A Mastodon community with a food and wine focus. Mainly English speaking, open to all epicurians.

Epicure.social is a Mastodon server for people interested in food, wine and other adult beverages. Our community includes journalists, chefs, sommeliers, winemakers, beer geeks, cheese fans, bloggers and many who just love good food and wine - and want to chat about it.

All epicurians are welcome, but you need to provide a "reason for joining" when you register. Please make it clear that you have a genuine interest in food or wine. If you only write "I like food" or "Want to get off twitter" we will reject your application.

We ask that our users are respectful and inclusive. Epicure.social is intended to be a welcoming environment that fosters sharing and meaningful discourse. Our moderation takes a light touch, but we will intervene if bad actors attempt to derail these aims. You can find more detailed information about what we do and don't allow, towards the bottom of this text.

As with most Mastodon servers, when you register here, you'll be able to connect with Mastodon users anywhere in the world, on any of the many thousands of other Mastodon servers.

Epicure.social is run on an entirely non-profit basis by The Morning Claret and @simonjwoolf. We created this server because we love the Mastodon concept, and like many of you, we want a better future where social media allows us to connect without sponsored posts, obtuse algorithms or toxic timelines.

We fully subscribe to and comply with the Mastodon Server Covenant. That means:

• Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia
• Daily backups
• At least one other person with emergency access to the server infrastructure
• Commitment to give users at least 3 months of advance warning in case of shutting down

Detailed rules

The following guidelines are not a legal document, and the final interpretation is up to the epicure.social administrators. This information is provided as a guide only. Our decision is final in all cases relating to moderation.

The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline:

• Clearly corporate or otherwise excessive advertising
• Uncurated news bots posting from third-party news sources
• Pornography and sexually explicit content, including artistic depictions
• Nudity, unless hidden with a "sensitive content" warning.
• Untagged gore and extremely graphic violence, including artistic depictions.
• Any other content whose purpose is purely offensive or malicious, in the opinion of our moderation team

The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline, and may result in account suspension and revocation of access to the service:

• Racism or advocation of racism
• Sexism or advocation of sexism
• Casteism or advocation of casteism
• Discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, or advocation thereof
• Xenophobia or offensive nationalism
• Spreading disinformation or conspiracy theories that undermine public health

The following types of content are explicitly forbidden and will result in revocation of access to the service:

• Sexual depictions of children
• Content illegal in Germany (where epicure.social is hosted) or the Netherlands (where epicure.social is registered), including holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism
• Conduct promoting the ideology of National Socialism
• Any conduct intended to stalk or harass other users, or to impede other users from utilising the service, or to degrade the performance of the service, or to incite other users to perform any of the aforementioned actions, is also forbidden and will lead to revocation of access to the service. This includes, but is not limited to, the following behaviours:
  
  
  • Continuing to engage in conversation with a user that has specifically requested for said engagement to cease and desist, regardless of platform-specific privacy tools employed.
  • Aggregating, posting, and/or disseminating a person's demographic, personal, or private data without express permission (informally called doxing or dropping dox)
  • Inciting users to engage another user in continued interaction or discussion after a user has requested for said engagement to cease and desist (informally called brigading or dogpiling)
  
  

These provisions notwithstanding, the administrator of epicure.social reserves the right to revoke any user's access permissions, at any time, for any reason, except as limited by law.

Media Retention

We retain local media files for as long as your account remains active. Cached media from other servers is deleted after 30 days.

Donations

If this instance becomes popular and we need to scale up the hosting resources, we will request donations to help with the running costs. For now, this is not necessary.

Bot Accounts

Bot accounts are allowed, but you need to set the post visibility to unlisted and mark your accounts to Bot.

Blocked Countries

This list will be updated as and when necessary.

Epicure Moderator Team

We will seek volunteer moderators to help as this Mastodon instance grows. For now, moderation is handled by

@morningclaret @simonjwoolf @stephendwolff

Please contact us at mastodon@themorningclaret.com if you are interested in being a member of this team.

Limitation of liability

This website is provided to you "as is". The owner and administrators of epicure.social accept no liability for any loss or damage that may occur as a result of your use of this site. It is your responsibility to back up any data or media files that you wish to retain in perpetuity, and we accept no liability whatsoever for data loss.

1. Registrations are only accepted from those who demonstrate a serious interest in food and wine. Please make this clear in the "reason for joining" field, or we will reject your application. See our about page for more details.
2. No threatening, abusive, or intolerant behaviour. We have a zero tolerance policy on racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Your account will be suspended in such cases.
3. No commercial advertising, political campaigning/propaganda, duplicate accounts or impersonating legal entities. All such accounts will be suspended and potentially removed.
4. You must be at least 18 years old to use this service.
5. Our servers and data are located in Germany. Anything illegal in Germany and/or the European Union is prohibited.
6. After registering, please edit your profile, add a short bio and post a short introduction to yourself. We may delete inactive accounts where this has not been done, after 30 days.

1. mytter.jp: suspension