Erin Kissane
Bluesky has reply-gating (you can set who can reply to a post, like people you follow or a given list or no one) and is now testing out post-publication reply locking.
I just want to yell for a second about how humane and consent-forward these features are, especially after seeing some people here losing their minds when someone asked for gating recently because they felt (alas, not a paraphrase) entitled to always be able to respond.
Evan Prodromou
The people who work on the ActivityPub specs are humans and we use the Fediverse. We're not space creatures or robots. We care about other humans and we love our kids and dogs.
There are currently two specs being worked on for reply control. You'll probably see some more work on this coming out soon.
Did we think of everything when we created ActivityPub? No. Did we make it extensible so future people could improve it? Yes we did.
Derek Powazek 🐐
@kissane The fact that people say this is all the proof I need that the specs are being written by engineers when they should be written by humanists / communitarians.
Erin Kissane
Believing you are morally entitled to reply directly to someone because they speak in public is…definitely a position, I guess, but I think being able to specify how you want to be interacted with is deeply humane. (And being able to do it after a thread starts to go sour is so important.)
Someone will ask why blocking doesn’t make this unnecessary and the short answer is that prevention is better than picking off unwanted interactions one by one, and having to process each one as you do it.
Erin Kissane
Someone else will say that if you don’t want everyone to be able to say whatever they want in your thread whenever they want to say it, you shouldn’t post in public because that’s the bargain.
But like…I don’t want the old bargain. The old bargain is kind of shit! We have a million ways to contain and shelter even “public” conversations offline, let’s have that in the good online places, too.
Evan Prodromou
@fraying @kissane this one works by setting a flag.
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/5624/fep-5624.md
Evan Prodromou
@fraying @kissane this one works by maintaining a canonical list of replies on the sender's server, so they can edit it.
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/7458/fep-7458.md
Evan Prodromou
@fraying @kissane probably the right answer is going to be a mix of the two.
Evan Prodromou
@fraying @kissane if you hear from someone that the system works correctly now, because that was how it was designed, they are misinformed. Please feel free to tag me in.
Evan Prodromou
@fraying @kissane thanks, that's nice to say.
I agree that reply control is a high priority. I think we can find a solution that works.
Derek Powazek 🐐
@evan @kissane Evan, I wasn’t talking about you. I understand why you might have thought I was, but trust me, you’ve proven yourself to be kind, smart, and considerate on this platform.
If anything, I’m talking about mastodon’s implementation in particular, but also Bluesky’s. I’m also complaining because I’m exactly the kind of communitarian who gets shouted at by fedi folks every time I talk about how this very good place could be improved, as Erin is here.
Derek Powazek 🐐
@kissane also “don’t speak if you don’t wanna be spoken to by everyone, everywhere” is abuser logic.
Renaud Chaput
@kissane @b0rk We want this is Mastodon as well but this will be a huge undertaking because of the way we do thing on the ActivityPub level.
At least we intend to do it properly from the start with Quote Posts
Renaud Chaput
@joenepraat @kissane Claire started to look at it and even drafted an FEP. But this will require significant work and probably changing how replies are managed in Mastodon from an user-perspective.
A big issue is knowing who is allowed to decide who can reply in a thread: the author of the post you directly reply to? Mentioned people? The top post author (making them owners of the whole thread).
Lot of complexity here, especially in a distributed network. This will require significant funding
joene 🏴🍉
@kissane Agreed. It's my post, so I should decide who may reply. Simple is that. The so called freedom of speech is not the same as the freedom of reply. MAS-37 (Restrict who can reply to a post) is on the roadmap, but under the section Exploring. @renchap Is the exploring phase already started, or else we loose people to Bluesky. 😢
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