So, since we’re starting to get some actual traction, even being posted about on the hard R. I figured we should probably have a little post explaining the instance and it’s goals.
What Burggit aims to be
Burggit aims to be a platform for Free Thought and Expression. Our goal is to have a place where people can freely and respectfully express their ideas/opinions without fear of being censored because they decided to use the wrong terms/wordings.
We will also not immediately suspend a user for their first infraction, though we will definitely warn them and won’t be afraid to take action of it continues.
What Burggit is not
We are not another Kiwifarms, Gab or Voat!
While we’re fine with people posting offensive speech and imagery, we won’t allow them to use their right to “Free Speech” as a weapon against the overall health of the platform. Threatening, Berating, Dogpiling, Doxxing and otherwise being complete and total assholes to other users will not be tolerated.
Having a different, unpopular opinion on a sensitive topic is fine, but there’s absolutely no reason why anyone would not be able to express those opinions respectfully. And if you can’t express those opinions without being shitty to other users directly, that’s not something we’re going to be putting up with.
If we believe that a user of ours is causing problems for our instance or other instances, we will not hesitate to deal with them.
But what does it mean to be shitty?
For clarification I’ll add some examples of behavior which would be deemed not okay.
Please note, this is not an exhaustive list.
- Calling out death to a group or individual
- Targeting another individual/user regardless of reason (Discussing something in a way which could be percieved as rude doesn’t count, some people argue passionately and that’s okay.)
- Going out of your way to cause trouble with other friendly instances
- Attacking someone’s character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself. Also known as Ad hominem’s
Neat place. I’m a fan of basically just sticking with the golden rule for general moderation policy. It does leave a lot of discretion to moderators which inevitably means someone is eventually going to get uneven treatment since we’re all just human. But even in places with nicely codified sets of rules, I’ve seen some high profile cases where the moderatorship (or rather, some “ardent” subset of the team) bends over backwards to justify their position irrespective of the rules. Enough to make me question what the point is, for most use cases anyway.
Having said that, I personally rarely run up against moderation since I mostly just lurk. I’ll try to do slightly less of that latter bit here. 👋
Yes, we are only human; however, we will try to the best of our ability to stay objective whenever any actual issues end up arising. I think the fact that we don’t punish based on the first infraction definitely helps with overall communication and transparency.
Welcome to Burggit! We’re happy to have you here and would definitely appreciate your contributions, especially at this early stage. Regardless, we hope you enjoy your stay!
Much agreed. I’ve been on the other side of the moderator-moderatee divide before, and my main “contribution” was pushing for a more lenient infraction ladder during a rules rewrite. In retrospect though, I’m not sure I’m happy about having done what I feel is the right thing compared to having effectively pushed extra work on some very good acquaintances. At the end of the day, repeat offenders tend to climb the ladder all the way up to a ban regardless of its length, even if I’d like to think otherwise.
Still, I hope things work out well here; I definitely agree with the approach, at the very least in principle.