for friends of the void

Welcome to The Void

void.holdings is a small instance of friends, mostly based in San Francisco. This instance is invite-only for folks we know and their projects, and we never intend to grow much.

If you're interested in learning more about folks on the server, check out our directory and filter by "From void.holdings only": https://void.holdings/directory, or our local public timeline: https://void.holdings/public/local

Goals

• Provide a space where a network of friends can share things silly, snarky, and serious, while opting-out of unwanted content and contact
• Help show how community-oriented small-scale federated social media can help enrich existing connections and foster new ones
• Support voidlings to make the fediverse more enjoyable, including through posting their creative work; making accounts for projects, RSS feeds, and bots; etc.
• Get Cindy the Barfer the fediverse stardom she deserves
• Celebrate at least three of the nine delights every day

Non-Goals

While void.holdings aims to be inclusive, it’s important to understand what the void is not. The void is not:

1. A “free speech” zone. If you would like to exercise your full free speech rights, you can do so somewhere else; while on void.holdings, you should agree to follow the community rules set out in this CoC.
2. Keeping things cordial. While we aim to ensure everyone has a harassment-free experience, it is not our goal to define or enforce civility, or to tone police. If there is conflict that does not qualify as harassment, we hope that folks can sort it out themselves or mute and block accounts as needed. (But, if you feel that something does qualify as harassment, be sure to send a moderation report!)
3. Growing this instance beyond the size of an impressive house party

Code of Conduct

Here is where we lay out ground rules for participation in void.holdings (referred to as voidlings). We have tried to craft these policies to create a space that is safe for all community members, and to help make a process clear if and when conflict arises. Instance-wise, our goal is to have a place to hang out with friends, shitpost a bit, post pictures of dogs and birds, and, probably, gripe about local politics and hopefully do something product about it. This is a living document, and the void.holdings team will amend this document as necessary to ensure the safety of our users and health of our community.

This is not a legal document, which you may have begun to suspect, and our team will address gray areas as they arise. This document is primarily to provide insight into the values that drive both the instance and moderation decisions.

What action can I take?

You have tools to mute and block content and accounts, and report bad behavior. Instance moderators will help you by enforcing server policies to limit bad behavior (as defined in the section below). However, you have many options available to curate your own timeline:

1. Mute accounts you don’t want to see content from, but you’re ok with them seeing yours.
2. Block accounts you don’t want to see you.
3. Block instances that produce content you would rather not see.
4. Report content that violates the server code of conduct.

Rules for all Posts

All posts (public and private) should abide by the following rules:

1. Do not use slurs or racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist or otherwise discriminatory or hateful jokes or language or promote white supremacy, anti-Semitism, transphobia, casteism, or other hateful ideologies.
2. Do not harass anyone, participate in group harassment of anyone, or otherwise engage in personal attacks. Posting or threatening to post other people’s personally identifying information (“doxing”) constitutes harassment. Continued contact after someone has requested that you stop contacting them does, too.
3. Do not “shitpost” hateful content – while shitposting in general is encouraged, ‘shitposting’ does not grant exceptions to rules (1, 3). There are no ironic slurs.
4. Mark sensitive content with a warning. We encourage the use of content warnings (CW) and hashtags to identify material that some users may not want to see (for example, #squirrelballs). Use of CW or tags allows users to opt in or out of conversations they don’t want. This does not mean all potentially uncomfortable content requires a content warning. Discussing lived experience or issues of identity do not require content warnings, though authors may choose to add them.
5. Do not post illegal content. This includes unlicensed media. We will remove DMCA reports we receive. Legal NSFW content is allowed, but must be marked with a content warning.

Suggestions for Posts

Though we will not moderate against these items, we do suggest considering them when posting:

1. Add descriptions to all images, audio, and video. Mastodon makes adding this information easy, and adding a description both helps folks who use assistive technology to understand what is being posted and lets you point out to everyone the most relevant information.
2. Consider using the content warning field as a subject line, even when the topic of the post is not sensitive. Think of it like an email, where people can understand what they’ll be reading before they commit to the entire message. It also makes for good jokes.
3. Consider using the unlisted or followers-only post types if you are posting a lot in a short period, or are just riffing on an idea. Public posts show up in the local and federated timelines but unlisted and followers-only do not.

Moderation

If you notice a post that violates this code of conduct, promptly click on the three dots at the bottom of the post and report it. When choosing “spam” or “other” report reasons, please include a short description of why you are reporting the post.

If you believe something is not a good contribution to the community, but is not covered by our Code of Conduct, please report it with a comment about why you are reporting it. The moderation team will take appropriate action

When our moderators receive a report, we will investigate to understand the context of the account being reported and the interactions that led up to the report. If our team decides that the content goes against our code of conduct, we will take corrective action.

Participants asked to stop any bad behavior are expected to comply immediately. If the moderation team finds that a user repeatedly violates server rules, they may be suspended. Similarly, if an instance receives a lot of reports they may be defederated. If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the administrators may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all void holdings spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other void holdings members or the general public.

Our current moderators are @christa, @jim, and @peter.

Winding Down Some Day

We plan on keep on running this as long as people use it. When the party is over some day and we decide to shut it down, we will give users at least 3 months of advance warning, and repeated reminders, in order to allow them to gracefully migrate accounts.

Privacy Policy

The data you post here lives on a server that a small group of void holdings administrators run. They promise that they won't look at your private data. You are just going to have to trust them on this.

This is, however, an ActivityPub federated server. This means that other people on other federated servers can find you, send you messages, etc. This also means that any information you put in posts, whether they are public or private, might end up "federated" -- basically, a copy of your post gets put on any server that reads your post.

If you want decent privacy (the info doesn't leave this server), the only way to do that is to set your account to private, only accept friend requests from other void.holdings users, and only ever @ mention other void.holdings users. Once you start talking to people on other servers, all bets are off. Any private message you send to someone on another server could be looked at by the admin of a different server. This is kind of like email: if you are on a private email server, and you send an unencrypted email to a gmail account, congrats, Google now has the content of that email. But also, you do this every day, so, hey. The internet!

License

This Code of Conduct was adapted from the sfba.social Code of Conduct, which as far as I can tell was adapted from the Fosstodon Code of Conduct. I’m not sure if either has an explicit license, but thank you to both instances for the format and a fair amount of the wording.

The Privacy Policy was adapted from the Friend Camp Privacy Policy by Darius Kazemi and as such is licensed using a Creative Commons Zero License, meaning the contents are in the public domain.

1. Don't be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, fatphobic, etc. Don't interact with people when they requested you not.
2. Celebrate at least three of the nine delights every day
3. Do not post illegal content. Please, thanks
4. For a full list, including what to expect, goals of the server, etc, see the full code of conduct somewhere on this page. It's pretty manageable!

1. nothing.tacowolf.net: suspension