Terms of Service

1. What is being offered

ComputingCache is a personal, non-commercial project. The services are provided free of charge, at the operator's discretion, on hardware the operator owns and pays for. There is no subscription, no contract, and no service level agreement.

A service may be changed, moved, restricted or discontinued at any time. Where a shutdown is planned rather than forced, reasonable notice will be given and there will be an opportunity to export your data.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account. If the law where you live sets a higher minimum age for consenting to online services (16 in parts of the EU, for example), that higher age applies to you.

3. Your account

You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for everything done through your account. Use a strong, unique password, and enable two-factor authentication where the service supports it. Tell us promptly at admin@computingcache.com if you think your account has been compromised.

Do not share an account with other people, and do not impersonate anyone else in your username or profile.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to use these services to:

• Post, store or transmit anything illegal under the laws of the United States, including child sexual abuse material, which results in immediate termination and a report to the authorities.
• Engage in targeted harassment, stalking, or incitement of violence against any person or group.
• Post content that infringes someone else's copyright, trademark or other rights.
• Publish another person's private information without their consent, including home addresses, phone numbers and identity documents.
• Distribute malware, run phishing, or use the services to attack other systems.
• Send unsolicited bulk messages, or operate spam accounts and relay-flooding scripts.
• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of the infrastructure, or to another user's account.
• Place a deliberately unreasonable load on shared resources, whether through automation, mass scraping, or use as general-purpose file storage or a CDN.
• Evade a suspension or ban.

The Mastodon instance additionally publishes its own server rules, which apply to accounts there alongside this policy. Where they overlap, the stricter reading applies.

5. Your content

You keep ownership of everything you create, upload or post. Nothing here transfers copyright.

To operate the services, you grant a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, transmit and display your content, and to distribute it to other servers where the protocol requires it. That licence exists purely so the software can do its job. It ends when you delete the content, subject to the backup and federation realities described below. Your content is never used for advertising, never sold, and never used to train anything.

6. Federation

Matrix, Mastodon and Nostr are federated protocols. When you post on them, copies are transmitted to other servers run by other people under their own rules.

You acknowledge that: deleting content here sends a deletion request outward but cannot force any remote server to comply; content that has left this server should be treated as permanently public; and we have no control over, and accept no responsibility for, how a remote server handles it. Content that arrives here from remote servers is theirs, not ours, and is moderated on a best-effort basis. See the reporting and takedown page for what can actually be done about it.

7. Moderation, suspension and termination

Content that breaks these terms may be removed, and accounts may be limited, suspended or terminated, at our discretion. Where circumstances allow, you will be told what happened and why, and you can dispute it by replying to that notice.

Serious cases, in particular illegal content, are actioned immediately and without warning. Accounts subject to repeated valid copyright infringement notices are terminated as described in the takedown policy.

You may close your account at any time. Email admin@computingcache.com and it will be deleted along with its content, within the limits set out in the privacy policy.

8. Availability and backups

These services run on a small amount of self-managed hardware, on a residential-grade internet connection, maintained by one person in their spare time. Outages happen. Hardware fails. Maintenance windows are not always announced.

Backups are taken, but you are responsible for your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Do not treat any of this as your only copy of important data.

9. No warranty

The services are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. No promise is made that the services will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that any data will be preserved.

10. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, ComputingCache and its operator are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, profits, revenue or goodwill, arising from your use of or inability to use the services.

Because these services are provided free of charge, total aggregate liability for any claim relating to them is limited to one hundred United States dollars (US$100).

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. Where that is the case, these limits apply only to the extent the law permits, and nothing here limits liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

11. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless ComputingCache and its operator from any claim or demand, including reasonable legal fees, brought by a third party and arising out of content you posted or your breach of these terms. This does not apply where the claim results from our own negligence or wilful misconduct.

12. Changes to these terms

These terms may be updated. Changes take effect when posted on this page, and the “last updated” date reflects the most recent revision. A material change will be announced from @CCAdministrator on the Mastodon instance. Continuing to use the services after a change means you accept the revised terms.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California and the United States, without regard to conflict of law rules. Any dispute that cannot be resolved by talking it through will be brought in the state or federal courts located in California, and you consent to their jurisdiction. Nothing here deprives you of the protection of mandatory consumer law in your own country of residence.

14. General

If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest remain in effect. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. These terms, together with the privacy policy and the reporting and takedown policy, are the entire agreement between us regarding the services.

15. Contact

Questions about these terms: admin@computingcache.com.