Freethought Online

Server rules

Below is a summary of rules you need to follow if you want to have an account on this server of Mastodon:

1. No -isms. This includes, but is not limited to, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, age-ism, and able-ism.
2. No spam. This includes, but is not limited to, unapproved bots, advertising on behalf of others, and filling up the local timeline with posts.
3. No harassment. This includes, but is not limited to, non-consensual trolling, excessive private messages, and posts with dog whistles or other microaggressions.
4. No scams. This includes, but is not limited to, advertising cryptocurrencies and NFTs, misrepresenting yourself as part of a group you are not, or "just asking questions" that others have long since answered.
5. No feds. This includes, but is not limited to, members of any law enforcement, military, or intelligence agency.
6. No short links. Link shorteners like bit.ly, t.co, and others obscure their destinations and track who clicks on them.
7. No incitement. This includes, but is not limited to, encouraging others to commit violence or flood the account of another person with unsolicited messages.
8. No stereotyping. When critiquing religion It is easy to treat heterogeneous people as a homogeneous group and become a bigot. Not all Christians are terrorists, not all Buddhists carry machine guns, and not all First Nations people are video game streamers.
9. Act with consent. Use content warnings so that other people won't see things they don't want to, but don't force others to use content warnings they don't think are appropriate. Respect the boundaries set by others, and so on.

Introduction

We're all part of the atheist and skeptic community, on the social justice side of the deep rift. We're worried about religion and pseudo-science, but we're also worried about climate change, fascism, and bigotry in all its forms. We rarely agree on things, but we try to focus our anger on social institutions rather than people.

Does that sound like you? Then come join us! Not sure? Most of us come from Freethought Blogs, so by browsing there you can get a feel for what we're like here. However, Mastodon is not a blog, nor even Twitter without Nazis; don't worry, we have some reading material available to help explain what it is.

Just like our other site, there are no ads here. We do not sell your data to third-party brokers, either. This instance is made by the community, for the community, and runs on volunteers and donations. Conversely, be mindful of that; running this server is not our job, and we have lives and time commitments elsewhere.

Code of Conduct

The server rules do a pretty good job of explaining what's acceptable or otherwise here. Still, a few points are worth elaborating on.

... filling up the local timeline with posts.

Many people catch up on what's new by scrolling through the local timeline. If you post your twenty-post-long magnum opus all at once, you're forcing others to scroll past twenty consecutive posts if they're not interested. Putting a content warning on them doesn't help, as most clients don't shrink the post down to the content warning, so you've just exchanged a wall of text for a wall of blank space.

The recommended approach is to make the first post relatively short, add either a content warning or description stating it's part of a long thread, then setting the visibility of the remaining posts to Unlisted instead of Public.

Incidentally, this is why we don't recommend you use the official Mastodon phone app; for some bizarre reason, it prevents you from using the Unlisted visibility. If you have an iPhone, Metatext does not have this problem plus it has a threaded view, and last time we looked it was free. There are other choices for iOS, as well as for Android.

... excessive private messages ...

This is a bit of a tangent, but worth mentioning. Private visibility means your posts can only be seen by the people mentioned in them. Twitter, in contrast, keeps direct messages private even when they mention another person's handle. This has lead to more than a few people being surprised their private gripes about That User are visible to said user.

... "just asking questions" ...

The devil doesn't need an advocate. If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me how we can be evolved from monkeys because monkeys still exist, or pointed out the high level of black-on-black crime, or gestured vaguely at Hannah Mouncey, I'd have maybe two nickels. That's because I avoid conversations where one side hasn't done the bare minimum of research necessary to become informed, and are likely just trying to feed a martyr complex. If you try to engage in sealioning, don't be shocked when you're banned or blocked from this instance.

No feds.

The police have not been kind to LGBT people. Within living memory, they have gone out of their way to harass and ruin them financially. This is just one of the many, many, many problems with law enforcement. Excluding them makes our community friendly and safer, without causing a public safety issue. Other branches of the state have their own issues, hence why they're included as well.

No short links.

Having said that about short links, Mastodon can create huge spikes in network traffic due to its decentralized nature. If you're linking to a small Mastodon instance in a post, consider using a proxy like jort.link to soften the traffic spike.

No stereotyping.

Consider this asshole.

What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day — but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.
Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. (2004)

His hypothetical future scenario was not hypothetical when he wrote it. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan performed their first nuclear weapons tests in 1998, and claims to have been capable of detonating a nuke since 1984. Yet despite being an active sponsor of terrorism and engaging in occasional small wars with neighboring India, we're far more concerned about Russia dropping a nuclear bomb nowadays. Sam Harris holds a wildly stereotyped view of religious terrorists, at odds with reality.

This tendency to stereotype is shockingly common. Think all Buddhists are pacifists? In reality, Buddhists have found ways to justify violence and war. Ever shake your head at how bigoted Floridians are against gay people? Support for gay rights in Florida is on par with Minnesota, Hawaii, and Pennsylvania, plus not too far behind New York, Maine, or California. Argued that all Texans are gun nuts? A majority favour stricter gun laws, they're just stuck in a state that allows minority rule. In sum, critique the actual views of specific people, rather than assume an entire group is homogeneous in how they think.

But seriously, First Nations people are l33t gamerz.

Use content warnings so that other people won't see things they don't want to, but don't force others to use content warnings they don't think are appropriate.

Mastodon has a culture of putting content warnings on pretty much everything. Think of it as a subject line for what follows, allowing you to skip reading something you don't care about. There's also the argument that something you find bland, such as a photo of your meal, might be annoying to someone else, say those with an eating disorder. Why risk making someone's day worse, when all you have to do is type a few words in the "content warning" box?

Thanks to the recent influx of Twitter users, there's been quite a bit of push-back on that culture. The two best counter-arguments are that if you put content warnings on everything, you're arguing that everything is equally triggering. "Hair woes" and "sexual assault" are clearly not. It's also tough to scrub out your unconscious sexism/racism/etc. if you can easily ignore posts on sexism/racism/etc.

In practice, both posting styles coexist quite peacefully. Those who must have a content warning can add filters as insurance, and if someone is egregious about not using them you can mute or block that user, or report the post to a mod. In case the implication isn't clear, let's be explicit: refusing to put content warnings on posts that need them are a violation of the rules and can get you kicked off this instance. Trolling people with misleading content warnings is also a violation of the rules.

Avoid replying to a post with an request for a content warning, that rarely works unless you're a moderator.

Moderated servers

Hometown generally allows you to view content from and interact with users from any other server in the fediverse. These are the exceptions that have been made on this particular server.

Filtered media

Media files from these servers will not be processed or stored, and no thumbnails will be displayed, requiring manual click-through to the original file:

Limited servers

Posts from these servers will be hidden in public timelines and conversations, and no notifications will be generated from their users interactions, unless you are following them:

Suspended servers

No data from these servers will be processed, stored or exchanged, making any interaction or communication with users from these servers impossible: