Terms of Service

By creating an account or using the hosted service, you agree to these terms and to the Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the hosted service. Running the software yourself, contributing code, or building a client on the published protocol is governed by the MIT license and not by these terms.

The hosted service is operated by the Synapse project. It includes the web app at synapse.app and the native clients when they are signed in to a hosted account. It is provided under these terms and the Privacy Policy.

Anyone may run the MIT-licensed software for their own community. If you connect to a deployment that we do not operate, that operator’s terms and policy apply, and we are not responsible for its content, moderation, security or availability.

• You must be at least 16, or the age of digital consent in your country if that is higher.
• Provide a working email address and keep your credentials safe. You are responsible for activity on your account.
• One account per person. Automated accounts and bots are welcome when they are labelled as such and stay within documented API rate limits.
• Do not create accounts to evade a suspension, impersonate someone else, or manipulate followers, reactions or reports.
• Tell us promptly if you believe your account has been compromised.

You agree not to:

• Use the service for anything unlawful, or to infringe another person’s rights, including intellectual property rights.
• Post or share child sexual abuse material, content that incites violence, or content that harasses, threatens or exposes another person.
• Send spam, harvest credentials, scrape the service at scale, or run automation that degrades it for others.
• Attempt to break end-to-end encryption, extract keys from another person’s device, or access an account or system without permission.
• Probe or test the service in ways that disrupt it. Report vulnerabilities through coordinated disclosure to the contact below.
• Impersonate other people or communities in ways that mislead their members.
• Circumvent rate limits, bans, access controls or storage quotas.

Space owners and moderators set the rules for their own communities. Their decisions bind their members; our decisions bind the hosted service as a whole.

You keep ownership of everything you post. You grant us only the limited licence needed to operate the service: storing, copying, transmitting and displaying your content to the people and clients entitled to receive it, and maintaining backups. That licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies in backups that rotate on the schedule in the Privacy Policy.

Direct messages composed in native clients are end-to-end encrypted. We cannot read, review, moderate or hand over their plaintext, and we will not build a capability to do so. The web client does not implement that encryption, so do not send content through the web that you need the service to be unable to read.

You are responsible for having the rights to what you upload, for the content you publish, and for the conduct of anyone you invite to a space you own.

The Privacy Policy explains what data we collect and how to exercise your rights. The Cookie Policy lists the strictly necessary cookies we set and the third-party requests involved in sign-in and default avatars.

If you believe content on the hosted service infringes your copyright, email support@synapse.app with the work you own, the link to the content, your contact details, a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is unauthorised, a statement that the information is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act for them, and your signature. We may remove content while we investigate. Accounts that repeatedly infringe may be suspended or terminated. If your content was removed by mistake, contact us and we will review it.

We moderate the hosted service for legal compliance, abuse and the protection of members. Actions are proportionate: content removal, role removal, temporary limitation, suspension, then termination. Where we can, we tell you the reason and the evidence we can share, and decisions can be appealed to support@synapse.app. You may close your account at any time; deletion works as described in the Privacy Policy. If we shut down the hosted service, we give notice and keep export available for a reasonable period so communities can move to a deployment of their own.

Synapse clients, server software, protocol specification and SDKs are released under the MIT license. You may use, copy, modify, redistribute and fork them, including commercially, subject to that license.

The name “Synapse”, the logo and the project’s repository URLs are not part of that grant. Use them only to describe the real project accurately — do not name a fork in a way that implies it is ours, and do not imply our endorsement of your deployment or client. Forks are welcome; ask for a distinct name.

The software is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, to the extent the MIT license allows. The hosted service is offered without an uptime guarantee, and features may change or be withdrawn. Security is a serious design goal, not a promise that no vulnerability will ever exist; report what you find and we will fix it. Nothing in these terms excludes warranties or rights that cannot be excluded by law.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss, or for lost data, arising from use of the software or the hosted service, and our aggregate liability for any claim is limited to the greater of one hundred euros and the fees you have paid us in the preceding twelve months. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited, including for wilful misconduct, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or our own data protection obligations.

To the extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify us against third-party claims and costs arising from content you publish or your breach of these terms. If you are a consumer, this section applies only so far as mandatory law allows.

We may revise these terms as the service evolves. Material changes are announced at least 30 days before they take effect, by email and in the changelog. Continuing to use the hosted service afterwards means you accept them. Source already released under MIT is never retroactively re-licensed.

These terms are governed by the laws of the operator's principal place of business, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Courts in that jurisdiction have exclusive jurisdiction, except where mandatory law gives you the right to bring a claim in your country of residence. Before starting a formal claim, write to support@synapse.app so we can try to resolve it. Nothing in these terms deprives you of protections you are entitled to under the mandatory law of your country of residence.

Service of legal notices, abuse reports and questions about these terms: support@synapse.app. Technical issues are better raised at the repository issue tracker.