Rules
| Harassment | No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other users. |
| Impersonation | No impersonation of other people, companies, organizations, brands, etc. |
| Bigotry | No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, or casteism. |
| Extremism | No incitement of violence or advocacy of violent acts/ideologies. |
| SPAM | No advertising, spam or excessive promotion. |
| Sexual/Violence | No sexually explicit or graphically violent media. |
| Disinformation | No intentionally false or misleading information. |
Rule Violations
If you find content that is in violation of the Server Rules, please report the offending account. You may also take other actions on your own, such as muting or blocking the account, or the entire domain/instance.
Moderation Process
We have documented our moderation process to be as open as possible.
Defederation
We actively "defederate" vmst·io from other instances that are incompatible with our fundamental rules, in an effort to protect our users. The decision to defederate can come from reports by our users but is also based on community discussion around such bad actors. We would rather be proactive in blocking bad actors versus waiting for abuse to happen.
We previously listed all defederated instances on at vmst.io/about, but have since switched to posting the listing in CSV format on our GitHub.
Download BlocklistThe rationale for this change was to limit the listing of domains that sometimes contained offensive language or hosted illegal material. Being posted in CSV also allows other instance administrators to easily import our blocklist or compare it against their own.
Reporting
If during your use of the platform, you find another instance that you think needs to be restricted from interacting with ours or if you feel that another instance may have been blocked by our staff in error, please file an issue on our GitHub. If you'd feel more comfortable, you can also reach out to one or more of our staff directly via direct message.
Brand Accounts
Please see our policy page on Brand & Bot accounts.
Our Discretion
We want to foster an open discussion where everyone feels welcome. The rules are meant to be clear and direct, but the staff of this instance has ultimate discretion on how they are enforced. We may alter to these rules as needed, but will make an effort to notify you of any major change.
If you are found to be in violation, the staff may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from the instance.
Following Norms
There are certain "norms" of Mastodon, and the wider "Fediverse" that you'll be expected to follow while a member of this instance.
For example, include content warnings when necessary, mark media as sensitive as appropriate, and regularly use descriptive text (or "Alt Text") for image uploads.
Some of these norms may be different than what you're used to on other platforms. While failure to use these these are not strictly moderation worth events, we do ask that you respect and try and conform to these norms as you explore and grow on the platform.