Tech.LGBT General Information

This Mastodon instance is for tech workers, academics, students, and others interested in tech who are LGBTQIA+ or Allies.

We welcome and support all marginalized identities and are dedicated to fostering a space free from hate, bigotry, and prejudice. We are explicitly anti-racist, anti-queerphobic, and anti-transphobic, with zero tolerance for harassment or discrimination. This Mastodon instance is actively moderated with a focus on creating a community that prioritizes the safety and needs of its members. Our space is intended for LGBTQIA+ individuals and allies with an interest in tech, academics, and technology.

Customizations

tech.lgbt uses a modified version of glitch-soc, a fork of Mastodon.

In addition to this fork, we have made a variety of customizations for our instance, including:

• 1024 post characters
• 1024 bio characters
• 8 bio fields
• 64 display name characters
• 16 poll options
• 8 pinned posts
• Automated post translation
• Authorized Fetch is enabled
• Adding support for remote unicode usernames
• Increasing max results in the emoji searcher (web interface)
• An increase in the media proxy API endpoint rate limit, so that when you’re scrolling through someone’s media tab on their page, all the media will properly load

Our repository of customizations can be found at https://github.com/techlgbt/techlgbt

Attributions

Props to @malle_yeno@tech.lgbt for the instance branding art!

• This instance uses Mutant Standard emoji, which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
• Blobhaj emoji by @heatherhorns@plush.city.
• Blobfox emoji by Volpeon.
• Baba emoji by @ShadowJonathan, adapted from assets from the Baba is You fandom wiki, under CC BY-SA.
• Queer cats, fire, flags, hearts by Zoë Bijl.

Code of Conduct

Short Version

We try to handle moderation ASAP, but we may not see reports for several hours. We will get to all reports though!

We’re not a free speech absolutist, and there are instances available for that. We’re not interested in Nazis, TERFS, or hate speech of any sort, which we will define at our sole discretion as moderators. No homophobia, transphobia, queerphobia, racism allowed.

This instance is meant to be a friendly, welcoming space to all who are willing to reciprocate in helping to create that environment.

Long Version

The following guidelines are not a legal document, and final interpretation is up to the administration of tech.lgbt; they are here to provide you with an insight into our content moderation policies:

1. The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline:
   1. Excessive advertising
   2. Uncurated news bots posting from third-party news sources
   3. Untagged nudity, pornography and sexually explicit content, including artistic depictions
   4. Untagged gore and extremely graphic violence, including artistic depictions
2. The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline, and may result in account suspension and revocation of access to the service:
   1. Racism or advocation of racism
   2. Sexism or advocation of sexism
   3. Discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, or advocation thereof
   4. Xenophobic and/or violent nationalism
3. The following types of content are explicitly disallowed and will result in revocation of access to the service:
   1. Sexual depictions of minors (real or artistic depictions; human or non-human)
   2. Zoophilia (real or artistic depictions)
   3. Content illegal in the United States
   4. Content illegal in Germany and/or France, such as holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism
   5. Conduct promoting the ideology of National Socialism
4. Any conduct intended to stalk or harass other users, or to impede other users from utilizing the service, or to degrade the performance of the service, or to harass other users, or to incite other users to perform any of the aforementioned actions, is also disallowed, and subject to punishment up to and including revocation of access to the service. This includes, but is not limited to, the following behaviors:
   1. Continuing to engage in conversation with a user that has specifically has requested for said engagement with that user to cease and desist may be considered harassment, regardless of platform-specific privacy tools employed.
   2. Aggregating, posting, and/or disseminating a person’s demographic, personal, or private data without express permission (informally called doxing or dropping dox) may be considered harassment.
   3. Inciting users to engage another user in continued interaction or discussion after a user has requested for said engagement with that user to cease and desist (informally called brigading or dogpiling) may be considered harassment.

These provisions notwithstanding, the administration of the service reserves the right to revoke any user’s access permissions, at any time, for any reason, except as limited by law.

Content Warnings and Sensitive Media

Our Content Warning (CW) policy is intended to make our server comfortable for our community. We are not trying to silence our community or police discussion, but ask that you consider those who may read your posts when making them.

Content Warnings are a feature of Mastodon that enable you to hide the body of a “toot” (post) behind a line of text. The intended use of this feature is to provide a way to discuss sensitive and/or potentially harmful topics without causing duress or harm to anyone who might stumble upon it, though content warnings may be used for a wide variety of reasons.

Images can be marked as sensitive. This is a feature which hides an image until a warning banner is clicked. Images may be marked as sensitive separately from Content Warnings, though using a Content Warning automatically marks the toot’s images as sensitive.

Please note that our sensitive media rules apply to profile photos and headers as well. Since those images cannot be hidden behind sensitive media warnings, they are not allowed to contain content from enforced content warnings.

We cannot enforce content warnings on users from other instances, but can help to manage content that you see when reported to instance moderators.

Please be clear and accurate when labeling content warnings, to ensure that they follow both the letter and spirit of the enforcements that we have.

Above all, try to be polite, and come from a place of mutual respect when discussing content warnings with other. We do not condone tone policing, and want to promote healthy discussion in our community.

This cannot ever be a complete list, and so we want to keep it semi-general, and reserve the right to use the judgement of the moderation team to make decisions in the future.

• Enforced Content Warnings:
  • NSFW/sexual discussion and imagery must be behind descriptive CWs (nudity, sex, kink discussion, etc)
  • Sensitive imagery (please use your best judgement on what content that most other users would find sensitive, such as photos of surgeries, abuse, war, deceased individuals, etc)
• Suggested Content Warnings:
  • Discussion of overtly political (relating to elected or unelected government officials) topics
  • Triggering topics (direct discussion of rape, trauma, abuse, suicide, transphobia, homophobia, etc). The intention is to provide a warning for users who may not want to consume this content, not to silence users who are sharing their negative experiences.
  • Drugs or drug use
  • Advertisements for corporations
  • “Rage” posts and posts using mainly capital letters
• Suggested Sensitive Image Marking
  • Eye contact images
  • Food related images

CryptoCurrency/NFTs

We do not allow the promotion, advertisement, or sale of cryptocurrencies on our instance. Mentioning the existence of cryptocurrencies, linking personal accounts or addresses, and otherwise discussing them in a way that is not intended to sell or advertise a specific cryptocurrency is acceptable. We do not have any association with any cryptocurrency or other monetary transactions that happen within the server.

We do not allow the promotion, advertisement, or sale of NFTs on our instance. We do not allow content from our instance, including content and media uploaded by our community members, to be sold as NFTs.

Staff

This instance is administered by the team of:

• @david
• @ShadowJonathan (Server technician)

Moderation support is provided by the hard working team of:

• @bluestarultor
• @deejunfazed
• @diffrentcolours
• @ItsCryptic
• @juni

If you would like to directly contact our moderation team, we have an account at @mods, and can be reached via email at mods@tech.lgbt

Legal

DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) Notice

As required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (17 U.S.C. 512 (c)), all notifications of copyright infringement regarding content hosted on tech.lgbt should be sent ONLY to its designated agent.

Wolfinger Law, LLC 4509 Bee Ridge Road Sarasota, FL 34233 dmca@tech.lgbt

Funding

This instance is funded by Patreon and Liberapay donations.

Moderation Transparency & Communication Policy

Previously, our instance had a standard policy of withholding all information concerning moderation decisions. While this policy could be controversial, it was made based on past experience regarding moderation transparency and the safety of our members and moderators. 99% of moderation decisions are never noticed or commented upon by members, as we are doing our due diligence to protect our community from spam, scams, harassment, abuse, and general ickiness. But when those decisions are noticed, a lot of conclusions are drawn!

This transparency and communication policy is an attempt to make more clear when we take actions that affect our community, and why they were taken. It is based on a survey conducted in early 2025, which we outlined the results of in a blog post.

There is no perfect solution to a level of transparency, nor any one agreed on definition of what that even entails. While it may seem simple to say, “be transparent about everything”, that is both a reductive view, and can be quite harmful. The survey showcases some of these challenges, but crucially gave us insight on where we can improve as moderators.

How We Communicate Moderation Decisions

To balance transparency, privacy, and ethical responsibility, we will follow these guidelines when sharing moderation decisions.

We will provide general transparency reports that summarize moderation activity, including:

• Instance-wide moderation actions (for instance, blocking another instance due to harmful behavior).
• Trends in moderation enforcement (for instance, repeated spam patterns or coordinated harassment).
• Policy changes that affect how moderation is handled.

To protect user privacy and avoid undue harm, we do not publicly disclose:

• Individual reports or user-specific actions unless absolutely necessary.
• Sensitive details about incidents involving vulnerable individuals.
• Private conversations or internal discussions between moderators and users.

Some moderation actions are communicated based on context and who is affected:

• Directly affected users (such as someone suspended for a violation) will receive a private notification.
• Members impacted by larger moderation actions (such as an instance-wide block) may see a public announcement if relevant to the community. For instance, if there are a large number of members who follow users on a blocked instance.
• Requests for explanation will be considered, but we prioritize user safety and privacy when deciding what will be disclosed.

We recognize that transparency builds trust, but it must be balanced with ethical responsibility. Our commitment is to be clear about moderation practices without compromising user safety or privacy.

Note that with all of the above, moderation is still at the discretion of the local moderation team. Sometimes the decision doesn’t come down to any one specific rule breaking incident, but general patterns or an overall vibe check. We will not be coerced by other instances or users into making a specific decision that does not align with our values and goals. Our primary goal is to make this instance a safe and welcoming community to all members who find our Code of Conduct reasonable.

If you have questions about moderation decisions or transparency policies, please reach out to @mods@tech.lgbt, or email mods@tech.lgbt

Appeals

Mastodon has an appeal system for local report moderation built in. The limitations of this system are that only affected local users can appeal, and only via the original report action.

We have separately provided a private appeal form that you can use to provide feedback for us to review. This includes space to share which decisions, why you believe that they should be reviewed, and any other information that you can share that we may not be privvy to. The form is through Cryptpad, and only stores information that you enter, with no additional identifiable information.

Please note that submitting an appeal does not guarantee that a moderation decision will be reversed.

Above all, please remember that the moderators for this instance are real individuals with feelings, emotions, and lived experiences. While tensions may be high in the moment, all of us are working toward a shared space that we all want to participate in.

Appeal Form

Blocked Instances

We maintain a blocklist of instances that we do not federate with. If you believe that an instance should be added to this list, please contact an admin or moderator.

The list is visible for logged-in members under the section Moderated servers on https://tech.lgbt/about. While we understand that not publishing this list for non-members is not fully transparent, we are not trying to scare off potential new members who want to ensure that their friends are not blocked. The only nefarious intent here are those who have used this information when public to harass individuals and the instance as a whole. Bluntly, if those are the people that you want to interact with, you should probably join their instance instead.

This page was most recently updated on 16 April 2025