Guidelines for Marketing, Self Promotion and Bots

Marketing_Self_Promotion_Bots.md

Tabletop Social on brands, marketing and self promotion Policy

You are welcome and encouraged to have an account for your (tabletop related) company or an account for an actual game on tabletop.social. To make everyone's stay enjoyable, here are the set of rules you need to follow

1. Any Self promotion post or marketing post needs to be unlisted at all time, have a CW, done in low volume and with some context (do showcase your work)
2. The game or company main operator must be included in its description or a pinned post.
3. Games and company account must clearly state what they are in their display name.
4. Your game or company account must only follow users after receiving consent (@ them and ask if they are OK with you following them from your game or company account, maybe give people a little insight into why).
5. Your game or company account must only boost toot after receiving consent (only required for users your game or company account doesn't follow already).
6. Your game and company account must never mention other users unless the mentioned user has initiated it.
7. Your game or company account must follow the same rules as normal users, with regards to acceptable content, harassment, etc.
8. If you respect the above rules, yet only do self promotion/marketing, you'll be suspended.

Failure to follow these rules will result in the account being suspended. Understand that people accross the fediverse will start silencing all content from tabletop.social and therefor harm the community if we don't stick to these rules.

Tabletop Social Bot Policy

Bot accounts are welcmoe, provided they follow these rules:

1. All Markov bots or other generative bots that may output nonsense must always post unlisted, or with a CW.
2. If a bot will post public posts, it must not post any more frequently than once an hour and must be clearly marked as a bot in its display name.
3. Bots must never mention other users unless the mentioned user has initiated it. For such user-initiated posts, any rate limits may be ignored.
4. The bot's operator must be included in its description or a pinned post.
5. Top-level unlisted or followers-only posts must not be made any more frequently than once every 15 minutes.
6. If a bot incorporates data from posts made by another user that are not directed at the bot, the bot must be following that user.
7. Bots must follow the same rules as normal users, with regards to acceptable content, harassment, etc.
8. Generative bots must be monitored by their operator.
9. Bots must not follow users with a #nobot or #nobots in their bio.

Failure to follow these rules will result in the bot being suspended. A bot's operator is responsible for all content posted by it.

Additional stuff:

1. Open source bots are encouraged, and should have a link to their source code in their description or a pinned post.
2. Meta posts from the bot operator should be clearly marked. Generally this is only useful if you run a Markov bot, so you can announce downtime or a meta change, without the bot tricking users by incorporating a similar announcement from your main account into a post. Feel free to ignore this.

Other instances are free to adopt this policy, either by incorporating it into their /about/more page or by linking the this page from it (or the original provied by sleeping.town).

If I may? It's one thing to make a few rules to limit self promotion, but not only are these rules strongly discouraging for anyone out there that aspires to start a business from their craft, but it's downright counter productive to the community to have so many suffocating rules. Indie developers, like myself, are looking for a new homes after the recent fall of tumblr. They're going to see these rules and immediately get turned off. Why would anyone worthwhile bother using your server over just making a twitter account? Twitter lets me post links to my patreon without making me bend over and do backflips.

Your rule #1 is the most offensive, frankly. It comes off like your punishing a person for making good content that's worthwhile and trying to simply get paid for it.

"Have a have patreon, a gumroads, a kickstarter on the go? Is it your main source of income? We get it and encourage you to share these."

Clearly this just isn't true. What's the point of putting out an ad with beautiful eye catching artwork if you're going to force me to hide it with a content warning it like it's obscene fetish porn? And then go a step further and force me to delist it so literally only my 30 followers will see it. How am I supposed to support myself, or get the word out about my product like that?

I could go on, but I'd beg you to reconsider the rules your making and how they not only impact creators that are simply trying to make worthwhile content, but also the fediverse as a whole. Rules like this, make places like twitter, and even tumblr actually look pretty lax.