Terms of use

Last reviewed: 9 August 2026

What this is

insomne.es is a site with a few small things for people who can’t sleep. It’s offered by an individual, not a company. Their identifying details aren’t published here — they belong to a person and their home address — but they are available to the Spanish Data Protection Agency, to the courts, to law enforcement and to any other competent authority, and are handed over to anyone who needs them in order to bring a claim. Ask for them at mantente@insomne.es, which is also the address for anything else.

The Lantern puts two awake people from the same city in touch for fifteen minutes. The Lighthouse lights, every night, the text of one single person, drawn by lot from whoever signed up that day. The Bridge raises a bridge between everybody each day: one brick per person, with an inscription, and we’ll see whether it closes before midnight. There is one lighthouse and one bridge per time zone: the one where you are, with the people awake at your own hour. The Globe shows the whole planet with its night side facing you, and what the world is asking itself that day. The Postcard lets you leave one image a day from where you are: every city has the same twenty spots, they fill in order of arrival, and at midnight in each city its own are deleted.

Who can come in

• You can come in from anywhere. Everyone has their own night: the lighthouse lights, the street opens and the bridge starts and ends at the hour of the place where you are, not at ours. If that hour isn’t yours, you can change it by hand in the corner.
• You have to be at least fourteen, and if the age of consent where you are is higher, that’s the one that applies. It’s explained in the privacy page.
• There’s no signing up for The Lantern, The Globe or The Postcard. For The Lighthouse an email address of your own is enough.

What can be written, and what can’t

In The Lighthouse and The Bridge, before anything is published, every text goes through an automatic filter. What is rejected is anything that urges, proposes, celebrates or glorifies:

• violence or threats against people or animals;
• suicide or self-harm: methods, encouragement, instructions, or presenting it as a way out;
• explicit sexual content, and any sexualisation of minors;
• taking, selling or making drugs;
• hatred or contempt towards a group for its race, origin, religion, sex, orientation, identity or disability;
• harassment, humiliation or singling out a particular person;
• illegal activities or instructions for carrying them out.

Advertising, spam, promotional links and other people’s personal details are also rejected: full names, addresses, phone numbers, emails or accounts. In The Bridge that weighs more than anywhere else, because an inscription stays in plain view of everybody for a whole day.

Feeling bad is not grounds for rejection. Sadness, loneliness, fear, heartbreak, grief and rage all get published. Saying you feel bad gets published; explaining how to hurt yourself doesn’t.

That filter is artificial intelligence

You ought to know, so it’s written here: the check is done by an artificial intelligence system, not by a person. It’s used where there’s text that other people are going to read — what is written in The Lighthouse and what is carved into a brick in The Bridge — and for one thing only: deciding whether it breaks the rules above. It isn’t used for anything else: not to choose whose turn it is to write, not to order the queue, not to decide where your brick lands, and not to look at what’s said in The Lantern.

Your email isn’t attached to the text, nor is anything that identifies you: the system only sees what was written. It decides nothing about you as a person and produces no legal effect; the only thing it decides is whether that particular text lights that night. If it rejects something and you think it got it wrong, write to mantente@insomne.es and a person will look at it.

The filter is automatic and gets it wrong in both directions. There is also a button for putting out by hand a message that shouldn’t be lit, and it’s used if needed. In The Lantern there is no filter: what’s said there is read by nobody but the other person, and it disappears when the light goes out.

What can be uploaded to The Postcard, and what can’t

Everything above applies to an image too, and there are three more things that only make sense here.

The photo has to be yours and from today. Yours means taken by you: not somebody else’s, not one you found, not one anybody holds rights over. And from today because this is what you are looking at right now, not an album — which is why the camera opens rather than the gallery, and why the time the photo carries inside is checked.

Don’t upload anybody who doesn’t know about it. A recognisable person who hasn’t said yes shouldn’t be there, and least of all a minor. Nor an identity document, a card, a number plate or any paper with somebody’s details on it: what gets uploaded is seen by everybody that day.

Any image with sexual content involving minors or sexualising them, explicit sex, real and explicit violence, or documents with readable personal details is removed without further notice. The first of those is also reported to whoever it should be reported to.

Here the review comes when somebody flags it

This is worth saying plainly because it works the other way round from the rest of the house: images are not reviewed when they are uploaded. Every postcard carries a button — “this shouldn’t be here” — that does two things: it hides it from your view immediately, which happens entirely in your browser, and it flags it for review. Only then does an artificial intelligence system look at it, and if it agrees, the postcard is removed for everybody.

This is a decision taken knowingly and it has a cost you should know about: something that shouldn’t be there may be there for a while before anybody flags it. If you come across anything like that, the button is on the postcard itself, and you can also write to mantente@insomne.es.

A removed image cannot be uploaded again: a fingerprint of it is kept — not the photo, and nothing that could rebuild it — and that is enough to recognise it even if it is recompressed or resized.

Who owns what you write

You do. No ownership over it is claimed. By writing in The Lighthouse you only authorise showing it that night on the page, anonymously, and keeping its last line one more day; by laying a brick in The Bridge, showing it that day and the next, also anonymously; by leaving a postcard, showing it on the map that day, anonymously too, and keeping a fingerprint of it afterwards that cannot rebuild it and only serves to recognise it if it was removed. None of it is passed on to anybody, used to train anything, or published anywhere else.

What’s expected of you

• Don’t use this to harass, threaten, defraud or impersonate anybody.
• Don’t give somebody else’s email address.
• Don’t try to bring the service down or force your way past the limits.
• Don’t automate access in order to hoard turns.

If any of that happens, access can be cut off without prior notice and without further explanation.

What isn’t promised

That it will be available. It can fall over or be shut down any night. It’s offered as is, and no liability is accepted for damages arising from it not working one day, or from what somebody else writes.

Nor is any liability accepted for what is said in a conversation in The Lantern: it isn’t read, isn’t recorded and can’t be recovered. If somebody treats you badly there, close it and come back another night.

This is not professional help

insomne is not a health service or a crisis line, and whoever is on the other side of the lantern is an ordinary person, not a professional. If you’re going through a really bad moment, look for your country’s crisis line: almost every country has one, free and at any hour. In Spain it’s 024, and in an emergency 112; across the European Union 112 works the same. Outside it, the emergency number where you are.

If this changes

The date at the top changes. Carrying on using it afterwards means accepting it. If one day it closes, whoever is signed up to The Lighthouse will be told by email, and their addresses will be deleted.

Law and jurisdiction

Spanish law applies. If you are a consumer, the courts of your own place of residence have jurisdiction: there is no clause here taking that away from you, and it wouldn’t have been valid if there were. For everything else, whichever courts the law says.

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