I'm curious how you plan to run a community without formalizing the rules that are expected to be followed somewhere. Restaurants generally have a sign outlining dress and language expectations, why is it so controversial to document community behavior expectations?

There are a number of internet communities which essentially have this in the opposite form - as in "getting insulted is expected, no we are not going to do anything about it".

This was the de facto Linux mailing list way for a bit, and was somewhat documented in a lot of "how to interact and what to expect on LKML" guides.

Is "don't be a dick" not enough? For a long while there was a group of militant people hell bent on having everyone keep a CoC in their repos and ironically being the more intrusive and rude force themselves. I don't think any such document I've read has had any more substance or achieved much beyond the initial kerfuffle

People don't agree what's being a dick and what's not.

> Is "don't be a dick" not enough?

If everyone is going to act in good faith the whole time, sure, it's fine. But as soon as you get one person acting in bad faith, it all falls apart - see the current Republican Party, for example.