What the town keeps
Everything indie.town records about you, why it records it, and how long it is kept. It is a short list, and this page is all of it.
Who is keeping it
Semih Özsoy, an independent developer in Türkiye, reachable at support@indie.town. There is no company behind that, no team and no department: one person, one server, and one directory on it holding everything written here.
Your email address
Asked for only if you want to hold a plot, and kept for one reason — a plot has to be editable by whoever took it and by nobody else. Wandering around, talking and looking at what other people have built never asks for it.
What is stored is the address itself, folded to lower case, and two dates: when you first signed in and when you were last seen. There is no password, because there is nothing here worth stealing one for — signing in is a link sent to the address, good once and for an hour.
The address is never in what this site serves. The only thing the page is ever told about the person asking is which plot numbers are theirs to edit. The sign-in form will not say whether an address is one the town has seen before either — otherwise it would be a way to ask, one address at a time, who has an account here.
It is not sold, not shared, and not used for anything else. There is no newsletter to be added to.
What you put on your building
Your project name, tagline, brand colour, logo and links are public by design — they are painted three storeys high on a building everybody walks past, which is the thing a plot is bought for. Nothing should go on a building that you would not put on a billboard, because that is what it is.
The visitor book
Every visit is written down, and the honest version of what that means is below. It exists to answer two questions — whether anybody finds the town, and whether the people who find it walk around in it — and a town nobody explores is a different problem from one nobody finds.
None of it is served over HTTP. The site has one endpoint for this, it answers with two numbers — how many people are online and how many have ever visited — and everything else goes into a file on the server that is read from a terminal.
Your address, which is not kept
Your IP address is turned into a salted SHA-256 hash, shortened, and only the hash is written down. The salt is generated on the server and never leaves it; without it, hashing an address is decoration, because there are only four billion of them and anybody holding the hashes could walk the whole space in minutes.
What the machine is
Browser and version, operating system, languages, time zone, screen and window size, pixel ratio, colour depth, processor cores, device memory, touch points, whether you prefer light or dark, whether you have asked for less motion, network type and speed, graphics card, the page that linked you here, and the query string you arrived with.
Every one of those is readable from an ordinary page load without asking permission. That is the line, and it is not a loophole: nothing the browser puts behind a prompt is touched at all — no location, no camera, no microphone, no clipboard, no notifications.
What you did
How long you stayed, roughly how many frames a second you got, and counts of whether you walked, zoomed, said something, got as far as a plot, opened the build form or built. Counts rather than a log: the question is whether people do those things at all, and a count cannot quietly become a trail of somebody moving around a town.
The visitor book holds no email address and nothing that names you. It is not joined to the record of who owns a plot, and neither one points at the other.
What you say in the town
Chat is kept. The message, the name you said it under, when you said it, and — unlike anything else on this page — the full address it came from, not a hash of it. It is there for one reason: so that something said in the town can be answered for, and a hash cannot answer for anything.
It is kept for 90 days and then deleted. It is never shown to anybody through this site, it is not joined to your email address or to who owns a plot, and it is read only from the server itself. Your name in the town is whatever you set it to, and nothing checks that it is yours.
Following a link off a building
A plot is bought to be clicked, so the clicks are counted and the count is shown on the building — that is the only number telling an owner whether their money did anything. What is written down is the plot, the moment, and the browser id from the table below; the same browser following the same plot again inside an hour is not counted twice, which is the only reason that id is kept at all.
No address, nothing that names you, and nothing about where the click went afterwards. It is not joined to the visitor book, to your email address or to what you say in the town.
What is kept in your browser
| Name | Where | What for | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| indie.town/visitor/v1 | Local storage | Tells a returning visitor from a new one | Until cleared |
| indie.town/profile/v1 | Local storage | The name the town calls you | Until cleared |
| indietown.welcome.seen | Local storage | Whether the welcome card has been dismissed | Until cleared |
| indie_town_sitting | Cookie | Being signed in, so a plot knows its owner | 60 days |
That is the whole list. There is no analytics script, no advertising network, no tracking pixel and no third-party cookie of any kind. Even the typefaces are served from this server rather than fetched from somebody else, so loading the page tells nobody but this server that you loaded it.
Who else sees any of it
- Resend carries the sign-in letter, so it necessarily sees the address the letter is addressed to.
- Creem takes payments as merchant of record. What you type at their checkout is theirs and never reaches this server, which has never seen a card number and has nowhere to put one.
- Whoever hosts the machine the server runs on, in the ordinary sense that a server runs on somebody else’s hardware.
Nobody else, and nothing is sold to anybody. There is no arrangement here that a longer sentence would be hiding.
How long things stay
- Sign-in links stop working after an hour and are deleted after a day.
- Being signed in lasts 60 days from the last time you used it, then the record is swept.
- Your address and your plot stay for as long as you hold the plot. Ask, and both go.
- Chat is deleted after 90 days, with the address it was said from. It is the one thing here kept against a full address, and the one thing with a hard expiry.
- The visitor book is kept, because it is the only record of whether any of this works. It contains no address and nothing that names anybody.
Asking for a copy, or for it to go
Write to support@indie.town and ask for either. A copy is everything held against your address; deletion is that record removed, which takes the plot with it — the building comes down and the plot goes back on the market, so it is worth being sure.
If you are in Türkiye those rights are yours under the KVKK, and in the EU or the UK under the GDPR. This paragraph is how to use them; there is no form and no portal, because a person answers the address above.
Children
The town is not built or advertised for children under 13, and nothing is knowingly kept about one. If something has been, write and it will be removed.
If this page changes
The date at the foot of it changes with it. If what is collected ever changes in a way that matters, it will be said plainly here rather than absorbed into a longer sentence somewhere in the middle. What a plot costs is on the pricing page, and what it is sold under is in the terms.