Some thoughts on running a Mastodon instance (community)

One of the great things about Mastodon, is that it’s community based.

As the number of people on instances (communities) increase, so do the stresses on the admins and moderators. Most of these people are volunteers, and are doing it for the benefit of their communities.

On vis.social, in addition to many other tasks, we read all of the posts on our local timeline to ensure that things run smoothly.

When we make new “Rules” for our community, it’s usually because something bad happened.

But some rules are less clear to some folks and harder to explain.

One big challenge, after the migration, has been having to make rules about some AI tools.

When we make a rule like banning AI “Art”, it’s mostly because of the ethical problems with how the training data was collected.

My understanding of Mastodon culture is that consent is a huge part of every feature and practice.

As a moderator, the explosion of images that were created with tools built with apparently stolen artworks, without consent of the artists who created them, was stressful…to put it mildly.

So we asked folks on vis.social to stop posting them. As did other instances.

The push-back was also stressful. So we had to make it a Rule.