Looking forward to discussions here, thanks for doing the work so far, @icaria36!
Something else that should be at the top of the pile is a thorough moderation policy. The current FAQ mentions that “these are not hard and fast rules” but I think we should have some.
@dried Excellent point! Added.
Yeah, now that’s more like it! 1 hour a forum and already with the legalism. Well, I shall then commence with all the rest, if you don’t mind? A CoC can make a place safe, but it sure as hell ain’t what makes it cozy.
Yup, started a couple general threads, in the name of people speaking to each other. Please have a look and let me know if you find them acceptable 
This project is committed to be a safe and friendly space for everyone. For that principles and moderation are required.
Luckily, it’s 2025 and we don’t need to write something from scratch. Any recommendations?
We have the default FAQ.
There is also About - SoNoMu, which has a lot of good stuff to borrow. It comes from GitHub - weirderearth/weirder-rules: weirder.earth's community guidelines.
If you’re concerned about cozy, I can tell you that your reply wasn’t.
Duly noted 
Let us not escalate.
default FAQ
I have strong reservations about the legitimacy of ethical judgments as made by any American tech vendor. Guess I’ll be keeping them to myself. Ain’t here for that.
SoNoMu and weirderearth/weirder-rules
These are more like it. Keep cops away and protect people’s right to see the world in unconventional ways. Safe enough for me.
Thanks 
Something like these is what I had in mind. Clear, thought-through, built on precedent and community input. Important to have something concrete to point to before issues arise.
I fully agree that CoC, rules & etiquette are put in place as early as possible. This basic community hygiene. The Weirder Earth one is quite nice, I agree.
Ok, here is a first version.
These Rules and Etiquette are adapted from sonomu.club and originally by weirder.earth. Main changes:
feature in Discourse, which allows for easy confidential reporting and very powerful community moderation.I’m sure this version can be improved. I just did a first pass because (I agree) it is better to set clear expectations from the start.
Yes, thank you, that was the admin link. Fixed.
I would actually remove the whole “Our Rules in Just a Few Points” part. While it tried to get to the point as quickly as possible, it may actually be too on the nose without the nuance and context which is much better provided below that intro section. The “Our Rules in Just…” is something I actually added on top of the rules & etiquette from weirder earth instance.
You know that text very well. Section removed.
there is still an instance of “instance” there in the text. forum is usually not an instance, right? i mean technically it is, but it’s not usually used that way, if I’m not mistaken.
Two thoughts after a first read-over:
@prinlu later I will review the use of “instance” n the text. People also talk about “Discourse instances” but probably more as tech jargon than user talk.
@dried Yes, UI strings can be changed. I’ll change it to “Code of conduct” since this is is a widespread term, unless someone has a better idea. In a few hours, when I get back to the comfort of my desktop.
I agree with your point about politics. I’ll try to improve the text based also on…
… I have been thinking more about the concepts of CWs and triggers on a forum. While in Mastodon / “social media” content lands raw and without warning in your timeline (hence content warnings) in a forum by default you see a list of titles (akin to the CW subject) and you open the topics you care about.
Also, while social media defaults to posts as the basic unit, on a forum the basic unit are topics. Therefore, we can be more flexible about having topics about political (and other misc topics) as long as new posts are added as comments instead of contributing to a proliferation of topics about the same off-topic or fringe subjects.
What’s more, users can mute a specific topic, a tag, or a category, which removes all related topics from their sight. We could ensure as moderators that these fringe topics are properly tagged, and then users can set their filters according to their preferences.
This shouldn’t become an excuse to post about off-topic subjects, and specifically the triggering ones. The op creating a topic needs to explain why this discussion makes sense in The Social Music Network.
You shouldn’t see any “FAQ” (except in the URL, but changing that is more tricky. If you still see “FAQ” somewhere, please let me know.
I have updated the text and I think I have caught the points you have made. I have also polished other small details here and there, not changing any meaning.
So… a buncha things! Wall of text incoming, might be the moment to grab a refreshment. I promise to not be funny!
Isolating from the toxic media spectacle of representative politics
“Political current events” as off-topic & discouraged might need a bit more detail. Finding ways to participate in music outside of big tech is already political, and the idea of avoiding politics is a bit of a dogwhistle. Is there a way to phrase this point that more clearly describes the potentially problematic content and doesn’t rely on “political” as the main descriptor? Maybe something like “global affairs” or “world news”?
Wholeheartedly agree with @dried on this one.
“The news” is there to compete for mindshare with actual immediate concerns. Enough of the “current affairs” slop reaches us as it is. Keeping all that at arm’s length would only be beneficial for the quality of discussion.
But things do happen with the people of the world, and our art and activism exist in political relation to those things and those people. So, what’s gained and what’s lost by keeping it at more than arm’s length?
A possible solution would be a word filter. Perhaps one which replaces the names of certain world figures with asterisks, or with silly versions of the names in question, thus robbing them of their symbolic power.
Also, besides the obvious slurs, certain meme phrases and thought-terminating cliches might be better kept out. I call those “tribbles”, because of the way they spread.
My go-to solution for letting people know they should avoid those, is switching to a mildly abrasive mode of speech – but if that’s off limits maybe someone can propose an automated way for ensuring the discussion is not simply civil, but coherent and free from mind-viruses.
Potential double bind in policy statement
And now for something a little more subtle.
The following is the closest thing I’ve found as a statement of purpose for the project. In my view, this brief statement happens to be structured in a way that approaches the so called “double bind”.
Which, as it happens, is a thing that stands out to me in a particularly disturbing way, but is not obvious to a lot of people. (Fair warning: I am likely to parse the behavior of anyone allowing such things in their speech as potentially hostile and possibly not in full control of their actions, and might react in accordance with a trauma response.)
The Social Music Network is a community for musicians, developers, and all music lovers collaborating for the common good! We welcome topics within this
[1] wide
You may not know why I find this disturbing. That’s okay! It doesn’t mean that I think you are a bad person just because you phrased something in some way at the very outset of this whole initiative. Not does it mean that I don’t want this project to succeed. Far from it!
However, please consider I may know what I’m talking about when I say that, should this rule remain a guiding principle to what is permissible on here, it’s absolutely essential to clarify the following:
Which scope is that? The first sentence defines “on-topic” as (pick one of the following):
If the scope established by the previous sentence is in fact “wide”, why explicitly state so?
I understand if this seems like belaboring the point; I’m trying to unroll the abstraction for those unfamiliar with certain kinds of microaggression. Vague and vaguely self-contradictory rules enable that mode of speech which prioritizes domination over creativity. It’s least purposeful of all to speak in a space which pretends to be the one kind of thing, but is in fact the other.
So, I believe we should figure out a way to state this particular guiding principle for acceptable speech on here in a more unambiguous way.
The toxicity of the “off-topic”
Whether it’s actually worthwhile to impose an on-topic/off-topic distinction, however clear and unambiguous one can make it, is a question on which the opinion of experienced community organizers may drastically differ from mine.
While establishing initial norms is on the table, I shall state my dissenting view:
The exact boundary about on-topic vs off-topic cannot be clearly defined
The fear that certain harmless speech is arbitrarily off-limits has a chilling effect.
If the idea here is to reduce moderator workload, I can understand that in principle – as long as you have the resources to monitor for off-topic speech…
Yet it still strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. Community, whether cozy or rugged or some other, is built by the sharing of thoughts – wherever those may lead, and it’s beautiful when they lead to surprising places!
The existence of Discourse’s various automations as a “software package for facilitating civilized conversations” (a very odd statement of purpose, imo, but at least a very direct and succinct one, sufficiently so to bear paraphrase - please have this free canary!) makes me wonder what sort of chaos might they be intended to ward against.
Could it be like placebo effect: Discourse’s feature set taking credit for an improved quality of conversation more rightly attributed to other factors - such as the rediscovery of threaded discussions (at long last!), or facilitating a self-selection by class? Perhaps people familiar with moderating other kinds of platforms can weigh in on that one.
I hope we all agree that this place is not at risk of turning into a Reddit-type cesspit anytime soon. That’s why I believe that starting out by setting a rule to prevent such a contingency might be counterproductive to whatever this space’s purpose is eventually decided to be.
CWs/triggers
social media defaults to posts as the basic unit, on a forum the basic unit are topics
users can mute a specific topic, a tag, or a category
Even on forums, the basic unit of speech is a message/post. They’re just more sensibly organized than the undifferentiated firehose of a newsfeed or chatroom.
Similarly, the basic unit of comprehension remains a concept/notion. It’s my understanding that the thing which may provoke painful emotional reactions in people is the referencing of certain concepts? (Sure’s how it works for me – though in my threat model to reveal which ones exactly, would just be bad opsec…)
Perhaps paradoxically, but filtering by topic may be more effective on a newsfeed-type medium, than on a forum, since there is space for fewer concepts to be referenced in a microblog post, than in a forum thread.
Thus I don’t really see how filtering whole threads or whole categories would fulfill the purpose of helping not encounter certain concepts. It could hamper people’s participation to the point they might as well “filter out” the whole platform…!
Since posting long things here is way easier than on e.g. Mastodon, I believe we should encourage people to CW those parts of their posts that might trigger others. The “hide details” formatting feature is great for that, and an official guideline on what things are likely to trigger people would be welcome – since it’s usually things that non-traumatized people haven’t really considered.
Instances and use of jargon
later I will review the use of “instance” n the text. People also talk about “Discourse instances” but probably more as tech jargon than user talk.
The one that always bugged me is discord “servers” – they’re not servers, they’re not even particularly serverlike. (Gaming jargon?) But how do you even call an group of chatrooms? Wordmaking being somewhat frowned upon in this era of the Internet, Matrix just went with “spaces”… Anyway, give people reason to add this useful piece of sysadmin jargon to their vocabulary, is what I’d say in general - it represents a concrete thing, the only social platforms of which there are not “instances” are the closed-source centralized ones!
If this helps with review, there are 2 instances of instance in the text, and indeed they’re Mastodon-specific:
Promoting, supporting, or using this mastodon instance to do business with cryptocurrency, NFTs, play-to-earn gaming, or the like. (Anti-cryptocurrency posting is permitted.)
These are general things to be aware of if you use our instance. You may not be used to them, and that’s okay! We’re willing to help you if you stumble along the way.
Swapping those to “space” or “platform” or “forum” would be just as fine imo.
