WelcomePagan+ is a federated ActivityPub social server that offers a space for those interested in spirituality, the occult, witchy stuff, and general good natured fun to share and collaborate, to learn and grow. We welcome all with good intention and banish those that would seek to do others harm of any sort.
Water and Air, Fire and Earth
Bless and cleanse this home and hearth
Drive away all harm and fear
Only good may enter here
A letter from the AdminHello cyberspace traveler,
Welcome to my little witchy occult aesthetic corner of the web. I’ve tried to make a space where others interested in spirituality, paganism, and generally off the beaten path ideologies can collaborate and share. My intent is to be the groundskeeper of a shared public space where others can learn and grow while learning from and helping others grow too. (And I kinda like some of the occult aesthetics.) My personal background being what it is as a white male working in the tech sector, I know I have a number of blind spots and unknown unknowns when it comes to some wider societal and cultural experiences. I am trying to keep an open mind and open gates to all. That said, I’m also aware that some aspects of this area have been appropriated, stolen, or co-opted by colonizers and haters, and will do my best to keep these poisonous pests from this garden so it stays a safe and nurturing space.
So, again, welcome and well met friend, join us and grow, and may you receive everything you deserve.
-@Crazypedia@Pagan.PlusCode of Conduct - Harm None and Do As You Will
- Be welcoming
- We strive to be a community that welcomes and supports people of all backgrounds and identities. This includes, but is not limited to members of any race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, colour, immigration status, social and economic class, educational level, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, size, family status, political belief, religion, and mental and physical ability.
- You must be 18 years or older to make an account on this site 🔞
- THINK before you post
- Is it True?
- Is it Helpful?
- Is it Inspiring?
- Is it Necessary?
- Is it Kind?
- Do not post content that is illegal in the United States.
- Hate speech, slurs, derogatory remarks, will not be tolerated.
Content WarningsContent Warnings (or CW for short) are Subject Headings that people are encouraged to use to tell people if they are talking about a particularly sensitive topic. This may include violence or current events, or food or eye contact (see full guidelines below). This is considered Good Manners™ and each server has their own specifics they might enforce locally. These Subject Lines do not prevent a post from reaching anyone, it is used to tell people about sensitive topics in the post, to hide a very long post, or set up a knock-knock joke. For remote servers, a lack of appropriate content warnings may result in multiple other servers de-federating with them so they do not have to moderate another server’s content.
- Sensitive Images: Images should be marked Sensitive if they meet any of the following criteria
- Selfies or eye contact (this is general mastodon best practice).
- Food: Images of food should be marked as sensitive
- Strobing, flashing, or other animated gif types that may be sensitive to those with epilepsy.
- Sexualy explicit images
- any content that would fall under the following Content Warning category.
- Content Warnings should also be included for the following topics:
- Mental Health: anxiety, depression, trauma, abuse, etc
- Current Events: Politics, news, tragic events, etc
- Drug Use: Cannabis, alcohol, smoking, psychedelics, etc
- the traumatic circumstances involved when making Requests for aid, payments, frequent advertising of services, etc
For cases of nudity: Breasts are not genitalia and do not need a Sensitive Image flag. However, sexualized or fetish content that only has breasts would still be a sexualized image, and require a Sensitive image flag at least. Images with genitalia should be marked as sensitive.
ReportingPosts in violation of our Guidelines or ToS should be reported using the Report button on the post. A note as to why it was reported should be included. This applies for local and federated content. Reporting is a community responsibility as there is zero automatic filtering or curation of public data. Contribute to our community by saying something if you see something.
PrivacyThere are some features you can use to attempt to limit your visibility, but these should not be considered secure by any measure. Staff will do their best to respect your privacy and data, and will not seek out information outside of what is necessary in the fulfillment of their duties of their roles.
That said, the ActivityPub protocol, and Mastodon in general, were not built or designed with privacy at the core. These are social tools intended to enable sharing to many people. What that means for you is that you can expect no level of guaranteed privacy. Not for your posts and Direct Messages, not for your account information, including registration email, IP address, and details you provide. Not from Admin and Staff of this instance or (at present) our hosting providers.
AvailabilityWe will do our best to maintain as much uptime as possible and mitigate the chances of data loss and downtime. We will allow for at least 90 days notice of server shutdown. That said, we do not currently control our own hosting environment nor have we obtained backups of data. If you are concerned about loss of data such as your posts, follow and block lists, or account information, you may use the Profile Settings options to make periodic backups of your data. We allow profile exports and redirects at this time, and in most cases will allow 30 days for banned accounts to retrieve their data at the discretion of the staff.
DonationsDonations are currently being accepted through LiberaPay in the form of recurring donations and single payments. Payment types supported by Stripe and PayPal are accepted. Our goal is to get enough small recurring donations to cover the month-to-month costs of the server and domain and reduce the administrator's out of pocket costs. Donations are only wanted on a pay-what-you-can-afford basis, and no preasure to contribute is intended.
About ActivityPub, Mastodon, and HometownAh, the technical stuff! Being a computer person by trade, I find some of this stuff really fascinating. Magic can be found in the wires, and sometimes knowing how the Rube Goldberg mouse-trap cluster heck of the internet works is magic in and of itself. Here I’ll offer a brief overview of some of the different aspects and components that make this social space possible.
Basics of ActivityPubActivityPub can be thought of, at its most basic, as a new type of email protocol. It allows you and others to send and receive messages and media of various types between different servers online in much the same way as email. It’s format and intended use is as an alternative to other microblogging, social media, and writing platforms and services online. ActivityPub Servers are independently owned and operated by a wide variety of system administrators, with a wide background of values, beliefs, and experiences. Servers are often specialized into niche community interests or topics of focus, and even run different types of software such as Friendica, HubZilla, PeerTube, PixelFed, Plume, Misskey, WriteFreely, and others in addition to Mastodon.
You can check out
ActivityPub.Rocks for further technical specifications.
What is Mastodon?Mastodon is the server side application that first implemented and shaped ActivityPub, and is one of the most widely used software packages for ActivityPub services. The original server, Mastodon.Social, set many trends and norms for the community as a whole in the early days, and other servers have since taken up the torch of dictating norms and acceptable behavior for their own users and others that interact with them. The original Mastodon services included a 500 character post limit(up from Twitter’s 250), and custom emoji or emoticons that could be uploaded by admins to offer a more unique flavor to communications.
You can learn more about Mastodon at the
main documentation site, or from
Fediverse.Party.
What is Hometown?Hometown is a fork, or derivative based on the main Mastodon server code. It was developed by Darius Kazemi and others to add features and address issues that have not been added to the main Mastodon services. Some of these features are listed below. Hometown’s main code repository can be found here:
HomeTown @ GitHubHometown FeaturesLocal Only PostingThis feature allows you to make a post that stays on the local server and does not federate to the larger fediverse. This may be useful if you’re interested only in the opinions of your peers on your server or have a specific interest and don’t want comments or reactions from the peanut gallery.
You can use this on our server by adding the
:local_only: emote to a post, or selecting the chain link icon on the interface to make your post local only.
More privacy featuresA number of privacy features and options have been added to further limit access to an account if you choose.
Better content types and more ways to interactWhereas core Mastodon treats certain types of content metadata as a defacto standard of sharing, Hometown is trying to make more post types specified in the ActivityPub standards guide accessible natively. What this means for you is a better reading experience when coming across different types of posts, and better sharing experiences for your friends and followers. Many of these improvements are still in the discussion and development stages at this time.
Getting StartedSo, you’re joining your first fediverse server and want to know where to start. Great! Here are a few great tips!
- Write and Introduction post!
Talking about yourself can be hard, but a post that talks about your interests and what you hope to find on the fediverse and using the #introductions hashtag helps people with similar interests find each other, so use plenty of hashtags in your introduction! You can always re-write it later too.
- Hashtags!
Hashtags are a powerful tool in the fediverse, allowing you to find other posts that use a particular tag, and it helps others find what you’reposting about too! You’ll only see posts that your server has seen though, meaning someone on your server has to have been following or seen the a post with said hashtag for it to show up.
- Fill out your profile!
Having a profile picture that represents ‘you’ can be a factor in if people want to interact with you or assume yours is an inactive account. Filling in your profile description and info fields is important too. (The info fields are free form, so go wild. Many use it to include their pronouns, languages they know, or other interesting or silly info) Many people make a login but don’t fill out their profile and wonder why no one wants to interact with them, but it’s very hard to interact with someone if all you know is their username!
- Check out the Follow Friday tags or A.Gup.Pe discussion groups.
The #FollowFriday or #ff tags are used by people on the fediverse to personally recommend cool accounts to follow. Since there are no algorithms determining what content you see, its important to occasionally tell others about all the cool stuff you’re finding! Additionally, the a.gup.pe bot service works similarly to hashtags, but instead it broadcasts the messages sent to the group to anyone else following that same group. Check out @KitchenWitch@a.gup.pe to see what I mean.
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We also have alternative interfaces on our site at the following addresses. These other designs can be more suited to how you want to interact with your friends and the rest of the fediverse. check them out at https://phanpy.pagan.plus/ and https://enafore.pagan.plus/.
Errata
We will attempt to adhear to the Mastodon Server Covenant to the best of our abilities.
Pagan Plus Server Rules by Crazypedia is marked with CC0 1.0 Universal
It's pumpkin spiced cider season 🎃