What the Earthlings People Is Not
Anyone who hears "a people founding itself online" reaches for a familiar label. Each label is a reasonable first guess. Each is wrong about the Earthlings people in a way that can be checked against its founding documents, and the documents answer every one of them in its strongest form.
Not a network state
Network states aim at territory and statehood: build the community first, then acquire land and seek recognition. The Earthlings people deliberately does not. It renounces territorial claims in the unamendable part of its Declaration, and it has no stage at which land or statehood appears. The step it is taking is a different one: the self-determination of the human being and of their belonging, not the building of a state.
Not separatism in disguise
The suspicion is that an additional identity today becomes a territorial demand tomorrow. The answer is that this is impossible by design. A people that holds no territory and claims none cannot encroach on anyone's; the object of encroachment is absent. An earthling takes nothing from their state and adds a belonging. International law itself says that self-determination gives no licence to break up states that represent their whole population; the Earthlings people has written the same renunciation into a part of itself that no vote can touch.
Not a micronation
A micronation imitates a state: a flag, a head of state, titles, passports that mean nothing. The Earthlings people does the opposite of imitating a state. It has no head, because no one in it holds a position from which to command another person. It has no territory and wants none. Its passport is not a travel document; it is a record showing that one confirmed living person stands behind one vote. The thing a micronation wants, to be treated as a state, is the thing the Earthlings people has written itself out of wanting.
Not a parallel jurisdiction, not tax avoidance, not anarchism
The people neither judges nor coerces. It has no court with power over anyone, no armed or security structure, no taxation, no criminal law, no regulation of anything. A person keeps their citizenship, their taxes and the jurisdiction they live under; where the people's rules and a state's mandatory law conflict, the state's law prevails. Belonging is an addition, not a replacement, in the same way that citizenship of a union of states is added to national citizenship without displacing it.
Not a DAO, though it uses the same tools
Here the objection is partly accepted. The infrastructure is the same: a public ledger, votes recorded on it, rules enforced by code. None of that guarantees anything; earlier communities had all of it and ended as plutocracies, because tokens voted, accounts multiplied, and the rules of voting could be voted away. The Earthlings people differs in exactly those three places. Each vote belongs to one confirmed living human being, not to a balance. Money is separated from the vote. And the foundation is outside the reach of any vote. The page One Person, One Vote sets this out.
What it is
A voluntary, non-violent and non-territorial people: a community of human beings who have chosen to belong to one another and who mutually acknowledge that belonging. A society with no power of some over others, where every vote is equal, no one can be expelled, anyone can leave, and the only means of influence is the word. A society of trust, in which no one has to believe anyone because each member is confirmed to be one real person and every count can be checked.
It chose the form of a people because that form gives it a standing of its own, derived from no state and terminable by none, and because years lived openly in that capacity become evidence of what it claims to be. Its purpose is to make it possible to form, verify and express a collective will, and to convey that will to states and international organizations, with no power behind it but the fact that it cannot be dismissed.
Questions
Will it ever seek territory or statehood?
No. The renunciation is in the unamendable core; a future majority cannot repeal it.
Can my government object to my belonging?
Joining is the exercise of freedom of association, a right every state party to the covenants has undertaken to respect, and belonging changes nothing in your legal relation to your state.
If it has no power, what is the point?
A position of confirmed, unique, living people, published so that anyone can recount it. Why that is rarer than it sounds is on the page Why Petitions Are Ignored.
What does it admit about itself?
What is not yet done, in a list it keeps itself, under the title Where We Are Now.
The founding period is open
The founding period of the Earthlings people is open. Objections and Answers, like every founding document, may be challenged by anyone, and a new objection is published with its reply. See The Founding Period.
Objections in their strongest form
The document Objections and Answers puts every serious objection in its strongest form and answers it on the merits, saying where an objection stands unrefuted.