IMO, the fact that replies to a post aren’t ever under the control of the original poster is the original sin of social media. From that one design flaw we get dunks, reply guys, sealioning, “blocked” people still able to stalk people, etc.
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“Who can reply?” seems to have landed on the site formerly known as Twitter in 2021 2020. In 2021 they let you change the setting after posting. Better late than never!
Go To Social also has the ability to choose who replies, which is intriguing.
Honestly, BlueSky is leaps and bounds better than Mastodon in terms of user-level moderation controls. It’s a shame that this honeymoon period won’t last once the VC folks start demanding returns. Hopefully Gargron and team can put aside some of their ego and incorporate the parts that can be supported despite the differences between ActivityPub and AT.
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I agree with the OP that this is how Mastodon should work, and the fact that it currently makes any sort of moderation impossible shows a surprising lack of foresight. Unless the viewpoint of the developers is “moderation is censorship,” that is.
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Surprised to learn that Mastodon doesn’t let you delete replies to your own posts. That’s a really basic expectation on blogging platforms like Wordpress, Dreamwidth, etc.
Edit: oh hey, that’s Siderea in the comments there. I remember her from Up the Slope: On Mastodon and What Social Engineering Should Be.
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From Up the Slope:
You decide what change you would like to see in the system you are designing for, you come up with an “intervention” (based on studying the problem, reading into other people’s approaches to trying to solve the problem, and maybe doing a bunch of rounds of iterative experimentation), you decide, up front, how you will determine whether or not the problem has been solved, and then you implement the intervention, and then you check those criteria you previously identified as the ones that will determine whether or not the problem has been solved.
That iterative experimentation is absolutely critical and much slower in a federated ecosystem.
And I am 100% in the “I won’t touch anything Jack Dorsey has touched” camp. That is absolutely and forever disqualifying.
Honestly this type of reasoning is something I’ll never understand. I get not wanting to touch something where someone you don’t approve is actively involved.
But the man left the board and he’s even arguing against the product.
Why can’t we just evaluate products for what they are? I’m not interested in using any of these platforms, I signed up on bluesky just to see how the domain name integration works and that’s probably all i’m gonna do there.
But I can at least appreciate that the—relatively small—team there is trying to do things differently. And sure, as @n3verm0re said they’ll probably be dragged down by VC money at some point but still, it’s a different attempt.
I get what and why you’re saying this, but isn’t this difference one of the important factors to distinguish social media vs a personal web space?
Conceptually speaking, if we’re both on a public digital space, that neither of us own or control or pay for, why should you get to decide if other people can see my reply to your post?
Isn’t this a double edge sword? And isn’t this just tool to help people being trapped in bubbles?
Again, I’m not naive to the point of not seeing why you’re arguing against this, I understand very well where the problem is. Just playing devil advocate here.
I think social media in general are a net negative but if one decides to participate, I think it should be prepared to live in a very open platform.
To pick another example, I don’t think you’d expect to being able to decide that this reply i’m writing to you here, on a forum, is under your control and to being able to decide that the other people can’t see it.
That’s would be incredibly weird imo. I expect you to being able to mute me or to block me or to do anything else you want at a personal level and I obviously expect moderators to being able to ban me or do anything else if I cross some lines.
But that’s about it. if other people don’t want to see my reply they can decide on their own and I’d not expect you to being able to make that call.
I’m saying “you” but i’m obviouly arguing generically, you specificly would probably just tell me to my face to go to hell lol and I’d appreciate it.
All this to say that the conceptual problem I see with social media is that we treat profiles and posts as part of a personal space while I don’t think that’s the case.
But maybe I’m wrong, I often am.
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I actually ran into a bit of an oddity yesterday on Mastodon regarding replies. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with what I experienced, but it just felt awkward.
The sequence was this:
Poster 1 shares thing.
|- Poster 2 writes a reply.
|- Poster 1 reacts to reply.
All good. Then Poster 1 deleted their original post. I would have expected either the entire thread to disappear or for the post from Poster 2 to make an obvious reference to a deleted post.
Instead, what happened was the tree simply collapsed upward.
Poster 2 writes a reply.
|- Poster 1 reacts to reply.
Now, Poster 2 could delete their reply if they so choose. But that requires active monitoring. This seems very subject to abuse. Imagine that Poster 1 shared something to bait a particular response, which out of context would seem incendiary. Delete the original post and then maybe Poster 2 looks like an ass. I don’t know, this just feels off.
Isn’t that the same thing that happens with twitter? Or am I remembering this wrong? If you reply to a tweet of mine and then I delete it doesn’t your stays up but my quoted tweet in your reply only says “this tweet has been deleted”?
What you said about deleting the whole thread doesn’t make sense in a broader context if you think about it.
What if a Poster 3 replied to Poster 2 and a new conversation branches from there? What happens there if Poster 1 deletes the OP? Do all the discussions get deleted?
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Oh, I agree with you. What I’m saying is that the original post just disappeared entirely. My post, the reply, was then just there, floating all by itself. There was no reference to a deleted post.
My preference isn’t to kill the entire hierarchy, only to retain all nodes, even those with messages that get deleted — that’d keep the integrity of the whole conversation a bit more intact.
Hopefully that’s more clear than my original botched attempt at explaining 
EDIT: Notably, Mastodon doesn’t support quote replies. With Twitter, BlueSky, etc, a quoted reply that had been deleted would include the “deleted” verbiage.
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Ah ok so you’re saying it should still behave like that but mention somehow that the second post was a reply and not a new post.
That make sense and I agree that it should reference that somehow.
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Exactly! It seems a bit deceptive otherwise, or at least subject to confusion. This is an edge case, I imagine. I’ve been on Mastodon since July and have only experienced it once so far.
Yeah as you said nodes should be preserved. Sure, let me delete the content of mine but keep the structure otherwise things can get messy.
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No, I think this is the crux of the issue. I think a lot of people on social media mistake it for a personal space when it isn’t. It’s also not a public square, either, though it’s still much more public than one might think while shitposting in the privacy of one’s home.
It occurred to me while I was in the john this morning that social media’s biggest problem isn’t “context collapse” as currently understood, but the way it blurs and threatens to erase the boundary between public life and the private sphere.
You think you’re just posting to your “friends” online, that you’re safe and private in your own home – but that’s an illusion. Everything posted on the internet is public. Even on a “private” platform, what you post isn’t just for people you trust to see; it’s also visible to the platform’s operators in the absence of end-to-end encryption.
As a result, I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a “safe space” online, only safer spaces.
Worse, I think this blurring is intentional, based on something Mark Zuckerberg said a few years ago:
You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.
I think the existence of a public and private sphere is fundamentally inconvenient for people who want to run society, whether they’re in government or business. Nor are they particularly fond of the idea that a person might show different sides of themselves in different social situations, which is why you have people working corporate jobs in the US being exhorted to “bring their whole selves to work”.
It reminds me of Trevor Goodchild’s “new openness” in the first full-length episode of Aeon Flux, and like in the show I think we need to ask: cui bono. Who benefits from the mere existence of social media?
I don’t think I benefit from it, so I’m no longer willing to use it. Others can and must decide for themselves.
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Man, a lot makes sense in the context of this quote. The insistence on “real” names on Facebook, the initial requirement for connecting a Facebook account to Quest headsets… And of course the more broad trends you’re talking about.
I have two main identities; online and off. (My corporate, “professional” work identity is no longer in use.) But I’m pretty sure I have more integrity than the dude who made a website for rating the attractiveness of female classmates without their consent.
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A forum like this, in terms of moderation, is closer to a subreddit or Facebook group than it is to Mastodon.
An author wants to use microblogging to announce a new book, a streamer might post about an upcoming collaboration, or an artist might share an image of a recent commission. All of those users would probably prefer to be able to moderate replies to their posts. That’s not “weird!” People follow them for these updates, not for the ░M░Y░P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░ reply bots or the hangers-on trying to boost their own profiles by replying to a popular post.
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But it is weird to expect to being able to moderate other users’ content on a platform that’s not really yours to control, that’s what I’m arguing.
If I create a thread here, I don’t consider that “mine”. And if you post on that thread I shouldn’t be able to delete your reply smply because I’m the one that started it.
And that is why those people should do that on a platform they control. Mastodon is in a weird state because you can in theory just run your own server and that is under your control. But the vast majority won’t do that for obvious reasons.
In an ideal world, yes. But what if instead is someone sharing something a bit more controversial and then letting them simply delete every single comment that doesn’t agree with them? Because that’s what happens when you let people moderate other people’s content at will.
And it’s the unfortunate reality of the web. Striking a balance is hard and there are often unintended consequences.
I don’t imagine that the authors, artists, and entertainers — the people a platform needs to please — would be happy to receive this advice. In 2024 you can’t make any money on a platform you control.
Who can moderate comments and replies? That’s an important question. Under-resourced trust and safety teams, contract labor, and Artificial Intelligence is not a great answer.