I'm going to talk about sexual harassment online for just a little bit here.
Bear with me.
Like many women online, I get sexual harassment in waves here on the good ol' fediverse.
Today was a rough day, other days are less rough, all of it is unwelcome, and that's a bigger problem than one online community. I don't expect Mastodon (or any other ActivityPub thing) to solve that problem 100%.
When I see it, I block it. Often enough it's a bad server, and I defederate.
This impacts the visibility of the comment.
So here's what happens practically:
First, I get a disgusting remark (or several) and block/defederate/whatever.
This remark does not pass through to other servers, who often enough *also* are blocking/defederating/whatever.
That means you, dear end-user, don't know that any of this happened.
So when I say something like "harassment is rough today", you're not seeing what I saw.
I personally feel like that's a problem. It gets in the way of understanding the scope of the issue.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to host harassment and share it around. I get vile nightmare fuel you don't want to see.
Defederating is a good solution. But I feel strongly that Mastodon (as the putative leader pushing the protocol) could do two things.
One would be to make it easier to share naughty-lists full of bad actors in real time. This would help stop issues before they start.
The other is blocking replies.
I know, I know. "Blocking replies is impossible". "You can't stop people from disagreeing with you on the internet".
I've heard it all, and don't really care.
Here's my proposal: much like how I can set the post visibility here, I should be able to tell my server to drop any replies to that post.
Not "don't send notifications about replies". Drop them. Don't host them.
And compliant servers would honor that request in the UI.
This even sounds technically feasible without too much hassle.
Whilst we can't always be sure that all instances would honour such a "reply block", once the big ones do it, a lot is gained.
Smart idea. I wonder why no one has proposed it, already.
“MAS-37 Restrict who can reply to a post”
https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
Something's on their roadmap, but it's in the “Exploring" section, below “In Progress" and "Planned”, so unless someone convinces the group to prioritize it and/or provide an acceptable implementation, that may be a while.
A long standing suggestion, clearly: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14762