Indie Authors Social (IAS) Moderation Policy

IAS is a Mastodon Fediverse instance dedicated to all things indie authoring, self-publishing, and the readers that love indies. We don’t prevent posting/tooting at the hashtag level. We don’t block users or entire instances other than for hate speech or explicit intolerance of others’ political, religious, gender identification, sexual, or lifestyle views as demonstrated in posts/favorites/reblogs.

• IAS does moderate what trends on the instance. We do this to remove the clutter of all the ‘other things.’ Our stance is that there are plenty of other instances that have the sole purpose of being an all-up, broad social environment. On IAS, all posts, links, and hashtags are moderated to be related to topics that support: indie authors, self-publishing, and the readers that love indies.

  • Trending Posts, Links, and Hashtag Moderation: The topics and content must be largely in line with the charter of IAS. Examples:

    • Trend Not Approved: A primarily political news link that covers publishing, but is mostly focused on political posturing

    • Trend Not Approved: A primarily lifestyle or gender identification post, that has more to do with debating lifestyle choices than publishing-related topics

    • Trend Not Approved: Misleading or factually incorrect indie author/publishing information posted/linked. Usually, this will be deliberate and not accidental. We are not looking to moderate people’s opinions

    • Trend Approved: An author released a new title with associated details

    • Trend Approved: An author posts a writing craft article

    • Trend Approved: A general post related to the challenges of being an indie author

    • Trend Approved: A general post of encouragement for indie authors

• Automated BOTs as users on the instance must adhere to the same standards as human users. News should be related to, or of interest to, indie authors, self-publishers, and indie lovers.

  • As with human users, indie author-related information posted by a BOT should not be misleading or factually incorrect.

• Automated BOTs must provide a value in-line with IAS values. If it’s deemed that a BOT has other purposes or is spamming in any way, their accounts will be suspended.

In the case that a user, instance, post, or link is moderated, all protests will be reviewed by the moderators of IAS and resolved based on consensus. Anyone granted the moderator role on IAS must adhere to these standards or forfeit the moderation role.

Uncanny Publishing reserves the right to refuse service to any user or organization or to federate any instance for any reason without notice.