Public Projects & Org Profiles

A project can be public: its releases are browsable and downloadable by anyone with the link, it can appear on Explore, and its organization gets a public profile page. Nothing about this changes how the project works for your team - the drive, locks, history, and permissions are identical.

Public projects are for distributing things - release assets, datasets, model weights, sample content - not for collaborating with outside contributors; that's what share links and external collaborators are for.

What "public" means#

Two things are set when a project is created and don't change afterward:

• Visibility. Public or Private. The choice is permanent - there's no "make this project public later" switch. If you need a public copy of private work, publish a release into a new public project (the Get this project action on a public release copies it into a project in your own org).
• Storage tier. Public projects store content on the plaintext tier, because anything the world can download has nothing left to encrypt at rest. A project that needs managed or end-to-end encryption at rest can't be public.

Where a public project shows up depends on its releases. Its card appears on the org profile as soon as the project is public, but Explore and the project's own page stay empty until the first release is published - there is simply nothing to browse yet. Archiving a project removes it from the listings until you unarchive it.

The project page#

Every public project has a page at /public/<org-slug>/<project-slug>. It shows the release's README (rendered, with its file listing), every published release with download counts and sizes, and the contributors of the latest release. From here a visitor can:

• Browse a release and download individual files, or the whole release as an archive where the release is set up for it.
• Follow releases - a verified free account gets an email whenever a new release is published. No account is needed to subscribe to the RSS feed instead.
• See provenance. A card or release marked commit-pinned means the release names the content-addressed commit it was published from. You can check the project's signed commit chain yourself with swarmfile-verify-history; the badge itself is the pointer, not a verification result.

The organization profile#

An organization with public projects gets a profile at /public/<org-slug>: its logo, bio, website and support contact, a README, its public projects sorted by recently updated, most downloaded, or name (pinned projects first), and a contributors strip merged from its public projects. Member names are not shown - only people whose commits are already public on the projects themselves.

Owners and admins edit this under Settings → Organization → Public profile:

• Bio - one line, shown under the organization name.
• Website and support contact - shown as links on the profile.
• README - markdown, rendered below the header. Use full https:// links; relative file links aren't resolved there. The editor has a Preview toggle and a View public page link.
• Pinned projects - up to 12 public projects to feature at the top, in the order you pick.

Every edit to the public profile is recorded in the organization's audit log, with the fields changed but not their contents.

Following an organization#

The profile's Follow releases button subscribes one verified email address to every public project in the org. The same email rules as the project follow apply:

• If you follow both the organization and one of its projects, you get one email per release, not two.
• Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and you can also unfollow from the profile while signed in.
• Prefer a reader? The profile links an RSS feed that carries the org's releases across all its public projects: /feeds/<org-slug>/releases.xml.

What visitors can see, and what they can't#

Archiving a project or deleting a release removes it from the public pages, the org profile, and Explore; public pages are cached at the edge for a minute or two, so a removal can lag by that much.