Server rules

Below is a summary of rules you need to follow if you want to have an account on this server of Mastodon:

1. Review the entire Code of Conduct before using labyrinth.social. These rules are summarized from the Code of Conduct, but the entire Code can be found linked below. Updates to the Code of Conduct will be announced from the @admin account.
2. Harassment of any kind is not tolerated on labyrinth.social. Review our Code of Conduct for a list of behaviors that are considered harassment.
3. Respect the privacy of posts on labyrinth.social. Do not publicly share the contents of direct messages or followers-only posts.
4. Keep in mind that labyrinth.social uses the Hometown fork of Mastodon, and therefore some posts can also be flagged as “local-only”. Respect the privacy of these posts as well.
5. Include a descriptive content warning for any posts that other users may find upsetting or prefer not to view without opting in. This includes any nsfw/sexual content, or depictions/discussions of violence, as well as other categories listed in the code of conduct.
6. All content uploaded to this service must be legal in the United States.

About labyrinth.social

labyrinth.social is a small Mastodon server for friends of Tom Dickinson, using the Hometown fork of Mastodon.

This about/readme document is mirrored between the labyrinth.social server and github pages. Hopefully they will always be in sync. This is the latest version as of 11/18/2022.

What is this?

Let’s break that down into three different questions, increasingly granular as we go.

1. What is Mastodon?
2. What is Hometown?
3. What is labyrinth.social?

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a social networking app. It’s a little like Twitter, in that you make short posts and follow/reply to other users. But it’s nothing like Twitter, in that it’s open source, decentralized, and has no ads.

If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, I get it. It’s a little hard to explain. But here are two pretty good explanations.

• A good, short video video explaination from the official Mastodon youtube channel
• A better, longer written explanation by me

There are many Mastodon servers out there, all talking to one another. This is one of them.

What is Hometown?

This server uses Hometown, an alternate version of Mastodon created by Darius Kazemi. Hometown has been altered to add some additional features that aren’t in the main version of Mastodon. Yeah, you can do that! It’s one of the cool things about open source software.

The most major differences are local-only posting, and exclusive lists. See the Hometown wiki for more information on the project and how it differs from regular Mastodon.

What is labyrinth.social?

Labyrinth.social is a deliberately small Hometown instance created by Tom Dickinson, for a few friends. Currently there are five active users. I intend to invite more people but I don’t think there will ever be more than around 25.

An informal roadmap for the future of the project is maintained here.

The name “labyrinth” was chosen because it is an interesting image/word that has a lot of different resonances, Mythology, design, architecture, puzzles, David Bowie in very tight pants, etc. My direct inspiration for using it comes from Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story “The Garden of Forking Paths”, which is good and you should read it.

Using labyrinth.social

How do I join?

labyrinth.social is invite only, and limited to Tom Dickinson’s friends. If you want to know more about how I’m deciding who to invite, check out the Invitation Policy. The general gist is that I am only planning on inviting a small number of people I know pretty well. If that describes you and you’re interested in joining, let me know!

That said, and you may already know this: even if you haven’t joined labyrinth.social, you can still follow me and the other labyrinth.social users. All you need is an account on any Mastodon server. Actually there are some other kinds of servers that work too, but if you’re new to all this then I recommend Mastodon.

If you’re looking for some other server to join, skip to this section in the middle of my “What is Mastodon?” post, which has some advice on how to find one to join

Who is already using labyrinth.social?

As of this writing, five people including Tom. Plus an admin account which is just Tom again tbh.

You can browse the Profile Directory to see the users who have opted in to appearing in it. But not everybody necessarily has!

Policies

Users are required to read, at minimum, the Code of Conduct. It is recommended that you read the other policy documents as well.

• Code of Conduct: This document details the standards of behavior. Reading this is mandatory for all users of labyrinth.social.
• Terms of Service: This document contains general information about the operation of the service, including Admin rights, availability of service, and blacklisting/silencing of other instances. It’s highly recommended that you read this.
• Privacy Policy This document explains what kind of data is collected by labyrinth.social, how it is used, and how it is protected. It’s highly recommended that you read this.
• Invitation Policy: This document provides some information about how I will decide whether or not to invite someone.

These are not just boilerplate documents, they are largely original documents written by me, so my goal is for them to be clear and readable. Although some of them do have some boilerplate language in them.

Any significant updates to any of these policies will be announced from the @admin@labyrinth.social account.

Local-Only Posting

One of the most important differences between Hometown and vanilla Mastodon is the ability to use Local Only posting. In the context of Hometown, local only posting is a per-post security option that lets you set whether that post can federate out to other servers or not.

Click here to read more about local-only posting and how it works on labyrinth.social.

Emoji

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

For the moment, I have chosen to add only a small subset of these emoji, most notably the custom flags and symbols from their Gender, Sexuality, and Relationships category. Other emojis from that set (or any other source) can be added by request to the admin.

Moderated servers

Hometown generally allows you to view content from and interact with users from any other server in the fediverse. These are the exceptions that have been made on this particular server.

Filtered media

Media files from these servers will not be processed or stored, and no thumbnails will be displayed, requiring manual click-through to the original file:

Limited servers

Posts from these servers will be hidden in public timelines and conversations, and no notifications will be generated from their users interactions, unless you are following them:

Suspended servers

No data from these servers will be processed, stored or exchanged, making any interaction or communication with users from these servers impossible: