Moderation on ohai.social

Moderation team

There are currently three moderators for ohai.social:

• @dee_in_calgary (she/her) 🇨🇦
• @lutoma (he/him) 🇪🇺
• @silsha (he/him) 🇪🇺

Instance rules

1. We do not tolerate discriminatory behavior and content promoting or advocating the oppression of members of marginalized groups.
2. We do not tolerate threatening behavior, stalking, doxxing, or harassment (including brigading, dogpiling, or any other form of contact with a user who has stated that they do not wish to be contacted).
3. We do not tolerate violent nationalist propaganda, Nazi symbolism or promoting the ideology of National Socialism.
4. We do not tolerate conspiracy narratives or other reactionary myths supporting or leading to the above-mentioned (and/or similar) behavior.
5. All explicit (NSFW) content must be marked as sensitive and have a content warning. Explicit content must not be used in user avatars or header images.
6. Content that is illegal in Germany will be deleted and may lead to immediate account suspension.

Best practices

The list below is a collection of behaviour that we expect to see from our users. If you see a user go against these best practices in a way that bothers you, please file a report and we will talk to them. While these best practices are designed to be guidelines for a good communal instance, repeated malicious unwillingness to follow the best practices will be considered just like breaking a rule.

• In general, use the tools provided to foster a considerate and accessible atmosphere. This includes the liberal use of content warnings (especially on potentially disturbing or controversial topics), and alt-text captioning of media files.
• When possible, provide credit for creative works in your posts that are not your own.
• Uninvited comments about another user’s personal choices, lifestyle or family are strongly discouraged and may be considered harassment. Inappropriate sexual attention, comments about appearance and implication of physical contact will not be tolerated toward any non-consenting user.
• If you post advertisements, use a content warning. Advertisements should not be excessive or automated.
• Bots may only interact with a user when they’re invited by that user to do so.
• Automated posts and high-frequency posts should be unlisted (rendering visible to everybody, but not appearing on the local timeline) to keep the local timeline of our instance a place of community dialogue and human interaction. This extends to bots, feed posters, Twitter “retweets” and Twitter crossposts with broken mentions ("…@twitter.com"). Crossposter accounts that stop being active participants in our community may be removed at the discretion of the moderators.
• In discussions, please remain civil, do not insult the people you’re talking to. Note that irony, sarcasm, or similar modes of language don’t translate well to written language and tend to escalate discussions or misunderstandings.

(These best practices were inspired by the Terms of chaos.social and bsd.network. Thank you!)

Instance defederation

We generally try to avoid suspending instances and instead prefer blocking individual accounts. But sometimes, there are instances that were exclusively set up to harass people, or that have insufficient moderation. In these cases, we either suspend or limit the instance.

You can find the list of instances we have suspended along with reasons at the bottom of our Mastdodon about page.

Suspension

Completely blocks all interaction with the remote instance.

We suspend instances that

• clearly only exist to facilitate harassment/trolling, or
• self-describe as “free speech zone” or “without moderation” or something to that effect, or
• permit content that is illegal under German law.

In addition, we also block automated Twitter mirror instances (Mostly ones based on BirdsiteLive). While they’re not actively malicious, they constantly get confused with fake accounts, use up comparatively much database space and generally add relatively little value.

Limiting

Accounts on limited instances can still be followed, but their posts do not show up in the federated timeline and there is a warning before accessing their profile.

We limit instances that

• are excessively spammy with a very low signal-to-noise ratio, or
• permit unmarked NSFW content.