Spicy take: an advantage of centralized social media platforms is some degree of "Post Soverignty". Basically, OP controls their replies, which can be a really powerful tools to allow individuals to manage harassment and abuse or even just make an announcement and not hold a discussion.
I get that fediverse spec doesn't allow for it (at least in current implementations), but it sure would be nice to be able to unlink replies and only allow certain people/no people to reply.
Sometimes you just don't want to deal with trolls and replyguys and dunks.
Hi @Jess👾
, ReplyGuy here. 😸
So what you're asking for is, if I reply to your post, my reply first goes to you, and then your settings determine whether it gets accepted and forwarded to the other participants in the thread. Do I understand that right?
Because (as @rakoo and @Mike Macgirvin 🖥
️ pointed out), that does exist already. If the Streams repository and Forte are too cutting-edge for you, check out Hubzilla. But you'll need Fediverse software that is designed around the "Post Soverignty" concept. Mastodon is not. As I understand it, this was a conscious design decision: the original poster and the commenters are all equal, and there is no way to retrofit Mastodon with "Post Soverignty".
But it's not a Fediverse spec problem.
And why yes. This post was bait for people wanting to explain why I'm fediversing wrong.
If you block someone, their replies will be gone. You can also hide the thread, and you won't get notified of any replies (for things like announcements).
@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange privacy should sometimes be limited to the people I follow. "People who follow me" is a strange privacy setting.
https://infosec.exchange/@JessTheUnstill/115011747742796121
@cy@fedicy.us.to Gee golly, thank you for explaining to me how the platform works. I would have never thought of exploring existing functions for whether they meet what I would like to see before posting a take.
Sorry, I thought if you knew, then you'd see that there's no advantage to centralized social media's "Post Soverignty."
@cy@fedicy.us.to @JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange
Or maybe, just maybe, it's you who don't understand what advantages Jess sees for being able to control aspects of one's posts.
Pretty sure it's an ideological divide. I don't think I should be able to forbid people to talk about what I'm saying, as long as I don't have to hear it. Other people think talking should be forbidden to prevent evil people from coordinating. Anyway I'm sure Jess is done with this. I just wanted to diss centralized social media, really.
Okay fine. Here's your user story.
As a Fediverse user, I would like to limit replies to a post or retroactively remove replies to a post for use cases like the following:
An Open Source project with a large number of followers makes an announcement about a new release of their software. The replies start being filled with abuse and slander against people involved in their projects. Similar, the post gets replies of people wanting to spam their own stuff also unrelated to the original thread.
A person with a stalker has their stalker invading their mentions with a revolving list of sock puppets to continue their stalking, abuse, slander, and harassment leaving the victims no way to keep this person from continuing their abuse.
Similar, but a group of people whip up a dogpile lynch mob against a person and any time they make a post, the mentions are flooded with abuse.
"Solutions" like "Well just mute your replies" means that the original poster can no longer participate in the replies of their thread with people they want to engage with.
"Well you can't stop people from talking about you!" I understand. At best you could appeal to their moderators but that is its own thing. However, you should be able to limit them from polluting your mentions with their abuse, harassment, or spam. There's a categorical difference between someone making posts about "jesstheunstill is an awful person in these reprehensible ways" on their own account, and the same person replying to every post I make using an endless number of sock puppets posting the same message, both continuing the abuse, as well as making everyone who visits the mentions of my post be aware of said abuse.
There are undoubtedly more use cases than that, but they're all tied together by a common thread:
The problem is not only limited to the original poster having to see the unwanted content in their replies, but also: they have no way to limit them from putting their abuse in front of the eyes of everyone else who wants to read their mentions, and trying to use replies as a weapon.
@cy@fedicy.us.to @dragonfrog@mastodon.sdf.org
I mean, yes there's decentralized ways to get partway there around replies control. But it'd all be down to post-hoc server specific implementations and clients playing nice with each other. And I have little to no hope of that ever becoming a widespread functionality across the Fediverse. Especially when we still haven't seen other moderation and abuse tools properly implemented in many of these platforms despite people asking for them for years and years now. So in the meantime, I just bitch at the clouds.
@cy@fedicy.us.to @dragonfrog@mastodon.sdf.org
Jess👾
