Believing you are morally entitled to reply directly to someone because they speak in public is…definitely a position, I guess, but I think being able to specify how you want to be interacted with is deeply humane. (And being able to do it after a thread starts to go sour is so important.)

Someone will ask why blocking doesn’t make this unnecessary and the short answer is that prevention is better than picking off unwanted interactions one by one, and having to process each one as you do it.

Someone else will say that if you don’t want everyone to be able to say whatever they want in your thread whenever they want to say it, you shouldn’t post in public because that’s the bargain.

But like…I don’t want the old bargain. The old bargain is kind of shit! We have a million ways to contain and shelter even “public” conversations offline, let’s have that in the good online places, too.

Anyway the big fedi research project I’ve been on for six months is nearly ready for publication and there’s so much I’m excited about in it.

Having Mastodon be so central to the fediverse by the numbers means we could really use attention to these safety/humane conversation/good experience features here. I hope that happens.

It’s the first day of summer break and my replies to last night’s posts are like when you put double the correct amount of popcorn in the popper and the top flies off and rolls around the kitchen floor, which is entirely on me

But my kid is home! So I’m going to burrow into that woods plants Totoro life and catch up when we surface laterrrr ✌️