Terms of Service
These Terms of Service are the agreement between you and BOT-HOLDINGS, LLC, doing business as codedatda.casa ("we", "us", "our") for your use of The Social Web at https://thesocialweb.site, its apps and its related services (together, "the service"). They are written to be read, not skimmed past. Where we had to use legal language, we kept it as short as we could. Please read them, along with the Privacy Policy and the Community Guidelines, which are part of these terms.
1. What this is
The Social Web is a small, invite-only social network with no advertising, no tracking, no analytics and no ranking algorithm. It is run by a very small independent team with limited funding, on hardware we operate ourselves in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is an experiment. We work hard to keep it secure, online and pleasant, but we are not a large company, and these terms are candid about what that means for you: the service comes without guarantees, and you are responsible for what you post and for keeping your own copies of anything that matters to you.
2. Accepting these terms
You accept these terms when you create an account (by checking the box on the sign-up form) or when you otherwise use the service. If you do not agree, do not create an account or use the service. If you use the service on behalf of an organization, you confirm that you have authority to accept these terms for it, and "you" includes that organization.
You agree that we may communicate with you electronically, by email to the address on your account and by notices inside the service, and that those communications satisfy any requirement that they be in writing.
3. Who can join
- Adults only. You must be at least 18 years old. You confirm this when you sign up. If we learn that an account belongs to someone younger, we close it and delete its data.
- One person, one account. Each account belongs to one real human being. You may not share an account, sell or transfer one, or run more than one account without our written permission.
- No bots. Accounts operated by software, scripts or automation, and accounts created in bulk, are not allowed. Automated access through the API is allowed only through an account you personally own and only for your own use.
- No return after a ban. If we have banned you, you may not create another account or use someone else's.
- Legal eligibility. You may not use the service if the law where you live forbids it, or if you are barred from receiving services under the laws of the United States.
4. Invitations and invite trees
Membership is by invitation. Members receive a limited number of invite codes (10 when they join, then 5 per calendar month that do not roll over). Unused codes expire after 90 days.
- Invite people you know. Codes are for friends, family and people you trust to be real and decent. Do not post codes publicly, trade them, sell them, or hand them to anyone you do not actually know.
- We keep track of who invited whom. Every account records which member's code it was created with. This lets us see the "tree" of accounts that grew from any single code and act on the whole tree at once. The Privacy Policy explains what we keep and why.
- Bot networks are removed as a group. If accounts that descend from one invite show signs of automation, coordinated abuse or ban evasion (for example, many accounts created from one network address or a burst of sign-ups in a short time), we may lock, suspend or pause the invites of every account in that tree in a single action, while we review it. Real people caught up in a group action can contact us and we will look at their account individually (see section 8).
- Your codes reflect on you. If accounts you invited turn out to be bots, spam or ban evasion, we may pause your ability to invite and review your account. Knowingly giving codes to a bot operator, spammer or banned person is itself a violation of these terms.
- Invite accounts are free forever. Accounts created with an invite code will not be charged for the features they have today (see section 11).
5. Your account and its security
- Give us a real email address that you control and keep it current. We use it to confirm your account, recover it, and send you security and legal notices.
- You are responsible for your username, password, two-factor codes and recovery codes, and for everything that happens under your account. Use a strong password that you do not use anywhere else.
- We strongly recommend turning on two-factor authentication in Settings → Security and storing your recovery codes somewhere safe. If you lose your password, your email and your two-factor device, we may not be able to give your account back to you.
- Tell us right away at [email protected] or through Support if you think someone else has accessed your account. We will never ask you for your password.
- Your username must not impersonate anyone or infringe anyone's rights. We may reclaim or change usernames that do.
6. Your content
You own it
Everything you post, upload or send ("your content") stays yours. We do not claim ownership of it.
The license you give us
To run the service, we need permission to store your content, process it (for example, resizing photos and transcoding videos), and show it to the people you chose to share it with. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, process, transmit and display your content solely to operate, secure and improve the service for you and the members you share with. We will not sell your content, license it to anyone else, or use it in advertising. This license ends for each piece of content when it is deleted from our systems, except for copies we are legally required to keep (such as material under a legal hold) and for content other members have already reposted or quoted, which disappears when you delete the original but may remain in their own private copies.
You are responsible for it
You are solely responsible for your content and for the consequences of posting it. You confirm that you have the rights to everything you post, that it does not violate anyone's rights or the law, and that it follows the Community Guidelines. We do not review content before it is posted and we do not endorse anything members say.
Profile songs and links
You can feature a song on your profile, but only as a link: a direct link to an audio file, or a track page on a music platform. We never upload, host, copy or fetch the audio. A visitor's browser loads it straight from the address you gave, and only when they press play. When you add a profile song, you confirm that you have the right to share it here: it is yours, it is licensed to you, or it is a track page on the artist's platform. Linking to material that infringes someone else's rights breaks these terms. When we receive a valid notice about a profile song or any other link you posted, we remove it under our Copyright and DMCA Policy, and repeated infringement earns strikes and, in appropriate circumstances, the end of your account (see section 10).
Keep your own copies
The service is not a backup or archive. Content can be lost through bugs, hardware failure, moderation, account closure, or the service shutting down. You can download a copy of your data at any time from Settings → Account, and you should keep your own copies of anything you care about.
Private messages
Direct and group messages are private to their participants, but they are not end-to-end encrypted. They are stored on our servers in a form we can read, and we may review them when they are reported to us, when we investigate abuse such as a bot network, or when the law requires it. Do not use messages for anything that must stay secret from the operator of the service.
Groups, pages and the Ideas board
Members may create groups and pages. The member who creates one, and anyone they give an admin or moderator role, is responsible for what is posted there, for enforcing these terms and the Community Guidelines inside it, and for the people they admit. We may remove any group, page, post or member from a group at any time. Pages must not impersonate a person, band, project or business you do not represent. Ideas you post on the Ideas & bugs board are suggestions: you give us permission to use them without payment or credit, and you accept that we may decline them.
7. What you may not do
The Community Guidelines describe in plain words what is not allowed. In addition, you may not:
- break the law, or use the service to help anyone else break it;
- post anything that sexualizes minors in any way (we report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, as federal law requires);
- harass, threaten, stalk, dox or impersonate anyone;
- post content you do not have the rights to;
- send spam, run scams, or create fake engagement;
- create accounts automatically or in bulk, operate bots, or sell, trade or publicly post invite codes;
- scrape, crawl or bulk-download the service or other members' content, except your own data through the export tool;
- probe, scan or test the security of the service, except under our responsible disclosure policy;
- interfere with the service, overload it, bypass rate limits, bot checks or access controls, or access accounts or data that are not yours;
- upload malware or anything designed to harm devices or data;
- reverse engineer the service except where the law allows it despite this restriction;
- evade a suspension or ban, or help someone else evade one.
8. Moderation and enforcement
We may remove or hide content, limit features, pause invites, issue warnings and strikes, suspend accounts for a period of time, lock accounts, or permanently ban accounts when we believe, in our reasonable judgment, that someone has broken these terms or the Community Guidelines, or that action is needed to protect members, the service or the public. Accounts that collect 3 strikes are suspended automatically for 7 days. Serious violations, such as threats of violence, child sexual exploitation or operating a bot network, can lead to an immediate ban without warning.
Members can report content and accounts. When we act on your account, we tell you what happened and why, unless the law or the safety of others prevents it. You may appeal each action once from Settings → Standing. If your account was locked and you cannot sign in, email [email protected] from the address on the account. An appeal is reviewed by an administrator. We keep a record of every moderation action.
We are not obligated to monitor the service or to act on any particular report, and choosing not to act on something is not approval of it.
9. Privacy
Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect, why, how long we keep it and what you can do about it. The short version: we keep only what the service needs to work, we never sell or share your data for advertising, and there are no trackers. Our Cookie Notice lists every cookie we use.
10. Copyright
We respond to notices of claimed copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and terminate repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances. Our Copyright and DMCA Policy explains how to send a notice or a counter-notice.
11. Fees and donations
The service is free today. Accounts created with an invite code will stay free for the features they have now, forever. In the future we may offer paid sign-up for people without an invite, or an optional low-cost subscription for extra features. If we do, the price and terms will be shown clearly before you pay anything, and nothing will be charged without your explicit action.
Donations are voluntary gifts to support the project. They are processed by PayPal, they do not buy any feature, status or service level, they are not refundable except where the law requires it, and they are not tax-deductible charitable contributions.
12. Availability, changes and shutdown
We do not guarantee that the service will be available at any particular time, that it will be free of errors, or that any content or data will be preserved. We may add, change or remove features, set or change limits (such as upload sizes and invite quotas), and take the service down for maintenance at any time.
We may suspend or permanently shut down the service. If we decide to shut it down, we will give members notice where feasible, by site notice and by email, with at least 30 days to export their data, unless something outside our control (such as a legal order, a security emergency or a loss of hosting) makes that impossible.
13. Third-party services and links
The service relies on a few outside providers, listed in the Privacy Policy. Members also post links to other websites, and a member's profile song plays from whichever site hosts it, only when you press play. We do not control third-party sites or services and are not responsible for their content, policies or practices. Visiting them, or playing audio from them, is at your own risk and under their own terms.
14. Ending your use of the service
You can leave at any time. Delete your account from Settings → Account. Your account disappears from the service immediately and is permanently erased after a 30-day grace period; signing in during that period cancels the deletion. Download your data first if you want a copy.
We can end or suspend your access as described in section 8, or if we are required to by law, or if we shut the service down. If we permanently ban your account for reasons other than illegal activity or a risk to others, we will try to give you a reasonable chance to download your data.
Sections 6 (the parts about responsibility and copies), 7, and 15 through 20 continue to apply after your account ends.
15. Disclaimers
THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, security, and uninterrupted or error-free operation. We do not warrant that the service will meet your needs, that content will be preserved, that defects will be corrected, or that the service is free of harmful components. Content posted by members is their responsibility, not ours, and we make no promise about its accuracy, legality or quality. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so some of these exclusions may not apply to you.
16. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, BOT-HOLDINGS, LLC, doing business as codedatda.casa and its members, managers, owners, volunteers and contractors will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, content, profits, revenue, goodwill or opportunity, arising out of or related to the service or these terms, whether based on contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability or any other theory, even if we were told such damages were possible.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability for all claims arising out of or related to the service or these terms is limited to the greater of one hundred U.S. dollars (US$100) or the total amount you paid us for the service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim. Donations are not payments for the service.
These limits apply even if a remedy fails of its essential purpose. They do not limit liability that cannot be limited under applicable law, such as liability for fraud or for gross negligence or willful misconduct where the law forbids limiting it.
17. Indemnification
To the extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless BOT-HOLDINGS, LLC, doing business as codedatda.casa and its members, managers, owners, volunteers and contractors from any claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or related to your content, your use of the service, your violation of these terms, or your violation of anyone else's rights. We will tell you about any such claim and may choose to control its defense, in which case you agree to cooperate.
18. Governing law and where disputes go
These terms and any dispute arising out of or related to them or the service are governed by the laws of the State of Nevada, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and by applicable federal law. Any lawsuit must be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Clark County, Nevada, and you and we consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts. There is no arbitration requirement in these terms.
Before filing a claim, please contact us at [email protected] and give us 30 days to try to resolve it informally. Most problems are fixed faster that way.
19. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms as the service and the law change. The effective date at the top of this page always shows the current version. When we make a material change, we will announce it with a notice on the site and an email to the address on your account before it takes effect, normally at least 14 days ahead, unless a faster change is required by law or needed to address abuse or a security problem. If you keep using the service after a change takes effect, you accept the updated terms. If you do not agree, you can delete your account.
20. General terms
- Entire agreement. These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, the Community Guidelines and the other policies linked here, are the entire agreement between you and us about the service and replace any earlier agreements on the subject.
- Severability. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, that part is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary, and the rest stays in effect.
- No waiver. If we do not enforce a part of these terms, that does not mean we give up the right to enforce it later.
- Assignment. You may not transfer these terms or your account. We may transfer these terms in connection with a merger, reorganization or transfer of the service, and we will tell you if that happens.
- Events beyond our control. We are not responsible for failures caused by things outside our reasonable control, such as power or network outages, natural disasters, or actions of governments or providers.
- No third-party beneficiaries. These terms create no rights for anyone other than you and us.
- Headings and language. Headings are for convenience only. These terms are written in American English, and the English version controls.
21. Contact
BOT-HOLDINGS, LLC, doing business as codedatda.casa, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Email [email protected], or open a ticket at Support. We do not publish a postal address; contact us by email if you need a mailing address for formal notices. Answers to everyday questions live in the Help Center.