Urbanists.Social is a Mastodon instance for urbanists - people who are into bikes, transit, and / or walkable cities.
Want to donate to us?
Check out our Open Collective here!We generally align ourself with the policies and goals of other instances like
mastodon.social,
awoo.space, and
icosahedron.website. We want our server to be a safe space for our users. Generally the rules boil down to "don't be a dick", but a few worth drawing attention to:
- Any content that is illegal under US or EU law is prohibited. We're run by a small community, please don't get us in trouble.
- No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and any other discriminatory conduct that attacks any individual or group of individuals based on what they are or what they believe is strictly forbidden. This excludes shitting on drivers, but still try to be nice.
- Any conduct that abuses this Mastodon instance, or any other Mastodon instance, is strictly forbidden.
- Your user profile (including your name and display name) must be SWF. NSFW content is not banned, but please be sure to tag it appropriately.
- Please be considerate and respectful of others. Consider adding content warnings to your posts about controversial subjects or commonly-held phobias.
- No harassment. Harassment is any improper or unwelcome conduct that might reasonably be expected or be perceived to cause offence or humiliation to another person.
Our admins on this server are
@sam and
@zak.
This is not Twitter.
Reporting posts that make you feel uncomfortable, or that you feel should be brought to our attention, is highly encouraged. Your reports will not be ignored, and will be dealt with (usually) within a few days. It may take more than a week due to timezone differences or jobs, but you will always hear back about your report, and it won't be closed until you're happy with the resolution for the report. If your report involves a user or post on another instance, you have the choice of sharing your report with the administration of that instance as well, but the report will always be sent to us. Please include in the report whether you chose to send the report to the other instance, though.
No moderation actions are automatic whatsoever. Nothing happens without human review.
We follow the Mastodon server covenant. If we decide to close the server, we will give you
minimum three months notice. Our hosting provider,
masto.host, does daily backups of our database.
Defederation policyDefederation occurs when we limit access to other Mastodon instances. We do this through
domain blocks, where we silence or suspend other servers by their domain name.
Silencing an instance will make all posts from all accounts on the instance invisible to anyone who isn't following them on our server.
Suspending will remove all of the instance’s content and media, and will not allow you to follow any users there.
We use domain blocks to keep our server safe, to pressure other instances to moderate more effectively, and to decrease the amount of moderation of remote content we have to do. We monitor the [#Fediblock](
https://urbanists.social/tags/FediBlock) for reports from users and admins for troublesome accounts and instances.
We don’t yet have a specific set of rules we follow when blocking instances, but generally this is our policy:
- Any instance whose purpose, stated goals, or moderation rules conflict with any of our rules are immediately suspended. Fairly self-explanatory. We don’t want this content on our server.
- Example: We do not allow promotion of crypto. Cryptodon clearly breaks this rule and it has been suspended.
- Another example: There are multiple instances for TERFs. We do not allow TERFs or ‘gender critical’ bullshit on our server, so multiple TERF sites have been suspended.
- Instances that do not have adequate prohibition of hate speech or harassment are immediately suspended.
- A large percentage of these instances are ‘free speech’ servers with little to no rules. Remaining federated with these instances opens our users to a high possibility of receiving abuse from them.
- Example: Gab does not have adequate rules against hate speech. It’s an alt-right hellhole known for harassing lots of minorities in the Fediverse. So it has been suspended.
- Instances with admins that engage in hate speech or harassment are immediately suspended.
- Admins that do this are not capable of moderating hate speech or harassment, point blank. We do not want our users to be subject to their users’ harassment or hate speech.
- Example: Alex Gleason is a well-known TERF who regularly posts hate speech and harassment on his servers. This behavior attracts more TERFs to his servers who engage in the same behavior. As a result, all instances Gleason runs are suspended on our server.
- Instances that are on lots of our peers’ block lists are very likely to be suspended.
- We trust the admin work of our peer instances, especially those that are larger than our own server. As a server that hasn’t received a lot of abuse, we like to prevent it before it happens. Watching other instances’ block lists is key to making this happen.
- Instances reported on #FediBlock are very likely to be silenced or suspended.
- If we get repeat reports about an instance on the [#FediBlock](https://urbanists.social/tags/FediBlock) hashtag, we are very likely to take action against that instance. A high frequency of these reports from multiple users usually indicates a good candidate for a domain block.
- Example: The admin of journa.host has been the subject of numerous complaints on the FediBlock tag. As a result of this, they have been silenced. This prevents our users from receiving random harassment from their users, while also allowing our users to follow users on the server.
- Instances with questionable moderation are highly likely to be silenced or suspended.
- Example: c.im bans exactly one server. They’ve received numerous complaints on #FediBlock due to their admin not moderating content effectively. As a result of this, we’ve silenced their server.
Instances on ProbationUsers have requested the following instances to be unblocked, and the admins have reviewed them and put them on a probation list. We'll take any reports against these instances seriously and we'll be more likely to block them again.