Terms of Service

Version 1.6 · 24 September 2026

These Terms govern your use of Eurosky Publisher, a service run by Stichting Modal that turns a publication's feed into posts on its own account. By signing in, or by using the service in any other way, you agree to them. They are written to be read; if anything in them is unclear, ask at support@eurosky.tech before you rely on it.

1. Who we are, and who you are

The service is run by Stichting Modal, Kranenburgweg 135 A, 2583 ER The Hague, Netherlands (RSIN 868779465), at https://publisher.news.eurosky.tech. "We" and "us" mean Stichting Modal; "you" means the person or organisation using the service.

The service is for publications (newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, newsletters, blogs) and the people who run them. If you use it on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you are entitled to bind that organisation to these Terms. You must be at least 18.

If you use the service as a consumer in the EU or EEA, nothing here takes away rights your local consumer law gives you; where these Terms conflict with it, the law wins.

2. What the service does

You add a feed. We read it on a schedule and post each new article, as text plus a link card with a thumbnail, to your own account on the AT Protocol: from your account and under your name. Optionally, your posts are carried on to Mastodon by a third-party bridge (section 9). You can see how your posts were received (section 8). An outlet can have a page in mu, the Eurosky app, showing its journalists and the articles of the feeds it chooses (section 7).

The service is free. It is also in beta: features may be added, changed or removed, and we provide it on a best-efforts basis (section 10).

3. Your account

You use the service with your own AT Protocol account, on whichever server hosts it. You sign in there; we never see your password. The authorisation you grant us is described in the Privacy Notice (section 4 there); you can withdraw it at your server at any time, and doing so stops us posting.

If you arrive without an account, we can create one for you on the Eurosky Personal Data Server. That account is governed by the Eurosky Terms of Service and Privacy Policy at https://eurosky.tech/accounts/terms/ and https://eurosky.tech/accounts/privacy/ in addition to these Terms; by creating it, you accept those too.

You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping its credentials safe. Do not share it, and do not use anyone else's.

4. Approval, and the rules we publish under

A person approves every publisher before anything is posted. Until then your feed is read and nothing goes out. An application is usually answered within one to two days, and we may decline one; we will normally say why.

The rules on our Rules page (https://publisher.news.eurosky.tech/rules) are part of these Terms: what we post and from when, the link lock that keeps a feed on its own domain, the limits that start low, and the rest. They are enforced by the software rather than merely stated, and where this document and that page describe the same thing, they mean the same thing.

5. Your feed, and what we do with it

You must have the right to publish what your feed contains and to have it posted from your account. A feed must be the publication it was approved as; if it changes hands or purpose, tell us.

You keep every right in your content. To provide the service you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence, for as long as you use the service, to fetch and store your feed and the articles in it, to fetch the pages they link to for an image, to resize and reformat that image, to compose a post from the article and to write it to your account, and, if you switch it on, to show your articles on your outlet page. We use your articles for nothing else.

The posts we make are yours. They are written to your own server, they are public there like everything you post, and deleting them, editing them or moving your account happens there, not here. We never post anything your feed did not publish, and we never post your back catalogue.

6. Acceptable use

You may not use the service to:

• publish anything that is illegal where you or your readers are, that infringes anyone's rights, or that a court or competent authority has ordered removed;
• impersonate a publication or a person, or present a feed as a publication it is not;
• circumvent the posting limits, the link lock or the approval, including by running more than one account for the same purpose;
• attempt unauthorised access to the service or to anyone's account, or disrupt the service.

Breaking these rules can lead to a feed being stopped or an account being suspended (section 12). We will tell you why.

7. Outlet pages, staff lists and the registry

We keep a registry of outlets and decide which of them are listed in the app. Listing is ours to give and ours to withdraw, and is not something an account is entitled to. We may list an outlet from public information before anyone there has signed in; an outlet that signs in takes its entry over and can propose corrections, which we apply.

An outlet can name the journalists who work there. Name only people who do, and remove them when they leave; we may ask for confirmation, and a person named can ask either of us to be removed. What you put on your outlet page must be accurate.

The registry and the articles on outlet pages are published through a public interface that the app reads and anyone can read (Privacy Notice, section 7).

8. How your posts did

The service shows you what the network did with your posts: likes, reposts, replies, quotes and follows, counted from the public records that make them up, with the accounts that reacted most named. Three things to know:

• the counts are a floor, not a total: we count what the live stream and a public index show us, and a reaction neither recorded is not counted;
• there are no views, impressions, reach or click-throughs: the protocol does not carry them, and we do not guess;
• the people behind the reactions have not signed up to anything. Use what the page shows you to understand how your publication is received. Do not use it to build lists of those people, to contact them because they appear here, or to identify anyone beyond what they made public. They can object to appearing at all (Privacy Notice, section 8), and we will honour it.

9. Mastodon, and other services we do not run

Reach beyond the AT Protocol comes from Bridgy Fed, a free bridge run by somebody else. If you switch it on, we follow the bridge from your account and it carries your posts to the fediverse under its own terms. We cannot promise for it; your dashboard shows what we have actually confirmed, and switching it off is there too.

Your server, the app, the labelling services whose labels we show you, the index we ask about reactions, and every other application on the AT Protocol are run by others under their own terms. We are not responsible for them, and they are not responsible for us.

10. Availability, and changes to the service

We will use reasonable skill and care to keep the service running and to post what your feed publishes, and we say when we cannot: a stopped feed, a lapsed sign-in and a reached limit are all reported in your dashboard and by email. We do not promise uninterrupted service. Your server can rate-limit us, a feed can break, and we can take the service down for maintenance, security or legal reasons.

A feed is a window rather than an archive, so an article that appears while we are not reading is lost for good. That is why you can pause posting but not reading, and why stopping a feed from being read is something we do on request.

The service is in beta. We may add, change or remove features, and we will take reasonable steps to tell you about a change that affects how you use it. If we ever stop running the service, we will tell publishers by email at least 30 days beforehand, and nothing on your own server changes.

11. Notices of illegal content

If you believe that content posted through this service, or shown on an outlet page, is illegal, write to notices@eurosky.tech with the address of the content and why. We will confirm receipt, decide whether to act, and tell you the outcome with reasons. Notices from trusted flaggers under the Digital Services Act are handled with priority. Content on a publisher's own server is theirs and their server's: we can stop posting it and remove it from an outlet page, and we will pass a notice on to the server that hosts it.

Our single point of contact for authorities is the same address; for enquiries from the public it is support@eurosky.tech. We correspond in English, German, French and Dutch.

12. Suspension, and ending your account

You can stop at any time: withdraw our authorisation at your server, which ends our ability to post immediately; or write to support@eurosky.tech to have your account closed, which deletes it here together with its feeds, articles and authorisation (Privacy Notice, section 14). Posts already made stay on your server, where they are yours.

We may stop posting for you, suspend or close your account, or remove an outlet from the registry, if you seriously or repeatedly break these Terms or the Rules, if a feed is used for something other than the publication it was approved as, if we are required to by a court or authority, or if your continued use poses a credible risk to other publishers, to the service or to the network. We will tell you why, and where the law requires notice before we act and giving it causes no harm, we will give it.

13. Intellectual property

The Eurosky name and logo, and the design, code and copy of the service, belong to Stichting Modal or its licensors. Using the service gives you no rights in them beyond ordinary reference ("posted with Eurosky Publisher"). The service is built on open-source software under its own licences. Your name, your logo and your content stay yours.

14. What we do not promise, and our liability

Where the mandatory law of your country gives you more than this section does, that law wins.

We provide the service with reasonable skill and care, and otherwise as it stands and as available. We do not promise that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, that any feature will remain available, that it will work with any particular server or application, or that the network will carry your posts to anyone in particular.

Nothing in these Terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, for gross negligence or wilful misconduct, or for anything that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits, lost readers or lost data; for the content or conduct of other publishers, of other operators on the AT Protocol, or of the bridge; for an interruption, suspension or closure that complies with these Terms; or for delays caused by events outside our reasonable control. Our total liability to you for everything arising out of the service or these Terms is limited to one hundred euros (EUR 100).

Tell us in writing about any claim within twelve months of the events it arises from, and give us a reasonable chance to look into it and put it right before bringing it.

15. If you use the service for a business

If you use the service in the course of a trade, business, profession or public function, which most publishers do, you will indemnify Stichting Modal, its officers, employees and contractors against losses, fines, costs and reasonable legal fees arising from your breach of these Terms or the Rules, from a claim that your content or your use of the service infringes someone's rights, or from your breach of the law. We will tell you promptly about such a claim and may choose to defend it ourselves with your cooperation; you will not settle it without our consent. This section does not apply to consumers.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of the Netherlands. If you are a consumer in the EU or EEA, that does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the country you live in; you can bring a claim in the courts there, and we can only sue you there. Otherwise the courts of Amsterdam have exclusive jurisdiction. We do not require arbitration, and we do not ask you to waive collective proceedings.

17. General

These Terms, the Rules page and the Privacy Notice are the whole agreement between you and us about the service. If part of them is found invalid, the rest stands. We may send notices through the dashboard or to the email address on your account. Not enforcing something straight away does not mean we cannot enforce it later. You may not transfer these Terms; we may transfer them to a successor bound to the same public-interest commitments. Nobody else can enforce them. Where a translation of this page and the English one differ, the English one applies.

18. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. If a change is material, we will tell publishers by email or in their dashboard at least 30 days before it takes effect, unless the law requires it sooner; if you do not accept it, end your use under section 12 before it does. Continuing to use the service after a material change takes effect counts as acceptance. The version and date at the top of this page say which version applies.

19. Contact

About the service: support@eurosky.tech. About personal data: privacy@eurosky.tech (Privacy Notice, section 1). Notices of illegal content, and correspondence from authorities: notices@eurosky.tech. By post: Stichting Modal, Kranenburgweg 135 A, 2583 ER The Hague, Netherlands.