@6L6GC People, especially those in recovery, need to have safe spaces and CWs allow for self moderation (giving the person on the receiving end control over what they allow into their space).
Ironically, Mastodon isn't even particularly good at that. Not by overall Fediverse standards.

How Mastodon does it

Mastodon handles CWs by having them put into a text field that was invented on identi.ca in 2008 as a summary field. Thus, CWs have to come from the poster. And the poster has no other choice but to force the same CWs upon absolutely everyone else, regardless of whether they need that particular CW or not, regardless of what other CWs someone may need. Your posts will be over-CW'd for some and under-CW'd for others.

What's even worse is that this and only this is deeply engrained in Mastodon's culture. From a Mastodon POV, it's completely unimaginable that it could possibly be any different. It's actually being enforced upon the whole Fediverse by Mastodon users.

CWs would be better if they didn't come from the poster. If they were automatically generated on the reader's side, individually for each reader and their needs, based on text filtering.

Mastodon can do that actually. But it's cumbersome. It's as cumbersome as Mastodon's filters altogether: Each keyword needs its own filter defined and adjusted. Next to no-one knows that Mastodon can do that, also because Twitter can't, and who expects Mastodon to have features that Twitter doesn't? Lastly, it was introduced in October, 2022, with Mastodon 4.0, too late for it to become part of Mastodon's culture.

How Hubzilla does it: Filters

Now let's look at Hubzilla. (Friendica, which Hubzilla was indirectly derived from by its own creator, may be similar, but not quite as advanced; @Hella can probably say more about it as a part-time Friendica user.)

For what Mastodon's filters could do before 4.0, Hubzilla only needs one blocklist. Adding a new keyword is as easy as adding a new line to the blocklist. For reader-side CW generation which Mastodon's filters learned in October, 2022, Hubzilla has an optional extra filter list named "NSFW". It has had it from its very beginnings, and it has inherited it from Friendica. Just about everyone in the whole software family agrees: Having your own CWs generated only for you is better than having the same CWs forced upon you as upon everyone else while misusing the summary/abstract field for it.

Hubzilla also has an allowlist for the whole channel. It optionally has one blocklist and one allowlist per contact so you can filter certain things coming from certain contacts and not coming from all the others. It supports regular expressions. And it has a very advanced filter syntax for the blocklists and allowlists that, for example, allows you to filter by whether a message is a repeat (Mastodon: boost), whether it's public or restricted, whether it's a top post or a comment, from whom it came etc. etc.

How Hubzilla does it: Permissions

But self-moderation doesn't stop at filters on Hubzilla. There's also the permissions system, the second-most advanced one in the Fediverse, second only to Hubzilla's own descendants, (streams) and Forte, again created by the same developer. Hubzilla's permissions system works on up to three levels: for the whole channel (Mastodon: account), for each individual contact (Mastodon: follower/followed) and often also for individual content (posts/threads, images/media/other files etc.).

Some examples of you can do with the permissions system:

• You can allow only your contacts or only certain ones of your contacts to see your public profile. (In fact, you can make additional profiles and assign them to certain contacts. But both only works with contacts on certain server applications and not with Mastodon contacts.)
• You can allow only your contacts or only certain ones of your contacts to see what other contacts you have. (Again, this only works with contacts on certain server applications and not with Mastodon contacts.)
• You can allow only your contacts or only certain ones of your contacts or nobody at all to see your previous posts. (Again, this only works with contacts on certain server applications and not with Mastodon contacts.)
• You can only allow posts from certain ones of your contacts onto your stream. (This does not affect comments and DMs.)
• You can allow only your contacts or certain ones of your contacts or nobody at all to like, dislike and comment on your posts.
• You can completely disallow comments on certain posts of yours.
• You can only allow your contacts or certain ones of your contacts or nobody at all to send you DMs.
• You can only allow
  
  • your contacts
  • certain ones of your contacts
  • the members of one of your privacy groups (Mastodon: lists on steroids)
  • a custom combination of privacy groups and certain contacts minus certain other contacts and privacy groups
  • only yourself
  to see and therefore interact with a certain post of yours. This makes DMs actually private.

Also, conversations on Hubzilla aren't bunches of posts loosely tied together by mentions. They're enclosed objects with exactly one post at the top and otherwise comments. All comments always have the same permissions as the top post, and this cannot be changed. This means you cannot reply to a public post with a DM. This also means that, very much unlike on Mastodon, you cannot pull someone else into a DM conversation just by mentioning them. That someone else simply isn't permitted to see anything in the conversation.

There's even more: You don't only own your own posts. You also own all comments on your posts. You and not whoever wrote them. This means you can moderate your own conversations by deleting comments from it. (That is, if someone on Mastodon comments on your post, and you remove it, you do not delete their Mastodon toot from their Mastodon account. You only remove it from your conversation.)

This is real serious self-moderation power.

Hubzilla is entirely built around moderating your own channel and your own stream yourself and, if it is activated, the public stream (Mastodon: local or federated timeline, depending on the admin configuration) along with it. Mastodon's filters work by deleting stuff from your inbox, but letting it onto and keeping it on the local or federated timeline regardless. Hubzilla's filters and permissions work by rejecting it altogether. Content that you reject, and that nobody else on your hub allows in, doesn't enter the hub at all and thus doesn't show up on the pubstream either.

By the way, this also works with forums (groups): You can make a forum private by only allowing its contacts to see its profile. You can make its membership private by only allowing its contacts to see its other contacts. You can hide it from directories. You can make its conversations private by limiting reading permission to only contacts.

How (streams) and Forte do it

As I've said, (streams) and Forte go another bit further.

They don't rely mostly on templates called "roles" to define the permissions of your channel and of your contacts. You can switch individual permissions on and off anytime.

They have an extra switch to let repeats in or not. Hubzilla needs a filter syntax line for that.

And they have the option to make reply control even more advanced: Next to entirely allowing and entirely disallowing comments, you can allow only your own contacts to comment on a certain post. You can generally allow comments on your posts for a certain period of time. And you can allow comments on a certain post only until a certain point in the future.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Filter #Filters #Permission #Permissions #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte