I’ve evidently been living under a rock as a budding controversy has been brewing in the Fediverse. There is a two-year old proposal known as FEP-5624: Per-object reply control policies:
“Sometimes, users may want to…
I understand the idea of wanting to post and not wanting replies from anyone, I really do. But this brings me back to the question that I always seem to come back to: if you want full control, why do you rely on someone else’s platform? Get a blog! Curate comments or close them!
Social media is social. If you want broadcasting media, get a broadcasting platform, I guess? (That’s what I did, at least…)
@alexture Limiting replies isn’t just about having full control. It’s a safety feature that made a huge difference when it arrived on Twitter a few years ago.
People at risk of being harassed or piled on social media should still be allowed to use social media. Those platforms should implement safety features to protect them, and to allow them to protect themselves.
Most platforms let you block or limit replies under your posts for this exact reason (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Threads, and more), fediverse platforms should too.
That’s fair. I think we give different meanings to social media (as a society, not just the two of us) and that’s where my reaction comes from.
I wrote about social networks for broadcasting information vs. discussing with friends before, and that’s also why I’m mostly just crossposting things to Mastodon now − I’m uncomfortable with both of these uses, because I’d rather broadcast on my own spaces and discuss in private. But for other uses, I guess this feature isn’t useless.
I must say I don’t remember it being a good thing at all when it came to Twitter, mostly because it encouraged people to quotetweet instead of reply when they didn’t disagree. That meant more visibility for angry takes and actually made things worse pretty often, in my experience at least.
@alexture I remember circa 2010 a movement within the blogosphere to remove the ability to comment altogether on their blogs.
The reasoning was that it positive comments would find their way to them via other means (dawning social media at the time which only had chronological time lines) and would remove the burden from moderating the comments on their own domain and brand.
Some of these ideas have made their way to the fediverse designs: your content is hosted by you but federated elsewhere.
Yeah, we’re still having a bunch of debates about this with many indieweb friends, with webmentions (what I have) vs. comments vs. encouraging people to email you when they have something to say, to nurture private conversations. I think all 3 are pretty interesting takes tbh, although I’m definitely on the side of open comments and webmentions (even if it means a bit more moderation by hand, I’ll just disable comments on stuff that start getting targeted by dogpiling) 🙂