Administrators

Admins are the people making the tech stuff work. They maintain the website and do the weird techie stuff that pretty much no one really wants to do. They have the ability, but not the authority, to perform moderation functions unless they are moderators as well.

Moderators

Moderators are Speakeasers who have the ability to review complaints and act on those complaints. They have the ability and the authority to warn, limit, and suspend individual accounts to protect the users of the Speakeasy and the Fediverse as a whole.

Investigators

Investigators decide whether to approve account applications and research any appeals to bans or defederations. They are not moderators or administrators and cannot take punitive action on accounts. They do not make the final decision on appeals.

Transparency in All Decisions

The Speakeasy does not believe in moderating behind the scenes. We are not queens or empresses or whatever; we're just people who have been entrusted with managing the Speakeasy. As such, we will always 'show our work' when it comes to defederation, bans, and blocks because we want the people who are here to be able to decide for themselves whether we're moderating well.

Look, as sucky as it can be sometimes, moderating is a privilege. People place their trust in us and we're not going to undermine that by making decisions where they can't see. And we're not going to get mad if they critique our decisions because I mean, come on, that's the fking point.

Public Anonymity, Private Accountability

Moderators may manage public affairs, but we do not require them to disclose their identities. We're well aware of the risk of harassment that moderators elsewhere face. Rather than subject our friends and partners to that, we have decided to communicate moderation actions through the Overgoddess. If you need to harass someone, harass her.

Bound by, Not Above the Rules

Moderators are expected to follow the rules of the Speakeasy. We're not 'above' everyone else because we have the tools to ban people; that's a power we're entrusted with, not a symbol of authority. We use those powers sparingly, and most importantly, we use them on ourselves if we've vioalted the Core Tenets.

Get in the bin. Get in the bin and light it on fire. With kerosene.

Transferability Covenant

If a speakeaser wants to move on, we promise to allow them to transfer their account to a new instance. In the super unlikely case that a user has been banned, we'll provide their account data without hassle.

One exception: If a speakeaser is banned for being homophobic, transphobic, racist, bigoted, or otherwise horrible, we reserve the right to tell them to go fk themselves.

We Are Not Perfect

Admins and moderators of the Speakeasy instance do their best to be impartial and fair, but we're all people too. We'll probably get it wrong sometimes. This is why we swear by transparency (as noted above) and why we're absolutely okay getting feedback on the actions we take. This is a community, not a monarchy.

To that end, we promise the following:

• If we ban you or defederate your instance, you have the absolute right to appeal. You will be given the opportunity to plead your case and we will consider any information you have or perspectives you present, and we will do so without favoring our initial view.


• If the action was taken by a moderator or admin, the person who made the final decision will ensure that other, trusted individuals are part of that review. That might mean other Speakeasy members, trusted 'friendly' instance admins, or other people who we trust to be objective and fair. As noted... this is not a monarchy.


• If we put the question to the Speakeasy, your appeal will be presented to the community for review. We will not override the will of the Speakeasy, but we will ask that they consider your appeal.

Consensus Isn't Always Justice

We do our best to vet every defederation and every instance level block personally. We love the Fedi community but we do believe that they are often heavy-handed and yes, unfair with some of their defederations and blocks. In the interest of full disclosure we have used portions of the Garden Fence blocklist and Seirdy's Fedinuke blocklist, but the Overgoddess went through it to vet the entries. We chose to leave dead instances on the list out of an abundance of safety.