Code of Conduct
A note from Mike. Don't be an asshole. It's called Friend Town. This instance is going to be small, middle-aged, and made up mostly of people I know so I ask that you act like we're at a party at my house. If you're causing a scene I will ask you to leave. I don't imagine I will have much moderating to do but just in case:
Friend Town is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.
This code of conduct applies to all Friend Town spaces, including public channels, private channels and direct messages, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the administrator.
Types of Harassment
- Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, race, immigration status, religion, or other identity marker. This includes anti-Indigenous/Nativeness and anti-Blackness.
- Unwelcome comments regarding a person's lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
- Deliberate misgendering or use of "dead" or rejected names
- Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they're not appropriate or undesired
- Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like "hug" or "backrub") without consent or after a request to stop.
- Threats of violence Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm
- Deliberate intimidation
- Stalking or following
- Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes
- Sustained disruption of discussion
- Unwelcome sexual attention
- Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
- Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease
- Deliberate "outing" of any aspect of a person's identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse
- Publication of non-harassing private communication
- Jokes that resemble the above, such as "hipster racism", still count as harassment even if meant satirically or ironically.
- Microaggressions, which take the form of everyday jokes, put downs, and insults that spread humiliating feelings to people of marginalized groups
- "Reverse"-isms, including "reverse racism," "reverse sexism," and "cisphobia"
- Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as "leave me alone," "go away," or "I'm not discussing this with you."
- Communicating in a "tone" you don't find congenial
- Criticism of racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
Reporting
If you are being harassed by a member of Friend Town, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact an administrator (listed at the top of this document) directly or file a report using the Mastodon reporting system (click the "..." on a post and then use the reporting feature).
The admins reserve the right to exclude people from Friend Town based on their past behavior, including behavior outside Friend Town spaces and behavior towards people who are not in Friend Town. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.
Consequences
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the administrators may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all Friend Town spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other Friend Town members or the general public.
Updates
The administrators reserve the right to update the Code of Conduct at any time at their discretion. Updates to the CoC will be communicated to users via email and posts from admin accounts. If you have any concerns about or suggestions for the CoC, please contact an administrator via DM.
License
This was adapted from the LGBTQ in Tech Code of Conduct and as such is licensed using a Creative Commons Zero License, meaning the contents are in the public domain.
Privacy Policy
The data you post here lives on a server that hosted by Spacebear.ee. They do not make a habit of looking over server materials.
This is, however, an ActivityPub federated server. This means that other people on other federated servers can find you, send you messages, etc. This also means that any information you put in posts, whether they are public or private, might end up "federated" -- basically, a copy of your post gets put on any server that reads your post.
If you want decent privacy (the info doesn't leave this server), the only way to do that is to set your account to private, only accept friend requests from other friend town users, and only ever @ mention other friend.town users. Once you start talking to people on other servers, all bets are off. Any private message you send to someone on another server could be looked at by the admin of a different server. This is kind of like email: if you are on a private email server, and you send an unencrypted email to a gmail account, congrats, Google now has the content of that email. But also, you do this every day, so, hey. The internet!
License
This privacy policy adapted from the Friend Camp polcies by Darius Kazemi and provided under a Creative Commons Zero License, meaning the contents are in the public domain.