Mastodawn

To be clear: I understand that the racism on Fedi is a larger political problem—it stems from interpenetrating dimensions of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and all other forms of exploitation. There isn’t, there cannot be, a technical-only solution to the problem.

My suggestion in this thread will only cut off one particular mode of harassment. But I feel this step is worth taking, as one among many.

I also don’t see any advantage of the present model where each reply post can have a different visibility. If someone wants a different privacy level for their response to some post, they can always write a new post with the desired privacy level, include the link to the post they want to respond to, and tag the relevant users.

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Of course, an abuser can start a new “followers only” or “mentioned users only” post tagging the victim. But they can do it even today, that’s another aspect of the problem, and it will need other solutions.

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To put this differently, only a new post (the original post of a thread) should have the option to select privacy levels. Every single reply in a thread or a sub-thread should simply inherit the privacy level of the original post.

This will cut off the abusers’s ability to create pile ups in reply threads that are invisible to everyone bar the victim and the abusers themselves.

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One technical solution to alleviate this problem would be to force replies to inherit the privacy level of the parent post. If the parent post is “public” or “quiet public”, then the reply also has to be “public” or “quiet public”.

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When the victim mentions publicly that they are facing harassment, other Fedi users respond saying that they don’t see any abusive replies, and blame the victim for being too sensitive, or for not correctly using the moderation tools.

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Basically, an abuser replies with post privacy level set to “followers only” or “mentioned users only”, and tagging only the victim and the abuser’s followers. The followers of the abuser then pile on, with their own abusive replies, all set to “followers only” or “mentioned users only”.