The problem here, as many have already stated, is that this is a very subjective proposal. And it is very hard to codify a rule based on a subjective. What you consider vulgar or obscene my not be close to crossing the line for me. Rules need to be objective in nature. They need to have the ability to have clear set guidelines that mean the same thing to everyone.

It is similar to the old argument about porn. What is porn? I’ve seen artistic photographs of nudity and I have seen porn. But where is that line drawn? That line is going to be somewhere different depending on the person. There are those that would say any photograph or video where the subject is nude is pornographic. Some would say only if there is a depiction of a sexual act, it is pornographic. And there are a lot of people that fall between those two and go further to the extremes in either direction. In that case, you cannot easily write an objective rule that everyone will interpret the same way. You could, say, write a rule about not having any depictions of nudity. That is more objective. Still not perfect…because what if it’s just one breast but the subject is otherwise clothed?

Anyway, this is getting way more wordy than I intended. The TL;DR is that trying to codify a subjective rule is both difficult and a really bad idea because no two people will interpret the rule in the same way. We need to focus on objective rules that leave little-to-no room for misinterpretation and solve or prevent actual problems.

But this is a great discussion on civility guidelines and I do think we need some of those. Though, again, they will likely have to be somewhat vague because of the subjectiveness of it all.

Nay. I feel this suggestion is based in the old centralized platform mentality. That isn’t to say it is wrong, but it seems based in a premise that does not apply to a federated platform. If you start thinking about how a federated platform actually works, I could join this community…and others on this instance…from an account on another server. Why would we treat someone as second class citizens for using the Fediverse in the way it was intended?

For those thinking “they can just make an account here if they want to vote”, you are right. They could. But that also goes back to centralist mentality. We want to be able to interact with people and communities regardless of which instance houses the data object that is my account. From that perspective, I feel voting should be more inclusive than just those who have a user object stored on this instance.

My question back to you would be, what problem are you trying to solve by this limitation? I’m sure there are any number of hurdles we will need to address with open voting, but we have to identify those problems first.

Nay. Too many of our members are here with one of the driving reasons being that we do not have an email requirement. The privacy concerns alone in the Cons list is enough to warrant extreme caution.

The same holds true for monoliths like Reddit and Facebook and Twitter. What if they decide to just turn it off? In those cases you just lose everything. Period. With the Fediverse, if one instance turns off, then we just lose the stuff on that single instance. Everything else you have been following or doing is still there.

By and large, though, Fediverse instance operators are a communicative lot. If things are going to go south and the instance is going to go away, my experience has been they’ll give you plenty of warning to move elsewhere and work to preserve whatever data you would like to keep.