Effective date: September 24, 2026
Last updated: October 15, 2026

1. Our principles

Before you were a member of Iris, you were an applicant. You answered three questions in your own words: what you value most about social media with real human expression, what humanity has lost in the pursuit of convenience, and what you consider timeless. We didn't ask those questions to make you jump through a hoop. We asked them because your answers are, in a real sense, the reason Iris exists, and these Community Guidelines are simply a continuation of that same conversation — now applied to the day-to-day business of posting, commenting, and being present here.

Iris is a closed network for real people. Not a growth engine, not an open platform optimized to onboard as many accounts as possible, and not a place where anonymity is the default. Every person on Iris applied to be here, was read and evaluated by another human being, and was let in on the belief that they would add something real to the community rather than take something from it. That is a different bargain than most of the internet offers, and it comes with different expectations in both directions. We expect a lot from ourselves in building and moderating this space thoughtfully. We expect a lot from you in return.

Three ideas run underneath every rule in this document:

• Real human expression matters, and it deserves a space that isn't drowned out. That's why Iris exists at all, why membership is limited, and why we care so much about who and what is actually behind a post.
• Convenience is not the highest value. An application process, a manual review, a wait with no guaranteed timeline, an authenticator app instead of a text message, a cap of three posts a day — none of these are accidents or oversights. They are deliberate trade-offs of speed and frictionlessness in favor of something we think is worth more.
• Some things are timeless. Honesty about who you are. Respect for the people around you. The difference between expressing yourself and harming someone else. Community Guidelines come and go in their specific wording, but the values behind them are not trends we expect to abandon.

These guidelines describe what we expect of every member, in plain language, so that there is no ambiguity about what "being a good member of Iris" actually means in practice. They apply to everyone, regardless of how long you've been a member, how the algorithm — or in our case, the human reviewer — happened to look upon your application, or how many people follow you. Membership on Iris is a privilege that was extended to you after real scrutiny, not a right, and it can be revoked if you don't hold up your end of the bargain described here.

2. Be who you are

Iris has no handles, no aliases, and no anonymous accounts. When you applied, you gave your real name, and that is the name attached to your profile and everything you post. This is not a stylistic preference — it is close to the whole point of the platform. A "closed network for real people" is a contradiction if the people in it aren't required to actually be themselves.

Concretely, this means:

• Use your real name. Your profile identifies you the same way you'd introduce yourself in person. Stage names, brand names, joke names, and "aesthetic" pseudonyms are not permitted in the name field, even if you also use them elsewhere on the internet.
• Represent yourself accurately. Your username is unique to you, but it is a handle for finding you — not a mask for hiding behind. Your profile role (the one you selected from our list of preset options — Photographer, Writer, Founder, Athlete, and so on) should reflect something genuinely true about who you are, not an aspirational costume.
• Don't impersonate anyone. Creating an account in someone else's name, presenting yourself as a person you are not, or claiming an identity, title, or affiliation that isn't yours is a serious violation. This includes impersonating public figures, other members, or people who don't use Iris at all.
• One person, one account. Iris does not support managed pages, brand accounts, or multiple accounts per person. Every account should correspond to exactly one real, identifiable adult human being.
• No fake or automated accounts. Because every account on Iris passed through a written application and a human review, accounts created to evade that process — through false information, misuse of another person's identity, or any attempt to automate or fabricate an application — undermine the trust the entire community depends on.

We recognize this is a stricter standard than most social platforms hold their users to. That's deliberate. On an open platform, a fake or pseudonymous account is one problem among millions of accounts. On Iris, where the entire premise is that you are talking to and being seen by real, vetted people, even a single fabricated identity undermines the reason members trust this space in the first place. We take authenticity violations seriously, and they are one of the fastest paths to suspension or termination of membership.

3. What you can post

Iris supports three kinds of posts: photos, video, and text notes.

• Photos. Up to 10 photos in a single post, with an optional caption.
• Video. One video per post, up to one minute in length, with an optional caption.
• Notes. A styled, sticky-note-style text post, up to 500 characters. Notes are for the words themselves — thoughts, observations, small essays. Links and URLs are not permitted inside notes; the app blocks them before a note can be submitted, because Iris is meant for expression written in your own voice, not a distribution channel for outside content.

On any photo or video post, you may add up to three "keywords" — words from your own caption or note that you choose to highlight, each in a color you pick. Keywords are a way of drawing attention to the words that matter most in what you wrote, not a tagging or discovery mechanism.

You can post up to three times per day. This is a limit, but we'd ask you to think of it as a feature. Iris was never built to reward whoever posts the most, most often, fastest. A daily cap forces a small amount of intention into what you choose to share — which of today's three photos, or which sentence in your note, actually says something you want the rest of the community to see. Quality over quantity isn't a slogan here; it's built into the product.

Everything you post should be your own, should represent something genuinely true or genuinely yours, and should be something you'd be comfortable being identified with under your real name — because you will be.

4. What's not allowed

The following categories of content and behavior are not permitted on Iris, in posts, captions, notes, comments, direct messages, or your profile. This list is illustrative, not exhaustive — content or behavior that clearly violates the spirit of these guidelines may be actioned even if it isn't named explicitly below.

Hate speech & harassment

We do not allow content that attacks, demeans, or dehumanizes people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender or gender identity, disability, serious disease, or immigration status. This includes slurs, stereotypes intended to degrade, and content that celebrates or promotes hateful ideologies. We also do not allow targeted harassment — repeated unwanted contact, threats, degrading comments directed at a specific person, pile-ons organized against a member, or content designed to shame, intimidate, or scare someone into silence. Iris is a small community; harassment here is not diluted by scale, and we treat it accordingly.

Violence & dangerous content

We do not allow credible threats of violence against any person or group, incitement to violence, glorification of violent acts or the people who commit them, or instructions for carrying out serious harm. Content depicting graphic violence for its own sake, content that promotes self-harm or suicide, and content that promotes dangerous activities or challenges likely to lead to serious injury are not permitted. If you or someone you know is struggling, we would rather you reach out for help than post — and we will always prioritize a member's safety over enforcement.

Nudity & sexual content

Iris is an 18-and-over community, but it is not a platform for pornography or sexually explicit content. We do not allow explicit sexual content, content that sexualizes minors in any form (which is prohibited absolutely, with no exceptions), or non-consensual intimate imagery. Artistic nudity presented in a genuinely artistic or editorial context is treated differently from content whose purpose is sexual gratification, and our human reviewers make that judgment with context in mind rather than through blunt keyword or skin-detection rules.

Spam & inauthentic behavior

Because Iris is built around real people and small, deliberate posting habits, we do not allow spam: repetitive, unsolicited, or automated content; coordinated inauthentic behavior; attempts to artificially inflate likes, comments, follows, or any other engagement signal; or use of the platform to run bulk commercial promotion outside of what's appropriate for an individual member sharing their own work or interests. Since Iris currently has no payments, subscriptions, or purchases built into the app, there is also no legitimate "sponsored content" or in-app commerce mechanism — be wary of anything on the platform that claims otherwise.

Paid promotion isn't allowed either: no sponsored posts, brand deals, or paid partnerships, nothing posted in exchange for money or free products, no affiliate or discount codes, and no sales pitches. That includes your own work — share it here, but sell it somewhere else.

Misinformation

We do not allow content that spreads demonstrably false information likely to cause real-world harm — false claims about public health or safety, manipulated media presented as authentic and used to deceive, or fabricated claims about civic processes such as voting. Good-faith opinion, satire clearly presented as such, and honest disagreement about contested topics are not misinformation, and we are careful not to treat them as such.

Intellectual property violations

Post your own work, or work you have the right to share. Do not upload photos, video, writing, music, or other material that belongs to someone else without their permission, and do not present someone else's work as your own. If you believe your intellectual property has been posted on Iris without authorization, contact us at contact@join-iris.com with enough detail to identify the content and your rights in it.

Illegal activity

We do not allow content that facilitates, promotes, or documents illegal activity, including the sale or facilitation of illegal goods or services, content that facilitates human trafficking or exploitation, and content that otherwise violates applicable law. Membership on Iris does not exempt anyone from the law that applies to them in the real world.

5. AI-generated content

Iris exists because we believe real human expression is worth protecting — and increasingly, that means being honest about the difference between something a person made and something a machine generated. This section explains, in plain terms, how we approach that problem. It is one of the more distinctive parts of how Iris is moderated, and we want you to understand it rather than discover it.

Nothing scans your posts automatically. We don't run an AI check over everything you publish, and your posts aren't sent to an outside AI service unless someone reports them. Checking starts when a member raises a concern.

Members can flag a specific post for a closer look. If you come across a post you suspect is AI-generated, you can report it as AI-generated. That triggers an on-demand analysis — performed by an Anthropic Claude AI model capable of evaluating the actual image, not just accompanying text — and generates a report for a human moderator to review.

A human always makes the call. Whatever the analysis of a reported post says, a person reviews it before anything happens. We do not auto-remove, auto-label, or auto-penalize based on an AI-detection score alone. Detection tools are good at surfacing signal; they are not good at understanding context, intent, or nuance, and we don't ask them to make final calls about another person's expression.

Why we do this at all. A platform built on the premise of real human expression has an obligation to know, as best it reasonably can, whether what's being posted is actually that. We're not interested in an outright ban on every tool or technique that touches AI, and we're not trying to play detective on every member's creative process. What we are trying to do is protect the basic premise that when you scroll Iris, you're looking at things real people actually made, wrote, and felt — not synthetic content passed off as someone's authentic voice. If a post is found, after human review, to be misrepresented as authentic human expression when it was substantially AI-generated, that is treated as an authenticity violation under these guidelines, with consequences up to and including content removal or account action as described in Section 6.

6. Reporting & how enforcement works

Iris is curated on the way in, through applications and human review, but it also depends on active care from members once they're in. If you see something that violates these guidelines, please report it.

How to report. You can report an individual post directly, choosing the reason that best fits: spam, harassment, inappropriate content, AI-generated content (as described in Section 5), or something else. You can also send free-form feedback to our team at any time, described further in Section 8.

What happens after you report. Every report — whatever the reason — is reviewed by a human moderator. We do not take enforcement action based purely on an automated signal, a report count, or an algorithmic score. A person looks at the content, the context, and the report itself before any decision is made. There is no guaranteed timeline for that review, in the same way there was no guaranteed timeline for your original application — we would rather get it right than get it fast.

If we remove your content. We will tell you privately in the app, with the reason, and by push notification if you have notifications turned on. You can dispute a removal once, and a person will review it.

What enforcement can look like. Depending on the severity and context of a violation, consequences may include:

• Removal of the specific content in violation;
• A warning to the member responsible;
• Temporary suspension of an account; or
• Permanent termination of membership.

These consequences are applied at Iris's discretion, based on the nature of the violation, whether it's a first occurrence or a pattern, and the harm involved. A single serious violation — impersonation, exploitation of a minor, credible threats of violence — can result in immediate permanent termination without warning. Lesser or first-time violations more often result in content removal or a warning.

Membership is a privilege, not a right. You were let onto Iris after a written application and a human decision to say yes. That same standard applies on an ongoing basis: continued membership assumes continued good faith participation in the community described by these guidelines. Repeated violations, even relatively minor ones, or a pattern of behavior inconsistent with the values described in Section 1, can result in your membership being revoked — independent of any single reportable incident. We do not owe an explanation for every enforcement decision, in the same way a rejected applicant is not automatically told why their application didn't succeed, though we will generally tell a member what rule their content or behavior was found to violate when we take action.

7. Blocking & your control over your experience

You can block another member from your account. Blocking limits that person's ability to interact with you — for example, seeing your posts, contacting you, or engaging with your content — and is a tool you can use whenever you feel it's necessary, without needing to explain yourself to us or to them.

Here is where blocking stands today. When you block a member, your posts are hidden from each other, you no longer appear in each other's search results, and new messages between you are prevented. Blocking does not yet hide comments, hide profiles reached from comments or follower lists, or remove existing follows. If you notice a gap — a place where a block doesn't seem to be respected — please tell us through the feedback channel described in Section 8, or by reporting the specific interaction. We take those reports seriously and are actively working to close any such gaps as we find them.

Blocking is separate from, and does not require, reporting someone for a guideline violation — you're free to do either, both, or neither, depending on what you need.

8. Feedback

Iris is a small, deliberately built community, and we'd rather hear from you directly than guess at what's working and what isn't. You can send free-form feedback straight to our team at any time — bug reports, feature suggestions, or anything else on your mind about the app or your experience on it. We read it. We may not act on every piece of feedback, and we won't always be able to respond individually, but member feedback has a real, direct line to the people building Iris, and we intend to keep it that way as the community grows.

9. Changes to these guidelines

We may update these Community Guidelines from time to time — to clarify existing rules, address new situations, or reflect changes to the app itself, such as new content types or moderation tools. When we make a material change, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this document, and we will make reasonable efforts to let members know through the app. Continued use of Iris after a change to these guidelines takes effect means you accept the updated guidelines. If you disagree with a change, you're always free to stop using Iris; because Iris has no payments, subscriptions, or purchases, there is nothing to cancel beyond your account itself.

If you have questions about these guidelines, you can reach us at contact@join-iris.com.