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.
I'm not asking to regulate your speech, dudes.
I'm saying I don't want to host it in certain contexts. And I think it'd be nice if the popular server software enabled that.
This would make the choice of "post or stay quiet" a lot easier here. This might encourage more folks from marginalized communities to come here instead of Bluesky or other platforms.
It might help *grow* this space. And I care about that.
"But how does blocking replies promote speech?"
Good question. Let's imagine selfies.
I don't share a ton of selfies because I get creepy comments.
I would almost certainly post more photos if I could tell my server "drop all replies that aren't from people I follow".
The lack of reply limiting is causing me to self-censor.
@vkc I wonder if a white-list approach could work? As in, you can mark specific users as "allowed to reply", and anyone not marked as such cannot. This way, you could cultivate your own circle of people you trust, so people like you, who get way more abuse than most of us can imagine, could still get some of the benefits of having a social presence and interaction online.
Of course, the downside is that it puts the onus of being safe online on the vicitim. Certainly not a perfect solution.
@thomholwerda @vkc One of the things that worries me about reply whitelists is how it can give people false impressions about what people think of a post, because only certain people can reply. This would be used for spreading propaganda.
Unless, of course, below the post it says that replies are restricted to certain people, like Twitter. That might work, I suppose.
