Like many women online, I get sexual harassment in waves here on the good ol' fediverse.

Today was a rough day, other days are less rough, all of it is unwelcome, and that's a bigger problem than one online community. I don't expect Mastodon (or any other ActivityPub thing) to solve that problem 100%.

When I see it, I block it. Often enough it's a bad server, and I defederate.

This impacts the visibility of the comment.

So here's what happens practically:

First, I get a disgusting remark (or several) and block/defederate/whatever.

This remark does not pass through to other servers, who often enough *also* are blocking/defederating/whatever.

That means you, dear end-user, don't know that any of this happened.

So when I say something like "harassment is rough today", you're not seeing what I saw.

I personally feel like that's a problem. It gets in the way of understanding the scope of the issue.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to host harassment and share it around. I get vile nightmare fuel you don't want to see.

Defederating is a good solution. But I feel strongly that Mastodon (as the putative leader pushing the protocol) could do two things.

One would be to make it easier to share naughty-lists full of bad actors in real time. This would help stop issues before they start.

The other is blocking replies.

I know, I know. "Blocking replies is impossible". "You can't stop people from disagreeing with you on the internet".

I've heard it all, and don't really care.

Here's my proposal: much like how I can set the post visibility here, I should be able to tell my server to drop any replies to that post.

Not "don't send notifications about replies". Drop them. Don't host them.

And compliant servers would honor that request in the UI.

I'm not asking to regulate your speech, dudes.

I'm saying I don't want to host it in certain contexts. And I think it'd be nice if the popular server software enabled that.

This would make the choice of "post or stay quiet" a lot easier here. This might encourage more folks from marginalized communities to come here instead of Bluesky or other platforms.

It might help *grow* this space. And I care about that.

"But how does blocking replies promote speech?"

Good question. Let's imagine selfies.

I don't share a ton of selfies because I get creepy comments.

I would almost certainly post more photos if I could tell my server "drop all replies that aren't from people I follow".

The lack of reply limiting is causing me to self-censor.

"But Veronica, you can mute posts containing certain words!"

True. And I do. But that stops *me* from seeing it. My server still hosts the harassment in that case. It's sending it to other servers.

I don't like that. Ethically that feels very bad. And potentially dangerous.

I want more control over what my server hosts. And the fact that I don't have that control? That's a choice from the folks pushing the protocol.

Fin