Rules

We expect users on chaos.social to adhere to the following rules:

  • No content condoning or advocating for the oppression of members of marginalised groups, or general discrimination of groups based on characteristics like gender, race, disabilities, nationality, education, religion etc.
  • No harassment, stalking, mobbing, deadnaming, misgendering, contacting users who have made it clear they do not wish to be contacted.
  • Obviously: no content that is illegal in Germany, no actions intended to damage this instance (performance, reputation, security).
  • No right or alt-right bullshit, Nazi content, conspiracy narratives.
  • No automated accounts (unless approved by the moderators). This includes bots, crossposters, feedposters etc.
  • When posting to the local timeline, provide Content Warnings for violence, sexually explicit content, death/disease, and politics, particularly when negative or controversial (those are the larger categories, a CW might be something like “uspol, elections”).
  • When posting to the local timeline, provide image descriptions.

Clarification: You post to the local timeline when you give your post “public” visibility. If you don’t want to follow local timeline rules, you can post with visibility “unlisted” – posts will still be visible to everybody (your followers and everybody else), they just won’t get shown on the local and federated timelines. Boosts also do not appear on the local timeline.

Note that the instance is also subject to our terms and privacy policy.

Best practices

We ask users on chaos.social to keep the following guidelines in mind, in order to foster a considerate and accessible atmosphere. Forgetting about them is not as serious as breaking the instance rules, but repeated malicious unwillingness to follow the best practices will be considered just like breaking a rule.

  • Use content warnings liberally, especially for topics that are potentially disturbing or controversial, or that make life harder for people struggling with addiction or trauma.
  • Provide credit for creative works that are not your own.
  • Don’t be a reply guy – uninvited comments about another user’s personal choices, lifestyle or family are strongly discouraged and may be considered harassment.
  • In discussions, please remain civil, do not insult the people you’re talking to. Don’t escalate.

Enforcement

Rules are only worth as much as their enforcement, so here is what you can expect from the chaos.social moderators (we will publish our moderation guidelines in the future, but here’s the short version):

Breaking these rules can get you kicked off the instance, though unless you’re behaving in bad faith, we will give you several warnings first. Going against the Best Practices can also get you kicked off the instance, but you have to really persistently act against them (and at that point, why are you on chaos.social?).

Please report behaviour that bothers you. We will keep your report confidential.

Ultimately,

we (@leah and @rixx) are maintaining this instance on our spare time, hardware and nerves. Don’t push either of those.

The rules are licensed under CC-BY-SA by chaos.social e.V.