This week a US governor reportedly pushed X to suspend a political party's account. Anyone who writes online wants to know where the line is, and who draws it. Serey has put its line in writing: legal opinions are welcome, while violence, threats and illegal content are not. Here are the rules, how they work, and what you get on Serey that Big Tech does not give you.
Why this matters
Accounts disappear from big platforms more and more often. Users are frequently not told which rule they broke. Sometimes a government leans on a company, and then nobody knows who really drew the line.
Serey takes a different approach. Its Platform Guidelines say creators should not lose their work because "a company changed its mind, a government applied pressure, or an algorithm decided something was inconvenient." That does not mean anything goes.
Two layers of rules
The first layer is the Serey Rule of Law. It applies to everyone, "anonymous or not, on every platform, without exception." The list is deliberately short and rules out only what is "genuinely immoral and harms real people."
The second layer is platform rules. Anyone who builds a platform on Serey can add stricter rules on top. In the guidelines' words, an owner "cannot permit what we prohibit, but they can prohibit what we permit."
Owners must also display their rules clearly. That way every writer knows in advance what applies where they publish.
A short list of hard limits
The banned list is short. Urging or planning violence and "credible threats against a specific person or group" are out. So are child sexual abuse material, trafficking, fraud, hacking and doxxing private people.
Writing about violence, crime, drugs or weapons is allowed. As the guidelines put it, "The difference is between explaining and enabling." Journalism is protected too: naming officials, executives and public figures and publishing records is explicitly permitted, "including where the subject would prefer they were not."
Just as important is what Serey says it will not remove. That includes content that is unpopular or offensive, content that criticizes a government, a company or Serey itself, and serious allegations the subject objects to. Serey says it does not decide what is true and leaves defamation to the courts.
What writers lose when rules shift case by case
Locked out: losing an account can mean losing years of work. Photo: succo / Pixabay
A writer removed from a big platform loses more than an account. Readers, years of work and the link to followers can vanish overnight, often without a clear explanation of which rule was broken.
When the line keeps moving, writers get careful. They drop the sharp sentence and skip the risky topic, and the debate shrinks. It gets worse when government leans in. An official calls and a company acts. Formally nothing was banned, but in practice the state chose who may speak, in a place with no judge and no appeal.
The First Amendment already marks the line. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), speech loses protection only when aimed at inciting imminent lawless action and likely to produce it. Real threats are already illegal, with no governor's call needed, and a line that bends to today's politics can reach you tomorrow.
The alternative: write it down, apply it evenly
The answer is clarity. Rules should be written in advance and applied equally. A user should learn what was removed and why, and be able to appeal to a human.
Serey's guidelines promise exactly that. You are told what was removed and why, unless that would interfere with a legal investigation. You can appeal within 30 days, and "a person will review it, not an automated system."
Serey says it does not act on demands from governments that lack jurisdiction over it, and plans a transparency report on removals and legal demands. Whether that holds up remains to be seen. But it is in writing, so every decision can be checked against it.
What Serey gives you that Big Tech doesn't
On Serey, what you write stays yours. Photo: William Fortunato / Pexels
Rules are only half the story. The other half is who owns your work and your income. These are the concrete differences, all taken from Serey's own FAQ and guidelines.
You own your work and can leave with it. Serey says your content, audience and platform belong to you. You can export your content and subscriber list at any time. If a platform owner removes your post, it is still yours to publish elsewhere on Serey.
Proof you published it. Every post is recorded on the Serey blockchain with a fingerprint of the content, a timestamp and your account name. If someone copies your work, that record helps prove you were first.
No single off switch. Standard posts are stored on the Sia network, encrypted and split across thirty independent storage providers, any ten of which can rebuild the file. An optional "Publish forever" setting stores a post on Arweave, where nobody, not even Serey, can remove it.
Money, privacy and control
You keep what readers pay you. Serey currently takes no commission on paid subscriptions, apart from payment provider fees, while it notes Substack takes 10%. Card payments go straight to your own Stripe account, and Serey does not hold your earnings. You can also earn from tips, a shop and sponsorships.
Anonymity is allowed. You can sign up without an email address, phone number or real name, and pay with privacy coins such as Monero. Pen names are explicitly not impersonation.
No tracking. Serey says it never sells personal data and uses no cookies for analytics, advertising or tracking. Ads on a platform may not track readers without consent.
Your own rules and your own brand. You can run your own platform under your own domain, with a blog, shop, video, podcast and community in one place, and set its rules within the Rule of Law.
The bottom line
None of this makes Serey flawless, and some promises, like the transparency report, still have to prove themselves. But every decision can be laid next to written rules, and your work and income stay in your hands.
The question is not whether a platform may set limits. It is who sets them, and whether you can read them in advance. A line that shifts with every case protects no one; a line on paper protects everyone.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects free speech from the government, not from private companies, so a site like X may suspend accounts under its own rules.
But in 2024 the US Supreme Court said in the case NRA v. Vullo that a government official may not pressure a private company into punishing someone for their speech.
The First Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights, which became law in 1791, and the original document is on display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Bill of Rights at the National Archives by Runner1928, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons