Sample / template terms for fediverse instances

The goal of this repository is to prepare some sample / template terms for fediverse instances for their registered users, which fedi admins can consider adjusting and adopting for their own instances.

These are - at the moment, anyway - probably more suited to instances of Mastodon, snac, GoToSocial, and the like, rather than PeerTube (for instance), where the issues may well be different.

These are provided "as-is", and they are not legal advice

These sample/template terms are provided "as-is", and without any promises that they are suitable for your, your instance's, or indeed anyone's needs.

They are not legal advice.

We - that is, everyone involved in producing these terms - do not limit or exclude our liability in any way prohibited by law but, other than that, to the greatest extent permitted by law, we will not be liable to you for any claim, damages or other liability, whether contractual or non-contractual, arising from, out of, or in connection with, these terms.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

These terms are made available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

This means that you are welcome to use them for your own services on a non-commercial basis, and if you make changes, you must share that revised version under these same licence terms.

Adopt them, rip them apart, build on them etc. as you will.

The terms will require adjusting / customising

These terms are not - and probably never will be - suitable for use as they are: anyone wishing to adopt them will need to go through and deal with the square bracketed bits at a minimum, local legal requirements, things like dispute resolution - whether you want to push for arbitration, mediation, or just recourse to courts - and so on.

In particular, some jurisdictions require specific language to be included in terms. For instance, the United Kingdom requires specific language because of the Online Safety Act 2023.

The terms are geared towards registered users

These are terms for registered users of an instance.

If you want to prohibit scraping etc. by people other than registered users, then these are not the terms for you. You might want some separate terms to cover this, but I would suggest keeping these separate from the terms you use with registered users.

The main reason is that, IMHO, trying to impose terms of people who merely interact with your instance (but who are not users of your instance) needs to be done very carefully, because of the way ActivityPub works, and the broad scope for writing terms which are (inadvertently) inconsistent with the fediverse.

By the same token, I can understand why an instance admin might want to prohibit certain bots, scraping, abusive/expensive behaviour, and so on. Perhaps I should think about a separate, limited, set of terms to deal with this.

Data processing terms

I have included some sample/template data processing terms.

I have prepared these from the perspective of the UK GDPR; they could be amended quite easily to cover the EU GDPR.

Country-specific terms

I have included terms to attempt to cover the requirements of the UK's Online Safety Act 2023, for services which are subject to that Act. These are lengthy and cumbersome, reflecting what the Act requires. There is an additional optional section if the service is likely to be used by children.

Feedback is welcome!

I am using this to start a discussion, rather than to say "definitively, this is what you must do".

But since I'm running this on my own git repository, I've not really thought through how or where that discussion might happen.