The rules of the nest.

TERMS OF SERVICE

The terms governing your use of the hosted Colibri service, including acceptable use, liability, and governing law.

Effective date: 11 July 2026

Last updated: 11 July 2026

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) govern your use of the hosted Colibri service at colibri.social, including the web app, desktop applications, the AppView, and the Colibri-operated Personal Data Server (together, the “Service”). By using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

The Service is operated by Louis Escher (the “Operator”, “we”, “us”). Contact and full legal identification are provided in Section 18 and in the site imprint (Impressum).

1. What Colibri is

Colibri is a free, open, real-time chat and community application built on the AT Protocol (the “Atmosphere”). Unlike a traditional platform, Colibri does not hold your data in a private silo:

  • Your identity, messages, profile, and media live in a Personal Data Server (PDS), either the Colibri-operated PDS (if you create a colibri.social account) or a third-party PDS (such as Bluesky or one you run yourself).
  • The AppView indexes public network data to provide a fast, real-time experience.
  • Communities are their own repositories on the network.

A key consequence you accept by using the Service: content you create on Colibri is public. It is stored as public records on the AT Protocol network, can be read and indexed by anyone (including other AppViews), and is not a private message. Colibri does not currently offer end-to-end-encrypted private messaging.

2. Eligibility

The Service is available only to individuals who are at least 18 years old and who have the legal capacity to enter into these Terms. By using the Service you represent that you meet these requirements.

3. Your identity and account

You access Colibri using an AT Protocol identity. You are responsible for maintaining the security of your identity, your credentials, and your PDS, and for all activity that occurs under your identity. If you use an external PDS (e.g. Bluesky), your use of that PDS is also governed by that provider’s terms. If you use a colibri.social account, you must also comply with any terms applicable to that PDS.

4. The Service is provided free of charge

Colibri is provided free of charge, as a non-commercial passion project. There are no fees, subscriptions, in-app purchases, or advertising operated by us. We may change, suspend, limit, or discontinue any part of the Service at any time, and we do not guarantee that the Service will be available, uninterrupted, error-free, or that any particular feature will be maintained. The Service may include experimental or beta functionality.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to use the Service to:

  • post, transmit, or index content that is illegal under applicable law, including child sexual abuse material (which we prohibit absolutely and will report where legally required), credible threats, incitement to violence, or content that infringes others’ intellectual property or privacy rights
  • harass, abuse, defame, stalk, impersonate, or endanger others
  • distribute spam, malware, or fraudulent, phishing, or deceptive content
  • infringe or misappropriate any third party’s intellectual property, trade secrets, or other rights
  • attempt to gain unauthorized access to, disrupt, overload, or damage the Service or its infrastructure (including the AppView, PDS, relay, or voice servers), or circumvent rate limits, security, or moderation measures
  • scrape, harvest, or place automated load on the Service beyond normal use, or use it to build competing datasets in a manner that harms the Service or its users
  • violate the rules of a community you participate in, or evade a moderation action, ban, or suspension.

You are solely responsible for the content you create and the activity conducted under your identity, and you represent that you have all rights necessary to post it.

6. Your content and the licence you grant

You retain all ownership of the content you create, it lives in your PDS and travels with you. Because operating a network service technically requires copying and transmitting your content, you grant the Operator a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, index, cache, reproduce, transmit, and display your public content solely for the purpose of operating and providing the Service (including the AppView index, blob caching, link previews, and real-time delivery). This licence exists only to run the Service, reflects the inherently public nature of your records on the network, and ends with respect to our systems when the content is deleted and the deletion propagates to us, subject to the network realities described in Section 9.

7. Communities

Communities are created and administered by their operators and moderators, who set and enforce their own rules. If you create or moderate a community, you are responsible for its conduct and content and for complying with these Terms and applicable law. The Operator may host a community’s designated AppView, voice server, and presence relay, and may hold credentials necessary to administer a community account, but the Operator does not endorse and is not responsible for the content or conduct within any community.

8. Moderation and enforcement

We may, at our discretion and to the extent technically possible, remove or refuse to index content, and limit, suspend, or terminate access to our hosted Service (including our AppView and, for colibri.social accounts, our PDS), where we believe these Terms or the law have been violated, or to protect the Service or its users. Because of the decentralized architecture (Section 1), such action affects only the systems we operate: we cannot remove content from PDSes or AppViews we do not operate, nor from copies distributed across the network.

9. Deletion and the decentralized network

When you delete content or an account, we remove it from systems we operate upon receiving the corresponding network event, and, for colibri.social accounts, we delete the repository we hold as your PDS operator. We cannot guarantee deletion from third-party PDSes, third-party AppViews, other clients, or copies others have made. Content that was public may persist elsewhere on the network outside our control.

10. Third-party services and instances

The Service interoperates with, and may rely on, third parties and independently operated infrastructure, including but not limited to: the AT Protocol network and relays, third-party PDSes (such as Bluesky), self-hosted or third-party AppViews, push notification services (Google, Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft), the Klipy GIF service, and error-monitoring and analytics providers. These are operated by others under their own terms, and the Operator is not responsible for them. If you run or use a self-hosted Colibri instance, or a community whose AppView is operated by a third party, these Terms govern your relationship with our hosted Service only.

11. Intellectual property

The Colibri source code is made available under the licence stated in its public repositories (an MIT-style permissive licence). These Terms do not grant you any rights in the Operator’s name, logo, brand, or other trademarks, which remain reserved. Third-party components remain subject to their respective licences.

12. Disclaimer of warranties

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, availability, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, that content will be preserved or delivered, or that defects will be corrected. This does not exclude warranties or liability that cannot be excluded under mandatory law.

13. Limitation of liability

Because the Service is provided free of charge, the Operator’s liability is limited as follows, to the extent permitted by applicable law:

  • The Operator is liable without limitation for damages arising from intent (Vorsatz) and gross negligence (grobe Fahrlässigkeit), for damages resulting from injury to life, body, or health, and where liability is mandatory under applicable law (including the German Product Liability Act).
  • For simple negligence (einfache Fahrlässigkeit), the Operator is liable only for breach of a material contractual obligation (a “cardinal obligation”, an obligation whose fulfilment is essential to the proper performance of the Service and on which you may reasonably rely), and in that case liability is limited to the foreseeable damage typical for this kind of free service.
  • Any further liability of the Operator is excluded. In particular, the Operator is not liable for loss of data or content that resides on the network or on PDSes or AppViews it does not operate, for content posted by users or communities, or for the acts or omissions of third-party services or instances.

The above limitations also apply in favour of the Operator’s legal representatives and agents.

14. Your responsibility and indemnity

You are responsible for your own content and conduct. To the extent permitted by law, and except where the claim results from the Operator’s own breach, you agree to hold the Operator harmless from third-party claims arising out of your unlawful use of the Service or your violation of these Terms or of third-party rights. Mandatory consumer-protection rights are unaffected.

15. Term and termination

You may stop using the Service at any time. You can disconnect your identity, delete your content, and, for colibri.social accounts, delete your account. Your data on a third-party PDS remains yours and with that provider. We may suspend or terminate your access to our hosted Service as described in Section 8. Provisions that by their nature should survive termination (including Sections 6, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 18) will survive.

16. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms to reflect changes to the Service or the law. The current version is always available at colibri.social/tos, with the “Last updated” date shown above. Material changes will be communicated in an appropriate way. Your continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance, if you do not agree, you must stop using the Service.

17. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of your country of habitual residence, and mandatory statutory places of jurisdiction remain unaffected.

The European Commission provides an online dispute resolution (ODR) platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. The Operator is not obliged and not willing to participate in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board (§36 VSBG).

18. Severability and contact

If any provision of these Terms is or becomes invalid, the remaining provisions remain in effect.

Questions about these Terms: pds@colibri.social. The Operator’s full legal identification is set out in the site imprint (Impressum).