pyroclastic.cloud (“pyroclastic.cloud,” “we,” “us,” “our”) hosts accounts on the Atmosphere, the open network built on the AT Protocol that Bluesky and a growing number of other apps use. It is run by Nick Gerakines, an individual based in Ohio, USA.
pyroclastic.cloud runs one or more account servers (personal data servers, or PDSes), each named after a volcano. Vesuvius, at vesuvius.pyroclastic.cloud, is the first. You sign in and manage your account through Mayon, our entryway at mayon.pyroclastic.cloud, which directs each request to the server that holds your account. In these Terms, “your account” means the account you hold on whichever of our servers it lives on.
By creating or using an account, you agree to these Terms. If you don’t agree, don’t use pyroclastic.cloud.
1. You must be an adult
You must be 18 or older (or the age of majority where you live) to have an account on pyroclastic.cloud. The service is not designed for children, and no part of it targets or is intended for anyone under 18. By creating an account, you confirm that you are an adult.
Apps you use with your account may have age rules of their own, and those apply too.
2. What pyroclastic.cloud does, and what it doesn’t
An account on the Atmosphere has three parts, and we host all three:
- your identity, which is a permanent identifier (a DID) and a handle, the readable name people see, like
@you.dids.lol; - your repository, which holds the posts, likes, follows, profile, and other records you create, along with the images and other files attached to them; and
- your private account data, which covers your sign-in details, the settings your apps save for you, and the contents of any private spaces you use.
Apps such as Bluesky are separate services run by other people and organizations. They read from your repository, write to it when you ask them to, and decide what to show you and others. We don’t run those apps, and their rules, moderation decisions, and features are their own. When you use an app with your account, that app’s terms and privacy policy cover what it does.
We don’t own your content. See section 6.
3. Your account
Accounts are invite-only for now. An invite code is for the person it was given to. Please don’t sell or trade invite codes.
When you create an account, you give us an email address. Keep it working and current, because it’s how we send sign-in codes, confirm important changes like moving or deleting your account, help you recover access, and tell you about anything that affects your account.
Keep your password, app passwords, and sign-in codes to yourself. You are responsible for what happens through your account, including actions taken by apps you’ve authorized and by people you’ve given access to (see section 11). If you think someone else has gained access, tell us right away at hello@pyroclastic.cloud.
Bots and other automated accounts are welcome as long as they follow these Terms, stay within our resource limits (section 7), and say in their profile that they are automated.
4. Handles
You can use a handle under one of our domains (dids.lol, dads.lol, thegem.city, or atproto.camp) or a domain you own.
Handles under our domains belong to those domains. You may use one for as long as you have an account here and follow these Terms. We may refuse or take back a handle that impersonates a person or organization, infringes someone’s trademark, misleads people about who is behind it, or is abusive, and we keep some names reserved for the service itself. If we take back a handle, we will tell you why and give you time to choose a new one, unless it is being used to deceive or harm people right now.
When an account leaves pyroclastic.cloud or is deleted, its handle under our domains is held for at least 90 days before anyone else can take it, so nobody can pick it up and pose as you.
Handles on your own domain are yours. You control them through your domain’s settings, and they keep working if you move your account to another provider. Handles under our domains stop working once your account is no longer here, so if you want to keep the same name when you leave, switch to a handle on your own domain first.
5. Content rules
pyroclastic.cloud is a small service run by one person. It is not a neutral utility, and we don’t pretend to be one. There is content we will not host, and you should know what it is before you rely on us.
You may not use pyroclastic.cloud to publish, store, or link to content that:
- attacks, degrades, or dehumanizes people based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or immigration status;
- promotes, celebrates, or provides material support for hate groups, violent extremism, or terrorism;
- denies or minimizes genocide or other mass atrocities;
- harasses, threatens, stalks, or incites violence against anyone;
- sexualizes minors in any way, or depicts child sexual abuse;
- publishes private information about someone without their consent;
- deceives people in ways that cause real harm; or
- is designed to get around these rules, including by acting as a front for content that is prohibited elsewhere.
You also may not use pyroclastic.cloud to:
- send spam, run networks of fake or coordinated accounts, or fake engagement;
- spread malware, run phishing, or attack other people’s accounts or computers;
- store files that have nothing to do with using the Atmosphere, or otherwise treat our servers as general-purpose file storage;
- interfere with pyroclastic.cloud or the wider network, including by deliberately overloading our servers or anyone else’s; or
- return under a new account after we’ve removed one, unless we’ve agreed to it.
We may also decline to host anything else we find seriously objectionable. We would rather tell you plainly that this discretion exists than pretend the lists above are complete.
These rules apply to everything in your account, public or private, including the contents of private spaces you run and content you knowingly let other people add to them.
6. Your content, and the permission you give us
You own the content you create. To host your account, we need your permission to do certain things with it, and by using pyroclastic.cloud you give us that permission: a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to store, copy, back up, and transmit your content, and to make your public content available on the Atmosphere, for the sole purpose of running pyroclastic.cloud. The license ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies in our backups, which expire on the schedule in the Privacy Policy, and copies the law requires us to keep.
Public content travels. The Atmosphere is built so that anyone can read and copy public data, and it was designed that way on purpose. When you publish something public, our server sends it out to the network, where relays, apps, search services, and archives that we don’t control can copy it and may keep it after you delete it. On the Atmosphere, your follows, likes, reposts, and blocks are public too. Treat everything outside a private space as public.
7. Resource limits and cost
To keep the servers healthy for everyone, we set limits on things like storage, file sizes, and how quickly an account can make requests. Ordinary use of the Atmosphere stays well inside them. If your use is far beyond normal, we will contact you before restricting it, unless it’s harming the service or other people right now.
pyroclastic.cloud doesn’t charge for accounts today. If that changes, we will email you at least 60 days before any charge would apply to you, and you’ll be free to move your account elsewhere before then.
8. Leaving: your account is portable
This is the part we most want you to know. The AT Protocol lets you move your account, including your identity, your followers, and everything you’ve posted, to another provider without starting over. We support that fully.
- We will never block, delay, or charge for a move away from pyroclastic.cloud.
- You can download a full copy of your repository at any time, for example with your app’s data export option, and we will help if you need it.
- When you move, we will sign the identity update that points your account at its new home, once you request it through the standard migration process. That process sends a confirmation code to your email, so only you can start it.
- After you’ve moved, we keep a deactivated copy of your account for 30 days in case something goes wrong with the move, and then delete it.
We strongly suggest adding a recovery key of your own to your identity. If you do, you can move your identity even if pyroclastic.cloud is unreachable. The Security Policy explains how.
Deleting your account. You can delete your account from your account portal. We remove your repository, files, and private account data from our servers and tell the network the account is gone. Copies in our encrypted backups expire within 30 days. The history of your identity in the public directory that records it (the PLC directory) is permanent and outside our control, and so are copies other services have already made (see section 6).
9. When we can act on content or accounts
We may remove content, restrict an account, or suspend or end an account where content is illegal, breaks our content rules in section 5, breaks these Terms, or creates a real risk to pyroclastic.cloud, our infrastructure, or other people.
When we suspend an account, our server stops serving its repository and files and tells the network the account is suspended, so apps stop showing it.
How we’ll do this fairly. These commitments apply to every account holder, wherever you live. If we restrict, suspend, or end your account, or remove your content, we will:
- give you a clear statement of reasons;
- give you advance notice where that is reasonable, though we may act immediately if the law requires it, if the content is obviously illegal, if it seriously breaks our content rules, or if waiting would create a real risk to other people; and
- tell you how to ask us to review the decision, and look at it again in light of anything you send us.
Your identity stays yours. Even if we end your account here, you’ll have 30 days to download your data and move your identity to another provider, and we will sign that move. There are three exceptions: we won’t hand back content that is illegal to possess or share (such as child sexual abuse material); we won’t help where the law forbids it; and we won’t extend this to accounts created to spam, defraud, or evade an earlier removal. We will never use our role in your identity to take it away from you, give it to anyone else, or point it somewhere you didn’t ask for.
How we’ll reach you. We will email the address on your account, and we may also show you a notice the next time you sign in.
Other apps decide for themselves. Bluesky and other apps make their own moderation decisions about what they show. A label or restriction from an app doesn’t mean we’ve acted on your account here, and our decisions don’t bind them.
10. Reporting illegal content and other problems
If you think an account or content hosted on pyroclastic.cloud is illegal or breaks these Terms, tell us at hello@pyroclastic.cloud. Please include:
- your name and contact details (not required if the report involves certain offenses against children);
- the handle or DID of the account, and links to the specific content;
- a clear explanation of why you believe it is illegal or breaks these Terms; and
- a statement that you believe, in good faith, that your report is accurate and complete.
Reports you make inside an app such as Bluesky go to that app’s moderation team and any moderation services you subscribe to. They don’t reach us automatically, so email us if you want pyroclastic.cloud to look at an account hosted here.
Copyright. If you believe content hosted here infringes your copyright, send a notice to the same address with the details required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3). If we remove content because of a copyright notice, we will tell the account holder and pass on any valid counter-notice.
We review reports ourselves, by hand, and act on valid ones. We don’t run automated content-scanning systems for moderation. When we act on a report or on our own review, we give the affected account holder a statement of reasons, unless the law prevents it. We apply these rules with care and proportionality, and we respect your freedom of expression.
11. Shared accounts
You can let other people act as your account, for example to post or moderate for a club, project, or community, without giving them your password. Access is scoped to what you choose and can be taken back at any time.
If you share access, you are responsible for who you give it to and for what they do with it. We record which identity took each action under shared access, so you can see who did what and so we can look into problems. If someone with shared access breaks these Terms, we may remove their access, act on the account, or both.
12. Private spaces: new and still settling
pyroclastic.cloud supports atproto spaces, as described in the Permissioned Data proposal for the AT Protocol. Spaces let you keep some things between you and the people you choose, such as bookmarks, events, or a small group, rather than publishing them to everyone.
If you run a space, you take on responsibilities. You decide who may join and what goes in. If that includes other people’s personal data, you are responsible for how it’s used, including telling those people and, where data protection law applies to you, having a lawful basis for it.
Nothing in this section removes any duty we have under data protection law, including our obligation to keep personal data appropriately secure and to report breaches. Those duties apply regardless of the warnings above.
13. Availability, backups, and the status page
We make a best effort to keep pyroclastic.cloud available, but we don’t promise any particular level of uptime. pyroclastic.cloud is run by one person, and there will be times when it is slow, degraded, or down, whether for maintenance, problems on our end, or problems upstream that we don’t control.
We post scheduled maintenance and incidents at https://status.pyroclastic.cloud/. Check there first to see whether a problem is already known. The status page is a record of what happened, not a promise about what will happen, and nothing on it creates a service level agreement.
We take daily encrypted backups of all account, identity, and cryptographic data, and we keep a written disaster recovery plan. Backups protect against losing a server, not against changes you make yourself: we can’t restore individual posts or records you’ve deleted. Keep your own copy of your repository from time to time.
14. Other services
Highport is a website hosting service run by the same person as pyroclastic.cloud, but it’s a separate service with its own policies. Having an account here doesn’t sign you up for Highport, and using Highport doesn’t change these Terms.
The same goes for every app you connect to your account and every service your apps reach through our server, such as Bluesky’s services, custom feeds, and moderation services. Each has its own terms, and we’re not responsible for what they do.
15. Disclaimers and liability
pyroclastic.cloud is provided “as is” and “as available.” To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, for loss of data, or for content you or others publish.
Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud, and nothing in these Terms removes rights you have under consumer law that you cannot sign away.
16. Governing law and where disputes go
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Ohio, USA, and applicable US federal law, and disputes will be handled in the state or federal courts located in Ohio.
If you’re a consumer, your local law still protects you. Choosing Ohio law does not take away rights you have under the consumer law of the place you live that you cannot sign away. Where your local law gives you stronger protection than Ohio law, your local law wins, and you may be able to bring proceedings in your local courts.
We do not require arbitration.
17. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. When we make a significant change, we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, unless the law or an urgent safety or security problem requires a faster change, and we will update the “Last updated” date. If you don’t agree with a change, you can move your account elsewhere before it takes effect (see section 8).
18. How to reach us
Account holders, the public, and authorities can contact us in English at hello@pyroclastic.cloud. For security issues, see the Security Policy.