Community Guidelines

Last updated November 4th, 2025

Introduction

By using Northsky Social applications on the ATprotocol, you are agreeing to abide by the following Community Guidelines. The purpose of these guidelines is to ensure we all work together to maintain a space for the 2SLGBTQIA+ and other marginalized communities that is vibrant, safe, and most importantly brave.

As our communities face increasing pressure to comply with censorious fascism and hide our truth from the world for fear of reprisal, it is more important than ever to have a platform to speak out against injustice and support each other. We live in a time where acceptability politics and tone policing are silencing victims of genocide and demanding we meet bigots who want us dead halfway. We say screw that! Northsky is not a space for this kind of cowardly “safety,” but rather a place where we are free to be ourselves and tell our stories so that all can hear.

Northsky Social Cooperative members will do our utmost to preserve this independent space for us to live out loud and be in community with one another. This means striking a balance between compliance with just laws and legal resistance to unjust ones. For us to uphold this mission as a small volunteer team, we ask for your support in following these community guidelines. Together we can keep each other safe, enriched, and inspired.

Northsky Moderation Approach

This Community Guidelines document is a living document that will change over time in dialogue between Northsky Social Cooperative members and our growing community of users. Our volunteer moderators will action on reports from the community and decide if users are in breach of our Terms of Service or Community Guidelines. Users will be able to appeal decisions by volunteer moderators which will be reviewed by members of Northsky Social Cooperative before a final decision is made.

User behavior found in contravention of the Community Guidelines, or attempting to skirt around them, may result in corrective actions like timeouts, account suspensions, or the removal of illegal content from our server.

If you generate a “Rotation Key”, as we recommend during account creation or migration, you will be able to recover your account to a new PDS (or back to Bluesky’s PDS if your account originated there) even if we permanently suspend your account. We don’t want to hold your data hostage and will only delete illegal content off of our data servers.

We endorse the AT Protocol approach of decentralization and “composable moderation.” As a small team we are not currently equipped to replace all of the functions that Bluesky Moderation provides, but will be focusing our moderation efforts on fighting bigotry, harassment, apologia and remaining legally compliant. We will not have the resources to effectively combat bot farms, spam, nor label all AI-generated content. We plan to evolve our capabilities over time as we grown and gain more funding and recurring financial support. In the meantime, we encourage you to consider subscribing to these labelers of note:

• Northsky Labeler - (Coming soon as part of Northsky Phase 2)
• Blacksky Labeler - https://bsky.app/profile/blackskyweb.xyz
• Laelaps Labeler - https://bsky.app/profile/laelaps.fyi
• XBlock Labeler - https://bsky.app/profile/xblock.aendra.dev​
• AI Imagery Labeler - https://bsky.app/profile/aimod.social

We will not be adjudicating inter-community discourse. We will step in if someone breaches the Terms of Service or Community Guidelines, but we don’t want to abuse our authority by picking winners and losers in community squabbles.

We also plan on being in open dialogue with our community, but there are limits to what we will divulge about our decision making process and moderation methods, as doing so would provide a roadmap for bad actors to try to circumvent our safeguards or launch bad faith attacks on our members. We take the safety of our cooperative just as seriously as the safety of our users, so we will not tolerate harassment of our members or volunteers.

Our Commitments to Our Community

1. We commit to creating a culture that protects our users from abuse and serious harm while also allowing those who make mistakes a chance to learn and heal the damage, if they are willing.
2. We commit to creating a dialogue with the minority communities Northsky supports so that our reasoning is not opaque when dealing with sensitive intersectional matters.
3. We commit to using the principles of restorative justice when dealing with intracommunity harms that rise to the level of incident moderation, however abusers are not entitled to share space with their victims even after restorative justice has occurred.
4. We commit to making sure that users who are last in line for help and first in line for harm in society are first in line for help and support on Northsky.
5. We commit to telling you, when appropriate and without violating the privacy of others, why we made a certain moderation decision in plain language. This is to build trust with the community and engage in good faith dialogue to improve our moderation policies and practices over time.
6. We commit to protecting our community from corrupting influences that would compromise the mission of the cooperative regardless of profit, power, or personality.

We commit to measuring every decision we make as a cooperative against the Commitments outlined above.

Community Guidelines

We expect all Northsky Social users to abide by the following guidelines and uphold these standards in order to keep our community authentic, safe, and brave.

Behavior Standards

• No harassment, including threatening other users, telling them to kill themselves, coordinating harassment campaigns, automating harassment using tools, or activities of a similar nature.
• Do not harass BIPOC members due to the culturally protected practices or items of their culture. (e.g. land stewardship, hunting, spiritual practices, etc...)
• No stalking or unwanted contact with users, including circumventing their blocks.
• Do not use Northsky to promote or sell illegal goods or services.
• Do not engage in inappropriate conduct towards minors, like grooming, soliciting, arranging offline meetings, coercing or otherwise exposing minors to harm.
• Do not engage in activities designed to undermine the security of Northsky’s services, users, or cooperative members or volunteers.
• Do not knowingly disseminate misinformation or disinformation, and if you discover something you’ve posted is not factual, post a correction or remove the post.
• Do not share illegal content that puts individuals, the community, or Northsky Social at risk, such as: advertising controlled substances, facilitating illegal transactions, information on how to build or procure dangerous weapons, or other content that would jeopardize our community.
• Abide by the Copyright and Intellectual Property standards set forth in our Terms of Service.

Content Standards

• Adult content that is appropriately tagged, follows all of our Behavior Standards and Content Standards, and is shared with the consent of all featured subjects, is welcome on the platform.
• No posting Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), including real or drawn subjects. (relevant Canadian legal definition)​
• No posting bestiality: content involving sexual abuse of an animal by a human, real or simulated.
• No posting of animal abuse, torture, fighting, or similar exploitative acts.
• No apologia (defense, excusing, or minimizing) of pedophilia, CSAM, animal Abuse, or bestiality.
• No posting bigoted contentincluding but not limited to: abelism, acephobia, biphobia, enbyphobia, homophobia, misogyny, queerphobia, racism, transphobia, whorephobia, xenophobia, islamophobia, antisemitism, or other forms of hate speech.
• Graphic content (gory or violent) must be tagged appropriately, and have clear journalistic, educational, or artistic merit. Any graphic media shared with the intent to traumatize another user or users will result in account-level moderation including bans.

Privacy and Safety

• No doxxing or sharing of personal contact info, addresses, financial, medical data, or identification documents that don’t belong to you.
• No sharing private messages or communications you weren’t authorized to share, unless it is in the public’s best interest or has significant journalistic merit.
• Do not use Northsky as a platform for coordinating harmful acts like attacks on an individual, a group or groups of people, swatting, or similar activities.
• Do not promote self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, or extreme dieting practices.
• Do not share, threaten to share, or create facsimiles of sexual content involving someone who has not consented to the creation or distribution of said content.

Integrity and Authenticity

• No impersonating others. (Parody accounts must be clearly labeled as such!)
• No pretending to be a member or volunteer of Northsky Social Cooperative.

Enforcement and Consequences

Northsky moderators may take one or more of the follow actions if you are found in breach of Terms of Service or the Community Guidelines:

• Labeling your Posts, Content, Profile, or Account.
• Temporarily Suspending your Account
• Permanently Suspending your Account

You may appeal a decision made by a volunteer moderator. Appeals will be reviewed by a cooperative member, whose decision will stand as final.

Reporting and Feedback

We rely on you to help us maintain a healthy community and uphold these community guidelines. As a small team we do not have the resources to monitor all activity on our service at all times, so if you see an issue, please report it to us.

• Northsky users can report posts to our moderation team in the app by reporting a post and directing the report to the Northsky Moderation labeler (coming soon).
• Reports for issues that cannot be reported through the app can be sent to our moderation team at reports@northskysocial.com​
• Appeals for labels applied to your profile or posts can be appealed through the app.

Appeals can be sent to appeals@northskysocial.com, or as a reply to the suspension e-mail you’ve received.

Updates and Revisions

Our Community Guidlines will evolve over time and in dialogue with our community. Updates will be communicated to users via our e-mail newsletter and by posts from the @transrights.northsky.social account.

Changelist

• 10.24.26: First Complete Draft
• 10.30.25: Internal Review Revisions
• 11.04.25: First Public Draft for Community Feedback