dmv.social wants to be an environment of thoughtful, kind, and neighborly discussion. Please participate in a manner that doesn’t promote hatred such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism. Assume others are participating in good faith. Please keep content on dmv.social “generally safe for work”.

Have an issue or concern? Reach out to @dmvsocial@dmv.social to let us know.

Do note, the guidelines below cannot fully enumerate all behavior we wish to promote and discourage and will be amended as needed.

Federated Communities

This section applies only to those with accounts hosted on dmv.social. Accounts hosted on other Lemmy instances may ignore this section.

Users with accounts on dmv.social are welcome to join other communities in the fediverse provided the community is focused on content that is:

• Considered generally safe-for-work; not pornographic or sexually explicit.
• Not hateful in nature
• Legal in the DC/MD/VA area and doesn’t promote illegal activity across states

Communities that go against the above criteria will be removed. If you intend to join communities for the above, we kindly ask that you consider a more lenient Lemmy/Kbin instance to host your account and follow dmv.social communities from there.

When engaging with communities hosted on other instances, please make an effort to review and abide by the community rules. Actions of users on this instance may be seen as representative of everyone on here.

General Content

What to Submit

Anything anyone in the area would take interest in knowing or learning. This includes news, information about what’s happening, history, interesting things you’ve stumbled across, ramblings. The !chat@dmv.social community is available for general chat.

Prohibited

• Inciting harm against an individual or group by promoting violence, harassment, or revenge is prohibited.

• Please do not solicit donations or money. Posts for awareness of non-profit organizations may be posted in a very limited capacity if you actively participate and post seldomly.

• Refrain from submitting content that could reasonably be deemed illegal. In cases where state law and federal law conflict, abstract discussion is permitted but shouldn’t give exact instructions on how to violate the law.

• Please do not submit content that could reasonably be deemed pornographic or sexually explicit.

Posts

• Please refrain from stylizing post titles to make them stand out among other posts such as by posting in uppercase, adding symbols, and punctuation

• Try to submit a generally reputable or original source.

• Please limit self-promotion. Community members with an established history of substantiative contributions to content may seldomly contribute self-promotional posts. Members with new accounts or those with little activity should refrain.

• Please use the original title when posting links. Lemmy will suggest a title from a given URL.

Comments

• Be kind. Don’t be snarky. Assume good intent.

• Focus on the content of the argument instead of name-calling.

• Avoid generic tangents and perfunctory remarks. Demonstrate or explain why you hold your point of view for us to explore and learn.

• Controversial topics should be met with nuance and well-intended curious discussion. Please don’t try to flame, incite, bait, or provoke other commenters. When possible, cite reputable sources and avoid broad generalizations.

• Please don’t use this instance or it’s communities for political or ideological battle.