Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") describes uses of Ascended Social that are not permitted on the website, web app, mobile app, desktop app, in-game experiences, and APIs (collectively, the "Service"). It is incorporated by reference into the Website Terms of Service, the Mobile EULA, and the Desktop EULA, and supplements the in-product Community Guidelines.

Ascended Social is intended for adults and users represent that they are at least 18 years old. The product currently relies on that representation rather than independent age verification. If we learn that an account belongs to a minor, we may restrict or remove it.

• Content that is illegal, fraudulent, defamatory, or violates the rights of others.
• Sexual or sexualised content involving minors of any kind. We have a zero-tolerance policy. Use the dedicated Child Safety & CSAE Standards reporting path, or report the post, profile or message in the app. We remove this content, permanently close the accounts involved, and comply with our legal reporting obligations.
• Non-consensual intimate imagery, doxxing, or content used to stalk, harass, or threaten any person.
• Content that promotes or facilitates self-harm, suicide, or eating disorders, framed as spiritual initiation or otherwise.
• Content that incites violence, terrorism, or organised hate against people based on protected characteristics.
• Content that infringes copyright, trademarks, publicity, or other intellectual-property rights of others.
• Spam, automated mass-posting, repetitive promotional content, or coordinated inauthentic behaviour.
• Commercial offers of "curse removal", "dark energy clearing", manufactured spiritual emergencies, or similar services made with urgency, fear, or financial pressure. (This does not apply to in-game spiritual-combat mechanics — such as curse removal or energy-clearing actions inside the As Above So Below (AASB) practice-battle system — which are fictional gameplay, not real-world services.)
• Specific medical, psychiatric, legal, or financial advice presented as fact without appropriate professional disclaimers.

• Probing, scanning, or testing the vulnerability of the Service except as expressly permitted by our Vulnerability Disclosure Policy.
• Interfering with or disrupting the Service, our infrastructure, or other users' access.
• Bypassing rate limits, age gates, geographic restrictions, or moderation tooling.
• Scraping, harvesting, or otherwise collecting personal information about other users without their consent.
• Using the Service to train machine-learning models on user content without explicit authorisation from us and the affected users.
• Operating multiple accounts to evade enforcement, manipulate metrics, or amplify your own content.
• Using the Service to facilitate illegal activity, including unauthorised access to private property suggested by Astronomaly.

You may not use Ascended Social's AI features, recommendation systems, or moderation systems to generate content that violates this AUP, to attempt prompt-injection or jailbreaking, to impersonate a real person, or to mass-produce content that crowds out human voices in the community.

Pendulums is a public discovery surface for eligible content. Do not use multiple accounts, scripts, coordinated reactions, keyword stuffing, duplicate uploads, or other inauthentic activity to manipulate trending or popular ranking, facets, flow tags, or visibility.

Creator-provided flow tags are optional labels, not moderation verdicts or guarantees of ranking. They must accurately describe the associated work and must not be used to evade safety, copyright, or visibility controls.

This AUP applies to automated agents, integrations, and bot accounts, including bots installed into Networks. Projects channels are covered by the same moderation and accountability framework wherever they are enabled, including card timesheets used to record contributed time. Do not falsify clock-in or clock-out records, impersonate another member on a timesheet, or use timers to harass or surveil people outside legitimate project coordination. Bot operators and network admins who install bots are responsible for bot behavior and outcomes.

• Permitted uses. Utility automation, moderation assistance, and community workflows that are transparent, scoped, and consistent with user consent.
• Prohibited uses. Spam, unsolicited outreach, impersonation, covert automation, scraping/harvesting member data, vote or reaction manipulation, and attempts to bypass platform safety controls.
• Operator accountability. We may suspend or revoke bot tokens, remove bot installations, and enforce against the responsible account(s) when automated behavior violates this AUP.

Additional bot-specific obligations are described in our API Terms of Use.

The Akashic Engine lets the community propose and vote on the positivity prompt that shapes AI-mode recommendations. The following additional rules apply:

• No vote manipulation. Operating multiple accounts, coordinating inauthentic voting, scripting votes, or offering compensation for votes is prohibited.
• Proposal content standards. Proposed prompts must comply with this AUP and the Community Guidelines. Prompts designed to degrade recommendation quality, inject hateful content, suppress particular voices, or exploit the system are prohibited.
• Good-faith participation. Governance tools are for genuine community input. Submitting frivolous, spam, or deliberately disruptive proposals may result in loss of governance privileges.
• Admin review is final. All proposals that reach quorum are subject to admin review. Approved prompts become the active positivity prompt; rejected proposals include a written rationale.

Scheduled Flows. When you schedule a Flow, you authorize us to publish it on your behalf, as you, at or around the time you choose. You remain the author of scheduled Flows and responsible for them as of the time they publish. Scheduled Flows go through the same review as any Flow when they publish, using your moderation setting at that time. They may be delayed, held for review, removed or not published, including if your plan's limits have changed, your account is restricted, or the Flow isn't allowed in the place you scheduled it from. We don't guarantee that a scheduled Flow will publish at an exact time. You can edit, cancel or delete a scheduled Flow until it starts publishing. Delete removes a scheduled Flow and its media right away. Cancelled or failed scheduled Flows are deleted after 7 days. Once a scheduled Flow publishes, we delete the scheduled copy's content; the published post stays until you delete it. If an app, script or AI assistant schedules Flows for you through an API key or our MCP server, it acts for you within that key's permissions, what it posts is your content, and our API Terms of Use apply.

How moderation works. Public content (posts, comments, public Whispers, public network chat, public Lives and public calls) is moderated. If Use AI Features is on (AI mode), its text and images are checked by automated tools, including OpenAI's moderation API and Cloudflare, and some cases go to people. If Use AI Features is off (Human Community mode), or you choose Local Only, it's reviewed by people (community moderators or Ascended staff), not AI. Until we finish this change, images you post publicly and checks during public video calls and Lives may still use automated tools.

Private Whispers and private chats (direct messages, group chats and private network chat, including text, images, audio and video) aren't proactively scanned, by people or by AI, and aren't held for approval. They're delivered right away. An Ascended staff moderator sees a private message only if someone in the conversation reports it. The report shows the messages the reporter selects and up to 10 messages before and after them for context. Owners and moderators of a private network can see what's posted in that network's channels they belong to, like any member. Community moderators can't see private messages, and every staff view is logged. Reported private messages are never sent to AI.

Legal and safety exceptions. We may review, preserve or disclose content, including private messages, when the law requires it (for example, reporting child sexual abuse material to NCMEC or responding to valid legal process), or when we believe in good faith it's needed to protect someone from imminent harm.

Federation is planned, but it has no launch date and isn't available today, and plans can change. When federation launches, public content delivered to Ascended Social and private communication with Ascended Social-hosted users would remain subject to our rules and moderation; private exchanges solely among users of independent self-hosted services that never pass through Ascended Social may be outside our moderation, and those operators and users would be responsible for their own rules and legal compliance. Private messages involving Ascended Social-hosted users aren't proactively reviewed or checked by AI; they're reviewed by Ascended staff only when someone in the conversation reports them, or where the law requires.

Violations may result in content removal, feature restrictions, temporary suspension, permanent account termination, forfeiture of creator payouts, and where appropriate, referral to law enforcement. Material risks of harm may be acted on without prior notice. We provide an appeals path through the Privacy Center and in-app support.

Use the in-app report tools or write to [email protected]. For copyright-specific complaints see the DMCA / Copyright Policy.

Safety and privacy contacts: [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].

You can block another account in the app. Blocking stops that person from messaging you.

We aim to review child-safety and immediate-danger reports within 24 hours, and all other reports within 3 business days.

Public Lives are recorded through Cloudflare Stream and may be watched in real time by moderators and our team. Private Lives are recorded; we review them only if someone reports them.