Tech.LGBT Moderation Guidelines

Moderation Principles

Our guiding value for moderation, above all else, is the protection of our members. We are a community of marginalized individuals with a diversity of life experiences, and we respect the trust that our members put in us as moderators.

With that trust we have responsibility, and this document is an attempt to outline this responsibility. No document can cover all moderation events that may come up, but the general rules that guide our moderation team are:

Moderation will be proactive where possible. If we can take the onus off of our members in blocking harmful servers/instances, we will do so.
Moderation will be as transparent as possible where reasonable.
- Preserving the privacy of members (i.e. when talking about reports originating from our instance)
- Avoiding pile-ons

We do not perform “guilt-by-association” moderation. While that may contribute to moderation decision making, it is not the sole or majority basis for moderation action on our server. We follow reports and public discourse around moderation, but do not perform moderation via pressure from other servers.

Moderator Conduct

Our moderators are here to protect our community and make this a welcoming space for our users. We do this by keeping a watch of the local and federated feeds, responding to user reports, managing user accounts on our server, and curating federation.

Our staff of administrators and moderators are held to the same rules as all other users on our server.

Moderators with personal involvement or history in a conflict are not to engage in any actions beyond providing information. We also aim to keep our personal biases, knowledge, and experiences in check when making decisions as much as possible; if this cannot be done feasibly, the moderator is to disengage from the decision.

Moderators are prohibited from discussing private information about users publicly. We highly value our users’ personal data and only provide relevant information in the case of reports on a need-to-know basis only to affected parties.

Moderator Communication

Clear communication between our staff and others is vital to making appropriate decisions and maintaining healthy relationships with the wider Fediverse.

We issue statements via our server account, @mods@tech.lgbt. Our staff are allowed to express their own opinions on their own accounts, but personal account posts do not represent the moderation team or server as a whole.

Communication between another server’s moderation staff and ours should be done through our email, mods@tech.lgbt, or through direct messaging to the @mods@tech.lgbt account. For these official communications, it is done as the collective voice of our moderation team.

Our primary goal in sign-up reviews before accessing our server is to keep out bots and corporate accounts. Submissions with minimal or no reasoning will be denied with prejudice. Accounts that aim to use our service solely for hosting a business will also be denied approval.

We accept people, not proxies of people.

We also will not approve accounts for known bad actors, or those who directly or indirectly oppose our core tenants in their submission (i.e. to promote religious rhetoric; to debate against the legitimacy of LGBTQIA+ communities).

Reports and Appeals

All user reports are taken seriously and any actions must be taken with confidence.

Reports about our individual staff members will not be handled by the individuals in question but rather by the rest of the staff.

If a report appears to be more nuanced, then the moderator should investigate deeper to determine the context of the post and of the report itself to determine if any violation has occurred. Debates in which one party disagrees with the other but creates a retaliatory report are generally not actionable unless it meets the criteria for violation of our rules. The report button is not a “super downvote” button.

We may request additional information from reporters to get a better picture of the situation at hand, we want to be assured we have an as complete picture as possible when making decisions.

In the case that an action is appealed, the rest of the moderation team will be informed of the appeal and collectively decide if the action taken was justified (denying the appeal), or if the user receiving the action has corrected their conduct to justify a reversal of the decision or if the decision was made unjustly (approving the appeal).

Federation

We only federate with servers that align with our principles and defederate servers that oppose our ideals. Actions with other servers have the biggest impact on our community, so we implement a higher threshold of tolerance as necessary.

Some servers may only be limited if they do not pose a serious risk to our users.

Rules for defederation must meet at least one of the listed criteria below:

Their policies/rules directly violate ours
Multiple reports about users on their server, relative to server size
- Reports about server staff themselves may alone qualify for the entire server
- Severity of reports as they correlate to our rules
- Inaction from remote server staff to enact their own rules
Remote server staff responses that permit or endorse severe violations of our policies

Defederation with servers with which we more heavily federate will be given advanced notice via the @mods@tech.lgbt account with our justification and will be limited immediately. A window of 14 to 30 days will be made before suspension to allow for users to migrate if they feel directly impacted by the action.

If there is a request to revoke the limit/suspension of a server, our moderation team will decide if the reason for taking action against a server was justified or is still justified. If the server in question is deemed to still be in violation, we will inform the requestor about the outcome as reasonable to do so.

Covenants and Pacts

Our server is hesitant to be included in pacts and covenants among other servers, as we prefer to maintain our own moderation discretion. The pressure to be included in pacts will not be seen as an adequate reason to sign them. The hesitancy to sign pacts does not indicate a moderator position on the content of the pact or covenant.

We are currently signees of the following pacts:

Anti-Meta Fedi Pact

Moderation Team

Instance owner: @david

Staff:

This page was most recently updated on 7 October 2023