I see an ongoing culture clash between the Old Mastodon and the Newbies fleeing Twitter. The Old believe in heavy self-moderation by way of using Content Warnings for a lot of things, using "unlisted" posts to keep the timeline clean, silencing other servers to avoid even a chance of witnessing interactions of users of that server with users of yet another one that we disapprove of. Heavy self-moderation.
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The newbies are chaos incarnate. Let our feed be everything from food I ate through tips on getting a promotion to onlyfans bait. One feed, nothing is sacred.
I'm sitting here in the middle and wonder if there could be a middle way. A compromise that beats both extremes. Let people post whatever. But let them LABEL what it is. Not "warn", label. Then let my client mute messages by label. Food? Boring, never show it to me. Onlyfans? Sorry, I have this tab open all day and I work at home.
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@sergi Hashtags are close but I deliberately didn't mention them as a solution here because somehow it doesn't seem like they are used like this here by the Old Guard.
I don't know why this is. Maybe it's because they are too limited? No spaces? Too freeform? Maybe some relatively minor changes to the clients could allow this to be more natural? I guess now with Mastodon 4.0 you can follow hashtags so maybe muting hashtags will become more popular too?
Łukasz Langa
Sergi
Joe Wood