Terms of service

1. Who this agreement is with

This platform is self-hosted software. The agreement is between you and the operator — the organisation or person who installed and runs the deployment you are using right now — not with the authors of the software.

Three things depend on that operator and cannot be stated in software: their legal identity, the law and courts that govern this agreement, and the address for notices. The operator publishes those on the contact page. If they have not, treat this document as a draft the operator has not yet completed, and ask them before relying on it.

2. Your account

Registration is open to anyone. You need a working email address, because it is how account recovery and security notices reach you.

• An account belongs to one person. Sharing credentials is what turns one compromised password into a compromised publication.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account. Every active session is listed in your account settings and you can end any of them, or all of them, at any time.
• You must be old enough to enter into a contract where you live, and at least the age of digital consent in your jurisdiction.
• Do not register accounts automatically or in bulk. Rate limits and quotas apply, and circumventing them is a breach of these terms rather than a clever trick.

3. Your content stays yours

You keep every right you had in what you write, upload and publish. Nothing here transfers ownership.

To publish something, the operator needs your permission to do the specific technical things publishing consists of: store it, keep revisions of it, generate resized copies of images, render it as HTML, cache it, serve it to readers on the addresses you have configured, and include it in your publication’s feeds and sitemap. That permission lasts as long as the content is on the platform, and it exists only so the platform can do what you asked it to do.

You confirm that you have the rights to what you publish, including images and quoted material.

4. What you may not publish

Do not use this platform to publish or distribute:

• content that is unlawful where the operator or their infrastructure is located;
• malware, or pages designed to phish credentials or payment details;
• material that impersonates another person, organisation or product in a way intended to deceive;
• content that harasses or targets a specific person, or that incites violence against anyone;
• sexual content involving minors, of any kind, in any form — this results in immediate termination and is reported to the relevant authorities;
• material that infringes someone else’s copyright, trademark or other rights;
• bulk unsolicited content, link farms, or pages published to manipulate search.

Do not attack the platform either: no probing for vulnerabilities without the operator’s written agreement, no attempts to reach another tenant’s data, no scraping designed to exhaust capacity, and no using the platform’s outbound requests to reach systems you would otherwise not be able to reach.

Found something that breaks these rules? The reporting page explains what happens next.

5. Moderation, and what the operator can do

Reports are reviewed by the operator. Depending on what they find, they can hide an individual post, restrict a publication so it stops serving to readers, or suspend or ban an account. Every one of those actions is written to an append-only audit log with who did it and why.

The operator will act without waiting for a report where content is plainly illegal or actively harmful — malware and phishing being the obvious cases.

A reader who lands on restricted content is told only that it is unavailable. Reports do not name the reporter, and moderation detail is not shown to the public, because both are straightforward harassment vectors.

If you think a decision is wrong, contact the operator. There is no automated appeal queue; a person reads it.

6. Quotas and fair use

Storage, upload sizes, publication counts and request rates are all limited, and the operator sets the numbers for their deployment. Limits exist so that one account cannot take the platform down for everyone; they are not a pricing mechanism.

If you hit a limit you are told which one, and the operator can raise it. Deliberately working around a limit — many accounts, distributed requests, or automated retries against a rate limit — is treated as abuse.

7. Custom domains

You can serve a publication on a domain you control. You must actually control it: the platform verifies ownership through a DNS record before it routes anything, and a TLS certificate is only ever requested for a hostname that has passed that check.

Keep the DNS records in place. Verification is re-run periodically; a single failure is treated as a blip, but sustained failure withdraws both routing and the certificate, which is what stops a domain that has moved on to a new owner from continuing to serve your pages.

8. Availability and warranties

The software is provided as it is. Unless the operator has separately promised you an availability target in writing, there is none: this is a service someone is running, not one you have bought a guarantee from.

Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Revision history and backups are real, and they are still not a substitute for you having the original.

9. Ending the agreement

You can stop using the platform whenever you like, and you can request deletion of your account from your account settings. What deletion does today — and what it does not yet do automatically — is described exactly in the privacy notice, because being vague about that would be the worst place to be vague.

The operator can suspend or terminate an account that breaches these terms. For anything other than the plainly illegal, expect a warning first.

If the operator shuts the deployment down, they should give you notice and time to retrieve your content. Ask them what their plan is before you depend on it.

10. Changes to these terms

These terms can change. The date at the top of this page is the date of the last change. For a change that materially affects you, the operator should tell you before it takes effect rather than after.

Continuing to use the platform after a change means you accept the new version.