I'm going to talk about sexual harassment online for just a little bit here.

Bear with me.

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.

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.

@vkc sorry you have to deal with this stuff. I always struggle to understand why people do shitty things, when its so much easier not to do shitty things to begin with?

Anger and hate takes so much energy and effort.

Thanks for being public about this stuff.

@vkc I hate that "But how does blocking replies promote speech?" is a framing that we even have to take seriously

@vkc No disagreeing with those being a useful moderation options but just to seek clarification:
If you restrict posts to followers then surely that stops them being boosted and hence non-followers seeing them, unless one of your followers is really shitty and shares you/your post some other way?
I appreciate this doesn't help if you do want the post to get to the wider #fedverse but suppess replies.
And if someone does harass you, can't you report them and get both your and their instance admin/moderators to block them in future - that would then help to protect other users on the instance?

@vkc Thank you for posting this thread. I'm sorry you and others have to deal with this harassment.

@vkc being able to prune specific replies from your thread would be more generally useful than preventing them, so you don't have to preset the thread. You're right, "blocking" and muting functions are really just two kinds of muting.

@vkc
Reply gating.
IIRC from the last time somebody (@kissane ?) pleaded for this very reasonable improvement, it surfaced that reply gating (or limiting) has been on the Mastodon to-do list for nearly a decade but Eugen & co have deprioritized it all this time. There were reasons. All the reasons.
This was the issue where I started to question how much I like Eugen & co.

I hope this current push does the trick.

@vkc I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing that would cause you to rebase your whole instance, but I’m pretty sure @Bonfire has this feature.

At the very least, it proves you’re not alone in advocating for this change in the fediverse. It was important enough to the Bonfire crew to make sure it was included for RC 1.

@vkc thanks for the explanation! It really helps me to understand the problem!

@vkc
> [Muting posts] stops *me* from seeing it. My server still hosts the harassment in that case

So what you're concerned about is nasty replies being stored on your server, even if you never see them? You want to be able to Mute Replies on a post in a way that stops any replies to it being received by your server. Correct?

> It's sending it to other servers

FYI a reply to your post is sent by the server where it's posted, not by yours. The only thing a server sends is what's posted on it.