A Few Notes to Users
Hey y'all, now that we're all starting to settle in, I just want to go over some housekeeping stuff. Any similar posts will also be made on this blog in the future, so you may want to give it a follow.
First, a notice: the default post privacy is Public. There seemed to be issues with changing a blog to Public when the default was Unlisted. If you don't want your posts to show up on the Reader, make sure to set your blog to Unlisted or something stricter. We can change back to Unlisted and/or turn the Reader off if y'all want, but I think it's neat.
Secondly, you can send trusted friends the invite link. As a friend of mine used to say when throwing parties, “You're cool, and your friends are cool, but not your friends' friends.” If the link expires, ping me for a new one. For the time being, only I can create invite links, and there may be a hard limit on users at some point. There are two reasons for this. Mainly, I want this to be a cozy space; I'd like to know everyone here. More practically, the server hardware and my finances are limited. If invite access is an issue, let me know and we can address it.
Thirdly, we shouldn't need community rules because we're all friends with similar ethics, but I want to make one request. Please use Excerpts to warn about and hide potentially triggering topics on Public blogs. Besides that, if any moderation issues come up, we can handle them interpersonally, ideally communally. If you have specific requests, or if we decide together we need rules, we can make additional posts to this blog or add rules to the About page.
Fourth, some rules for me. I won't look at any of your data unless I need to for moderation or administration reasons, or you ask me to. What I mean by this is, each user has a page in the administration dashboard. I won't be accessing this except for the above reasons. The same applies to all data WriteFreely stores, whether or not it exposes an interface to it. I won't take any action on your account whatsoever except for the same reasons. The spirit of this is mentioned in the Privacy Policy.
Do note that other people potentially have access to data on this instance. This server is not encrypted on-disk, I do not have control over the physical drives, there are backups made daily, and it's hosted near Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Keep all of this in mind when deciding what to post. There is a gag order canary in the Privacy Policy just because that's cool and cyberpunk; I don't expect it to ever be needed. Unfortunately, we live in interesting times.
Other than that, just let me know if there are any issues, technical or otherwise, on the instance. Y'all know more about administration than me, so I may also come to y'all if I have issues. If you want to change the name or public pages of the instance, or if you look at the documentation and think our instance should have different settings, let me know that, too. Overall, I just want this to be a cozy little writing space we build together!