How it works
An event on Ephemeria has three moments: before, during, and 11:00 once it is over. Here is what happens at each step, and why.
Signing up
Ephemeria is for students aged 18 and over. You sign up with your university email address, which tells us your school. To get in:
- you create your profile: first name, last name, programme, level of study, expected graduation year, interests;
- you give your date of birth;
- you accept the community guidelines;
- you confirm your address with an 8-digit code sent by email. No password.
Everything you see belongs to your university. Students from other universities can’t see you: the database enforces it, it isn’t just hidden on screen.
Before the event
Your school’s associations and clubs post their events: parties, tournaments, talks, matches, trips, weekends away. You can answer “Going”, publicly or privately, and book your place.
Tickets
- One named ticket per student per event, with its QR code, in the app.
- For a paid event: pay by card, or with Apple Pay where your device supports it, on Stripe’s secure page. Your place is held for 30 minutes while you pay, and your ticket arrives as soon as the payment is confirmed.
- The organising association is the seller. Ephemeria takes no commission and adds no fees.
- If a payment goes through but no ticket can be issued, for example because the event is full, you are refunded in full, automatically.
- Charged twice by mistake? The duplicate payment is refunded automatically, and your ticket stays valid.
Transferring a ticket
Can’t make it? You can transfer your ticket for free to a verified student on your campus who doesn’t have a ticket for that event yet, until it starts. The old QR code is cancelled at once. Resale is not allowed. If the event is refunded later, the money goes back to the card that paid.
Refunds
The association issues refunds, always in full and to the card that paid: if the event is cancelled, or if it decides to. Its contact details are on your ticket.
During the event
For each event, the organiser chooses how attendance is confirmed. Both ways are valid, but they don’t say the same thing, and Ephemeria never mixes them up.
| Mode | What you do | What is recorded |
|---|---|---|
| Ticket scan | You show your ticket at the door. The organiser, or a co-organiser added for that event, scans it. | The scan, the server time and the account that scanned. A ticket only goes through once. |
| Self-confirmation | You confirm yourself that you were there, from the start of the event until 24 hours after it ends. | Your declaration and its time. It is never recorded as a scan. |
Buying a ticket or taking a photo is not enough to confirm you were there. Ephemeria doesn’t use your location for this.
The Minute
At events marked “free entry”, the Minute is armed automatically. At an unpredictable minute, your phone buzzes once: you have 90 seconds to take a photo with the app’s camera, never from your gallery. The photo goes straight into the Nebula, invisible to everyone, you included, until 11:00.
One invitation per person per event, no reminder, no participation counter. Missing it costs nothing and doesn’t change your attendance. The app asks for permission to send notifications when it is actually useful, never on first launch.
At 11:00, once the event is over
11:00 is the only fixed hour in Ephemeria, and it means “permanent”: the event’s photos are published together, and constellation names are sealed.
The Nebula
- A timeline at the scale of real minutes: forty minutes without a photo stay forty quiet minutes.
- The arc is a scrubber. Drag it and the event scrolls; scroll the event and the cursor walks along the arc. Your scan is marked at its real minute.
- Always in chronological order: no sorting, no counters, no reactions, no face recognition.
- After the event, the app finds the photos taken on your phone during the event. This sorting happens on your device: nothing is sent until you tap “send”, and you can leave some out.
- Only people allowed to open the album can see it, and every photo carries its author’s name.
Your image is yours
Spot yourself in a photo? In the album, the “this is me, hide it” gesture hides it immediately on your phone and blocks it from being shown while we review the request. We can’t erase an image another device has already displayed or copied.
No access to the album? Email privacy@ephemeria.app with the event and the date: we review the request within 72 hours, without showing you other photos or the list of attendees. Details in the privacy policy.
Your Sky and the Class Sky
Every event where your attendance is confirmed becomes a star in your Sky, placed by the hour and the season you lived it. The same season comes back to the same place every year: your sky fills in, year after year.
- Link memories into a constellation and give it a name, sealed at 11:00 the next morning. An event belongs to one constellation only.
- A constellation is visible only to people who were at one or more of its events, with its author’s name. No likes, no counters, no replies.
- One notification only: when someone names a constellation that includes an event you were at.
- No totals, no percentages, no comparison. Nobody can tell whose sky is fuller.
The Class Sky
Every star also drops an anonymous copy into a sky shared by your class, on your campus. Two hundred people at the same event make one patch of light, bright because there were many of them, without anyone being identified. It is anonymous by design: nobody can find themselves in it, or find anyone else.
The real sky
Ephemeria has one shape: the arc, which stands for a span of time. It isn’t drawn by hand; it is computed from where your campus is.
- Its depth is the real length of the night. Near Paris, it goes from 8 h 00 min of darkness on 21 June to 15 h 59 min on 21 December: a winter night draws much deeper than a summer one.
- Its apex is solar midnight, not midnight on the clock: around 01:53 in June near Paris, because France lives two time zones east of its sun in summer.
- Its light follows the density of photos: the arc brightens where the event was most alive.
- The stars in your Sky follow sidereal time: the same season brings them back to the same place.
Your data, your settings
- Download a copy of your data at any time: Settings → Your data → Download my data.
- Delete your account in the app, or from this page if you no longer have the app.
- A Report button on every piece of content, blocking on every profile.
- Notifications only for the Minute, the single constellation notification and the event reminders you set.
- Ten colour themes, and the app in French, English and Spanish.
One usage measure only: one line per day you open the app. Nothing else is measured. It is all explained in the privacy policy.