ComicsCamp.Club

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. NSFW art, images of gore, extreme blood, violence, and body horror must be hidden under a descriptive CW or marked sensitive. Sexually explicit art must be CWed/marked sensitive AND posted as Unlisted/Follower's Only.
2. Photographic pornography is explicitly disallowed. NSFW content of minors or persons of questionable age, "cub porn", and lolicon content will result in immediate suspension.
3. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, violent nationalism, fascism, hate speech, bigotry, and advocation thereof is prohibited and will be strictly enforced.
4. ComicsCamp.Club has a zero-tolerance policy for harassment or bullying, which includes wilfully committing microaggressions, trolling, dogpiling, and "doxing".
5. Re-posting other people's work/copyrighted content is not allowed without credit and some kind of analysis, opinion, or critique. Whenever possible, link to another's work instead of re-uploding, and respect the rights of creators.
6. Spam, flooding of the public/local/federated timelines, and unapproved bots or advertising is not allowed. (This does not include promoting your personal work or storefront; please promote yourself!)
7. We expect our community members to respect the boundaries of others, and to have their boundaries respected. Whenever possible, try to deescalate. Contact our admin/mod team for assistance, and follow our Community Guidelines.
8. NFTs and cryptocurrency (excluding critique thereof) are not welcome here. Please find another server for your crypto-content.
9. This list is not exhaustive. Read and understand the entirety of our Community Guidelines and Moderation Policy (CoC) before joining. We are trying to foster a safe, supportive, and inclusive space for as many people as possible, and our Community Guidelines are how we achieve that.
10. AI-generated art/images must be tagged with #AIArt, hidden under a descriptive CW/marked sensitive, and have the software used to create it listed.

ComicsCamp.Club General Information

ComicsCamp.Club — A friendly and peaceful home in the Fediverse for all manner of comics and narrative art creators and lovers, whether you're a professional, a dabbler, or a fan. It's a place aiming to be as inclusive and supportive as possible of people from varying faiths, sexualities, genders, and backgrounds, and its Moderation Policy/Code of Conduct will be strictly enforced. We prioritize the safety of our most marginalized users above all others. We strive to make ComicsCamp.Club a safe and supportive community for everyone — hate and bigotry have no place here.

Lovingly inspired by the Alaska Robotics Comics Camp community, a wonderful gathering of comics and narrative art professionals, dabblers, and enthusiasts from all over the world who occasionally retreat into the Alaskan wilderness to rest, recharge, and connect.

ComicsCamp.Club is an independent community-run instance and is not affiliated with the joinMastodon.org (tootsuite) organization. The following guidelines are not a legal document, and final interpretation is up to the administrators and moderators of ComicsCamp.Club. They are listed here to provide you with an insight into our vision for the community and our moderation policies.

Please read ComicsCamp.Club's Community Guidelines/Moderation Policy(CoC) and terms of use before signing up. Click here for a list of suggested Mastodon mobile apps.

Note about registration requests (if registration is open): This instance requires the "Why do you want to join?" field to be filled when requesting registration. Blank submissions will be rejected.

ComicsCamp.Club is often in Invite Only Mode to control the growth of the instance, and to discourage bots, spammers, and bad actors from making their home here. Invites are available from @CampCounselor (e-mail) or any ComicsCamp.Club user.

Contents

1. Server Info
2. Moderation Team
3. General Notice
4. Community Guidelines
5. Moderation Policy (Code of Conduct)
6. Copyright
7. Federation Policy
8. Hosting Information
9. Unavailable Content (visible only to logged-in users)

Server Info

ComicsCamp.Club is run on a fork of the vanilla Mastodon software called Hometown, which is maintained by Darius Kazemi. Hometown is alike to Mastodon in almost every way, except for a few quality-of-life changes. Some of these changes include: Local-only posting, exclusive lists, custom themes for the web app, custom max toot character lengths, missing alt-text signifiers, and more. You can see the full list on the Hometown Wiki.

ComicsCamp.Club also has Mastodon's AUTHORIZED_FETCH setting enabled to further limit the dissemination of our public posts to servers we've defederated from. This article does a good job of explaining what AUTHORIZED_FETCH does.

ComicsCamp.Club's max toot length has been altered from the default 500 characters to 1500, so you have more space to discuss your art, write drabbles, share recipes, or just wax poetic about your thoughts and every day life.

We look forward to seeing what you have to share with us!

ComicsCamp.Club is community run and will always be free. We will never serve ads, sell "premium" content or access, or profit from your personal information or content. Even so, there are costs associated with running the service, including hosting (approx. €30/month) and domain costs (approx. $13 USD/year).

If you'd like to donate to our instance to help off-set those running costs, you may do so at our admin Rheall's Ko-Fi page (monthly donations are available). All donations will be put toward the costs associated with running the service, with any excess given to the members of the mod team for their time and effort.

Moderation Team

• @CampCounselor (aka. @Rheall) [Instance Admin]
• @Jectoons
• @nebulos
• @Aoife

General Notice

1. The following is not allowed on ComicsCamp.Club: Bots, username squatting, registrations of famous trademarks/names (unless proof of identity is given). To be certain that your account isn't removed due to inactivity, be sure to upload an avatar and post at least once. Accounts without avatars or any activity may be deleted to free up registration space on the instance.
2. Do not use ComicsCamp.Club as a permanent back up or repository for your information, statuses, or media. Please keep an original copy of your work on your local machine, as Mastodon downsizes large file sizes. We cannot guarantee perpetual storage of your toots, information, or media on our servers. Please make a periodic local backup of your account to safeguard against possible data loss.
3. You may move your account to another instance at any time by using the "Move to a different account" setting at the bottom of your Edit Profile page in your Preferences. You can also export your follow and block lists from the Import & Export page and import them into your new account to make the transition easier.
4. You may delete your account at any time using the "Delete account" option at the bottom of the Edit Profile page. Keep in mind that federation of your statuses to other servers or search engines is beyond ComicsCamp.Club's control — statuses, media and federated copies of your profile may remain elsewhere. Deleting your account is permanent, cannot be undone, and your username/content cannot be reinstated.
5. We block or suspend many instances that do not adhere to ComicsCamp.Club's ToS and CoC. Also, instances are intermittently and temporarily silenced during report investigations or when other instance moderators are not monitoring their users for any of the behaviours against our ToS/CoC.

Community Guidelines

The following suggestions are meant to provide a guideline of the kind of community we're looking to cultivate here on ComicsCamp.Club. Please read and consider adopting these as habits as you engage with our community:

1. In order to foster a spirit of conviviality, try to make it a habit to regularly reply to and engage with other users, especially in a positive or supportive manner. A kind word about someone's art or content can go a long way in helping this place feel like home.
2. Only provide critique if it is explicitly requested. When requested, make sure the critique is constructive and supportive rather than just a list of flaws. Mention things you like and were done well in addition to things you think could use a little work. Where possible, provide links to references or resources you think may help the user learn.
3. Get to know Mastodon's per-post privacy settings. Consider using them so the public timeline is freed up for more public and engaging content.
   • Content you might want to consider setting as Unlisted: The replies in a long thread, off-topic discussions of personal life, idle/random thoughts, music you're listening to, etc.
   • Content you might want to consider setting as Followers Only: More sensitive discussions of personal life, difficult or sensitive topics, discussions you don't want to make public.
   These are not hard and fast rules. Use your best judgement.
4. Don't be afraid to use Content Warnings! CWs are not censors, they allow users to decide when they want to engage with specific content, keeping ComicsCamp.Club and the Fediverse at large a friendly and safe place for as many folks as possible. While we require people to CW NSFW content, gore, and violence, you may want to adopt the habit of CWing content dealing with potentially sensitive discussions or depictions of mental health, self-harm, alcohol, politics, violence against marginalized groups, etc.
5. We strongly encourage our users to use alt-text to describe their media whenever possible. This is important to make the Fediverse more accessible and welcoming for folks who use screen readers, and is a good habit to get into. Many Fediverse users won't boost media that isn't described, so describing your media is important for reach in addition to making it more accessible. If you are unable to add alt-text yourself, you may request help from others to do so. More info on this can be found here. [FIXME]
6. If a discussion between users is turning heated, sour, or negative, consider disengaging or de-escalating. You are more than welcome and even encouraged to contact an admin or a mod to mediate if this starts to happen.
7. Familiarize yourself with the various block/mute/filter options and use them to help make your Mastodon experience as awesome as possible. Is there a specific user that rubs you the wrong way but who isn't violating any particular rules? Consider muting or blocking them as appropriate. Is there a hashtag or topic that keeps coming up that you'd prefer not to see? Think about using keywords to filter it from your timelines. Is there a thread that you don't want to get notifications from anymore? Consider muting the conversation.
8. Likewise, if you find yourself muted or blocked by a user, any attempts to engage with the user or circumvent the block/mute will be considered harrassment. Don't take mutes/blocks personally! The reasons people have for muting/blocking are many, and many of them have nothing personal to do with the user themselves. Just accept that it happens and move on. Don't focus on this user, focus on cultivating other friendships and connections instead. It's a large Fediverse out there!

Moderation Policy (Code of Conduct)

The following guidelines are not a legal document, and final interpretation is up to the administration and moderation team of ComicsCamp.Club. These guidelines are here to provide you with an insight into the site and moderation policies:

1. All users, local and remote, are expected to adhere to the following principles:
1. If you repost others' work, you must credit the original artist/author. We do not allow accounts which primarily share other people's work/content.
2. Posting the same or similar content on multiple different instances (Fediverse servers) in order to spam local and/or federated timelines is not permitted.
3. Respect other users' boundaries. Be respectful and sincerely apologize if someone informs you that a boundary has been crossed. Give people space if you accidentally push past a boundary.
4. If you find yourself involved in a conflict and are worried about the situation escalating, contact your moderation team.
5. Tag sensitive content such as violence, blood, body horror, NSFW content, and other potentially upsetting or triggering topics and place them under a descriptive Content Warning (CW). CW is a big part of the culture of the Fediverse, and CW potentially upsetting content is how we keep our community and the wider Fediverse safe and supportive for everyone.
   1. Attention: CWs intersecting with racism and other issues is a complicated topic, and should be considered thoughtfully. Demanding the use of CWs from BIPOC/marginalized folks may be considered a form of tone-policing and micro-agression, and may result in moderation action.
   2. Similarly, we strongly suggest CWs for political content, but we will not mandate it. Many users are here because the CW system allows them the ability to choose when to interact with stressful content; CW political posts helps to foster that kind of safety and comfort. Please use them thoughtfully.
   3. Try to understand the spirit in which CWs are used, as a way of making the public timelines more comfortable for people to use, without using them as a cudgel to make people hide or censor parts of their lived experience.




2. All users, local and remote, will be considered in the wrong in a conversation that goes sour if they participate in the following:

   1. Microaggressions ("not all men", white/man/cis-splaining, using the wrong pronouns to address someone after being corrected, ableism, expecting education/civility from marginalized persons, etc.)
   2. Demanding education on problematic behaviour from a non-admin/moderator
   3. Trolling, or skirting the lines of being a troll, "dogpiling", or otherwise harassing others
   4. Sharing DM screenshots or quotes from DMs or private communications publicly without all parties' permission
   5. Creating memes about someone without their consent
   6. Ranting or engaging in long rambling tangents on public timelines about a particular user without explicitly naming them (also known as "subtooting")
   7. Deliberately/maliciously not tagging potentially sensitive or triggering toots as requested elsewhere in the CoC

   This is not an exhaustive list, and all moderation decisions are ultimately left up to the discretion of our mod team. If any of these expectations don't make sense, please speak with an admin or moderator, and we would be more than happy to help educate you. Do not demand that folks of marginalized communities/identies educate you about racism/ableism/transphobia/homophobia/misogyny/problematic behaviour/other issues.
   
   

3. The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline and/or deleted:

   1. Corporate or unsolicited advertising and spam
   2. Unapproved news bots, post bots or follow bots
   3. Untagged/non-content-warned NSFW content
   4. Pornographic or sexually explicit imagery that isn't tagged/content-warned and marked as Unlisted or Followers Only
   5. Untagged/non-content-warned gore and extremely graphic violence


4. The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline, and may result in account suspension and revocation of access to the service:

   1. Racism or advocation of racism
   2. Sexism or advocation of sexism
   3. Discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, or advocation thereof (This includes trans-exclusionary radical feminism(TERFism). Transwomen are women. Transmen are men.)
   4. Ableism or discrimination against those who are neurodivergent, physically disabled, or mentally ill
   5. Xenophobia and/or violent nationalism, or advocation thereof



5. The following types of content are explicitly disallowed and will immediately result in revocation of access to the service:

   1. Sexual depictions of minors, real or fictional
   2. Content illegal in Germany and/or France, such as holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism
   3. Conduct promoting the ideology of National Socialism

   ComicsCamp.Club has a zero-tolerance mandate for harassment or bullying — your account will be suspended.




6. Any conduct intended to stalk or harass other users, impede other users from using the service, degrade the performance of the service, or incite others to perform any of the aforementioned actions, is also disallowed and subject to punishment up to and including revocation of access to the service. This includes, but is not limited to, the following behaviors:

   1. Continuing to engage in conversation with a user that has specifically requested for said engagement with that user to cease and desist may be considered harassment, regardless of platform-specific privacy tools employed.
   2. Aggregating, posting, and/or disseminating a person's demographic, personal, or private data without express permission (informally called "doxing").
   3. Inciting users to engage another user in continued interaction or discussion after a user has requested for said engagement with that user to cease and desist (informally called "brigading" or "dogpiling").
   
   

7. Be aware, we take instances of micro-aggressions or racism against marginalized communities, especially black and indigenous people of colour (BIPOC), very seriously. Any examples of dogpiling, microaggressions, tone-policing, mobbing, interacting when those interactions have been requested to cease, or any other willful distrust or negative action towards such folks will be strictly enforced at the administration team/moderator's discretion.


8. Please do not flood the local timeline. We define "flooding" as posting three or more times per five minutes to the local/public timeline (but the definition is flexible; judgements on what is "flooding" or not will be made in context). Flooding drowns out other users and annoys instances we federate with.
   1. You can reply to the toots of others and banter back and forth as much as you want, as replies aren't shown on the local/public timelines.
   2. Please avoid posting many pieces of art/media all at once; there is no rush. Pace yourself, and consider how your frequent posting might affect others.
   3. If you'd like to post long threads of many toots, consider marking the first toot as "public", and the rest in replies marked as "unlisted". This will allow users to click through the first toot to read the rest of the thread without flooding the local/public timelines.


9. Regarding nudity/NSFW content:
   1. Illustrative nudity, nude body/anatomy studies, and titillating imagery intended for mature audiences (eg. "pin-ups") are allowed on ComicsCamp.Club, but only if tagged appropriately (ex. #NSFW, #nudity, #lewd, etc.) and marked as sensitive or placed under a descriptive content warning.
      • Tags are required so people have the opportunity to filter such content from their timelines altogether if they choose to.
      • Descriptive text is required in the CW/toot body so that people can make an informed decision about whether to engage with the content below the cut/image blur or not.
      • If you're unsure whether to mark a work as sensitive or post it under a Content Warning, consider the following hypothetical questions: Is it something you'd be comfortable viewing in a white-collar work situation? Is it something you'd be comfortable with being viewed by a minor? Would you happily show it to your parents? A "no" to any of these questions may require it being CWed/marked as sensitive. If you're still unsure, marking it as sensitive/CWing it is a good bet.
      • Another way to decide whether to mark a work as sensitive or post it under a Content Warning is to remember the Three B's: If your work features any Boobs, Butts, or Bits (genitals), hide that sucker!
   2. Illustrative pornography and depictions of explicit sex acts or sexual nudity (e.g. erect or engorged genitalia, bodily fluids, manual manipulation of genitalia, sex toys in use, detailed and titilating depictions of genitalia, etc.) must be posted as "Unlisted" or "Followers Only" with appropriate tags/CWs. (You can change the visibility of your posts by pressing the globe icon under the toot compose box.)
   3. Loli or sexual content of questionable age is expressly prohibited — your account will be suspended. (This includes "cub porn", or "aging up" minor characters to make them appear of-age.)
   4. Nude photographs are only allowed if done in an artistic spirit — however, it still needs to be tagged and CWed/marked as sensitive. Erotic photography, pornography, or photography that puts too much emphasis on the genitals is not allowed, even if marked "Unlisted"/"Followers Only".
   5. We understand that these things are subjective, but final interpretation of these rules are up to our moderation team. If in doubt, consider whether ComicsCamp.Club is the right place for this kind of sexual/explicit work.

   
   

10. Gore, vore, extreme body horror, extreme amounts of blood, and extreme violence must also be placed under a descriptive content warning or marked sensitive.




11. AI-generated art and imagery is a complicated topic, and ever evolving. In general, we don't advocate for AI art that is trained on databases that have stolen artist's copyrighted content without their consent. That being said, thoughtfully and ethically created AI-art is not prohibited, but we do require it to be tagged with the hashtag #AIArt, hidden under a descriptive CW or marked sensitive, and for the software used in generating it to be listed. We and many artists in general view the popularity of AI-generated art to be a threat to artists' livelihoods.




12. Selling, advertising, promoting, or advocating for NFTs or cryptocurrencies is prohibited on ComicsCamp.Club. Please make an account on one of the many crypto-focused instances in the Fediverse to promote and engage with that kind of content.




13. ComicsCamp.Club's administration team reserves the right to refuse service to anyone, as well as to remove your data at any time due to inactivity of any duration (to help against future unmonitored accounts from being hacked and becoming spam bots, and to free up space on the server), unethical use, or usage against ComicsCamp.Club’s CoC/ToS. This includes repeatedly skirting the lines of rules in bad faith without explicitly crossing them, or without attempting to understand and respect the spirit in which these rules were written.




14. Be aware, we may use actions made outside of our community/the Fediverse to judge whether someone is safe to engage with our users. People who show who they are will be judged by their actions/words, regardless of where they were expressed.

Copyright

All original content is considered copyrighted by the artist/user unless otherwise stated/licensed, and cannot be redistributed or used without prior permission by the artist/user. Do not repost or disseminate our user's original content anywhere without their express permission or consent.

ComicsCamp.Club cares about your privacy and doesn't monetize or profit off of your personal information or art — your information is never for sale.

Federation Policy

1. Federating with ComicsCamp.Club is not guaranteed. Links between federated instances are temporary and may change or disappear at any time.
2. Other instances may not disseminate our users' original content or toots without credit and proper licensing.
3. Other instances may not use automated means to analyze any derived work for publication or profit without ComicsCamp.Club's users' consent. This includes serving ads next to copyrighted content originally submitted on ComicsCamp.Club.
4. Public toots are authored works that are protected by copyright.
5. This instance honours noindex/nofollow and search engines are not allowed to index content from such users.
6. Crawling or scraping the content of the instance and creating a database of its posts and content for the purposes of archiving, searching, or analyzing is prohibited, unless the user has specifically consented to their data being used. We value our users' privacy and their ability to control how their data is utilized.
7. We will block, suspend, or silence any instance which permits any of the content or behaviour prohibited by this instance. We may also block, suspend, or silence instances that knowingly and willfully federate with instances that harbour hate speech or prohibited content.

Hosting Information

ComicsCamp.Club is fully hosted and managed by Spacebear.ee.

This document was last updated August 2nd, 2023.