@isagalaev @jwz
Holy shit it is so nice to hear people say this aloud. I've been quietly over here in my corner thinking about launching my own entire rant to this point wondering if I was the only person who got this.

I find Mastodon's complete failure to grasp/implement this principle both maddening and incredibly ironic. This has been, until quite recently, the number one problem with Twitter (and similar systems like G+), and what caused it to be such an utter shit show. Mastodon's failure to allow users to own their comments and provide them with moderator tools reconstitutes exactly the toxic dynamics of Twitter. Mastodon has tried to compensate for this with a model that has the people running instances functioning as moderators, which is a "solution" of such terrible long-term consequences as to be indistinguishable from active sabotage of the Fediverse.

@adrienne @siderea @jwz "i personally think that "deleting other people's posts" might be a bridge too far — this is exactly the problem I was talking about. Too many people adopted this… reverential approach to something someone else wrote, which just shouldn't exist.

As jwz mentioned in the article a person coming to *your* comments effectively uses your platform, of which you should stay in control. If they want to be in control they should write their own post, mentioning yours. (cont…)

@isagalaev @siderea @jwz Yes, i agree, but someone replying to your post kind of IS "writing their own post, mentioning yours". It still lives on their server! It's just that "mentioning" creates a relationship (reply-to). Being able to sever this relationship at will would allow people to maintain their own content which they did, after all, post on their own fucking server -- but removes it from association with your content.

(FYI, i'm on the mod team of a fairly popular Fediverse server which is extremely full of queer & marginalized people; i'm not stupid, i'm not inexperienced, and i am certainly not "reverential" about shit other people write.)

@adrienne

> but someone replying to your post kind of IS "writing their own post, mentioning yours".

That's the problem: it is, but it shouldn't be.

This isn't just a technological problem, it's a cultural one.

The Blogosphere has a very different culture than Twitter does. It has very clear boundaries that Twitter and many other "social media" platforms don't share. On the Blogosphere, whether or not you have jurisdiction over something you write depends on where you write it. If you didn't want to give somebody else authority to delete it you shouldn't have written it as a comment on their blog. You have your own blog where you have the authority and nobody else can delete what you write.

Mastodon is implemented like Twitter, where there is no distinction between different people's spaces, such that it makes sense to conceptualize a comment a user leaves on another's post as "theirs". After all, all of the comments each of us writes appear on our comments tab.

@isagalaev @jwz

@siderea @isagalaev @jwz Yes but from their perspective they are, in fact, writing it in their own space -- it lives on their server! I agree with you that the expectations and affordances here are cultural as well as technical, and, again, I AGREE WITH JWZ ON THE NEED TO BE ABLE TO KEEP PEOPLE FROM SHITTING UP YOUR CONVERSATIONS.

But frankly, i absolutely do not want people being able to send a request that deletes my own shit from my own profile on my own server! And i think there are solid ways to approach the issue of "make this more like a blog-space where the original poster has priority" that do not have that side-effect!