@louis The "no hates peach" and
"no harassment" clauses are a bit too ambiguous.
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We address that in some detail in the bylaws, though perhaps it could use better explanation.
Harassment is when you continually contact someone who has made it known they dont want to be contacted. It also includes creating alts to circumbvent bans.
Hate speech is also fairly explicitly defined in more detail.
That said if youd like to suggest some additional verbiage to make it more specific the bylaws are open for anyone right now to make suggestions, so just suggest an improved wording.
@louis@emacs.ch
@freemo @louis Glad that you replied. The circumventing bans is completely reasonable, but you already have that listed separately to the harassment.
Mastodon has plenty of tools that we can use to block content that we don't want to see, so having a policy against harassment, is kind of pointless. If there is someone that I don't want to interact with anymore, I can block them, and it doesn't need to be done on the instance level. As a moderator I've seen way too many times people claim harassment as a way to just shut down an opinion they don't like.
Now circumventing the personal blocking tools in mastodon is surely a good reason to ban someone.
@freemo @louis This I feel is much worse "No "hate speech", speech that nefariously expresses a form of prejudice or threatens a people of a protected characteristic (such as age, disability, ethnicity, gender, pregnancy, religion, sex or sexuality - unpopular opinions voiced respectfully is fine)." How do you determine that something is nefarious? What is a protected characteristic? How can we have any conversation about these things if the conversation is already shut down because of "hate speech". How do you decide what is a threat? If we are talking about violence, that is already mentioned in another point and is forbidden, rightly so, regardless of the target.
Again feel free to suggest a better wording if you want, these rules are up for debate and modification so just jump in and suggest better wording
@louis@emacs.ch
@freemo @louis While I appreciate what you are trying to do here, I think one of the beauties of the "fediverse" is that instances are self moderating. And there is no central authority deciding what is allowed and what isn't.
I think what you are trying to do is a bit of premature optimization. I think that small instances are the best way to go and keep mastodon safe and friendly organically.
That hasnt changed... most instances who join the UFoI will already have rules that are compatible with the ethics.. no one tells them how to moderate, they just continue doing what they are doing.
The protection is that **if** someone accuses your instance of being a bad-actor instead of gossip and random block lists blocking you you will have a chance to defend yourself and show you are, in fact, a good actor... you also have the option not to defend yourself and simply leave, in which case the case is dropped.
Moreover instances are free to moderate themselves by whatever additional rules they want anyway.
I strongly disagree with the "premature optimization" aspect, there is a **huge** issue on the fediverse that needs a solution, one many instances have been the victim of countless times. We are trying to address that, it is just ordinary optimization, a problem was identified, we are trying to fix it.
@louis@emacs.ch
