Politics is a tricky subject and nebulously saying no politics isn’t a good strategy because everything is political.

For that reason, attempting to create a formal ‘politics’ filter is likely to be counter-productive. In general, I apply common sense, which is largely subjective by definition. The way I balance this is that I always err in the side of not removing things. Just want to emphasize that the reason used to mistakenly remove this post was not related to the general politics rule. I mistakenly thought that the post was reported by multiple people.

So I think a better goal would be to target the political behaviors that hurt people

My logic for setting the scope as I did is the following:

• The internet is flooded with posts about politics, and especially so with US-centered politics (and I am not from nor live in the US)
• Politics and topics that have become polarized by politics tend to be difficult to moderate

So, because my instance’s focus is science and nature, I decided to make one of my instance’s value propositions: If you choose this instance your Local feed will not have politics in it. Note, that, one has access to ‘All’ and one can also access the instance’s communities from other instances. So, in my view, an instance that offers such a value proposition is a healthy component of the ecosystem - and easier for me to moderate.

I do agree that trying to come up with some better writing and guidelines that transmit the core idea while making it fairly enforceable would be good. I have said a few times in the past that I would do this, but I still don’t really know how. So I keep reading what people suggest. Thank you!