Thanks! :)

Thanks!

The way submitters didn’t played by the rules

It is not that the submitters did not play by the rules. The 'rules' of the instance set the scope of the kind of communities that belong here, but I would not expect users from other instances to be aware of these rules. So, it was a mistake on my end not on any poster's. It would have been better to react sooner, but better now than later.

There are ways this community could have been both science

From the name my impression was that the community was about more aligned with futuristic sci-fi, which would be a bit on the edge of the scope but acceptable.

You can have a look at some communities that often have content where science intersects politics:

https://mander.xyz/c/academiahttps://mander.xyz/c/earthscience https://mander.xyz/c/publichealth

Minimizing politics does not strictly mean being extreme about enforcing the no-politics rule. Posts that are about the interaction between politics and science generally contain enough overlap with science that it is acceptable. But that is not the case in this community, it is mostly general topics and politics.

Haha, thanks but no worries, the wound will heal 😁

The instance has had this policy for over 4 years. The sidebar reads:

The main focus of this instance is the natural sciences, and the scope encompasses all of the STEM fields.

Please keep politics to a minimum. When science is the focus, intersection with politics may be tolerated as long as the discussion is constructive and science remains the focus. As a general rule, political content posted directly to the instance’s local communities is discouraged and may be removed. You can of course engage in political discussions in non-local communities.

The goal when creating this instance was to a place to discuss about scientific discoveries, post pictures of nature, and have a set of communities for this while avoiding polarizing content. If someone wants to discuss politics they can click on 'All' and go right to it. The scope is explicitly anti-politics because I do not want to moderate a politically charged or polarizing environment, and I know that many people with interests like mine will also appreciate such a space existing because they see enough pictures of Donald Trump and polarizing discussions elsewhere.

y’all are a science community and science is being hunted down and destroyed systematically and your response is to try to become less political?

I do not disagree with you broadly, and that is to an extent why I use common sense and do not enforce the "no politics" rule religiously. There is quite a bit politics that gets through. Although I do prefer to offer users of this instance a politics free experience, if no one complains I usually let it go.

In this case: I have noticed posts in the front page that have nothing to do with science lately, and they came from this specific community. I then saw some US politics characters attached to articles that had nothing to do with science. I looked through the community and most of it is off-topic, so it makes more sense to lock the community.

I'm sorry this upsets you, I should have removed the community as soon as it was created, but I did not realize what it was.