Privacy

Last updated: October 2026

What we index

opensocial.directory is a directory of businesses on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Nostr. We discover accounts via each platform's public APIs, the same data anyone with a browser can see on the platform itself. We then enrich with a website fetch (when a URL is in the profile) and classify the account as a business or not.

We do not index personal accounts that aren't engaged in commerce. If a record is wrongly classified, request removal.

What we store per business

Name, description, profile image (from the platform profile)
Primary website URL and contact email if listed in the profile
The platform handle(s) and ISO country code if visible
A NAICS industry code derived from the profile contents

We never store passwords, follower lists, post contents, or anything behind a platform's login.

Legal basis

We process this data on the basis of legitimate interest: building a public directory of businesses operating on the open social web, similar to how Crunchbase indexes companies. The data is already public; we make it discoverable. EU/UK visitors retain the right to object via the removal form.

How we use the data

Anonymous visitors and search engines see a masked view of every listing: name, category, country, description, image, masked handle. Contact details (full handle, URL, email, phone) are gated behind a free account with a reveal credit or subscription. We do this to:

Discourage bulk scraping for spam / sales-list resale
Give business owners control over their visibility (claim → edit)
Fund the directory through ethical, value-aligned monetization

Cookies

Anonymous browsing sets no cookies. Cloudflare's bot-management edge layer may set a security cookie. When you sign in, we set a session cookie strictly for authentication.

Data retention & removal

Listings are kept indefinitely while a business operates publicly on the indexed platforms. To request removal of a listing, or to preempt a future re-crawl, submit the removal form. Approved requests result in a permanent suppression entry: the next crawl will not re-add the record.

Contact

Privacy questions and complaints: [email protected].