Please share your thoughts and feedback on the following draft terms of service for the piefed.social instance.
To maintain a safe, respectful, and fact-based community, the following types of content are prohibited on PieFed:
1. Harassment, Hate Speech, and Discrimination
- Do not post content that is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise dehumanizing.
- This includes slurs, dog whistles, or content that promotes stereotypes or attacks individuals or protected groups based on identity or background.
2. Spam and Malicious Behavior
- No spamming, flooding, advertising, or self-promotion without permission.
- No scams, phishing attempts, or distribution of malware.
- No brigading, vote manipulation, or coordinated harassment.
3. Authoritarian and Fascist Propaganda
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Content promoting fascist, ultranationalist, or authoritarian ideologies is not allowed, including things such as:
- Genocide denial or minimization, such as denying or justifying atrocities in Gaza, Xinjiang, Ukraine, or elsewhere.
- Use of fascist symbols & memes (e.g., Pepe the Frog), or 4chan/8chan screenshots.
- Support for regimes or ideologies that suppress basic human rights.
4. Misinformation and Pseudoscience
- No climate change denial or promotion of scientifically debunked conspiracy theories.
5. Violence and Threats
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No threats of violence, incitement, or glorification of harm including terrorism, mass shootings, or political violence.
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Joking about or fantasizing violence against individuals or protected groups is not tolerated.
7. Sexual Content and Exploitation
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No sexually explicit content, porn, or fetish content
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Strictly prohibited:
- Non-consensual sexual content
- Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or any allusion to it
- Sexualization of minors, even fictional
8. Impersonation and Misrepresentation
- Do not impersonate other people (including accounts on other instances), public figures, or organizations. Satire is fine if obviously so.
- Do not create deceptive accounts or mislead others about your identity, affiliations, or intent.
9. Illegal Content
- Don’t post anything that could cause legal trouble for PieFed, piefed.social or the people involved.
10. Defederation
Generally this will be a last resort when problems from an instance are systemic or caused by the admins of the instance.
General Guidelines
- Keep discussion civil and on-topic.
- Respect privacy: do not post personal information (doxxing), even if publicly available elsewhere.
- Admins reserve the right to remove communities & content or ban users at their discretion to protect the integrity of the community.
- Repeatedly questioning moderation decisions in public threads may lead to removal. Instead email contact@piefed.social for feedback or appeals.
- Do not attempt to circumvent bans, content filters, or community guidelines.
I’m a rule nerd and will nerd out a bit. When I modded a national subreddit we wanted to make rules more or less what your are aiming for here so allow me to share some experience.
I’ll post machine translated version of what we came up with and some rationale behind it.
We opted to not keep misinformation or nazi ban as a separate point because you don’t want to become an arbiter of truth on all things science or political ideology. Limit the scope to things where people can really harm themselves.
This is lifted near verbatim from Reddit content policy. It makes clear that prejudice based on inborn traits is forbidden but there needs to be a component where that trait makes you vulnerable to harassment, otherwise you’ll get religious people claiming they need to be protected. You’ll love last sentence when dealing with trolls too.
Don’t distinguish between promo and self-promo because on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.
You really need outright doxxing ban and what constitutes personal info might be controversial. We wanted to avoid witch hunts of any kind and that did that.