Terms & Policies

Last updated: May 24, 2026

By using Poke, or by creating and utilizing a Poke account, you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service. Poke is a free software, community-driven project and is provided entirely "as is" and "as available", without any warranties of any kind, whether express or implied.

You agree to use Poke responsibly. You strictly may not use our service, software, accounts, APIs, proxy systems, or infrastructure to conduct DDoS attacks, distribute spam, exploit system vulnerabilities, evade rate limits, overload our servers, or engage in any other malicious activity that degrades the platform for others.

Scraping, mass downloading, automated harvesting, bulk extraction, or abusive automated access to Poke data, pages, endpoints, feeds, media proxy routes, metadata, comments, search results, or other service output is strictly prohibited. If we detect scraping or abusive automation, we may block, rate-limit, firewall, suspend, or otherwise restrict access to protect our servers, users, contributors, and community infrastructure.

You may not use Poke to bypass laws, evade legal restrictions, access or distribute illegal content, facilitate unlawful activity, or do anything illegal. This includes, but is not limited to, using Poke in connection with child sexual abuse material, exploitative content, terrorist or extremist material, harassment, stalking, threats, fraud, malware, copyright infringement, privacy violations, or any other unlawful conduct.

Poke is fully committed to user freedom. Our software is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) or any later version, guaranteeing your right to freely use, study, modify, and distribute the code.

Your use of the platform and your Poke account are also subject to our Code of Conduct and Privacy Policy. Maintaining a safe, inclusive, and privacy-respecting environment requires strict adherence to these community guidelines.

These Terms of Service and any disputes relating to Poke, its services, infrastructure, accounts, policies, or community systems are governed by the laws of Germany, except where another law is mandatorily required by applicable local consumer protection rules.

We do not guarantee that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, and we offer zero liability to our users. The project maintainers, contributors, and instance operators accept no liability for any losses, data corruption, legal consequences, access restrictions, blocks, or damages that may arise from your use or misuse of Poke.

Last updated: April 28, 2026

Poke operates strictly as a privacy-respecting frontend for YouTube. We do not host, store, alter, or upload any video content on our own infrastructure. Every piece of media viewed through Poke originates and streams directly from YouTube’s official servers.

If you believe that your copyrighted material is being improperly displayed, please first verify if the content exists on YouTube directly. Because Poke simply proxies public data, the most effective and correct channel for resolution is submitting a claim via YouTube’s official DMCA takedown form. Once removed from YouTube, the content will instantly disappear from Poke.

Our network and platform qualify as a transient intermediary under 17 U.S.C. § 512 (a), serving solely to transmit publicly accessible information without modification. Directing a DMCA takedown at Poke for video content is legally ineffective because we do not have control over the originating media files.

In the unlikely event that our systems are erroneously scraping, mislinking, or caching material outside the scope of standard YouTube proxying, you can open an issue on our tracker at https://codeberg.org/ashleyirispuppy/poke/issues. Please provide clear documentation, including links to the Poke instance and the original source file.

Privacy of Submitted Reports

Any personal identifying information you share while filing a report will be used exclusively for evaluating and addressing your claim. This information will not be exposed to the public, sold, or aggregated.

Because Poke operates without centralized user accounts, your submitted issue details will be processed manually by our maintainers and permanently expunged from our direct communications once the matter is fully resolved. We strongly encourage keeping submitted personal details to a necessary minimum.

Last updated: April 28, 2026

Poke serves as a secure, privacy-focused gateway to YouTube, granting users a streamlined interface to public content. Our goal is to enable individuals to browse videos, read descriptions, and discover creators without facing invasive telemetry, user profiling, or aggressive advertising.

We retrieve all necessary video streams, thumbnails, and descriptive metadata via YouTube’s public-facing endpoints utilizing community-maintained, reverse-engineered protocols. Poke does not integrate the official YouTube Data API v3 and is not bound by Google’s standard developer API Terms of Service.

Under United States copyright framework, specifically 17 U.S.C. § 512 (a), our platform operates safely as a conduit that transmits unaltered material through a network. In the European Union, Poke’s functionality is safeguarded by Directive 2001/29/EC, covering transient and incidental acts of reproduction integral to a technological process.

Poke is an entirely lawful project. We do not engage in piracy, rehosting, or the distribution of protected works. We simply provide a custom, user-centric viewing layer for data that Google has already made publicly accessible to the open web.

Last updated: April 28, 2026

The Poke Project expressly forbids the mass scraping, downloading, or utilization of our frontend interfaces, data feeds, media streams, and community content for the purpose of training, fine-tuning, or populating artificial intelligence or machine learning models.

Because Poke acts as a proxy, the underlying video material, metadata, and user comments are copyrighted works belonging to their respective creators. Processing this data through Poke's infrastructure to construct AI datasets constitutes unauthorized exploitation of creator rights and abuses our server resources.

Any automated agents, organizations, or individuals detected aggregating Poke's output for LLM or generative AI training will face immediate network-level blocking and potential reporting. We build privacy tools for humans, not datasets for bots.

Last updated: April 28, 2026

We want the Poke codebase to remain highly maintainable, welcoming to newcomers, and heavily standardized. If you plan to contribute, please adhere to these core formatting guidelines:

• Indentation: Strictly use two spaces. Never use tabs.
• Line Length: Strive to keep lines under 100 characters to ensure readability on split screens and smaller monitors.
• Naming Conventions: Use incredibly clear and descriptive variable names. Avoid single-letter variables except in basic loops (like `i` or `j`).
• Code Comments: Document the why and how of complex logic, not the obvious what. Code should be self-documenting where possible.
• Licensing: Never import dependencies or copy snippets that conflict with the GNU GPLv3 license. Your contributions must remain free and open.

Following these simple rules helps us review your pull requests much faster and keeps the project technically sound.

Last updated: April 28, 2026

Poke is built and maintained by a small team of passionate volunteers. While we strive to provide a seamless, bug-free, and highly secure application, the software is ultimately offered entirely “as is.” We cannot promise 100% uptime, instant bug fixes, or flawless functionality at all times.

We design and test Poke primarily using Mozilla Firefox and standard WebKit environments. While we make every effort to ensure cross-browser compatibility, edge cases and rendering bugs may occur on certain Chromium-based setups or niche mobile browsers.

By using Poke, you acknowledge that the project’s maintainers, authors, and server hosts bear zero liability for any data loss, service interruptions, or inconveniences resulting from the use of our software or APIs.

Last updated: April 28, 2026

To promote a healthy digital environment, Poke ships with an optional, built-in transparency filter. This system identifies videos originating from widely documented purveyors of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and state-sponsored propaganda (such as InfoWars, RT, OANN, etc.).

When encountering such content, the interface will display a clear warning banner. This banner serves solely as educational context, drawing from public fact-checking databases, urging users to think critically about the source.

We do not censor, block, or delete this content. You retain complete freedom to bypass the warning and view the video in full. The Poke Project believes in equipping users with knowledge rather than outright restricting their viewing choices.