Community standards
No app can see your messages, so this is on us
Yapmesh has no server and no moderators. Nothing you send passes through a company, which means nobody can read it — and also that nobody can take it down for you. The tools below are the ones that exist, and they all live on your phone.
What is not allowed on the mesh
- Threats and violence, and praise or planning of it.
- Harassment, bullying and stalking.
- Hate directed at people for who they are.
- Anything that sexualises or exploits a child, in any form, including grooming and sextortion. See the child safety standards.
- Intimate images shared without the consent of the person shown, and sexual content sent to people who did not ask for it.
- Encouraging self-harm or suicide.
- Terrorism and violent extremism.
- Selling or arranging anything illegal where you are, including weapons and drugs.
- Fraud, scams, and pretending to be someone or something you are not.
- Spam, flooding, and abusing other phones' storage or relaying.
- Sending files meant to harm a phone.
- Publishing someone's private information.
- Sharing what you do not have the right to share.
Blocking is yours alone
Block anyone, from their name in People or from any message they sent. It takes effect at once, it needs nobody else's agreement, and they are never told. Nothing they send reaches your phone again: no message, no file, no call, and no receipt goes back to them.
What a block cannot do, on a mesh: your phone keeps carrying their sealed frames for other people, unopened, because it may be the only road between them and someone else. The app says so on the Blocked people screen rather than hiding it.
Reporting, honestly
A report is written on your phone and the person is blocked in the same tap. There is nowhere to send it automatically — there is no server. You can export it and give it to whoever can actually act: a teacher, an employer, the police, or [email protected]. If someone is in danger, contact your local emergency number first. Anything involving a child: see the child safety page, and report it to the authorities where you are.
The mesh can shun someone together
Separately from your own block, People offers a vote. When more than 5% of the phones around you vote to block someone, every one of those phones stops carrying anything of theirs, in either direction. It takes more than 5% voting the other way to undo. That is a community decision, not yours, and it is the only enforcement a network with no owner can have.
The phone filters and guards, a little
An abuse filter on your phone refuses abusive text on send and folds it behind a tap when it arrives; it is a word list, it runs offline, it can be switched off under Menu → Safety, and it is not a judge. Files are not fetched from strangers without your say-so, a file that is really a program is shown in red and opens only after a second confirmation, and blocking someone throws their files away. Nothing scans for viruses: nothing between two phones can look inside.
Deleting
Delete a message or a file from your phone at any time, and set a group to drop its history after a period. "Delete for everyone" asks the phones holding a copy to delete it; a phone that obeys will, and one that does not, will not. Copies already delivered cannot be recalled: there is no server holding them, which is the point of the app and also its hardest limit. Menu → Safety → Delete everything on this phone wipes your phone completely, identity key included.
Age
Yapmesh is for people aged 18 and over. It has no moderation, no way to remove content from anyone else's phone, and no way to verify who anyone is.
Reporting to us
We cannot see, remove or act on anything sent between phones: we have no access to it and no infrastructure it passes through. What we can act on is the software and this website. Write to [email protected]. A report about a child reaches us with "Child safety:" at the start of the subject and is passed to the authorities, never to the person reported.
How these standards are enforced, and not
There is no appeals process because there is no decision of ours to appeal: every block is a person's own, every community block is a vote of the phones around you, and every report goes where its writer sends it. We do not, and cannot, suspend anyone. If a law where you are requires more than this from a messaging app, Yapmesh may not be the right tool there, and we would rather say so than pretend.