Tootfinder

Soooo....I'm doing a thing...🤭😏
As a lot of you know, Tooters shut down recently and the way it was handled in the end is regrettable.
However, I felt for longest time while it was up, that it was consistently one of the BEST run instances on Fedi with how they protected their users from some of the insanity that happens here.
That being said, with Tooters being gone, it leaves a bit of a hole in my Fedi heart and I know a lot of others as well.
So, I'm creating a new, very limited for now, politically-light (as little politics as possible locally), AI friendly (AI art welcome), Sharkey instance for some folks within my circle that I've grown to consider my friends.
The Social Zone is meant to be a place to escape the very political society we currently all live in and just be social with one another about our hobbies, interests, and day to day lives.
I'm still working out all the details but when I launch it, it's going to be invite only because I'm new to something like this and I want to get it right. Especially because those I will invite are people that are close to me and I don't want to disappoint them.
Depending on how things go for the next few months, including if I can even get this thing started correctly, I MIGHT be open to allowing more members in, down the line.
But, this is just getting started. I registered the domain yesterday and just started researching Sharkey today and how hard it would be to spin something up. Then, of course, there's configuration settings and administration with Sharkey that I have to familiarize myself with.
All in all, I'm very nervous, but excited that I decided to take this next step in my Fedi adventure and hope to eventually "give back" to the entire community, the same positive energy that you've all given me over the past wonderful year of being on this amazing platform.
Please do not ask for invites. I will not be handing them out anytime soon. I've already asked about 5 of you along with some IRL folks and I feel I would like some time to get this right for them first.
Thanks for reading. I hope you understand why I'm choosing to do this and hope you're as excited as me to see where things can go and understand why I feel it's important to have these types of "politically-light" spaces so people can escape such topics from time to time.
Keep on keeping on, Fedi. The future is bright and I'm ready to learn along with you. More info about TheSocial.Zone coming soon!
Your friend,
B.A.

I've worked on community groups for a long long time, and the only good thing I can say about most codes of conduct is that their existence proves the group fought past the army of dudes who think they get in the way of important things like letting them dominate the group.
But seriously, most codes of conduct are worth about one bit of information: "has cared at all (y/n)”
There's a single code of conduct document that was extremely influential by being designed to be copy-and-pastable: the document was given a specific name, work was done to propagate the idea that all you had to do was adopt it as-is. Drop in and ready to go!
The only problem there is that doesn't work. A long, legalistic set of rules about what's Not Allowed with no actual policy for enforcement invites a bunch of problems: a long list can be treated as exhaustive, so people will do things not on the list then cry foul when you tell them to stop. A lack of enforcement policy invites a binary approach: is a person good (did nothing on the list) or bad (did something on the list)? If they're bad, kick them out, if they're good, keep them.
This is bad.
The actual rules that will be enforced will be much more subtle, will favor people in positions of power, and will not yield results consistent with the stated values of various factions of the group. Arguments will ensue about whether or not something "really counts" as an item on the list, because often the actual decision being made but not explicitly stated is “do we kick out some important person to the group for some broken way they relate to others in the group?”
The other way they get used is "here's a person doing something some part of the group doesn't like, which rule can we use to kick them out?”
These are both broken approaches that don't actually reflect the relations of the group, and they lead to punitive and destructive methods of enforcement, rather than healing and reparative methods. This leads to conflict within the group being turned into a code of conduct violation while at the same time allowing outsiders to weaponize the code of conduct by provoking those conflicts.