@doot @freemo Looks like it didn't last. I just checked https://qoto.org/about/more#rules and the current rule says "hate-based racism, sexism, and other hateful speech [will get you banned] but generally unpopular opinions voiced respectfully will be fine".
I want to ask what "unpopular opinions" are important enough to warrant an explicit whitelisting here but also vile enough that someone might reasonably have assumed "no hate speech" bans them, but I already know the answer will be "tHe tRaNs dEbAtE"
@doot Is that fair? I have no way of knowing! But my experience is: almost certainly.
And if I were running a Mastodon instance, I probably would not read every post on qoto to find out, or engage in a "public, evidence-based due process" because honestly, who has that kind of time?
No, I'm going to assume it's a server full of YouTube Atheists debating whether or not my friends should have human rights and block the whole thing, and it's unreasonable for @freemo to expect anything else.
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I have reworded our ToS maybe 30 times to keep appeasing objections like this and people just find new ways to twist it into something bad.. ill change it again I dont mind, but its getting absurd.. You ever think maybe you came in with a preconseption and went looking for something that would confirm it rather than the other way around?
Look what is meant is simple... derogatory speech isnt allowed, as long as its not derogatory speech then unpopular opinions are allowed. I will update QOTO so it copies the UFoI wording so there is no confusion, but we make this clear in several other places in our ToS..
As for the whole "what about this? discussion", Its an open-floor discussion, lots of people might have some bad ideas, thats why its a discussion.. but no exceptions have even been put up to vote, so lets try to worry about it if it happens...
I will make this clear, if hate speech or derogatory speech is allowed then QOTO would leave the UFoI. The irony, of course, is that leaving the UFoI would probably make people happy and they will just ignore the why and still call us nazis.
Still waiting for a single person to find even a single objectionable thing on the QOTO timeline, even remotely so.. but nah, that would just burst all the fun everyone is having calling people nazis I guess who are otherwise good people.
I realize I didnt fully answer your question in my last response...
So I assume by "the trans debate" you mean people debating if trans people are "valid"? So your suggesting that isnt derogatory speech but is a simple difference of opinion not falling under derogatory speech? I dunno, that is shocking, personally I think it is quite clear that would fall under the first clause as hate-speech/derogatory-speech... not that would not get an exception..
So what is not derogatory speech but is unpopular? How about debate over if QOTO is a good actor or not? The last week we got about I dunno 80 new users who were banned from their home instances simply for saying somerthing like "I dont see any prejudice coming from QOTO".. bam, their banned.. for... an... unpopular opinion.
Now i want to be clear there is a reason we have that clause in QOTO and not int he UFoI, theUFoI governs other instances. Therefore if some instance wants to make a rule making some sort of unpopular non-derogatory speech against the rules, they can. So that clause simply makes no sense... At qoto however as long as you are respectful, kind, and not derogatory towards marginalized people simply saying 'Windows phones are great" (an unpopular opinion) wont get you banned.
@freemo @doot Help me understand here. Do you think a user would look at the rule “no hate speech” and assume that it meant they couldn’t say Windows Phones are good? If not, why would you say “no hate speech but unpopular opinions are ok” and not “no bots but black people are ok” or “no advertising but you are allowed to use punctuation”? Putting the two things in one sentence implies a connection and that's concerning.
It seems to me that you're saying that one can read indirect implications from the phrasing. I would like to posit that being more terse makes this problem worse.
When I joined fedi ~2 years ago, I suffered from the standard decision paralysis about which instance to join. In the end I followed a friend's recommendation, but before that I read rules (and federation policies/server blocklists) of a few instances and in many cases couldn't really tell what the rules mean. I can't point to exact instances I've looked at then, but I remember seeing rules essentially paralleling Stewart's definition of pornography (e.g. "do not make us add a rule"), which made me think that typical interpretation of anything banned in the rules was very expansive and that I was expected to read between the lines that anything that resembles a banned thing is also banned.
If you put yourself in such a position, you can see how such apparently-obvious clarifications are not necessarily that ridiculous. Perhaps the phrasing of this one is terrible, but then I expect it could be made better by making it more verbose and not terser.
