Mastodon Rules: Characterizing Formal Rules on Popular Mastodon Instances is a recently published research article that compares and characterises the rules of the most popular Mastodon servers. The researchers find that “Rules on Mastodon often pay particular attention to issues of harassment and hate — strongly reflecting the spirit of the Mastodon Covenant. We speculate that these rules may have emerged in response to problems of other platforms, and reflect a lack of support for instance maintainers.”
The report compares the rules on Mastodon servers to those on subreddits, and comes up with some interesting findings: “[R]ules about Hate Speech, Harassment, and Doxxing/Personal Info are far more common on Mastodon, while rules about Consequences/Moderation/Enforcement, Behavior/Content/Format Allowed, and Links & Outside Content are much less common. This contrast may suggest that these spaces have different values and purposes.” and “rules on Mastodon often explicitly engage with systemic oppression across many different intersectional identities beyond what is required by the Mastodon Covenant.”
And finally, this line in the report is a good indication of why I want to spend my time on the fediverse: “Mastodon instances seem to have more of an orientation towards justice”.
https://laurenshof.online/mastodon-server-rules-research-paper/