Guiding Principles

We are committed to:

• Open access. We will never make it hard for you to get your data back from us or move to a different service if you want to. We will provide you with tools to facilitate backing up your data, and we will never try to lock you into using our service in any way.
• Interoperability. We will seek to integrate our service with other services on the Internet, following open standards, to allow you to work with other sites as much as you want to.
• Open source. We will release every code change we make under a generally-accepted open source license, aside from internal configuration files and anything we are contractually obligated not to publish. We will provide details on what code we don't publish, and let you know why. We will work with a community of volunteer developers, and encourage and nurture the volunteer development process. We are committed to making it easy for others to install and maintain their own instances of our server code.
• Community review. We will make our development process and our business decisions as transparent as possible, and look for community feedback at all stages. While we know we can't please everyone all the time, we know that our users are incredibly diverse, and the ways they use the site are just as diverse. We will strive to take your feedback into account as much as we can.
• Respecting privacy. We will provide you with tools to make choices about your privacy, and respect those choices at all times. We will never sell or trade your private data. We as a company are committed to maintaining your privacy and making it easy for you to show your journal and its contents to as many -- or as few -- people as you'd like.

We operate our service under the principles of:

• Transparency: We believe that you should know why we make the decisions we make. We will explain our reasoning as much as possible. We will make it easy for you to know as much as you want to about what we're doing. We will always err on the side of providing more information, rather than less, whenever possible. At any point, you should feel comfortable that you understand why we're making the choices we're making.
• Freedom: We believe in free expression. We will not place limits on your expression, except as required by United States law or to protect the quality and long-term viability of the service (such as removing spam). We will provide you with tools that make creativity and free expression easy. If, at any point, we have to place restrictions on your expression, we will tell you why, and work to find the best solutions possible.
• Respect: We believe in the inherent dignity of all human beings. We will never discriminate against any group of people. We will work hard to maintain inclusive attitudes, use inclusive language, and promote inclusiveness at all times. Our Diversity Statement isn't just there so we can pat ourselves on the back. It's there because we believe that our diversity is our greatest strength.

We will remain advertising-free.

We won't accept or display third-party advertising on our service, whether text-based or banner ads. We are personally and ideologically against displaying advertising on a community-based service. Advertising dilutes the community experience. It also changes the site's focus from "pleasing the userbase" to "pleasing the advertisers". We believe that our users are our customers, not unpaid content-generators who exist only to provide content for others to advertise on. We are committed to remaining advertising-free for as long as the site exists.

By "third-party advertising", we mean anything where a company pays us to show their banners, graphics, or text advertisement to our users. We may make partnerships with other sites in order to add features that we don't have the resources for ourselves. If we do this, we will clearly indicate any such features, and we will include information in our Privacy Policy.