are not translations of one rulebook that ought to be reconciled. They have to fit.
Which raises the obvious objection: if there are four hundred channels, is there a standard at all? Yes, and the reason is the next section. Because a channel may only ever be stricter, you know one thing for certain about every ruling on every channel anywhere on the network, without reading any of them: the floor held.
What an owner can change
A channel adds rules to the published standard. It can say that a broadcast under it must also refuse something the standard permits, and it can say how long the switch must stay on one feed before cutting to another.
What an owner cannot change, and why that is the point
- No bar can be lowered. Every rule in the standard applies to every channel.
- No permission can be added. A permission renders to the reviewer as "NOT grounds to reject", so adding one would carve an exception out of a floor prohibition: the one shape a relaxation could have taken.
- No rule that protects a person can be reached at all.
That is checked when an owner saves, and again when the rules are read, so a rule written straight into the database never reaches a reviewer either. It is what makes open creation defensible rather than reckless: the worst a hostile owner can build is a channel nobody wants.
Where the wrench comparison stops: a wrench standard is about a tool. It promises the wrench will not round the bolt and says nothing about whether you should be loosening it. The mechanical checks on the phone really are like that, tolerances with numbers, and a channel setting one of those higher is choosing a size. The rules about what is in the picture and what is said are not tolerances. A channel adding one of those is making a judgement about what its community will carry, and that is a different kind of decision wearing the same shape.
Every edit is a receipt
Publishing an edit creates a new version and the previous one stays readable. A ruling cites the channel and the version it was made under, so what did the rules say the day my video was refused has an exact answer. An owner may change the rules; an owner may not change them quietly.
The channels this deployment ships
A node may hold more, made by the people who own them. These are the ones whose rules are published here, because a static page can only publish what it was built from.
See the channels on this node, and make one. Reading the rules needs no account. Writing them does, because a channel carries an owner and every edit is signed.