An instance for the Monterey Bay area -- Santa Cruz, San Benito, and Monterey counties. Let's talk about this amazing place where we live and share the beauty of the Central Coast with the world!

Welcome to MontereyBay.social!

Established November 2022

From Santa Cruz to Salinas, Monterey to Bonny Doon, we live in an amazing area. MontereyBay.social is the place for locals to hang out and talk about who we are and why we make this our home.

Concerned about joining a smaller community? Here are a couple of articles that talk about why you might want to consider a local instance:

• @seb wrote about Regional Instances, Federation, and Scalability on the SFBA.social blog.
• Aram Zucker-Scharff makes a case for Why you should find the Mastodon instance that works for you on his blog.

Moderation

Submit moderation requests to @paul@montereybay.social or support@montereybay.social. Please be familiar with the Server Rules listed below as they will be enforced. Our privacy policy is also available.

No discrimination against unhoused people

I acknowledge that this is an unusual rule. I specifically call out hate speech against homeless individuals for two reasons:

1. In the United States, there are few if any social consequences to openly discriminating against the unhoused. Discrimination leads to poor physical and mental health outcomes and is recognized as a violation of human rights by the United Nations.
2. My family has direct, lived experience with homelessness. My spouse works for a nonprofit that provides services to unhoused people. We believe that housing is a right.

What you post on other social networks is your own business, of course.

Moving to a new account

Here are some useful resources if you are moving here from another Mastodon instance:

• Patricia Aas has written a concise guide to moving to a new Mastodon server.
• @MastodonMigration@mastodon.online regularly posts tips on how to move as well as interesting statistics.
• The official Mastodon docs also have a page on migrating from one server to another.

More information

To submit a DMCA request, contact @paul@montereybay.social or support@obscure.com.

This instance is hosted in the United States and follows all the laws of that country and the State of California.

1. Be excellent to each other! We are all humans who deserve respect and compassion.
2. Unsolicited messaging (spam) is not allowed. Self-promotion is fine, and we support local small businesses.
3. No hate speech, racism, pornography, slurs, discriminatory language, homophobic, or transphobic posts or language.
4. No discrimination or disparaging of unhoused people. See the About page for an explanation.
5. You must be 13 years of age or older to create an account on this instance.
6. Targeted misgendering, deadnaming, or promotion of so-called "conversion therapy" is prohibited.
7. US DHS and ICE employees and officials are prohibited.