Server rules
Below is a summary of rules you need to follow if you want to have an account on this server of Mastodon:
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Please read all the rules below. By having an account on Heck Town, you agree to the rules!
Code of Conduct
Note: "Heck Town" in this document refers to the Heck Town Mastodon instance at https://heck.town. "The administrators" refers to the administrators on this organization: currently @nasser@heck.town.
Heck Town is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.
Goal A - inclusivity
Let’s work together to make a community that is inclusive, fun, and nurtures a safe place to be online.
Rule 1: Bigotry, including but not limited to discrimination or hate speech based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability, or any other attacks on one’s personhood, will not be tolerated.
Rule 2: Threatening behavior or harassment of any kind will not be tolerated. Our community and its platforms are not to be used to to launch attacks on others. This includes using screencaps in a malicious manner.
Rule 3: Don’t put marginalized people in the position of having to explain or defend their marginalization. Don't speak over others. If you don’t know about a topic, research it. Read a conversation and consider whether it needs your perspective or whether you’d do better to listen. Conversely, if you feel someone is out of their lane, please raise the issue with a moderator.
Rule 4: Reach out to the moderators with any concerns you have, or to report any rule breaking.
Goal B - boundaries
Let’s work together to make this community respectful of others’ boundaries. Keep in mind that many of our members are minors, people who are sex-repulsed, people struggling with addiction, survivors of abuse, and/or have faced other trauma that they don’t wish to relive. Please ask a mod if you’re unsure whether something is okay to post.
Rule 5: Use content warnings and ROT13 when posting depictions of sex and sexuality, substance abuse, violence, disease, body horror, and death. Disable embedding on the link or nest in a thread if the preview contains mildly NSFW imagery, gore, or any of the above subject matter. Don’t post links to pornographic material.
Rule 6: Don’t joke about any of the topics listed in Rule 5. Don’t make lewd jokes, kink shame, or post about being intoxicated. Don’t punch down.
Goal C - respect
Let’s work together to give creators their due. Creation is hard, and we should treat others and their labor with respect.
Rule 7: Don’t post pirated materials or links to pirated materials.
Rule 8: When posting someone else’s work (art, cosplay, and so on), please do your best to source it and provide links to the creator's social media or portfolio. If you don't have the source, do a reverse image search to look for it.
Goal D - gentleness
Let’s work together. We want to cultivate a place where we can discuss complex and delicate topics in good faith, while considering other perspectives when we disagree.
Rule 9: Do not make blanket statements or state your opinion as fact. Don’t share bad takes solely to mock them. Don’t use emoji reactions to shut down another user. Be thoughtful and conscientious of other people’s time. Respect and support other people's interests, even if you might not share them.
Rule 10: Work to de-escalate rather than inflame heated conversations. Be mindful of group dynamics and avoid piling on. Don’t insist on getting the last word. If a moderator asks you to end or move a conversation, do so.
Goal E - comfort
Let’s work together to make this community a place where everyone can feel comfortable.
Rule 11: Ask how people in your group would like to be addressed. Whether by their username or by their pronouns, and what those pronouns are. Check their discord profile for pronouns before asking.
Rule 12: Don’t join voice channels without asking in text chat first.
Rule 13: Don’t stream or post video without the explicit consent of everyone involved.
Goal F - accountablity
Let’s work together to hold each other accountable.
The mods are also your friends with lives who can’t see everything that goes on and have our own blind spots. We are here to facilitate this server being as close to the goals laid out as possible, and we are always open to suggestions about how to do that, or to criticism about how we may have messed up.
If you feel one of us has messed up, please contact us! Comments are shared with all the mods so that we can talk them over and learn from them.
The mods take our rules seriously as they are what contribute to people feeling safe. All moderator decisions are made as a team; multiple people from different backgrounds offer their perspectives on each issue. Penalties include formal warnings, losing access to certain categories, channels, or privileges temporarily or indefinitely, with scaling severity depending on the circumstances. If you continue to disregard the rules, goals, or otherwise fail to adapt, you will be banned. Disciplinary action for unprecedented events or situations not covered by our rules will vary.
What you should do if you break the rules and are warned:
Realize it’s nothing personal, hold your hand up, consider you might have been wrong, and take a breath. Make an effort to do better next time and not repeat mistakes. More members than you might think have slipped up in the past, addressed the behavior, and continued to be a part of the community.
✨Howdy! Welcome to Heck Town✨
If someone is making you feel uncomfortable (this includes via DM or on another platform), or you feel the rules are being broken, please reach out to the mods. You can post on Home Town and set your post visibility to “Mentioned people only,” so that one of the mods can work with you to address your concern. It's why we're here. We can't get a situation sorted if we don't know it exists. @s and DMs are not ‘nuclear options’ and we would rather you bring your concerns to us directly rather than let them go unaddressed.
Privacy Policy
The data you post here lives on a server that Nasser Eledroos runs. He promises that he won't look at your private data. You are just going to have to trust him 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 heck.town users, and;
- only ever use our "local-only" posting mode which you learned about in your onboarding.
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!