I really want to make a change to the rules for our Lemmy and Mastodon server instances:

*[This DOES NOT effect the email listserv (see https://www.clinicians-exchange.org) – which remains a closed group whose messages should only be seen by members, and whose members are licensed mental health professionals, graduate students, and retirees (and a few nurses and doctors).] *

For Lemmy and Mastodon I want to:

a) Open up membership to ALL people professionally employed in mental health in any capacity, retirees of such, and graduate students. This would expand possible membership in several directions including bachelor’s level social workers; psychiatric day program staff; psych ward orderlies; staff members of professional associations such as APA, ACA, NASW; and staff members of state licensing boards; to name a few. I also wonder how this might change our world-wide membership? We would continue to vet the backgrounds of applicants.

b) Allow pseudonyms. Stop requiring real name and credentials in online profiles.

Lemmy and Mastodon are **NOT **confidential forums anyway – in theory, ANYONE in the world can see the posts on them even if not members.

This all helps our Lemmy and Mastodon instances by:

  1. Continuing to let members know that - LOCAL posts come from some level of professional colleague.
  2. Letting our professional members who worry about patients reading what they write use pseudonyms.
  3. Letting our professional members who want to post on other server instances NOT have to post as professionals – they can play just like members from any other instance. So if you want to post elsewhere about sports cars or whatever, you don’t have to have a profile that says who you are.
  4. The culture of Lemmy and Mastodon STRONGLY encourages the freedom of anonymity. (Which we will partially support by allowing pseudonyms – but our admins and moderators have to know who you are to vet you for membership to our professional instances.)
  5. Allow professional community spaces for ALL mental health professionals to interact. (Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to talk about a licensing issue, then have staff from licensing boards be able to read that and weigh in?)
  6. Admins and moderators will continue to enforce professional decorum on local toots (Mastodon) and local communities (Lemmy).
  7. Gain us membership! The vetting to join loses us members anyway, and I think the required posting of real names and credentials REALLY loses us members. I want to keep vetting new members as we are special purpose FediVerse instances not trying to grow giant by taking on all comers.

Thoughts?

Any great reasons not to do this? Again – this is for Lemmy and Mastodon – NOT the email list!

In case you missed it – I recently increased the hard drive space of Lemmy and Mastodon to 150GIGs and changed Mastodon to allow 10,000 character posts (most instances only allow 500 characters).

Thanks, Michael