Trust
Your community is not our product.
The platform works for the community, not the other way around. That is a design decision, and it shows up everywhere: in what we encrypt, in what we refuse to collect, and in what stays yours even on your worst day here.
The deal, in two lists.
No fine print required. This is what you keep, and what we will never do with your data.
What you keep
- Full control over every message you have ever sent
- Access to your account and data, even after a ban
- Private direct messages
- The ability to delete your account at any time, which anonymizes it
- A full export of your data, whenever you ask for it
What we never do
- Sell your data or show your members ads
- Read your private conversations
- Hand your activity to trackers or data brokers
- Lock core features behind surprise paywalls
- Hold your data hostage when you leave
The short version.
Privacy here is not a settings page you have to find. It is the default.
Direct messages are private, so only the people in the conversation see them and our staff do not read private conversations. Public channels are moderated, because communities need safe shared spaces, and that split is deliberate. There are zero trackers, zero ads, and zero data brokers anywhere on the platform, and there never will be, because our business model does not need them: core features are free forever, and later we will offer optional extras for power users. Nothing more.
Your account and your history stay yours in every situation, including the bad ones. The account ownership page explains how that works when someone gets banned. The legal wording lives in the privacy policy, and the engineering side is covered on the security page.
Everything below is the longer version: how the two kinds of conversations are protected, what happens to your data over its lifetime, what we store and why, and the trade-offs we made on purpose. If a claim on this page ever stops being true, the page changes first. We would rather have a shorter list than a dishonest one.
Two kinds of conversations, two kinds of protection.
Private things stay private. Shared things are moderated. The line between them never moves and never surprises you.
Direct messages: private
When you send a DM, in the app only the people in the conversation can see it. As a matter of policy, our staff do not read private conversations. Connections are encrypted in transit with TLS, so nobody in between is reading along either. Private conversations stay between the people in them. The full picture is on the private DMs page.
Community channels: moderated, on purpose
Channels inside a server are shared spaces, visible to their community and its moderators. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight. A public room where nobody can see what is happening cannot be kept safe: moderators could not review reported messages, automated filters and slow mode could not work, and the audit log could not tell an owner what happened while they were asleep. Communities that support 50k+ members in a single server need working moderation more than they need to hide content that hundreds of people can already read by joining.
Why channels stay moderated
Platforms that market blanket encryption for public group spaces are usually describing transport encryption, which everyone has, or accepting that their shared spaces cannot really be moderated. We think the honest position is a clean split. If a conversation is between you and one person, it is private, full stop. If a conversation happens in a channel, everyone in the room can see it, moderators included, and you know that before you type. You never have to guess which regime you are in: DMs are one surface, channels are another, and the boundary is visible in the interface itself.
The life of your data.
What happens to the things you write, from the moment you send them to the moment you decide they should not exist anymore.
While you chat
Messages you post in channels are stored so your community can read them, scroll back through them, and build on them with edits, replies, reactions, and read receipts. Your DMs are stored too, kept private so only the people in the conversation can read them. Pins, bookmarks, polls, and threads all reference the same messages; nothing is copied off somewhere you cannot see.
When you tidy up
Delete a message and it is gone from the channel. Edit it and the new text replaces the old for everyone reading. You clean up your own words the way you wrote them: directly, without filing a request or waiting for a queue.
When you want a copy, or want out
You can export your data at any time. And if you want out, you can delete your account whenever you like, which anonymizes it: your name and profile are removed, and the messages you already sent stay in their conversations attributed to a deleted, anonymous user, so other people's threads stay intact. Channels keep only a bounded window of recent messages, so older content ages out over time.
If things go wrong
A ban only stops participation. You keep your account, every message you ever sent, and the DMs you received, unless the sender removed them. You can still read your history, still export it, and still delete your account. Losing access to a community never means losing access to your own words. The details live on the account ownership page.
Privacy you can point at.
These are not policy paragraphs. They are buttons, defaults, and architecture that exist in the product today.
Private DMs
Direct messages are private: in the app, only the people in the conversation see them, and our staff do not read private conversations. Connections are encrypted in transit with TLS, so your private conversations stay between the two of you.
Delete your account anytime
Delete your account whenever you want. Deleting anonymizes it: your name and profile are removed, and the messages you already sent stay in their conversations attributed to a deleted, anonymous user, so other people's threads stay intact.
Export any time
Your data is yours to take. Export it whenever you want, for whatever reason, without asking permission. A platform that will not give you your own data back was never really storing it for you.
Ownership that survives a ban
Moderation acts on participation, never on possession. Banned users keep their account, their message history, and the DMs they received. Punishment on this platform is exclusion, not confiscation.
Zero trackers, zero ads
No advertising pixels, no third-party analytics SDKs, no data brokers, anywhere. Nothing on these pages or inside the app phones home to an ad network, because there is no ad network to phone.
An identity per community
Per-server nicknames and custom profiles let you decide who sees what. Be your handle in one server and your first name in another; the two never have to meet unless you want them to.
The numbers behind the promise.
Some privacy claims are hard to verify. These ones are just counting.
What we store, and why.
A chat platform cannot store nothing. Here is exactly what running yours requires, and where the boundaries sit.
To deliver a message in under 40ms and let a community scroll back through its own history, we have to keep that history. So we store your account and its settings, the servers you build with their channels, categories, roles and permissions, custom emoji and server tags, and the messages posted in channels, readable, because your members need to read them. We store your DMs privately, and our staff do not read private conversations. All of it runs on hardware we own and tune ourselves, not on someone else's cloud, which means no third-party platform sits between your data and us with its own terms of service. The whole system is hand-written, from 0 to over 125.000 lines of code with no template or white-label product underneath, so when we say we know every line that touches your data, that is literal.
What server owners and moderators can see
Inside a server, owners and moderators can see what any member can see: the public channels. On top of that, owners get an audit log of moderation actions and server analytics about how the community is doing. What they never get is your DMs, your activity in other servers, or your account's private details. Joining someone's server gives them your presence in that server, and nothing else. The moderation guide covers what good stewardship of that visibility looks like.
What we can see
We operate the platform, so channel content is technically readable to us the same way it is to the members in the room; that is what makes moderation support and abuse handling possible. But we never read private conversations, we never mine content to build profiles of you, and there is no advertising machinery anywhere that would want such profiles. We are a small team in the Netherlands, and the honest answer to "who at Vronify is reading my server" is: nobody has a reason to, no system does it automatically, and we do not read private conversations.
The trade-offs, stated plainly
Every real system has them, and we would rather list ours than let you find them the hard way. Channels are visible to their community and its moderators; that is the price of moderation that actually works. If someone who sent you a DM removes it, it is removed from your side too; ownership of a conversation is shared with the person you had it with. And deleting your account anonymizes it rather than wiping your history: your name and profile come off the messages you sent, but those messages stay in their conversations so other people's threads stay intact. Export first if you might want a copy of your words later.
The ad-funded model, next to ours.
Most chat platforms are free because you are the inventory. Here is what that difference means in practice.
The left column describes common practice across large ad-funded chat and social platforms; specifics vary by service and change over time. Our column links to pages where each claim is spelled out, so you can hold us to it. See the full comparison page for the feature-by-feature version.
Questions people actually ask.
Can Vronify staff read my direct messages?
As a matter of policy, no. DMs are private: in the app, only the people in the conversation see them, and our staff do not read private conversations. Connections are also encrypted in transit with TLS. If you would say it behind a closed door, say it in a DM.
Why can moderators see community channels?
Because shared spaces need working moderation. If channel content were hidden from moderators, they could not review reported messages, automated filters could not run, and the audit log would be blind. Channels are rooms that anyone in the server can walk into, so the meaningful privacy question there is who is in the room, which roles and permissions already control. The split is deliberate and it never moves: DMs private, channels shared.
Do you sell data, show ads, or use trackers?
No, no, and no. Zero trackers, zero ads, zero data brokers, on the marketing site and inside the app. Our model is simple: core features are free forever, and optional extras for power users come later. That model does not require knowing anything about you beyond what it takes to run your account, so we do not collect it.
What happens to my data if I get banned from a server?
A ban stops participation and nothing else. You keep your account, every message you ever sent, and the DMs you received, unless the sender removed them. You can still read and export your history, and delete your account whenever you want. The account ownership page walks through exactly how this works.
How do I delete my account?
Deleting your account anonymizes it: your name and profile are removed, and the messages you already sent stay in their conversations attributed to a deleted, anonymous user, so other people's conversations stay intact. Channels keep only a bounded window of recent messages, so older content ages out over time. Export your data first if you might want a copy, because anonymizing your account cannot be undone.
Can I export my data, and does it cost anything?
You can export your data any time, and like every core feature it is free. We built export because data you cannot take with you is data being held hostage, which is on the list of things we never do.
Will the mobile and desktop apps change any of this?
No. The browser version is available now with nothing to install, and the coming mobile apps for iOS and Android and desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux are the same platform with the same account and the same rules. DMs stay private, trackers stay at zero, and everything on this page applies on every device.
What about bots and automation reading my messages?
We do not run third-party bot code inside servers, so no external party can sit in your channels harvesting messages. Our upcoming built-in bot engine runs on our own infrastructure, acts only in servers where the owner switched it on, and cannot touch DMs, which stay private. It is not live yet; this page will not need to change when it is.
I found a security or privacy problem. Where do I report it?
Thank you, genuinely. Security issues go through our vulnerability disclosure process, which explains how to report responsibly and what to expect from us. For privacy questions that are not vulnerabilities, support or the contact page will reach a human on the team.
Your community. Your rules. Your data.
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