Terms

Short, because the site is small and run by one person.

What the site is for

Exhale is for publishing writing. The anonymity exists to protect the work's first reading, not to make speech untraceable. Content that uses it to harm identifiable people may be removed — through the same report queue and unpublish action described under moderation below, which are the whole mechanism.

What you publish

You keep whatever rights you have in what you write. By publishing you give us permission to host it and show it to anyone, on the front page and at its own address, indefinitely.

Don't publish anything illegal, anything that isn't yours to publish, or anything meant to harass or expose a particular person. Sexual content involving minors is taken down immediately, preserved, and reported as the law requires.

Publishing is permanent

Pieces are never deleted. During the 7-day window the author link lets you delete your own piece; after that it does not, because the link is gone. An unclaimed piece cannot be deleted by its author after day 7. This is not a policy we can make an exception to — it is the shape of the data. Nothing remains that would let us find your writing, and nothing remains that would let you prove a piece is yours.

Which means: authorship of a released piece cannot be verified. Requests that depend on identity — delete my piece, confirm what I wrote, hand over what you know about the author of this page — are unfulfillable for released pieces by design. We are not refusing. We do not have the record, and we cannot tell your claim from anyone else's. Take the deletion in the privacy policy literally, in both directions: it protects you and it strands you.

Claiming a piece is equally one-way. Your username goes on it permanently, and you can no longer edit or delete it. Deleting your account takes the byline off and leaves the piece published without a name.

The author link

Anyone holding your author link is treated as the author: they can edit it, delete it while nobody has commented, claim it, hide comments on it, and see the responses it has drawn. We show it once and store only a hash of it, so we cannot recover it, resend it, or tell you what it was. Look after it or lose it on purpose.

Moderation

Every published piece has a report link. It reaches one operator, who is the only moderator, and it is also where copyright notices go — name the page and what is being infringed, with a way to reach you.

The only action available is unpublishing: the page starts returning "nothing here". The content is retained for legal purposes and nothing republishes it automatically. There is no appeals process, no status page, and no answer — one person reads the queue.

Rate limits apply to publishing, commenting, voting, flagging, reporting, and sign-in links. An author can hide any comment on their own piece.

The rest

The site is provided as is, with no warranty and no promise about uptime or that anything you publish will still be reachable if the site stops existing. Don't rely on it as the only copy of anything you care about.