cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/67952523

This is the first big step in the process to develop comprehensive guidelines for the Fedecan non-profit and the various platforms.

While this will mostly involve converting tacit knowledge and experience into an explicit written form, we expect that this process will inevitably bring up some points of disagreement on the best way to deal with different issues. We ask everyone participating in these discussions to please contribute constructively and in good faith. We encourage you to bring up any concerns or issues you have with the proposed structure and drafted guidelines, so that we can work together to fix them early on. However, in order to keep a productive environment for those discussions, we will be pruning any comment chains that devolve into personal attacks, slap fights, etc.

To help ground your feedback, consider these thought experiments when evaluating a potential guideline:

• Veil of ignorance: Would it still feel fair to you if you switched places with someone else on the platform (ex. a new user, a moderator, an admin, a member of a vulnerable group, etc.)?
• Equal Applicability: These rules will be enforced uniformly on everyone. A poorly written rule that helps “your side” today, can easily harm “your side” in the future as circumstances change.

The full guidelines, including governance details like the annual review cycle, can be found on the website: https://fedecan.ca/en/guidelines/

We plan to structure the guidelines as follows:

Tier 1: Fedecan Rules

Internal Conduct

These rules apply to Fedecan team members (directors, officers, admins, and anyone with elevated access). They set expectations for how team members should act.

Universal Rules

These are the baseline rules that apply to every user on every Fedecan platform. They cover the things that are prohibited by Canadian law (threats, hate speech, CSAM, non-consensual intimate imagery) as well as universal policy rules (privacy/doxxing, harassment, fraud, content that could cause harm, labelling of sensitive content, etc.).

Tier 2: Platform-Specific

Each platform has different functionality and norms, so this is where we can be more specific with the rules. The threadiverse platforms (lemmy.ca, piefed.ca, sh.itjust.works) share similar rules around community creation, moderation, vote manipulation, and content labelling. Pixelfed has its own rules tailored to its platform.

Tier 3: Community-Level Rule Templates

These are optional templates that communities can link to, or use as a starting point for their own rules. The idea is that moderators can point users to a clearly written explanation of why a rule exists, and any relevant exceptions, rather than trying to fit everything into the sidebar. Additionally, if many communities are enforcing a particular rule in the same way, then users will have an easier time understanding and following them.

The post title standards template has been drafted, and we plan to add more as the need arises. I have a few others that are in the works, but they have some overlap with the other sections, so I thought that it would be better to let people discuss first.