Rules of Pleroma istance boseburo.ddns.net

Das Böse Büro is a self-hosted, self-managed, selfish instance of the Fediverse. It doesn’t accepts registrations. Nevertheless, I give few accounts to people I know personally, or I trust. I could give more of them, in the future.

It allows messages in Italian, bad English and terrible German. Writing in good english and/or decent german is not descouraged.

Unlike many other, this Instance has no rules , neither rules enforcement. Unlike many others, we don’t define rights of users. This instance has principles and powers. Before of listing powers and principles, I like to explain the difference.

If you have rules and rule enforcement (or: Criminal Law and Police) without having defined powers and principles, you just built a fascist state. Nothing more.If you just define rights, everything you did is to open a new shopping mall. Nothing more. If you define rights and criminal law, you have a shopping mall with a police station inside.

Why?

Without principles (meaning, a Constitution), you cannot decide how to proceed when laws are conflicting. By example, when people is having a stroke in their own home, is it ok to break in to save their life? Apparently to break inside other’s private property is a crime, but also let people die is. Since there are PRINCIPLES, then people knows this is legal because human life comes before of private property. This is why all democracies are stating principles inside a Constitution.

What about powers?

Without defining powers, (again, a Constitution), you have rules but is not clear what and how the enforcement can be. Is it ok if police shoots you dead after you are caught with a little weed in your pocket? Or maybe you have the right to call your attourney? This is why you need to define the powers. This is why constitutions are defining, together with principles, the power strong people has (or not).

Why define rights is meaningless?

To enforce rights, you need authorities to make them actual. Unfortunately, to define “rights” is so complicate , that authorities will always find loopholes to abuse their power. Perhaps, to ask authorities to enforce your right comes with a cost: this will cause your rights to be always a trade-off between the cost of protect them, and the need to do so. This creates huge grey areas where your rights aren’t worth to stand for.

Besides, a little community defining principles and powers has no need to define a whole Criminal Law, which takes a lot of work to refine and adapt. Either defined rights aren’t strictly necessary, since they come from principles, and defining rights requires a lot of work to refine and adapt.

If a community is small enough, and users can move to a better one, Powers and Principles are 100% sufficient.

Therefore, I consider AMATEUR people who starts an instance in the fediverse, thinking “it’s all about rules”, or “it’s all about rights”. It is not. Any fascist state may have a Criminal Law. Any Supermarket may define customer’s rights. But they aren’t the happy communities I have in mind.

Managing a happy community is ALL about powers and principles

So, let’s define powers and principles. Meaning, we write the Constitution of the instance, instead of a stupid Criminal Law.

POWERS

1. Administrators can prevent contents from a given instance to be listed in the Federated Timeline.
2. Administrators can mark NSFW all the contents from a given instance.
3. Administrators can ban a given instance, AKA “defederate”.
4. Administrators can remove a local account.
5. Administrators can add a local account.
6. Administrators can mute or unmute a local account.
7. Administrators can block a remote account.
8. Administrators can mute or unmute a remote account.
9. Administrators can mute or unmute a discussion thread.
10. Administrators can remove posts from local users.
11. Administrators can remove from this instance posts from remote users.
12. Administrators can remove media from local users.
13. Administrators CAN NOT disclose user’s identity, or other PII data (like your IP).
14. Administrators CAN NOT disclose details about user’s sexual life, private life, work life, political life, unless the user published them first on this instance.
15. Administrators CAN NOT disclose posts or messages the user set as private, private message or follower only.
16. Administrators can argue with users about their behavior on the instance.
17. Administrators can warn users about their conduct in this instance.
18. Moderators can be delegated any of the previous powers, albeit they inherit ALL limits from Administrators.
19. Administrators are entitled to use aforementioned powers to enforce principles.
20. Administrators are the only entitled to find the proper trade-off among principles, single case by single case.

PRINCIPLES

1. This instance stands for Freedom of Speech, albeit under German Federal Law.
2. This instance stands for Freedom of Thougths , albeit under German Federal Law.
3. This instance stands against propaganda. (See Annex 1)
4. This instance stands for happyness. This instance aims to increase happyness of its users. This instance aims to decrease misery and/or sorrow granting users a nice place to express themselves to pursue happyness.
5. This instance stands against collection of user’s data.
6. This instance stands against politically correctness and censorship in any form.
7. This instance stands for human dignity, against the culture of humiliation.
8. This instance stands for a positive socialization, against character assassination.
9. This instance stands against Stalking, Harrassment and Doxing.
10. This instance stands for mental health, preventing depression, psicosis, narcissism and/or any other toxic behavior to harm local users.

ANNEX 1

Propaganda is defined as “weaponizing Freedom of Speech against Freedom of Thoughts“. This is a second order logic -like definition. To explain that, let’s make an example.

If someone says “100.000 immigrants are coming in our country“, people may think this is good or bad. It’s up to people. The way the message was communicated gives people the Freedom of Thoughts, meaning people are free to decide/think if this is good or not.

If someone says “100.000 immigrants are coming in our country and all of them are evil“, it’s very hard for people to think this is good. So now people lost Freedom of Thoughts: people’s mind only has one possible conclusion. This is how freedom of speech is weaponized against Freedom of Thoughts.

This is exactly what happens with Propaganda. This is the difference between “correct information” and “propaganda”.

Have a nice time