Matt BlazeMay 4, 2023

Spam (like the torrent of cryptoscamspam lots of people got this morning) has been very rare for me here (and dealt with quickly), but I've noticed that almost all of the spam I've gotten has been via Mastodon's DM feature.

I really wish there was a way to turn DMs off or at least restrict them to people I follow. Control over incoming DMs was a thing Twitter did better than here.

Show threadnuztalgia  May 4, 2023
@mattblaze Preferences > Notifications > Block direct messages from people you don't follow.
Show threadMatt BlazeMay 4, 2023
@nuz Nope. Doesn't work.
Show threadnuztalgia  May 4, 2023
@mattblaze seems to work perfectly for me! you might want to open a bug report on the official mastodon github repo and include the steps you took (so they can reproduce your problem), the behavior you observed, and your expected/desired behavior. ​
Show threadMatt BlazeMay 4, 2023

@nuz No it doesn't. People aren't prevented from sending you DMs if you don't follow them.

What the setting does is prevent you from seeing it. But it allows people to labor under the false impression that they've sent you a message.

Show threadsnarkyMay 5, 2023
@mattblaze @nuz Who cares if the sender *thinks* they sent the message. If you don't see it, it may as well not exist. Shadow-bans are a useful tool for bad faith actors.
Show threadMatt BlazeMay 5, 2023
@snarky @nuz In general, I don’t want people to send me messages that they think I’ll see that I won’t actually see. Most people who send me DMs aren’t bad faith actors. They’re random individuals trying to reach me via a mechanism that I don’t want to use. I want to alert people who mistakenly use it that I won’t see their messages so they can use something else. But Mastodon doesn’t let me.
Show threadsnarkyMay 5, 2023
@mattblaze @nuz Then petition the folks who maintain the system to add that capability, don't complain that what's there (and has been there for YEARS) doesn't work for you. It's frustrating to see people pop in here, dismiss the history of why things are the way they are, and insist that things bet the way THEY want them.
Show threadNorman Wilson
@snarky @mattblaze @nuz If you find Matt's writings frustrating, perhaps you should use the existing Mastodon features to avoid seeing them.
May 5, 2023 at 6:20pmWeb
Show threadnuztalgia  May 5, 2023

@oclsc i think you might have missed the fact that i only jumped into this thread to try to help matt resolve his stated problem. but i can see how my early messages could have gotten lost in his barrage of straw man fallacies, so no biggie.

i'm not "frustrated by matt's writings" - at least not in the way i'm guessing you mean. rather, i'm disappointed that someone i formerly respected was so eager to silence and mischaracterize the marginalized folks who were only trying to say: "hey, the current system is designed to protect us. it might not work well for you, and here's how to go about changing that, but it definitely isn't 'broken'."

reread the thread and check his accusations against what was actually said to him - you'll see that most of his posts are DARVO, ad hominem, and straw man fallacies all the way down. it's extremely disappointing to see this from a "professor of computer science and law" with a large following on here.

more importantly, though - his actions are a clear display of white privilege, and a prime example of the type of behavior that makes BIPOC folks feel unsafe on mastodon.

the only thing that's "frustrating" to me is that other white people can't seem to see that kind of behavior for what it actually is.

@snarky @mattblaze

Show threadsnarkyMay 5, 2023
@oclsc @mattblaze @nuz Thanks for the helpful suggestion.