Notices by John Blair (jdblair@hachyderm.io)

@lain @piggo programment

@phiofx this is exactly the problem!

I’ve read posts from a few people wanting the ability to block or delete hostile posts that appear in their threads. I think this would be a great feature. Unfortunately, the way activity pub works makes this difficult, if not impossible!

To understand why, it helps to think of the fediverse less like twitter or facebook (a centralized server that controls the presentation of posts), and more like email.

Think of a classic listserv. When you reply to a message on the listserv, the only connection to the reply is the subject (most email clients prepend Re:) and various headers, like In-Reply-To, which are also set by the client. Email clients can use this information to present threaded views of the dialog.

Now, suppose someone replies to a message on this hypothetical listserv and violated the standards of the community. The user can be blocked from future posts, but the message can’t be removed! It exists on all of the email servers and in all of the email clients of the listserv participants. The conversation is distributed, which makes it resilient, but also prevents removing a message from all threads.

The fediverse is like this. Threads don’t exist except in presentation by Mastodon clients, which construct the thread for you using the in-reply-to information embedded in the post. Otherwise, the posts are all independent, each existing with equal significance in the system. It is our clients, or the mastodon web UI, which creates the concept of a thread with replies.

So to remove someone, or someone’s posts, from your replies, you have to be able to modify that post, without the posters permission, for all instances in the fediverse. This is a lot of power! And it is easy to imagine how this could be abused!

Now I do think the ability to remove posts from your thread js a good feature, but it will mean that threads have to be first-class objects in the fediverse, with ownership by the entity that created the thread. This is a big! difficult change!

@inthehands this is a great thread and captures the nuance of 1a.

@mmasnick
Especially odd since they had this pretty decent segment a while back with Clive Thompson reporting on Mastadon.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-mastodon-may-take-twitters-weary

@onthemedia @zoeschiffer