As soon as easy hosting options are available again, we'll move to a self-hosted instance. Unfortunately, qoto is one of the few scholarly instances that allow academic societies, but has a policy towards "free speech" we do not share.
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@ypc_bunsen What policy of free speech are you talking about? Our ToC is here, it doesnt say anything about free speech.
We have very specific rules, and that includes this part of our ToC:
… hate-based speech such as sexist, racist, or homophobic speech will not be tolerated, be kind to each other.
QOTO aims to provide a community where our users do not fear being punished for their personal opinions. We do not allow people to disseminate ideologies that are abusive or violent towards others. Demonstrating support for or defending ideologies known to be violent or hateful is a bannable offense. This includes, but is not limited to: racial supremacy, anti-LGBTQ or anti-cis-gender/anti-straight, pro-genocide, child abuse or child pornography, etc. While we recognize questions and conversation regarding these topics are essential for a STEM community, in general, doing so in bad faith will result in immediate expulsion.
@freemo still, qoto is blocked by multiple other instances, so we'll have to move eventually anyway.
@ypc_bunsen
Are you sure you are going to improve your situation by moving?
This is just an unfortunate property of fediverse. Either you are on an instance which is blocking other instances, so you don't see their content, or you are on one of blocked ones, so you can see others' stuff but cannot interact - most of the time a mixture of the two. I find it really unfortunate and tried to sort it our for myself, but finally dropped the issue. Apart from running your own instance, I wonder is there even an open instance of any significance/history which allows its users to see everything and be heard everywhere?
@FailForward @ypc_bunsen @freemo I did consider moving or having an alt but I’m not sure I really want to interact people who already blocked me transitively by blocking QOTO. All because they didn’t like the personality of an admin or one outreach attempt(in the most recent round of blocking).
I am missing out on other’s voices that aren’t involved in the blocking but at the same time for me the decision is to stay. I get that some people when they say free speech mean hate speech, and I have blocked those people. But I also don’t agree with people on the other side of the spectrum that block entire swathes of people for the reason they don’t like an opinion or a style of communicating.
@derickflorian
On a personal note, there have always been a handful of super radicalized servers on both sides that have large block lists... that describes anyone who blocks us... they are almost entierly toxic and looking for a fight. The types of servers that block us are the kind that it is a GOOD thing because otherwise it just welcomes abuse.
Any server you move to will eventually be blocked by these same servers. If you manage not to get pblocked you will at the very least be walled in with them and not see any of the bulk of the Fediverse by that point.
@FailForward @ypc_bunsen