Who we are
We are a group of Berlin queers with a burning desire to create a social media space where we queers and sex workers are free to share what we want without fear of getting blocked. We know that many platforms sell our data, surveil our profiles and monitor our relations. This is a place to organise ourselves, a place of queer knowledge and community.
This website is our planet in the distributed social media network called "the fediverse". Much like email where you are free to choose your own provider like gmail or hotmail, with the fediverse you are free to choose your own community in this network. Each community often has it's own servers and can have its own rules and policies.
We are NOT building a new centralised and monetised app. We want to break away from monopolistic corporate structures. We want to help build a new type of internet governed by smaller communities instead of profit driven companies. This is our space, where we get to define our own identity. This is where we make our own rules.
No monitoring. No ads. No censorship. No data collection.
Costs are covered by donations. Systems are maintained by a small volountary team of queers. This process will be imperfect and we plan to improve as we go. This is a labour of love from volunteers and an ongoing experiment.
Code of conduct
We aspire for this space to be a place of queer experimentation, utopian thought, social critique, collective organising, and lots of self affirming nudity!
Here all nipples are welcome and can be freely posted with the consent of the people in the picture. You are even free to post all of your sexiness, just be sure to mark it as "sensitive", so you let others consent to viewing it.
Try to be mindful of others: their experience or inexperience, privilege or lack thereof. No Body Police: Bodies are political. No Grammar Police: Language is political.
This is no space for hate speech, bullying, trolling, hostility or any of the following: Racism ~ Ageism ~ Sexism ~ Ableism ~ Classism ~ Fatphobia ~ Colourism ~ Classism ~ SWERFS (Sex worker exclusionary radical feminism) ~ Homophobia ~ Biphobia ~ Transphobia ~ TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminism)
For more information you can read all of our strict guidelines in our Terms of service.
Your data
We will never sell your data nor share it with third parties. We have no external trackers or analytics. Everything is hosted in Germany.
For more detailed information see our Privacy Policy.
Invites only
Currently we are running on invites only, send us an email if you'd like to join!
How to use this platform
Leaving the the maintstream platforms behind comes with a bit of learning. We are here with guides and tips to help you take this jump into queer technical freedom!
Federation and communities
Queer Haus is one of many communities in the larger "fediverse". These communities are also sometimes called servers or instances. Each community in the fediverse has its own domain, such as queer.haus or post.lurk.org. Each of these can have their own code of conduct and rules. All of these are interconnected across the internet. This type of decentralised network is called federation, hence the the name "fediverse".
In these communities there can be many users, you might see @dolphin@queer.haus or @rra@post.lurk.org. Users that are in the same community as yourself are shown without the domain like @dolphin. When you compose a post you can mention any of these users, your message will find it's way to them across this interconnected web.
Allowlist and secure mode
Our main goal is to create a safe queer space, so we are running this server in allowlist-mode. This means that federation and interactions are only allowed with other communities that we know and trust. So for queer.haus we are curating a small queer slice of the fediverse.
Since we are running in allowlist-mode, Mastodon also automatically enables something they call "secure mode". Secure mode hides all pages, profiles and posts that would normally be public to the internet. This means you cannot share a link for people to see your public posts. For others to access content on queer.haus, they need to have an account and be signed in.
If you don't like these limitations, you can create as many accounts in as many communities as you want. So if you are curious about interacting with the larger fediverse, there are many other communities that offer this. Check out joinmastodon.org
Post visibility
Every time you compose a new post, you get to choose who can see it. This is stored per post and cannot be changed after a post has been created.
We do our best to keep your posts and data safe, but always keep in mind that like with any social media, anything posted on the internet can be screenshotted or copy pasted.
In this section we explain who can see your posts and how they can spread, so you can decide what is best for the things you want to share.
Public posts
Posts marked as public will be shown to all users on queer.haus, and also be visible and spread to other communities that we federate with. Use this setting when you want to announce public information that can freely be spread around the internet.
Local-only posts
Here at queer.haus we run an alternative version of Mastodon called Hometown, this version allows you to create posts that stay private in our local community. This is great for posting about things you only want to share with queer.haus. These posts stay on our servers and will not be visible to the greater fediverse.
Followers-only posts
Just like with Instagram or Twitter you can set your account to be private. This is the easiest way to create your own private sphere of friends and requires you to approve each new follower. Others can still see your "Public" and "Local-only" posts, but your "Followers-only" posts will only be visible to your approved followers.
Users from other communities than queer.haus can also request to follow you, and if you approve them, your followers-only posts will then be copied to that community and visible to the users you approve.
Attention: This also means that the admins of those communities will be able to see your posts as they are then stored on their servers.
Direct messages
Direct messages can only be seen by the users you mention by username, so this can also be used for group conversations. Keep in mind that messages on Mastodon are not encrypted and can potentially be seen by admins in our team. If you mention users from other communities, also their admins can potentially see your messages.
This is the same as on any other social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Grindr, etc. But with the major difference that we will not algorithmically analyse your messages to better target ads to you.
For all these reasons, please use an encrypted messaging app like Signal for truly private chats with trusted friends. For more info on secure and private communication tools check out privacytools.io
Who can see me?
Since the fediverse is made up of many different people, communities and servers across the internet, it is important to establish what is visible where and how a post might spread.
Your profile info is always public. Users in our community and communities that we federate with can search for your username and find you. They will then see your name, avatar, header image, profile description, the number of posts and followers you have. On your profile they will ONLY see your Public posts, no other posts are visible by default.
Attention: Your profile information can leak out to communities outside those that we have chosen to federate with. Whenever someone from another community follows you or you reply to one of their posts, their server will save a copy of your profile for quick access. This profile copy can then be seen by other communities, outside of our initial circle.
This is the nature of a federated network of communities and cannot be changed, so please keep it in mind when you choose your avatar and header images. That they can spread. This does NOT affect "Local-only" posts. ONLY your profile info and "Public" posts can freely spread out to the fediverse.
Blocking other users
If a user is posting content you never want to see, you can click the three dots on any of their posts or profile, and mute them. This will hide all their posts from you. They will not know that you muted them.
If you want to stop another user from being able to contact you, you can block them. This will hide all their posts from your view, and hide all of your posts from their view and make it impossible for them to follow you.
If someone is harassing you or otherwise going against our rules, please report them.
You can read more about how blocking and muting works in the official documentation.
Apps on mobile
There are many mobile apps that can be used to access queer.haus. Mastodon curates a list of the most popular ones. The sad thing is that the creator of Mastodon currently does not believe in "Local-only" posting. This means that no apps support this feature.
To get around this limitation, we offer a setting in your preferences where you can select if you want your posts from apps to be treated as "Local-only" or not. This is enabled by default.
Go to the settings page - "Force all posts made by apps to be local only"
Web app on mobile
Another way to access all of queer.haus features on your phone is to use the website directly as a web app. For Android users this works very well, almost like a real app. On iPhone this works too, but does not support push notifications.
On iPhone: Click the share button, choose "Add to home screen". Now you have a new app with our logo and design, yay!
On Android: Visit your browser and tap on the menu icon (three dots or three lines). Click on "Add to Home screen" or "Add to" → "Home screen".
More documentation
For more guides and tips you can have a look at the official Mastodon documentation. It describes more about how to use the platform and how the system works in greater detail.
docs.joinmastodon.org
Questions?
If you have any questions about Queer Haus, please send a message to our shared @dolphin account 🐬✨ or an email to queerhaus@protonmail.com
Our allowlist
We federate only with these other instances in the fediverse. See our reasoning for this above.