Vael Town is a Mastodon instance for artists, musicians, developers, and other like-minded creatives who practice and identify with concepts such as sustainability, open & independent web standards, human & animal rights, and divestment from dominant tech & power structures. We endeavor to build a community that energizes rather than drains, and mutually inspires expression through creative output.

Joining The Instance

Please read this page to determine if this instance is a good fit for you, and submit an invite request to minori@vael.town, including some details about yourself and any relevant personal links to give us an idea of the sort of things you post. Personal sites are appreciated!

The instance requires invites to prevent spam and frivolous requests. The goal is to keep the instance relatively small, cozy, community-like, harassment-free, and the content aligned to our instance goals.

Instance Values

• This is a community focused primarily on expression through creative output, projects, and the exploration of ideas; as opposed to typical mainstream social media algorithms that promote draining, divisive and reactionary behaviors.
• We recognize the urgent need for technology and society to reorient around sustainability, equality, open standards, and more ethical forms of computing and social media.

Community Ethics

We stand aggressively against sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, ethnocentrism, and speciesism.

Our members are also generally opposed to nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and other violent or coercive power structures.

NSFW

NSFW content is permitted as long as it's on-topic to the community and appropriately tagged with a Content Warning as nsfw, i.e. original artistic works that include NSFW subject matter or imagery.

Perhaps obviously, any content that is clearly problematic, exploitative, non-consensual, or illegal according to US laws (where the instance data is stored) is not allowed.

Marketing and Promotion

We heartily encourage the sharing of personal projects, even monetized ones. You're welcome to add appropriate storefront, merch, fundraising etc links to your profile description, and to post content related to your project(s).

We do however discourage using your account as a primary outlet to actively advertise a business venture. Typical commercial/corporate posting behaviour is often not well received on the Mastodon network. Using this instance to collect marketing data or to engage in unsolicited direct or mass advertising is prohibited.

The promotion of organized religion is prohibited.

Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, AI

We recognize that:

• Many cryptocurrencies, related technologies, and the culture(s) surrounding this topic are largely incompatible with our other stated values.
• AI and Crypto tech is often environmentally wasteful and unsustainable.

Our policy is thus to prohibit the posting of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and any content generated exclusively from AI/LLM trained on harvested data without license, particularly artistic/creative output.

Cross-posting

Sharing similar content across your network is fine, but automatic or scripted cross-posting or mirroring to or from Vael with other social networks or instances is highly discouraged. It tends to lead to bot-like accounts that don't otherwise participate much in the community, and such accounts will be subject to removal.

Staff

[ @minori ]: Administrative Entity

[ @edmond ]: Instance admin

Privacy, Security, Data

We only store cookies and collect what data is necessary for the normal functional operation of the Mastodon software & network. No data harvesting is done for the purposes of marketing or advertising, nor will we ever sell or otherwise provide your data to any outside party, except if required by legal process or law enforcement action.

See the long version here: https://vael.town/terms

While no security guarantee could ever be 100%, our server admin has years of experience developing, hardening, and participating in auditing the security of production applications. Every reasonable effort is made to ensure the security of the instance, servers, and data to the best of our ability.

This instance subscribes to the Mastodon Server Covenant.

We highly encourage all instance users to participate in the security of the instance by using strong passwords and enabling two-factor authentication in their account settings.

1. One must understand and respect the Instance Values.
2. No trolling, harassment, or bullying is tolerated.
3. Be respectful of other users and their boundaries.
4. No NFTs, cryptocurrencies, or fully AI generated art/images/creative output

1. nothing.tacowolf.net: suspension