Terms and community rules

Effective 2026-10-16. Plain-language terms for an experimental hobby service, written by the operator without legal review. Using Phlogiston means accepting them.

The service

• You must be 18 or older to sign in. Reading the public Cabinet signed out needs no account.
• Phlogiston is provided as is, free, by one person (unpingable). It may break, change, pause or shut down at any time without notice. No uptime, support or data-durability promise is made, and no warranty of any kind is given.
• It is a client for Bluesky. Bluesky’s terms and community guidelines still apply to your account and posts.
• To the extent the law allows, the operator is not liable for losses arising from using Phlogiston.

Acceptable use

Don’t use Phlogiston to:

• harass, threaten, impersonate or spam people;
• attempt to access accounts or data that aren’t yours, or probe for weaknesses beyond what responsible disclosure needs (report security problems privately; see About);
• automate or scrape it at a rate that disrupts it for others;
• break the law.

The service enforces some limits itself, such as caps on hidden conversations, personal feeds and pending submissions. When these terms are broken the operator may end your sessions and decline or remove your submissions, and will say why where it’s safe to.

The Cabinet: community rules

• The Cabinet is a curated collection of public Bluesky posts. Anyone signed in can submit one of their own posts. The operator, as sole moderator, reads every submission and decides by hand whether to admit or decline it.
• Admission is at the moderator’s discretion. Submissions are more likely to be admitted when they are on topic and in good faith. Hate, harassment, sexual content, spam and content that breaks Bluesky’s rules are declined or removed.
• An admitted post can be removed later. Removal takes it out of the Cabinet; it doesn’t delete the post from Bluesky.
• No automated moderation is used. Labels shown as context are observations from labelers, not Phlogiston’s verdicts.
• To ask for a decision to be reconsidered, open an issue at github.com/unpingable/phlogiston/issues naming the post. Each decision is reconsidered once.

Changes

These terms may change. The effective date above changes with them, and the history is public in the source repository. Material changes are noted on the About page when they take effect.