I know this is already on Mastodon team's radar, but I do want to stress how important this feature is.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@informapirata Yes, of course, any reply control system would have to work across all fediverse platforms, hence this being a challenging feature to implement.

But yes, I do think people should have more control over their experience online. I think the trade-offs are worth it. Accounts that abuse this feature can be reported and suspended, I don't think that should be a problem.

If I was getting harassed on here regularly with few tools to protect myself, beyond reporting a post and waiting for someone to come to my rescue, I'd likely also leave for a platform where I will feel safer and more empowered.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@informapirata "and I don't see racism and mansplaining as urgent matters"

Well, it's easy to miss this if you and your communities are not directly affected. One particularly insidious attack vector has been making a followers-only post and tagging your victim. This way nobody else would see the abuse outside of the attackers and the victim. The post visibility, from what I understand, also makes it harder to report such attacks.

And there is quite a bit more, I highly recommend reading this:

5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people

Anti-Blackness is a long-term problem in the fediverse. Now's a good time to start changing that.

The Nexus Of Privacy (privacy.thenexus.today)

[informapirata@activitypub.space]

@stefan@stefanbohacek.online said in I know this is already on Mastodon team's radar, but I do want to stress how important this feature is.:
> The post visibility, from what I understand, also makes it harder to report such attacks.

I can assure you that on Mastodon, if a user flags a direct message, I'm perfectly capable of seeing it, regardless of its visibility level. Unfortunately, not on Friendica. I don't know about Lemmy and NodeBB yet.

As for the rest, I'm sure I'm probably underestimating the problem of racism; my concerns are Italian-speaking, and in the Italian fediverse, racist people are immediately identified and isolated. In fact, most of the reports I've received for racism were for English-language content, and this is indicative, because English-language content makes up the minority of the reports I receive.

However, I still don't understand why limiting the ability to reply constitutes a real limitation on harassment, when there's already the option (standardized in Activitypub) to limit the visibility of posts to followers only.

Paradoxically, the inability to reply to a public post (because I think we're talking about public posts) actually increases the risk of that post being copied, linked, and screenshotted for ridicule on different, more toxic platforms outside the control of the fediverse communities (X, Thruth, 4chan, etc.).

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@informapirata

"when there's already the option (standardized in Activitypub) to limit the visibility of posts to followers only."

I don't think it's really fair that, if you're a marginalized person, you have to choose between being able to reach a wider audience, and staying safe.

As a straight white dude, I never have to worry about that. It's always safe for me to post publicly. I think everyone should enjoy that privilege. (Among many.)

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@informapirata "the inability to reply to a public post actually increases the risk of that post being copied, linked, and screenshotted"

There will never be a perfect solution, it's true. But we can at least put up safeguards and empower people to protect themselves.

The bottom line is, the ability to disable replies is the top-voted issue on Mastodon's repo. Clearly people really want this.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc

[graue@social.coop]

@stefan 100%. I'm not sure how on their radar it is, either. I see no evidence in that issue thread of it being prioritized at all.

Also, low-hanging fruit: Blocking someone should hide their reply under your post.

So much simpler to implement, the code was literally already written back in **2022** but isn't being shipped.

Hide subthreads by blocked users when looking at a post's descendants by ClearlyClaire · Pull Request #18468 · mastodon/mastodon

This is about the server not returning known subthreads started by people blocked by the post's author, not the viewer. e.g., if we have A → B → C → D → E, where a → b means “b replies to a”, and B...

GitHub (github.com)

[dgodon@mastodon.online]

@stefan @AlsoPaisleyCat exactly! There are so many people not on here because of this who I would really love to be here. While not a silver bullet reply controls would be significant help.

[lobingera@chaos.social]

@stefan Is anyone on this thread actually working on this?

afaiu, it's a protocol change and these are hard to manage across implementations (masto + general fediverse).

[funbaker@chaos.social]

@stefan one cannot solve social problems with technology...

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@funbaker Right. But we should still give people, particularly marginalized people, tools for protecting themselves.

Disabling replies is the top requested feature, I think we can trust that it's needed.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@lobingera From what I understand, goToSocial has been working on this, with the Mastodon team waiting for them to publish a formal proposal so that this feature can be more widely adopted by other fediverse platforms.

It looks like that hasn't happened yet, probably because the feature is still being actively developed, based on what I see here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/federation/interaction_policy/

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@dgodon Absolutely! @AlsoPaisleyCat

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@graue I've seen it come up in a few conversations, but it seems like things are a bit stuck waiting for goToSocial to write an FEP, from what I can tell?

Stefan Bohacek (@stefan@stefanbohacek.online)

Any #GoToSocial developers, or anyone else who might know what the hold-up with publishing the FEP for reply controls is, interested in chiming in? https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/115316306587338554 #fediverse #FEP #fedidevs #ReplyControls

Stefan's Personal Mastodon Server (stefanbohacek.online)

[8124@mastodon.social]

@stefan On a decentralized network, replies are just links to your post. They are hosted externally by the server hosting the account publishing the reply.

It’s not that this isn’t being implemented. It’s that there are *no technical means in software* to prevent someone else’s computer server from hosting a URL pointing to your public post (which is because it is their computer and not yours).

The endless requests for this inherently impossible feature are just old Twitter habits dying hard.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@8124 Well the problem here is unwanted @ mentions. Again, I am not typically a target of harassment, so I don't want to speak for those affected by this, but I'd imagine unwanted @ mentions are a much bigger problem than strangers linking to your posts without tagging you.

Which, I suppose, based on the nature of such posts, could be a whole another problem, and much like people sharing screenshots of your posts, a lot harder to address.

[nonya_bidniss@infosec.exchange]

@stefan I've mentioned wanting this a couple of times and always it draws stiff criticism of the "you're doing it wrong" kind. But I should be able to preemptively shut up jerks when I know they're going to dogpile, or sometimes I want to post something personal like a remembrance of someone I've lost, without replies. Or sometimes I want to pin a post without it getting replies. I should have all that control to prevent randos from jumping in where they're not wanted.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@Nonya_Bidniss Yeah, it's the type of people that are the reason we need tools like this being the loudest opponents, go figure.

[8124@mastodon.social]

@stefan Replies to posts are implemented as links under-the-hood, though. Really, think about it, is there any other way it could work?

Our posts are hosted on different servers. They have to link to each other in a hidden metadata field, because otherwise how could threads be rendered? Each post would be standalone.

That is why reply controls are inherently impossible under a decentralized approach. There is no way to enforce that everyone runs the same software and configuration.

[thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange]

True, but https://pdsls.dev/ is a useful hack.

@dec23k @stefan @USelaine

[thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange]

GoToSocial has already implemented this. As I understand it Mastodon the worked with GoToSocial to tweak the protocol-level specification, and the Mastodon implementation can build on mechanisms that were put in place for Quote Boosts. Not sure just where it is on on the Mastodon roadmap though.

@stefan @lobingera