Mastodon Rules: Characterizing Formal Rules on Popular Mastodon Instances is a recently published research article that compares and characterises the rules of the most popular Mastodon servers. The researchers find that “Rules on Mastodon often pay particular attention to issues of harassment and hate — strongly reflecting the spirit of the Mastodon Covenant. We speculate that these rules may have emerged in response to problems of other platforms, and reflect a lack of support for instance maintainers.”
The report compares the rules on Mastodon servers to those on subreddits, and comes up with some interesting findings: “[R]ules about Hate Speech, Harassment, and Doxxing/Personal Info are far more common on Mastodon, while rules about Consequences/Moderation/Enforcement, Behavior/Content/Format Allowed, and Links & Outside Content are much less common. This contrast may suggest that these spaces have different values and purposes.” and “rules on Mastodon often explicitly engage with systemic oppression across many different intersectional identities beyond what is required by the Mastodon Covenant.”
And finally, this line in the report is a good indication of why I want to spend my time on the fediverse: “Mastodon instances seem to have more of an orientation towards justice”.
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@laurenshof I think part of that comes from the fact that most subreddits are topic based while many fedi instances are general. So, it makes more sense to police "off-topic" content on Reddit there than here.
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Now that I’ve managed to read that article, I think it only scratches the surface, also because the researchers obviously had to research first what Mastodon is instead of knowing that from personal experience. And they only know half the truth.Mastodon instance rules are always half-powerless due to how decentralised the Fediverse is. They can’t be enforced upon users on entirely different instances with different rules whose posts just happen to show up in the federated timeline. It’s even harder to enforce them upon users from entirely different Fediverse projects with not only different rules, but different sets of features.Take content warnings as an example. If you wanted to comply with the content warning requirements on any instance, you’d have to comply with the content warning requirements on all instances. You’d have to know and use over a hundred different content warnings. And you might break the "no excessive content warnings" rules on other instances.Other Fediverse projects such as Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams) don’t even have a dedicated content warning field. That is, they do have that particular field, but it’s labelled "summary" or "abstract" and not "content warning". Thus, their users often don’t know where to put Mastodon-style content warnings, and they believe they can’t do that anyway.Content and format rules are rare on Mastodon due to Mastodon’s lack of features. There’s only so much that you can do on Mastodon itself that could disturb someone. Why ban something that’s impossible to begin with?
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