Your words,
your repository.

Who owns what

Everything you write through branchline is stored in your atproto repository, on your PDS, under a DID you control. We don’t hold the canonical copy. If you delete a bud from your repo, it’s gone — we only ever held a reflection of it.

What you grant us

By signing in and writing through branchline, you grant us permission to display your ink.branchline.* records on the public web through this site and its AppView — including the text, your handle, your DID, and timestamps. Without that permission there’s nothing to read, so it’s the core of the deal.

You also grant us permission to write records on your behalf to the collections you authorized during sign-in. Today that’s:

• ink.branchline.seed — the seeds you plant as the root of a new story, or pass along to someone else
• ink.branchline.bud — the buds (story contributions) you write
• ink.branchline.pollen — the pollen you leave on other people’s buds
• app.bsky.feed.post — only when you explicitly opt in to crosspost a bud to Bluesky

We never write to a collection you didn’t authorize. You can revoke our access at any time from your PDS, and you can see exactly what we asked for on the sign-in consent screen.

What we store on our side

branchline runs an AppView, which means we read the atproto firehose and keep an index of ink.branchline.* records so pages render quickly and threading works. That index contains only information that is already publicly readable through your PDS. We also store a short-lived session cookie so we know it’s still you between page loads, and the OAuth tokens needed to publish on your behalf when you ask us to.

What we don’t do

• We don’t sell your data.
• We don’t share it with advertisers, trackers, or analytics brokers.
• We don’t train models on your writing or hand it to third parties who do.
• We don’t read your DMs, email, or any records outside the collections listed above — we never asked for permission to, and the protocol won’t let us.

Taking it back

If you want branchline to forget you, delete your ink.branchline.* records from your PDS and revoke our OAuth session. The firehose will tell our indexer, and those records will fall out of our AppView. Your atproto account itself isn’t ours to delete — it lives on your PDS and belongs to you.

One caveat: branchline is a shared tree. When a bud you wrote already has writers extending it, the text of that bud is load-bearing for their work — it’s what they read and replied to. Deleting it takes your byline off the bud, which becomes Anonymous, but the words themselves stay in place so the path still reads. If you need the text itself removed, reach out — see Contact, below.

Contact

Questions, concerns, or a record you’d like taken down? Reach us on Bluesky.