What's allowed on Towne
The short version: talk about anything you would talk about with a neighbor. Disagree with ideas, not people. That is most of it.
Yes, you can post about politics
National issues, local issues, elections, policy, the news. All allowed. Towne has no political slant and nobody here decides which views are the acceptable ones.
What Towne does instead is sort. Every post has a “mark as political” button. If enough neighbors mark one, it moves to Towne Hall, a channel for civic conversation that you visit when you want it. People who came for the lost dog and the plumber recommendation are not reading an argument they did not ask for, and the argument still has a home.
Nothing is deleted, nothing is hidden, and the author is told where their post went.
Two things worth knowing. Marking a post political is a category, not a downvote, and it never counts against the author. And nobody is shown who marked a post.
The five rules
- No harassment or personal attacks. Disagree with ideas, not people. You are going to run into these neighbors at the store.
- No discrimination. Content targeting people for their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability or other protected characteristics is not allowed.
- No doxxing.Do not share someone's private information, like a home address or phone number, without their consent.
- No spam or commercial solicitation. Marketplace is for neighbor-to-neighbor. Recommend a business you actually use; do not advertise your own.
- No misinformation. Do not knowingly post false safety alerts or fabricated claims. Being wrong is human; inventing a threat is not.
What happens if something crosses the line
Reports go to a queue, and nothing gets hidden because one person disliked it.
Towne is built so the neighborhood sorts itself rather than a moderator doing it for you. You vote, and you mark posts political, and those signals do the work. Some of that is live now and the rest switches on as each neighborhood gets big enough for the numbers to mean anything.
Accounts get removed for abuse, not for disagreement, and never for being quiet. If someone is rude or argumentative or wrong about something, that is a neighborhood, not a violation.
If you think something crossed a line, report it. If you think a call was wrong, email [email protected] and say so.
This page is the plain-language version. The binding document is the Terms of Service, where section 8 covers conduct in full. If the two ever disagree, the Terms win and I have made a mistake here that I would like to know about.