Hi! Yes, I think checking off "private" would cause the problem. The way Synthona currently works is that it runs a closed server on localhost, on the local network. It does not connect to any online services or anything, the server only accepts network connections from within the same device, but it will require private network access at least to access itself.

The reason it works like this is historical in nature:

Synthona was originally written as 2 independent components, a server and a user interface. The idea was that maybe someday it would be interesting to access other servers. I had an idea that it might someday allow for P2P connections of some sort, though currently that sort of functionality is disabled. There is actually a whitelist in the code which determines which IP addresses can access synthona and by default, it only allows for connections from on the PC running synthona. Basically, it's currently a closed loop because I haven't had a chance to really dig into writing more interesting network features yet

TL;DR: I think if you allow for private network access that will fix it. the only public call that happens is to check github for a new version of synthona. so if you disallow public access, I did see a minor error on startup but I think you can ignore it. I was able to run the app with my wifi disabled after ignoring it