Kune was a free/open source distributed social network focused on online real-time collaborative editing, decentralized social networking and web publishing in workgroups. It aimed to allow for the creation of online spaces for collaborative work where organizations and individuals can build projects online, coordinate common agendas, set up virtual meetings, publish on the web, and join organizations with similar interests. It had a focus on Free Culture and social movements needs. Kune was a project of the Comunes Collective. The project seems abandoned since 2017, with no new commits, blog entries or site activity.

Kune was programmed using the Java-based GWT in the client-side, integrating Apache Wave (formerly Google Wave) and using mainly the open protocols XMPP and Wave Federation Protocol. GWT Java sources on the client side generates obfuscated and optimized JavaScript conforming a single page application. Wave extensions (gadgets, bots) run on top of Kune (as in Facebook apps) and can be programmed in Java+GWT, JavaScript or Python.

The last version was under development since 2007 until 2017. The code was hosted in the GIT of Gitorious, with a development site and its main node maintained by the Comunes Collective.

Kune is 100% free software and was built only using free software. Its software is licensed under the AGPL license, while the art is under a Creative Commons BY-SA.

Kune was born in order to face a growing concern from the community behind it. Nowadays, groups (a group of friends, activists, a NGO, a small start-up) that need to work together typically will use multiple free (like beer) commercial centralized for-profit services (e.g. Google Docs, Google Groups, Facebook, Wordpress.com, Dropbox, Flickr, eBay ...) in order to communicate and collaborate online. However, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product". In order to avoid that, such groups of users may ask a technical expert to build them mailing lists, a webpage and maybe to set up an etherpad. However, technicians are needed for any new list (as they cannot configure e.g. GNU Mailman), configuration change, etc., creating a strong dependency and ultimately a bottleneck.

Kune aims to cover all those needs of groups to communicate and collaborate, in a usable way and thus without depending on technical experts. It aims to be a free/libre web service (and thus in the cloud), but decentralized as email, so a user can choose the server they want and still interoperate transparently with the rest.^{[citation needed]}

Opposite to most distributed social networks, this software focuses on collaboration and building, not only on communication and sharing. Thus, Kune does not aim to ultimately replace Facebook, but also all the above-mentioned commercial services. Kune has a strong focus on the construction of Free Culture and eventually facilitate Commons-based peer production.

The origin of Kune relies on the community behind Ourproject.org. Ourproject aimed to provide for Free Culture (social/cultural projects) what SourceForge and other software forges meant for free software: a collection of communication and collaboration tools that would boost the emergence of community-driven free projects. However, although Ourproject was relatively successful, it was far from the original aims. The analysis of the situation in 2005 concluded that only the groups that had a techie among them (who would manage Mailman or install a CMS) were able to move forward, while the rest would abandon the service. Thus, new free collaborative tools were needed, more usable and suitable for anyone, as the available free tools required a high degree of technical expertise. This is why Kune, whose name means "together" in Esperanto, was developed.