Terms and content guidelines

What Fauna is

Fauna is free, open-source software made by Fauna Social, provided under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licences and with no warranty. It runs on your devices. Some features, such as email or being reachable while your devices are off, need a nest: companion software on a small always-on server. The app helps you rent one from a hosting provider of your choice, or you can join a nest that someone you trust already runs.

Fauna Social hosts no servers or nests for users: we hold none of your content, no account of yours, and no key that could read what you store. We maintain three servers of our own, used to test releases of the nest software and to let app-store reviewers try the apps. Only one of them, fauna.build, has accounts that people sign in to: reviewers and our own testers. There we are the admin, and everything below about admins applies to us.

Who runs your nest

Whoever runs a nest is its admin; on your own nest, that is you. Joining someone else’s nest means accepting its admin, who decides who may join, which features are on, and who handles reports.

The software gives an admin no way to read content you did not share with their nest or publish to everyone, beyond the mail and the messages the nest passes to and from email and other networks. A community room’s members choose to let its home nest read it, to label and index it for them, and the app says so.

An admin has four levers:

• Suspending an account. The account cannot sign in, post or read until the admin restores it. Nothing is deleted.
• Removing an account from the nest. The member is warned for two weeks and keeps full access, so they can export everything; then access ends, and two weeks later the account and its data on that nest are deleted. Their data on their own devices is untouched; they can take their key to another nest, and their data comes back from their backup.
• Removing content under a legal obligation. When the law obliges the admin to remove something (on fauna.build, an app store’s or an authority’s request to remove it counts), they withhold it from everyone on the nest, naming the obligation, and published copies are recalled where the network allows. The software cannot check that claim; it guarantees only that the removal is never silent.
• Blocking a reported item. The admin can block a post or message that someone reported, on their nest only, naming the report’s reason; the report is the block’s citation. The item is withheld from everyone except its author, who keeps their own copy and their own view of a blocked post. A block does not recall copies that already reached other places.

For both a removal and a block, a notice naming the reason stands in the content’s place, the author of a post can appeal, the act is recorded permanently, nothing is deleted, and it can be lifted. No admin removes or blocks a single post or message by hand for any other reason, and no lever is silent. Mail is the one exception: incoming mail is checked for spam and malware on the nest before it is filed, under thresholds the admin sets.

Inside a group, its owner and admins can delete a member’s message for everyone in it, and the deletion shows in its place.

A nest’s rules are filters, not decisions about individual items: a rule is published with the nest, the app applies it to what reaches you through that nest, and anything it blocks is shown in place with the rule named, as a guardian’s rules are. The admin never sees what a rule blocks, and a rule never singles out an item; blocking one item happens only through a report. A nest’s rules add to your own filters and never loosen them.

What you agree to

When you join a nest, or claim your own, you get an account there, and you agree to these content guidelines:

• No spam. Don’t flood people or nests with unwanted content.
• No harassment. Don’t threaten, bully, or persistently target anyone.
• No hate. Don’t attack people for who they are.
• No violence. Don’t threaten, incite, or celebrate violence against people.
• No unwanted sexual content. Don’t send sexual content to people who did not ask for it.
• Nothing illegal. Don’t post content that is illegal where you are or where your nest is. Sexual content involving minors is illegal everywhere and is never allowed, for any reason.
• No impersonation. Don’t pretend to be another person or organisation.
• Your nest’s rules. When you join a nest you accept the rules it publishes, which the app applies to what reaches you there.

The first seven are the reasons under which anyone can report content in the app, with one more: something else, for anything you think the admin should see.

Reporting

Every post, message and profile in the app has a Report action. A report goes to the admin of your own nest; if the author lives on another nest, a copy also goes to that nest’s admin, without your name. You can withdraw a report while it is open, and your notifications show the outcome: acted on, or dismissed. Reporting something also hides it for you, and you can block the author at the same time.

A report removes nothing by itself. A private message stays unreadable to the admin unless you choose to attach its text to your report, and the app tells you so before you do. The person you report is never told who reported them.

What we can and cannot do

Fauna Social makes the app; it does not run your nest. We cannot read, remove or restore content on a nest we do not run, and a report about it never reaches us. On fauna.build we are the admin, and a request from an app store or an authority is carried out through the lever that matches it (removal for everyone, or a block that leaves the author their own copy), with the request kept as the recorded reference.

Changes

When this page changes, the date below changes with it.

Last changed: 19 October 2026.

Questions

Something here that isn’t right, or a question about a nest you run? Tell us: hello@fauna.social.