MastodonForHarris Hashtag and Mutual Aid Awareness Campaign

Blog post is a copy of a longer Hachyderm Moderation Announcment about the Mutual Aid campaign using MastodonForHarris.

Hello Hachyderm! This blog post is a copy of a Hachyderm Announcement made by the Hachyderm Moderation Team earlier today. The purpose of copying to the blog is to make it more accessible, due to its length.


Hello all! We have somewhat long announcement from Hachyderm Moderation. Please read in its entirety.

We’ve been receiving reports that groups are using the MastodonForHarris / Mastodon4Harris fundraiser as a means to promote awareness around Mutual Aid - both in general awareness and in specific cases. We support people trying to bring awareness to the most vulnerable.

As moderators, we want to ensure that people are able to see the content they wish to see as long as isn’t harmful to others. This is the main “line in the sand” that would differentiate between us taking a server-wide action from individual users using the tools at their disposal to enforce individualized boundaries like muting, blocking, etc.

https://community.hachyderm.io/docs/hachyderm/mental-health/

As of right now, Hachyderm does not enforce a “correct” use for hashtags since hashtags are typically short lived and their meanings evolve rapidly. The three we do enforce are FediBlock and FediHire (Fediverse-wise) and HachyBots (Hachyderm specific):

https://community.hachyderm.io/docs/hachyderm/hashtags/#fediverse-reserved-hashtags

That said, as we are approaching a US election and a large percentage of our instance is US based, we will be proceeding through the coming months with caution to ensure that people can follow the news and conversations around the upcoming elections to the degree they wish to.

All posts, Mastodon(For|4)Harris or otherwise, will still be moderated according to our current guidelines. This includes posts that are not marked sensitive that should be, that have a false or misleading content warning (“jump scare”), bait-n-switch / deceptive links*, or posts that harass others. We have information about these on both our Content Warnings doc and the No Violence section of our rules:

https://community.hachyderm.io/docs/hachyderm/content-warnings/ https://community.hachyderm.io/docs/rule-explainer/#no-violence

One last reminder: as Hachydermians you are expected to respect boundaries, even in disagreement, and to walk away from engagements that go awry rather than escalating them. Do not enter into conversations that you’ve been explicitly asked not to, or have been explicitly asked to leave / disengage. Not all discussions “in public” are for all of the public to participate in. To put it another way, being on a social media site is very much like walking in Central Park - there may be events open to everyone as well as small private groups existing in public spaces. (So enjoy the public conversations and abide by wishes for private spaces in public.) We have this outlined in our docs as well:

https://community.hachyderm.io/docs/hachyderm/mental-health/#create-and-maintain-interpersonal-boundaries

29 July 2024 23:04 UTC

* Minor edit to explicitly call out deceptive linking.

Last modified September 2, 2024: Added dropped code blocks in blog post (dd9e084)