1. Respect: No hate speech, harassment, trolling, dogpiling, doxing, transphobia, homophobia, aphobia, ableism, racism, sexism or xenophobia will be tolerated.
2. Age: You must be 16 years or older, regardless of location.
3. Sensitive Media: Sensitive filters and content warnings must be used for anything that may be sensitive. Please keep this a safe place. Ensure you do this for any content with flashing imagery too please.
4. Explicit Content: Sexually or violently explicit content is forbidden. What you share and what you post can have mature themes by all means but it must not be graphic, it must be behind a content warning/marked as sensitive, must be legal and of good faith.
5. No illegal content, spam or advertising.
6. Language: Please mainly post in English. I'm not stopping you entirely, and you may want to engage and share content not in English. That's fine as I can translate things. But you need to be posting mainly in English please.
7. Free Speech is not freedom from consequence. I will censor and cancel you, whether you’re an instance member or not, if you are an unfavourable “politically incorrect” person. This is not the instance for you.
8. Refer to people correctly. Respect how people want to be referred as. If they/them as personal pronouns are alien to you, please do catch up! And don't refer to everyone by they/them if they don't go by such. Respect people's neopronouns too! Avoiding or refusing is just misgendering!
9. Trans Rights Are Human Rights. If you are a TERF, crawl your way back to Rowling's castle as that's the only place you belong.
10. Aphobia is a-not-ok. Do not invalidate ace or aro folk, or anyone of any good faith attraction/orientation. Invalidating micro-labels also are not on.
11. All good faith identities are valid. You may not understand them, but at the very least have respect and do not gatekeep.
    
    BLERFs, get out of here with your TERF rewritten talking points about bi-lesbians and mspec-lesbians. You too go crawl your way over to Rowling like the TERFs! Stop including non-binary people into attraction you deny is mspec! We aren't women-lite! We are many genders.
12. Don't be ableist. Ableism of any kind will not happen here. Neurodiverse folks are welcome here. Sysmeds and anti-self diagnosis bigots are not welcome.
    
    People know themselves a lot more you ever will. Trust them in that rather than invalidate their reality. Why would you rather invalidate everyone who aren't making it up just so you can save yourself from believing the few that are? It is not your call to make!
13. Fascism & Nationalism: There's plenty of ways to take pride in where you are from, such as one's culture, without doing nothing but endorsing the unjustifiable actions of said country. You cannot say you're against war, then act neutral to it and endorse said war through actions because you still believe your leader is a saint.
    
    Slavi Ukraini.
    Free Palestine.
    End all war.

1. CSS: The ability to customise one’s profile’s CSS can be provided upon request, however I will revoke that ability if it’s been done in poor taste or is inaccessible. It must be responsive. JS & HTML are not an option, and all media used must be uploaded here appropriately sized.
2. Audio Player: Users can have an audio player added to the top of their public profile's bio upon request. This will not autoplay upon visiting the profile though. Audio of poor taste that will cause discomfort will not be allowed.

1. Custom fonts: In this context, I'm speaking about the non-ASCII based custom fonts that are able to be used anywhere. These are hugely inaccessible to people using screen readers. Despite that translators tend to be perfectly capable of recognising what the custom fonts say, screen readers on the other hand either output the random garbage which create those fonts, or ignore them entirely. Please do not use these fonts.
2. Emojis: Excessive use of emojis is a huge problem because if the same emoji is repeated multiple times, screen readers will repeat that emoji each time. It's ridiculous they can't just say XX emojis, such as "5 yellow hearts" instead of saying "yellow heart" 5 times.
   
   Mastodon does implement emojis as SVGs on desktop, which screen readers therefore entirely ignore. But mobile apps still use the original emojis, therefore the same problem still applies with excessive emojis. Please be reasonable with emoji use.
3. Flashing Imagery, or rapidly changing imagery, even the tiniest amount, can be at the very least extremely discomforting. Please keep this a safe and accessible place by using content warnings and DO NOT edit your profile consisting of such imagery.
4. Jump Scares: I won't tell you I don't find some funny, but please, keep them off of this instance, or use a content warning at the very least.

1. Dream Stans: I won't say you are awful for liking Dream's content. But with the amount of stans that are blatantly queerphobic and ableist, if you're a self-proclaimed stan of his, this is not the place for you.
2. Pepe the Frog: The creator never intended for Pepe to be used for hate speech by neo-nazis. However, he is, or otherwise by trolls anyway. Do not use him on this instance.
3. NFTs and Cryptocurrencies: So much harm to the environment is caused as a result of the recklessly wasted energy due to mining. Keep that off of this instance thanks.
4. Badly drawn NFT monkey: I consider that monkey indifferent to Pepe. The amount of times I've seen neo-nazi edits of that monkey, it's ridiculous, plus you're majority just trolls anyway. Consider yourself blocked.
5. Odysee/Lbry: Usage of Odysee and the Lbry platform I consider as an endorsement of the rampant hate speech and disinformation that is spread like fire on there. It's a shame, as it's a wasted potential the Odysee software. But there's mostly only two groups of people on there.. the alt-right and those who choose to ignore or deny the harm caused by the lack of moderation on what isn't really a decentralised platform.

"Cross-posting" is the automatic copying of posts from one platform to another.

If you use an app, like Twidere or PostyBirb, that lets you simultaneously post to both Twitter and Mastodon, that's completely fine.
But if you use an automated cross-poster, the following applies:

Cross-posting from Mastodon to other platforms is fully permitted.
Cross-posting into Mastodon from another platform is permitted under the following terms:

1. The posts do not include platform-specific references, e.g. talking about "here" meaning Twitter, or including text from other non-Mastodon users verbatim (e.g. cross-posted quote tweets).
2. The account is at least semi-regularly monitored by the author, so that interactions from Mastodon users are not ignored.
3. The account being cross-posted is owned by the same person. Third-party copying of content is not permitted.

This social networking website runs on a free and open-source software project named Mastodon. Mastodon is a decentralised federated alternative to platforms such as Twitter. Each Mastodon website is what's known as an instance, or a server.

You join one, and you can either just interact with the local community on that instance, or you can interact with a bigger community across a whole range of instances that together form what is known as the Fediverse.

Mastodon runs on the decentralised social networking protocol ActivityPub, along with a wide range of other free and open source software projects such as Pleroma, Misskey, PixelFed, Hubzilla, Peertube, Friendica, GoToSocial, Lemmy, Bookwyrm, Castopod, OwnCast, WriteFreely, Plume & even an ActivityPub WordPress plugin.

There also is GNU Social, though that consists of an outdated ActivityPub implementation apparently. These projects all have different focuses and features. While Mastodon is similar to Twitter, PixelFed is similar to Instagram, Friendica is similar to Facebook, Peertube is similar to YouTube, Lemmy is similar to Reddit, Bookwyrm is similar to Goodreads, Castopod is for podcasts, OwnCast is similar to Twitch, and WriteFreely is a blogging platform that Write.as runs on.

Yet despite all these differences and focuses of each project, users on one are able to communicate with users on another. It's really clever.

Mainstream social networks are single centralised platforms ran by one company you are locked into. They don't offer a way to cross-communicate such as communicating with someone on Instagram from Twitter. You have to use the particular platform for that.

Decentralised ones on the other hand are not single platforms ran by one ruling party. They are ran by many different parties, on many different servers, with their own goals and rules in mind.

They sadly can and indeed do benefit from this decentralised design. Being banned from one instance doesn't stop someone from joining another, or hosting their own. The fediverse is a wild-west if instances don't moderate what other instances are allowed to interact with theirs.

But the saving grace here with the fediverse is that admins can mute or block other instances from interacting with their own, you can as a user block instance domains as well as individual users, and you are more likely to have a personal human connection to those running the instance you are on.

It can and does result in a much friendlier environment than a single platform with billions of accounts that are just impossible to moderate half decently. There are also some very nice privacy options that you don't get with mainstream social media.

Yes, with more freedom comes those that abuse it. But if that freedom provides the tools to block all of that out, then that freedom can offer a safe space that is just almost impossible on other platforms in today's climate.

It only adds to that when the developers and the hosts of many major instances prioritise being an inclusive and safe space for queer and neurodiverse people. It does make sense considering so much of the friendly fediverse community came about from Trump's rise to the spotlight on Twitter back in 2016/17.

Absolutely 1000s. It's always growing. I first came across Mstdn.social ran by @Stux, which I highly recommend. The only main reason I'm hosting my own instance now rather than stay settled on Mstdn is because I wanted to be able to customise everything.

Stux also runs an instance that runs on coffee if you would appreciate a smaller, quieter instance but still ran by the same people. Alternatively, if Misskey is more of your fancy, there's Misskey.ai also ran by Stux and by @Freeplay, who is one of Stux's coffee moderators.

Stux, ALSO runs three different Pixelfed instances. Pixey.org, Gram.social which is aimed as a Giphy alternative, and Catgram.co for well cats.
Lets's also not forget about PeerTube.tv, a PeerTube instance.. yet again, ran by Stux.

There's the official Mastodon instances Mastodon.Social, Mastodon.Online and PixelFed instance PixelFed.social.

There's Tech.lgbt, Mastodon.lol, and Queer.Party, which are all queer focused instances. Then there's Mastodon.Art for well... art.

For other instances that I'd like to give a shout out to, there's @Naia's wolftastic Pleroma instance Howlr.me.
There's @Kdy's Mastodon instance Im-In.space which partly inspired my instance's design.
And there's @Hanna's Misskey instance LGBT.pm, whom gave me some pointers into the right direction when I first was wrapping my head around self hosting my instance.

Besides this, there's just far too much instances out there to list. Find one with good rules, that proactively blocks the wild west of the fediverse, that has a focus to what your interests are, and you hopefully will be opened to an amazing experience.

Don't feel you belong on one instance? Well there's so much other options out there. You can easily export your data, and transfer one account's followers to an account on another instance, at least with Mastodon. Whether you want to delete the old account or leave it up as a redirect is entirely up to you.

You will see across the fediverse that so much accounts have a blue tick in their display name. This is nothing more than a custom emoji that anyone can have. It is not a way to know if an account is legit.

If someone runs their own instance, make sure that the domain actually is real, works, and goes to that instance. If it doesn't, someone possibly is pretending to be that domain.

Mastodon has the ability to let you verify you are the owner of the links in your profile metadata. This consists of the linked website(s) containing a link back to your profile with a rel="me" attribute. This can be a hidden link, and you can have multiple if you have multiple accounts. This is the only valid method of confirming an account is legit, as long as the domain, and/or website is in the right hands that is.

Running your own instance, that's using your own domain and is personalised to how you want it, is awesome. But before I recommend you run your own instance, here's safety reasons I recommend not to:

Things may sound doom and gloom from this. But the fediverse is generally a much friendlier place than mainstream social media, again due to the fact that you have more useful privacy and blocking options at your disposal. But running your own instance just simply isn't suitable, viable or safe for everyone. Do not blindly recommend and tell people it's easy and that anyone can do it. Remember, not everyone is tech savvy, or able to deal with the pressure involved that just wouldn't exist as a regular user staying under the radar.

If you are someone that wants to go ahead and run an instance though, you know what you're signing up to, then I highly recommend it. You can create a lovely personal, fun and safe space, and do much more being in control, such as customising the character limit of posts and bios, using a fork and whatever customisations you like.

There's just so much fun that can be had out of running your own instance with the software of your choice. But again, please don't underestimate how much shit is out there on the fediverse. As someone hosting, if you don't block, or at least reject media from, malicious instances, it could land you in legal trouble if anything illegal is in the database/cache due to these bad actors.

Have fun on the fedi, but be safe.