The wptoots.social Community

Welcome to the community of the wptoots.social Mastodon instance, a group of decentralized, tooting WordPress enthusiasts. Here you will find information and resources on how we manage things on wptoots.social.

Mission

We are trying to build a curated network of respectful WordPress enthusiasts around the globe. Welcome anyone who follows the rules and needs a safe home or fresh start.
We are developers, users, professionals, enthusiasts, and are passionate about WordPress in all its facets, digital freedom, educating, respectful discourse and making digital publishing better.
We believe that our diverse community thrives best in a safe space, where our content and thoughts aren't monitized, not only the loudest voices get heard and free software is the base everything is build on.
#WordPress - #FreeSoftware - #Mastodon - #fediverse

Tools for wp-tooters

Make sure to check our status page: status.wptoots.social.

If you are just starting out, please see the following Welcome Guide for Mastodon 101 and getting started. If you're wondering where everyone is, we curate a List of the WordPress Community on Mastodon (on all instances).

If you want to get some WordPress into your timeline, our @wpbot might be a good place to start! Every source that it's publish from, has been checked for credibility, community reputation, relevant content and tollerable posting frequency.

Rules & Account Types

See our official rules. This is your first and final warning to take our rules seriously.

Changing, modifying and deleting rules

In general we try not to change our rules. If we do, we need to give the community time to understand the impact of the change and move away from our server if they chose.

If you want to creating a new rule follow the folowing process:

  1. Draft the new rule. Write the "headline" and then write a few sentences to elaborate on the rule.
  2. Publish the draft (GitHub, HackMD, etc).
  3. Advertise the draft (This is similar to publishing an obituary or a name change in a newspaper). Our admins, mods, and leadership should all be encouraged to share the new change.
  4. Gain feedback, make adjustments, work with the community, hear concerns, give space for alternative opinions. Pause. Reflect.
  5. Make the decision to institute the new rule, and publish a "goes in effect" date.
  6. Institute the new rule.

Only Daniel (@daniel@wptoots.social) can remove a rule at this time.

Account Types

We identify a few types of accounts, each with their specific set of requirements. Dependend on what account type you want to run it might be useful to read up on our detailed account descriptions.

Allowed Types

Following account types are generally allowed if they follow the rules and the specific restriction for each account type.

Disallowed Types

The primary purpose of wptoots.social is to provide a place where WordPress (and adjacent) professionals to network. To be clear: this is not a "LinkedIn" type of instance. With that in mind we have a few account types that we explicitly do not allow:

  • Fundraising Accounts
  • Ad / Marketing Accounts, including promos, discount codes, etc.
  • 18+ / NSFW Accounts

Our users may engage with the above types of content if they wish, we just aren't geared for supporting the above account types. An account will be considered one of the above if all / mostly all of their posts and re-posts are in the above categories.

General policies

Additional to account type and rules, using our instance, you will have to follow a set of guidlines. They apply in the somewhat fuzzy zone where a post or comment isn't clearly breaking the rules, but not clearly following them, either.

  • Don't be a dick
    We believe that everyone knows when they are "being a dick", and we do not tolerate this level of aggression towards our community. In short, we believe that you know if you are being a dick, and therefore you should be able to stop. If you do not stop, you will no longer be welcome on wptoots.social. Being a dick is measured by "self control" and "intent".

    Are you able to restrain yourself? What are your intentions?
    If your intentions are to hurt, brandish, slander, diminish, insult, or offend someone you are likely being a dick. If you are commenting on anyone's "tone", whether or not they are "having a civilized" discussion, or offering apologetics in response to one or more of the various forms of extremism, you are also likely being a dick. We believe you should be able to restrain yourself in these situations. If you do not restrain yourself, we believe that you are likely being a dick. Being a dick is the opposite of respect. We believe all "bad takes" on a topic can be voiced with respect. We hold each member of the community accountable for managing themselves and finding a respectful way of communicating their contrarian views. We expect all members to be respectful and thus, not be a dick.

  • About "shitposting"
    Oxford dictionary defines shitposting as: the activity of posting deliberately provocative or off-topic comments on social media, typically in order to upset others or distract from the main conversation. In short shitposting is allowed on wptoots.social. However, shitposting can easily violate our "don't be a dick policy" if it turns into offensive trolling at the expense of others. The key factor in distinguishing between shitposting and being a dick is "at the expense of others". We don't want to be the "shitpost" police. We encourage you to shitpost, just not at the expense of others.

Trolls, being targeted, and doxxing

We understand there are nasty people on the internet, and we will do everything we can to protect our community from them. We ask that all community members respect our mission to remain peaceful, and deescalate in times of conflict. If ever there clearly is a targeted attack, doxxing attempt, troll, or otherwise aggressive situation on wptoots.social our advice is to report it and deescalate the situation. Do not engage. Do not respond.

Our experience dealing with bad-actors, trolls, and aggressive accounts is that engagement is what they are looking for. Our primary weapon against them is a silent block (our mods are very responsive!) and moving on as if nothing happened. In the event this is not possible, we ask that you host your own infrastructure to forge such a counter maneuver against a group. Keep it off wptoots.social. We will remove any account who gains a reputation for "stirring the pot" or "engaging with conflict" on our site, despite how virtuous or noble the effort may be. wptoots.social is not the place for this.

Moderation

Our moderators are not the fediverse police. Your presence on wptoots.social should not become a burden to our moderators. We expect all community members to make our moderators jobs easier.
We expect everyone to understand that our moderators are volunteers who work tirelessly around the clock to keep deliberate bad-actors away from our community.

We don't expect our moderators to also have to chase around our community members who are violating rules or need to be reminded of our policy. As a community member if you get on our moderators radar you are likely doing something very offensive.

We believe in patience and understanding. There is a good chance that expectations have not been set or a policy has not been made clear. We will work with you to find a happy path, however if it becomes a pattern we will ask you to leave wptoots.social.

Contributing and issues

The wptoots.social community documentation is managed via the following git repo, where you are very welcome contribute:
https://github.com/danielauener/wptoots-community

The most critical thing you can do to help us help you (even more so than a donation) is to reduce noise. The best way for you to help reduce noise is to leverage our issue tracker instead of independent one-off requests for help. It is a full time job sifting through requests and making sense of them. If you want to help, leverage the issue tracker and create a new issue or better yet find one that already exists.

Do not

  • Please do not DM on Mastodon.
  • Please do not reach out on Twitter.
  • Please do not join the Discord just to report an issue, bug, or feature request.
  • Please do not send us emails (we get too many emails).

Do

  • File an issue in the repository

Donating & Sponsoring

Your contribution to the hosting costs is much appreciated and provides economic security to the community. Feel free to contribute on a one-time basis or monthly.

One-time donations can be easily made here:

Monthly sponsoring is possible via Patreon:

Become a Sponsor

What you are sponsoring

All donations will be used to cover the costs of running wptoots.social. Mainly that means server costs.

We follow the Mastodon Server Covenant . Do you want to know more about our infrastructure, data and server setup? There will be an Infrastructure Documentation soon, with the most relevant information.