← polis.pub

Terms of Service

Last updated: October 2026

What this service is

polis.pub provides free hosted blogging as part of the polis decentralized social network. When you sign up, you get a site at handle.polis.pub where you can publish posts, follow other authors, and participate in conversations across the network.

Your content

You own everything you publish. We don't claim any rights to your content. By publishing, you're making that content public on the open web. You can export your site at any time — it's just files.

Our servers turn away AI training crawlers from your site unless the terms you have stated allow training. Each post follows the terms it was published with, and everything else follows your current terms. If you have stated no terms, those crawlers are turned away. This is something we do as the host; it is not a statement of your terms, and it only works on crawlers that identify themselves. You can state or change your terms in Settings.

We do hold the private key that signs your content, and our software uses it. See Your signing key for what it's used for, what holding it means, and how to hold your own.

Comments and blessings

When you comment on another author's post, your comment is published on your own site and stays yours. If that author blesses your comment, they are choosing to publish a copy of it onto their site — it appears in their post's conversation, attributed to you, with a link back to your original.

You can withdraw a blessed comment at any time by unpublishing it. Unpublishing sends a signed withdrawal across the network, and sites that displayed your comment will stop showing it and remove their cached copy when they receive it. This is an honest best‑effort process, not an absolute guarantee: a site that is offline, has stopped syncing, or has already been archived or screenshotted may retain a copy. Treat anything you publish — including a comment offered for blessing — as potentially permanent once it is public.

Acceptable use

Don't use polis.pub to:

• Send spam or bulk unsolicited content
• Publish illegal content
• Impersonate other people or organizations
• Interfere with the service or other users' sites

Handle policy

Your handle is your handle.polis.pub subdomain. Handles must not be offensive, hateful, or infringing on legally protected trademarks. We reserve the right to reclaim handles that:

• Contain slurs, hate speech, or discriminatory language
• Impersonate or infringe on registered trademarks
• Were registered in bad faith to squat on a name
• Are hoarded, resold, or bulk-registered to extract value
• Are used to abuse the platform for personal or commercial benefit outside normal use

If your handle is reclaimed, you will be notified and given the opportunity to download a complete archive of your content. You keep your posts and comments, and the archive includes your signing key. Your identity on the network is tied to the address, though: other sites and verifiers know you as <handle>.polis.pub, so a reclaimed handle is a different identity from theirs.

Account termination

We may remove accounts that violate these terms. If your account is removed, you can still download your content archive.

Inactive accounts

Unverified accounts (those that haven't confirmed their email) are archived after 14 days. You'll receive a reminder at day 7. Verified accounts are not subject to this window. We may introduce separate policies for long-inactive accounts in the future — if we do, we'll give you notice and a chance to keep your handle. See how inactive handle reaping works for full details.

Direct messages

What we can promise: we never store your message password. Once you set one, the key that unlocks your messages is made from that password in your browser and never sent to us — so we cannot read your message content, at rest or in transit.

What we cannot promise:

• We cannot recover your messages if you forget your password and lose your recovery phrase — they are permanently lost, including to us. The recovery phrase is the only spare key; store it somewhere safe.
• We cannot protect messages you received before you set a password. Until then, messaging works with zero setup using a key we hold, so those messages are readable by us. Setting a password — or setting one proactively, before any message arrives — closes that window.
• We cannot hide message metadata: who you message, when, and how often is visible to the operators of your space and your correspondent's. "We can't read your messages" is about content.
• We cannot defend against a compromised device or a future-tampered web client. End-to-end encryption delivered through a browser ultimately trusts the code your browser runs; the strongest check is to export your messages and read them locally with your own tools.

For the full, precise treatment, see our direct-message encryption documentation. Keep local copies of anything important — your export includes your messages as ciphertext, decryptable offline with your password.

No warranty

This service is provided as-is. We do our best to keep it running and your data safe, but we make no guarantees. Keep local copies of anything important to you.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Continued use of the service after changes constitutes acceptance. We won't make changes that retroactively affect your ownership of your content.