Can anyone who understands how this platform works better than me explain why we can’t have crucial harassment tools like restricting replies to mutuals only, or mass blocking? Also any reason we can’t get link previews on here? Just curious if these are things that can ever be implemented 🙏🏻
@taylorlorenz defer to others on the link previews (which should work on some interfaces) but if you're getting abuse from a certain instance, your instance admins should be able to ban that instance entirely.
@TJ @taylorlorenz
New here as well, so there's questions... Ok, mods can block entire instances, great. But can't abusers simply spin up their own private instances and repeatedly abuse people? Or is it not that simple to do?
@vodamark @TJ @taylorlorenz a few years back there was a group that was spinning up distinct *domain names* and pointing them at the same server in an effort to evade a block; I never caught the back half of that incident so I don’t know how exactly they’d mitigate it, but it would likely generally parallel user ban evasion cold wars.
@PennyOaken @vodamark @taylorlorenz I think the bottom line here is that Mastodon, unlike Twitter, is a community-based enterprise, and unlike some Twitter Safety deus ex machina, we rely on each other, and our instances, to manage spam and trolls - perhaps some holes in the short term, but in the long term far more effective. Yes?
@TJ @vodamark @taylorlorenz Yes. Twitter’s “Only People Mentioned Can Reply”/“Only Followers Can Reply” was:
1: developed to mitigate noise/spam/dog piling/harassment/protests without dedicating policy (& human labour for actioning) to AUP violations;
2: needed a central technological access control system to enforce it.
If it were written into the specification … it might not be honored by some instances, but that could be a defederation condition.
@PennyOaken @TJ @vodamark @taylorlorenz
> 2: needed a central technological access control system to enforce it.
Not really. We already can kinda have it in some way:
a) the canonical view of the thread is served by your instance, so it can refuse to publish some replies there (using whatever internal logic it wishes to use),
b) when a reply is sent to the OP's followers, if the OP's followers list is not public, it's the OP's instance that does that forwarding (and can choose to refuse to do so based on any internal logic it uses).
If OP's instance is Mastodon/Pleroma/Akkoma and blocks (suspends) the domain of the replier, both of these things will happen. I don't know which kinds of other blocks (incl. in other instance software) will currently cause which subset of them to happen, but would hope that OP blocking the replier would also cause both to happen.
This obviously doesn't prevent the replier from sending that message to e.g. people explicitly mentioned. Alas, they could send such a message as a straight-up new message instead of a reply, and no reply-blocking would help with that (point (a) above already deals with visibility of that as a reply when viewing the OP's post).
