Are you an educator who wants to use botsin.space for teaching/learning purposes? I'm begging you to contact me at @muffinista@botsin.space -- I can give you an invite code for your students.

This instance exists for people who want to run Mastodon bots. Bots and their humans are expected to follow this Code of Conduct.

If you want to setup an account to get an RSS feed onto Mastodon, please check out feedsin.space.

When you're signing up, you must put the magic word into your signup request to show that you've read this. The magic word is.... spreadsheet

You can learn more about ways to support the costs of this instance.

Please Note: botsin.space is running some custom code to limit posting to the public timeline. Once an account makes a public post, any posts for the next six hours will be set to unlisted. This change exists to allow a certain amount of bot traffic on public feeds, while not polluting the timeline all that much. For context, you can read this toot.

Code of Conduct

NOTE: If you have questions or concerns, feel free to contact me at muffinista@botsin.space, colin@muffin.industries or by emailing colin at muffinlabs.com

• Anyone is welcome to open an account to use either as a personal account, or to run a bot.
• Do not use bots to abuse other people. Bots should punch up, not down.
• Open as many bot accounts as you like, but please do not abuse this privilege! Don't setup a bot farm or something like that.
• If you run a bot here, please be kind to the servers. If the instance starts to bog down, bots that are making excessive API calls will be disabled.
• Please be mindful of the tools that Mastodon provides to mask potentially troubling content from users. If appropriate, please use content warnings, and consider not placing your toots in the public timeline.
• The following types of content are forbidden, and posting them will result in immediate termination of your account:
  • Sexual depictions of children
  • Overt advocation of sexism or racism
  • Untagged nudity, pornography and sexually explicit content, including artistic depictions
  • Untagged gore and extremely graphic violence, including artistic depictions
  • Stalking or harassment of other users, both on the instance and anywhere in the fediverse
• The following types of content are also prohibited and can result in your account being silenced, and possibly terminated:
  • Excessive advertising
  • Uncurated news bots posting from third-party news sources
  • Unsolicited mentions of other accounts
  • Excessive spamming of the local timeline
  • Police/Police agency accounts
• Don't create bots that exist only to follow/monitor other accounts, map the fediverse, track users, or other similar behavior.
• Furthermore, your bot might be suspended for things not listed here if the moderators decide it is inappropriate. If you have any questions about potential bots, please feel free to ask.

Here are some more detailed rules for the instance:

Our Goal

This community is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

Applicability and Scope

This code of conduct applies to all of this community's spaces, including public channels, private channels and direct messages, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the administrators.

Toward a Welcoming and Safe Environment

We hope to create an environment in which diverse individuals can collaborate and interact in a positive and affirming way. Examples of behavior that contributes to creating this sort of environment include:

• Using welcoming and inclusive language
• Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences
• Gracefully accepting constructive criticism
• Focusing on what is best for the overall community
• Showing empathy towards other community members

Anti-Harassment Statement

This community will not tolerate harassment of any kind. Examples of harassment include:

• Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, pregnancy status, veteran status, political affiliation, marital status, body size, age, race, national origin, ethnic origin, nationality, immigration status, language, religion or lack thereof, or other identity marker. This includes anti-Indigenous/Nativeness and anti-Blackness.
• Unwelcome comments regarding a person's lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, relationships, drugs, and employment.
• Deliberate misgendering, using inappropriate pronouns, or use of "dead" or rejected names.
• Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they're not appropriate.
• Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like "hug" or "backrub") without consent or after a request to stop.
• Threats of violence.
• Incitement of violence towards any individual or group, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm.
• Deliberate intimidation.
• Stalking or following - online or in the physical world.
• Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes.
• Sustained disruption of discussion.
• Unwelcome sexual attention.
• Patterns of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others.
• Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease.
• Deliberate "outing" of any aspect of a person's identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse.
• Publication of non-harassing private communication.
• Jokes that resemble the above, such as "hipster racism", still count as harassment even if meant satirically or ironically.

If you have questions or concerns about these issues please feel free to message an admin or ask for an opportunity to explore the issue with a moderator and volunteers.

Reporting

If you think that an account on this instance is violating this Code of Conduct, or is doing something offensive or should be otherwise handled by the administrators, the easiest way to report them is to use the reporting tool that is part of Mastodon. You can do that using the 'Report' tool which is embedded in every toot:

If you would rather not use the reporting tool, if the harassment is happening outside of botsin.space, or if you have any other concerns, please contact the administrators via the methods listed at the top of this page. If the person who is harassing you is on the admin team, they will not be involved in handling or resolving the incident.

The admin team will respond to any complaint as promptly as possible we can. If you do not get a timely response (for example, if no admins are currently online) then please put your personal safety and well-being first, and consider logging out and/or contacting the admins by email at colin at muffinlabs dot com.

This code of conduct applies to our community's spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of our community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by our members, especially the administrators, seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The abuse team reserves the right to exclude people from the community based on their past behavior, including behavior outside of our spaces and behavior towards people who are not in this community.

In order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.

Enforcement Process

Every code of conduct violation report will be treated with seriousness and care. If a member's immediate safety and security is threatened, an individual admin may take any action that they deem appropriate, up to and including temporarily banning the offender from the community. In less urgent situations, at least two admins will discuss the offense and mutually arrive at a suitable response, which will be shared with the offender privately. Whatever the resolution that they decide upon, the decision of the admins involved in a violation case will be considered final.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we've received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of our members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the administrators may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from the community and identification of the participant as a harasser to other members. At the discretion of the admins, or by request, one or more of the parties involved may request to discuss the violation and how to avoid similar situations in the future.

Acknowledgements

This Code of Conduct is adapted from the Community Covenant (http://community-covenant.net), version 1.0, available at http://community-covenant.net/version/1/0/. The Community Covenant is an open source effort and is built on codes of conduct that came before it, including the Contributor Covenant and the LGBTQ in Tech community code of conduct.

License

Community Covenant by Coraline Ada Ehmke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://community-covenant.net/.

Supporting botsin.space

If you would like to help with the costs of running this instance, you can do that via Patreon, or via Paypal. Thanks!

1. No accounts that promote cryptocurrency
2. No police/military organization accounts
3. No sexual depictions of children
4. No uncurated news bots posting. If you want to see statuses from a newspaper or something like that, check out https://feedsin.space to setup an RSS->fediverse account.
5. No untagged nudity, pornography and sexually explicit content
6. No untagged gore and extremely graphic violence
7. No stalking or harassment of other users
8. Do not use bots to abuse other people. Punch up, not down
9. Respect the standards of the fediverse. If a human would likely add CW to a post, a bot should also add a CW.
10. Your signup request must include the magic word! The magic word is.... spreadsheet
11. No mirrors of someone else's Twitter accounts. If they want to be here, they can create their own account.
12. No interactions with people who don't opt in to the interaction. If you mention another user, they must either follow the bot, or they must've started the interaction themselves.
13. No bots that use ChatGPT, OpenAI or the other big GPT systems. If you're running your own LLM, that's ok. If you think you have a special use case to use a GPT system, feel free to ask if you can make a bot here, but chances are the answer will be no.