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

First, please fully 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, galleries, etc to give us an idea of the sort of content you post. Keep in mind there's preference for sites that do not require a login to view. We can't check Facebook or Instagram, personal sites are appreciated!

The instance requires invites to prevent spam and frivolous requests from users who do not want to read this page. The goal is to keep the instance relatively small, cozy, community-like, harassment-free, and the content aligned to our instance goals, so we perform a quick manual review for new account requests. Most requests will be checked within 24 hours (though typically much less).

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.

Animal Rights

Some of us subscribe to a non-speciesist worldview and would like to keep animal cruelty off of our timeline(s). Promotion of content related to the human exploitation of other animals, including non-incidental depictions of the use of animal body parts or other derivatives as food, clothing or other material for human consumption is prohibited.

Allowance is made for discussion in opposition or protest of these behaviours as long as any media is tagged with a Content Warning where appropriate.

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's 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 any form of organized religion is prohibited.

Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, AI

We recognize that:

• Many cryptocurrencies, AI content generators, related technologies, and the culture(s) surrounding this topic are largely incompatible with our other stated values.
• AI and Crypto tech is environmentally wasteful, unsustainable, and dangerously destabilizing.
• Artists of all kinds have been forced to deal with scams and exploitation involving the theft of their artworks. The current nature of crypto and AI tech makes these incidents irreversible and largely unpreventable, leaving artists without recourse. In many cases this has had a chilling effect on the ability of artists to continue safely sharing their legitimate work online, especially on mainstream social media platforms.
• Within the AI content generator scene, the copyrighted work of real artists, developers, and writers are exploited to train for-profit AI's and automatically generate content which closely replicates original human works or personal styles without permission, license, or any compensation to the original artist. In the vast majority of cases, this tech is not used as a tool for inspiration (as is often claimed), but rather for completely bypassing the creative process and laundering human-made artworks.

Our policy is thus to prohibit the posting and promotion of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and content generated from any AI that is trained on harvested data. We will also limit or block any federated account or instance that appears to be used for the purposes of promoting or acquiring content for use as NFTs or for training AIs.

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 AI-generated content.

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