queer.party

queer.party (q.p) is a queer-oriented Mastodon instance which generally aligns itself with the policies and goals of other instances such as mastodon.social, awoo.space and icosahedron.website, aiming as much as possible to be a safe space for its users. The rules pretty much boil down to "be good to each other", but a few rules I'd like to explicitly list out are as follows:

• Any content or postings which may be illegal under German or Scottish law are not permitted.
• Any content or postings containing Nazi symbolism, ideology and the promotion thereof, are strictly forbidden and seriously uncool.
• Racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and any other discriminatory conduct which attacks any individual or group of individuals based on what they are or what they believe in, is strictly forbidden and also seriously uncool.
• Any conduct which abuses this Mastodon instance, or which causes harm to other Mastodon instances, and/or the users thereof, is strictly forbidden and seriously uncool.
• While essentially all posts not violating the above are welcome on this instance, you are asked to be considerate and respectful of others - for example, tagging a post about a controversial subject or a commonly-held phobia using content warnings.
• Basic parts of your user profile, such as username/display name, profile picture and banner, must not be explicit in nature.
• Explicit/NSFW content is allowed, but must be appropriately tagged using the sensitive media and content warning tags.

This server abides by and has committed to the Mastodon Server Covenant.

This is not Twitter. Reporting posts that make you feel uncomfortable, or that you feel should be brought to our attention, is encouraged. Your reports will not be ignored, and will be dealt with (usually) within a few days. Due to timezone differences or just the fact that I have a full-time job, it may take more than a week. When filing a report, please include information about why you are making the report.
As this instance, and the fediverse in general, has grown, so too have the moderation demands -- in complex cases, I will reach out to you regarding your report, either to explain the moderation decision taken (if any) or to ask for more information, but for more obvious cases, I unfortunately no longer have the time to notify you as to the status of your report. If your report involves a user or post on another instance, you have the choice of sharing your report with the administration of that instance as well, but the report will always be sent to us.
No moderation actions are automatic whatsoever. Nothing happens without human review, and I try my utmost to do right by the users on this instance.
For anything that isn't covered by reporting things in Mastodon, or if you have any questions, concerns or other thoughts, please either direct-message @Maffsie@queer.party, or email the queries address posted above - this goes directly to my inbox.

queer.party is not a company. This Mastodon instance is operated and moderated solely by one person - me (@Maffsie@queer.party). Funding for hosting the service is provided out of my own pocket, and in the past a number of people have given donations via the tip-jar (now closed). I do not ask for or accept funding by any other means, nor do I accept donations when I do not strictly need them.

queer.party runs on free, open-source software atop human-managed hardware. This means, all software involved in operating queer.party and serving it to the world is open-source and freely licensed. This is, currently, the following:

• Mastodon
• Redis
• PostgreSQL
• Minio
• Traefik
• Duplicacy
• Forgejo
• Git
• Docker Swarm
• Docker
• Portainer Agent
• Portainer CE
• Alpine Linux
• Tailscale
• Authentik
• Uptime Kuma

This also means that all hardware involved in operating queer.party directly is leased, paid for and operated by myself. This currently is the following:

• "the server" - a Hetzner dedicated server in Falkenstein, Germany, running Alpine Linux, with everything down to the RAID controller being personally configured and managed. Costs approximately forty-eight euro (EUR €48) per month.
• "my server" - a Hetzner dedicated server in Falkenstein, Germany, similarly configured to "the server", but primarily used for operating my own personal services, unrelated to queer.party. Hosts a Forgejo instance, which queer.party does use. Costs approximately forty euro (EUR €40) per month.
• "homebox" - a diminuitive little NAS at my home which runs the authentication, authorisation and accounting platform that gates administrative access to queer.party's underlying infrastructure. Purchased in 2016, unknown monthly cost in electricity.
• "the boy" - a Raspberry Pi at my home which runs the Docker cluster management software controlling queer.party's deployment. Purchased in 2020, unknown monthly cost in electricity.
• "ebay" - a Pine64 A64-LTS board at my home which handles securely proxying traffic between my home infrastructure and the Hetzner infrastructure. Purchased in 2018, unknown monthly cost in electricity.

queer.party makes every reasonable effort to avoid third-parties, however this is sometimes unavoidable. The third parties currently involved, and their purposes and limitations, are as follows:

• Amazon Web Services' Simple Email Service - Used for sending email from queer.party to users, for the purposes of registration confirmation, opted-in notifications, and administrative communications. Not used for receiving email. Use requires providing email address, email subject, and email body to AWS. Unavoidable due to self-hosted email being operationally difficult, and other transactional email providers are more expensive. Costs vary based on user activity but currently average twenty cents (USD $0.20) per month.
• Digital Ocean's Domains service - Used for storing and serving the DNS zone for queer.party. Use requires Digital Ocean knowing the IP address of whichever DNS resolution service your computer uses for resolving domains. Unavoidable due to my self-hosted DNS cluster becoming unreliable and caused an outage of queer.party a few years ago and has not been used since. Currently does not have a cost.
• Digital Ocean's Spaces service - Used for storing compressed, AES-256-encrypted backups of the Postgres and Redis databases. Backups are fully encrypted before a connection to Digital Ocean is established. Does not transfer any information to Digital Ocean related to queer.party's operations or users. Unavoidable due to having no other infrastructure with the bandwidth and storage needed. Costs approximately five dollars (USD $5) per month.
• Backblaze's b2 Object Storage service - Used for storing compressed, AES-256-encrypted backups of user-uploaded media. Backups are fully encrypted before a connection to Backblaze is established. Remote media cached locally, and any user account archives, are explicitly excluded from the backups. Does not transfer any information to Backblaze related to queer.party's operations or users. Unavoidable due to, again, having no other infrastructure able and ready to store these backups at such low a cost. Average cost per month not yet known, but estimated to be around fifty cents (USD $0.50).
• Github Repository hosting - Used for fetching source code during the build process for queer.party's software. Unavoidable due to it just being Where The Code People Write Is Usually Stored. Free service.
• Docker Hub container image hosting - Used for fetching container images for the services operated for queer.party. Unavoidable due to it just being Where Container Images Are Stored. Free service.

queer.party's monthly operational cost is approximately ninety euro (EUR €90), with an additional yearly cost of approximately twenty two dollars (USD $22) (may be lower due to deals and sales offered by the domain registrar).

This instance uses Mutant Standard emoji made by Dzuk, which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This instance includes themes sourced from Hometown, cybre.space and Meemu. These themes are included automatically at build time and no claims are made as to ownership thereof, and all sourced themes are attributed to their source in the theme picker UI. If a theme has been made available on this instance and you would like it removed, please contact me and I will do so promptly and respectfully.

Transparency is important. Where administrative decisions have been made that impacts the userbase of queer.party, those decisions will be detailed on this page.

queer.party's federation policy is open-first, however in cases where an instance has been identified as either being indifferent to, permissive of, or as actively encouraging abusive conduct to this or other instances, that instance's domain will be blocked from federation. The block is typically a suspension, such that no interaction between queer.party and the offending instance can take place, however in cases where there is a lesser risk (eg., an instance that is indifferent to abusive conduct but is not known for being a source of abusive conduct), the block is typically a silence block, such that individual users can still interact with each other, but they must be following each other, and posts do not appear in the federated timeline. Such actions are generally only prompted by user reports, except in cases where the administrators of other instances are raising awareness of a new bad actor on the fediverse with reasonable evidence and outside confirmation.

An addendum to the above is the blanket suspension of federation with instances that claim to forbid abusive or hateful conduct, but which permit "respectful" "discussions" of "unpopular opinions"/"controversial views". Dessert pizza is an unpopular opinion, trans folks' right to live a happy life is not, and hate is hate regardless of how dressed-up it is.

Exceptions to the above are rare, but do happen. Currently, a blanket federation ban is in place for all Gab Social and Soapbox instances, for what should be obvious reasons. Where a specific instance has been blocked, it will be listed below. Due to the use of scraping tools and automated emails requesting to be unblocked, the domains may be partially obscured.