Oh… yikes! I had no idea you can’t delete/block bad replies. Aw man, I was looking forward to being an avid Mastodon user. I’m just going to dread any weirdos finding an avenue to cause disturbances in my bubble.
This is why, when I was on Mastodon, I followed the Cobra Kai way of social media:
block first, block often, no mercy
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Yeah this is part of why I’m still not on there either.
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I like JWZ’s blog, but I would like to point out this post is 3 years old and outdated. Mastodon now allows more options in reply restrictions.
However, a lot of this “who should own the replies on a site” is an open question. While I would agree its good to and I would like to deplatform racist replies, the same technology can be used to remove negative reviews or other negativity that arguably deserve to exist.
Ultimately posts you make on the internet are public. Blocking is for YOU, and you can’t ever really stop people from lurking and reading your public posts if they want to. Its not anything more than that. You should be able to deplatform people under your posts and that’s a fine argument to make, but people can take their comments offsite and you can’t do shit about it. Mastodon is a semantic network of websites, and every reply is users posting on their own site moreso than posting on yours. And why should you control what other people post on their own websites? Even so, you don’t need to platform those replies, that’s fair.
Fediverse really assumed the main flagship network being demsoc would encourage a network of nice leftists, but we didn’t get that. Fedi really has more than a few issues, including many unique ones enabled and exasperated by semantics. Its an implementation of a semantic web that leaves a lot to be desired. I do LIKE fedi, but I don’t love it, and hope this attempt can be treated as a case study to improve future implementations.
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What options does it allow?