I disagree. I think the we must definitely defend ourself from those hypothetical contingencies. I don’t know where you’re coming from but from my experience we MUST focus thematically and we MUST setup rules that protect people from harrasment and abuse - in advance. To me, in 2025, online, that’s a no-brainer.
a welcoming, judgment-free, no-strings-attached space for unassuming good-faith promotion of newcomers’ music
This forum (or at least idea for it) was born from an observation that there are number of initiatives - mostly software projects, but also community building platforms - that each talk and discuss in their own bubble or platform (sometimes in closed SILOs) and sometimes talk similar things without ability to exchange those ideas, experiments, and results from their work. All those initiatives have a common ground: providing fair marketplace and/or community, based on idea (and practice) of increased autonomy for the music-maker (which ties to decentralization, federated social media or even music platforms etc). This forum was not concieved with an idea to provide another promotion platform for music-makers. There are many other music forums that provide that.
In other words, the central idea of this forum is (was?) about cross-polination of platforms and communities that are working on fair spaces for music promotion, exchange and sales. The idea was NOT the creation of a such fair space.
And yes, if this idea is followed, this means “turning away” musicians seeking a safe space to promote their music in. Maybe this doesn’t work. Maybe it “sinks” this ‘place’. I, for that matter, am not interested in investing in another forum where significant amount of posts are about “look, my new album”, but rather about socio-technical solutions and experiments that try to create such spaces and all the underlaying tech-criticism.
And, perhaps the question is still: “why limit ourselves”? And the answer is, because there are very limited resources available (despite the appearance of the oposite) - hosting expenses, administration, moderation, curation…
If you look at What we offer and Join The Social Music Network! … how would you rather rephrase it so that it is clear about our basic idea put forward there?
on abuse
Newb signs up.
I would kindly suggest to not use this disparraging term for a new member.
It’s not about ‘a space recovering’ or not, or adversarial scenarios, it’s about allowing abuse to happen in the first place.
Moderating after the abuse has happened is a practice that spaces that consider themselves safe or safer are avoiding. The usual practice is to setup rules in advance, to communicate them unconditionally. If you want a diverse space (and that means welcoming people from disadvantaged groups who are usually the ones on the receiving end of abusive behaviour), you don’t want to send a message out “if someone will abuse you here, we will kick them out”. Well, it’s not safe then, since “you will first need to be abused in order that the abuser is kicked out”. The damage will already be done. You can read read on some background on moderation at IFTAS.