Just an occasional reminder that disabling replies is the #1 requested feature from Mastodon.

[manankanchu@mastodon.social]

@stefan

... suppressing discussion has never been a good approach...

[amberage@eldritch.cafe]

@stefan I have quite a bunch of ideas for moderation that could prevent harassment in the first place, tbh, but chances of Masto devs ever implementing anything like it are about minus 9000%

What can be implemented re: reply controls is, basically, selective muting. A post could indicate "only people XY may reply" (i.e.: followers), fellow vanilla Mastodon servers would respect that, other ActivityPub software may or may not respect that, and bad actors certainly wouldn't. So while it may hide unwanted replies from cooperating parties, it would only ever do so on a good faith basis.

Twitter could do reply controls because Twitter is one company. All user accounts, all posts, all are owned by Twitter. It rules absolutely, for better or worse. That isn't possible with ActivityPub, where each post, each like, each follow, is just servers sending "hey, I did this thing" announcements into the ether and other servers deciding how to respond.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@manankanchu Would you consider a blog that has comments disabled a "suppression of discussion"?

Bottom line: https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/115940412454524948

> "But what if I have a strong urge to reply to a stranger?"
> Find a more productive way to spend your time.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@amberage What you described is pretty much how I'd imagine this to work. Obviously you can't prevent people from publishing whatever they want on their website, blog, or social media, but there have to be ways to limit their reach.

Also, have you seen Mastodon's updated roadmap?

> Moderation tools
> Looking at ways to make moderation easier, e.g. shared block lists.

https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap

That sounds promising, I think!

[mina@berlin.social]

@amberage

That's the basic misunderstanding that people have about decentralised networks:

They don't get it that once a message leaves your instance, you lost all control about it.

All this "Don't quote, don't reply, quiet public, followers only, opting out of indexing and search machines etc." is merely a recommendation, but cannot be enforced.

I always say: Only post what would do no harm to you if plastered it on a public bathroom's wall or take it to the police

@Edent @julian @stefan

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@mina That is a solid advice, sure. But even completely innocent posts can attract mansplaining, tone policing, and outright racism and sexism, and worse.

I don't typically deal with this stuff myself, but on at least two occasions, after posting some pro-trans articles and messages, I'd have bunch of anti-trans losers show up in my replies.

Easy to block, but I just can't imagine dealing with that daily. Or on a bigger scale. I would probably leave for Bluesky myself.

@amberage @Edent @julian

[systemadminihater@cyberplace.social]

@stefan If you limit who.can reply there should be a setting to also completely block my ability to see posts I cannot reply to. No point in showing me peoples shitty drive-by takes.

[shironeko@fedi.tesaguri.club]

@stefan How would that even work, reply are not controlled by the poster's server right?

[renwillis@mstdn.social]

Really takes the whole social thing out of social.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@shironeko I'd recommend going through the linked conversations about potential approaches, but in my mind, I'd imagine each server would reject replies that don't match the reply settings.

Yes, there will be servers, either running outdated fediverse software, or designed to ignore the settings, and the replies might be visible there, but their reach will be limited.

Obviously you can't stop people from talking about you in their dark corner far away, just like screenshots easily work around quote permissions. Or someone writing a blog post about you.

Still, what we have now is pretty subpar and I've seen too many people leaving the fediverse because they feel unsafe and unwelcome. And they tell their friends who will never come here.

This has to change.