Tŵt Cymru | Toot Wales (“Tŵt”) is a collection of Web services whose mission is to connect Cymru and its diverse community, at home and abroad, encouraging and enabling the use of the Welsh language online. We strive to provide a welcoming, bilingual platform that is free from hate, discrimination, and abuse.
To that end, the following guidance reflects the wishes of the Tŵt staff and membership. In all cases, when using the Tŵt services we ask you be respectful, be mindful, and be nice.
Discussing politics on Mastodon is fast becoming a hot-button topic. I’ve seen a lot conversation lately about whether or not “politics'' should be behind a CW and there’s one side asking for “politics” to be CWed and another side declaring it to be the most important thing in the world and should never be CWed. (skip the intro and go straight to the play)
I do not see or hear the ninety percent of people who rarely speak up. As with all things, a small selection of voices is speaking up one way or the other (ref. the 1% rule).
We’ve worked hard on explaining the subtleties and expectations in our Community Code of Conduct, but nonetheless it’s important to note two things:
Tŵt is a bilingual online social content platform, very similar to Twitter in some ways, and very much not in others. You may well be thinking the same thing I heard a more than a few times during its development; “do we really need another social media platform?” and I hope you’ll read on to see if indeed there might just be a good answer to that question.
First, the similarities.
Tŵt allows anyone to create a member account and post messages up to 500 characters to the network; we call these “Tŵtiau” or “Toots”. These messages can contain #hashtags and links, as well as video and image files. Members can subscribe to other members on the network, and reply to anything in their content feed.
Familiar ground for many, but what makes Tŵt a meaningful alternative?
Technologically the differences are privacy and ownership. Unlike Twitter, Tŵt makes it simple for authors to control who can see their content, who can follow them, and they can completely remove themselves from the network at will. If desired, all content can be retrieved and even transported to a competing service providing it uses the same underlying software.
Philosophically, Tŵt is completely open source and is operated as a non-profit; no advertising, no dues, no fees of any kind. And Tŵt comes with clear guidelines about what is considered unacceptable content.
A quick note for new members jumping ship from Twitter. First off: welcome! We are incredibly glad you have come to see what Mastodon and Mastodon servers like Tŵt are all about!
In all cases, you will find a community of friendly people ready to help you navigate a slightly different experience than you're used to on Twitter. Ask your questions in the app and you'll have an answer in no time!
This is not Twitter or an attempt to clone Twitter. It's the same but different, and is intended to be so. We are micro-blogging for people who want to control their social media feeds, be free of harassment and abuse, and want to join a more communal, supportive service that is non-toxic, non-corporate, non-surveillance.
Community Requests for Account Suspensions (3 of 3)
[This document will be published in three parts, such that Part 1 can be referenced in future conversations, Part 2 deals with a very specific set of account concerns, and Part 3 addresses some long form questions posted to the moderators on Tŵt.]
Part 3 of 3 Response to community questions
Several members of toot.wales, as well as users from other Mastodon instances posed several questions and comments around our response to their concerns over one of the accounts that some people felt deserved stronger moderation than they were perceiving. These questions are preserved and answered below.
Community Requests for Account Suspensions (2 of 3)
[This document will be published in three parts, such that Part 1 can be referenced in future conversations, Part 2 deals with a very specific set of account concerns, and Part 3 addresses some long form questions posted to the moderators on Tŵt.]
Part 2 of 3 Regarding specific account suspension requests
As a preamble, I want to remind anyone reading this that I chose to not block Gab before they came online. In the run-up to their launch there was a lot of conversation about defederating them. And within a couple of minutes of them coming online, we had them blocked. But not before they contravened our Community Guidelines. That’s a principle I cannot waver from. I’ve been around the block a few times, I’ve seen my assumptions been wrong more than a few times, and I’ve seen people change over time. I had very little doubt what was going to happen when they came online, but nonetheless the way I operate, the way I work, they would be blocked the second they contravene our stated Guidelines. Anything else – to me – is unfair, hypocritical, and a dangerous precedent. I am not the judge of all things, I am merely the current administrator of an Internet service with a stated code of conduct.
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The first account I want to discuss is from an account that posts what one user-submitted report labelled “religious spam”. Here is one of the three toots for which we received a report:
Everything we do is motivated by the life, teachings and ministry of Jesus We believe that every human life has equal value and that every person should be empowered to reach their God-given potential. To do this, we all need to belong to flourishing communities
These words were reported as “Racist spammer”.
If I were to put my non-moderator hat on, I would silence this content. I would mute this account. I would take a one-click action to never see this person’s thoughts again. I have no interest in it, and I find it disagreeable to me, personally. I do not enjoy being preached at.
And this, to me, is one of the strongest tools Mastodon users have that other services either don’t or have weaker versions of. Mastodon makes no inferences about what “should” be in your feeds. No algorithms deciding to “surface” content for you.
You decide. You own your feed. You own your experience. If you don’t like something, you never have to see it again.
Community Requests for Account Suspensions (1 of 3)
[This document will be published in three parts, such that Part 1 can be referenced in future conversations, Part 2 deals with a very specific set of account concerns, and Part 3 addresses some long form questions posted to the moderators on Tŵt.]
Part 1 of 3: Background and context on Tŵt Cymru moderation goals and policies.
“Tŵt is the community-led microblogging network for Wales and the Welsh, at home and abroad.”
This is the founding statement for Tŵt, an instance of Mastodon. Mastodon is
“a free and open-source self-hosted social networking service. It allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different servers.
Each operating server has its own code of conduct, terms of service, and moderation policies.
This differs from centrally hosted social networks by allowing users to choose a specific server which has policies they agree with, or to leave a server that has policies they disagree with, without losing access to Mastodon's social network.”
In recent weeks, one account on the toot.wales instance of Mastodon has received a report submitted by a fellow user of the service, a community member. Reports are a built-in feature of Mastodon that allow individual members to signal to the server operator that a particular toot or account is in contravention of the server policies, and this then establishes an audit trail for actions taken by moderation staff. Due to the federated nature of the content, this report can be “remote” – a report made by a user of a different server that is seeking to stop that content from coming in to that server; or “local”, a report made by an account on the same server as the offending account.
In both cases, the members with moderator privileges are then able to review the report and act upon it, with generally four possible outcomes: do nothing, warn the user, silence the user, suspend the user.
Before I dig into the particular account in question, the report our staff received, and the community responses to our handling of the report, I’d like to lay out some context for why toot.wales exists, why it’s on Mastodon, and why I am enthusiastic about having this sort of problem to deal with.
Tŵt is now updated to Mastodon 3.1 which brings several new features.
Bookmarks
Bookmarking is a new way for you to favourite something without informing the author. It's a great way to make a quick note of a toot you found helpful. You can review your bookmarks in the new “Bookmarks” menu item, https://toot.wales/web/bookmarks
To remove a bookmark, simply open that toot and click the bookmark icon again.
One of the first problems we ran into when trying to market Tŵt as a friendly alternative social media network was people asking “where's the Tŵt app?”
Of course, our answer was “you can download a bunch of apps, your choice! Freedom!”
To which we heard: “Right. Sounds good. So which one is the Tŵt app?”
