For instance administrators

DouceBot

If you found this address in your logs, this is the whole story. douce scroll is a language-learning feed: it reads public posts in French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, pulls out the words and expressions worth learning, and shows a learner the post together with a link back to the original.

The user-agent

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DouceBot/1.0; +https://douce.social/bot)

The Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; …) prefix is not an attempt to look like a browser. Several instances reject bare bot user-agents outright, and we would rather be identifiable inside a conventional string than anonymous outside one.

What it requests

Public, unauthenticated read endpoints only. We hold no accounts, no tokens and no API keys on any instance, and we never request anything that needs a login.

Mastodon — /api/v1/trends/statuses, /api/v1/trends/tags, /api/v1/timelines/tag/<tag>, and /api/v1/timelines/public?local=true as a fallback when an instance has trends switched off.
Lemmy — /api/v3/post/list and /api/v3/community/list.

How often

A scheduled run a few times a day, per language. Each run asks a given instance for at most 40 posts and keeps at most 30. Every request carries a hard timeout, so a slow instance is dropped rather than held open. There is no crawling: we do not follow links out of a post, and we never walk an instance's archive.

What we skip

Anything marked sensitive, or carrying a content warning.
Communities flagged NSFW.
Boosts and reblogs — we only look at original posts.
Posts whose declared language is not the language a learner is studying.

What we keep, and for how long

A cached post — its text, the author's display name and handle, the avatar, the link back, and the public favourite or score count — is stored for a maximum of ten days and then deleted automatically. It is shown in the app as a post, attributed, with a button that opens the original on your instance.

The individual words and expressions our system extracts outlive that window as ordinary vocabulary cards. Those cards carry the word, its meaning and its grammatical detail — not the post's text, not the author's handle, and not a link to the account it came from.

Deletions

The ten-day ceiling is deliberately short so that a deleted or edited post cannot linger for long. If you need something removed sooner than that — a specific post, an account, or your whole instance — write to report@douce.live and we will do it by hand.

Opting your instance out

Send one email to report@douce.live from an address on the instance, or from the admin contact it publishes, and say which domain to exclude. No form, no account, no justification needed. We will confirm when it is done and we will not ask you to reconsider.

Blocking the user-agent at your edge also works and we will not route around it.

The AI part, stated plainly

Extraction is done by a large language model, which reads the post and returns the vocabulary in it. The model is not used to rewrite posts, generate replies, or produce anything that is published back to the fediverse. Cards built this way are labelled as AI-assisted inside the app — see the AI transparency statement.

Posting

At the time of writing, douce scroll does not post to the fediverse at all. If that changes it will be because a learner explicitly asked for a sentence to be shared for correction, from their own account on their own instance, one tap at a time. We will not post on anyone's behalf automatically, and this page will say so before we do anything of the sort.

Who we are

An independent, one-person project in Stuttgart, Germany. Full details in the imprint (Impressum). General mail: hallo@douce.live. Security reports: security@douce.live.