Barely ever used birdsite, so I don't understand the recent no-more-blocking kerfuffle. If Alice posts something but doesn't want Bob to be able to see it, she'd block him. If it's a protected tweet, she can revoke his approval instead. If it's a public tweet, he can just log out and view it. And if it's a matter of Alice not wanting to see Bob's tweets, she can unfollow him. What am I missing?
I thought that people you blocked couldn't reply on your posts (or, expressed in observable terms, that neither you nor unrelated 3rd parties would see their posts in your replies).
I'm not sure if we're talking about the same situation.
Let's say Alice blocks Bob and posts something. Now it's impossible for Charlie to see Bob's replies to Alice. Note that Charlie's client is not aware of Alice having blocked Bob, so even if Charlie was willing to cooperate, they wouldn't be able to reproduce the same effect client-side.
@robryk oh wow... is that even desirable? Does Charlie not get a say in the matter?
@lutzky @robryk whether that's desirable will depend on your views on moderation.
Personally, I don't think that anyone has a right to have their content I don't endorse appear threaded to my content. I don't want people reading replies to something I've posted be subjected to reading abusive stuff.
Replies are a giant reach multiplier. They basically allow someone with 0 followers to get content in front of someone else's audience. Sometimes that's good, sometimes not.
@lutzky @robryk see also jwz's take on this topic: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/08/mastodons-mastodonts/
"There is no way to delete a reply to your post. Let's say I post a zinger and then someone replies with a racism. I can block that person, and I won't see it any more, but the 10,000 people who follow me will still see it when they click on my post. It means that I have given that terrible person a boost in reach that I cannot revoke. It's like having dogshit on your shoe that everyone at the party can smell but you."
One set of relevant situations is what delroth described above. Another situation is posting something and using your effective moderation power over responses to create an impression of a wide agreement (note that the more egregious variant of this, where you call someone out whom you've blocked, was impossible on Twitter, because you couldn't mention people you've blocked).
There are multiple approaches to dealing with those issues. One of them is what Twitter has (used to have?). Another very similar one is the G+ approach of making top-level posts very different from comments, and explicitly giving moderation power over comments to post's author (this differs insofar comment authors do not get to moderate responses to their comments). Another one is what Fedi would approximately have if all servers were single-user: you see responses that the post's author approves of (passively), and responses of everyone you follow. (Multi-user-serverful Fedi expands this to responses of everyone anyone on your server follows.)
I think that the distinction between post and comment is something that's badly missing in Fedi, and is probably the source of most of the nonmisguided[1] requests to defederate from a server A due to that server not defederating from B, whom we consider bad.
[1] Quite often they come from some misunderstanding on how silencing and defederation work, which is not surprising given that most of this appears to be emergent properties of a system.
@robryk @delroth yeah, I'm realizing how much I'm failing to understand this (both for fedi and for birdsite). I vaguely think that having the concept of a "wall" moderated by OP is indeed useful, but I'll immediately admit that this needs more than than the few hours' passive thought I've given it.
If you want to understand the mechanics of this in Fedi, there is no single description I know of, but reading https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#inbox-forwarding helped me understand how the heck all of this is not magic.
@robryk Ah, that explains it. The set of tweets Alice sees isn't just "whoever Alice follows", but also "whoever mentions her" (which covers replies), as well as "whoever writes something which matches something she searches for, including a subscribed hash-tag". Now, these are very "client-side-filtering" style features, which would be trivial to implement in a 3rd p... oh. OK, I get it now.