"But Dave, why don't they moderate?"

They do. The harassers spin up new instances to get around block lists.

"But Dave, why don't they show the receipts (screenshots to prove it's happening)?"

The brave ones do, when they have the energy. It invites a huge amount more harassment, so showing receipts *always* causes psychological damage.

Some folks are willing to tank that damage to get the word out. Most people understandably just want it to stop.

Addendum to this (thanks @flippac !): the receipts a victim of harassment could show won't help stop anything, it's all sock puppet accounts. The most information they can share is "see look, this *happens*. It happened to *me*."

Which, let's be honest, isn't that useful in the white supremacist patriarchal world we live in. A few new people will learn to believe the victims of harassment. That's not much return on investment when the cost is needing more therapy.

@dave

Would this change (in the code/design) be helpful, do you think: for posts that are in reply to something, give the original poster the ability to {reveal publicly, if non-public} and/or {completely delete, for everyone} those replies.

Maybe someone has come up with a better idea, but that's what comes quickly to my mind.

@flippac

@woozle @dave (so: first of all, situations where somebody's doing it in good faith like when they'd happily set it to the other person's followers aren't subject to new misbehaviour...

...but also nobody wakes up to an immense volume of shit to shovel overnight)

@flippac
Cough, What's that Fediverse thing that you are talking about?

Where are these super star accounts that create 1000s of interactions on a toot?

My definition of immense flood is if I ignore Mastodon for a day after hitting popular hashtags and being reposted by "big accounts" of I get more than a dozen interactions.

Please I'm not questioning that some people are being harassed as the OP describes but I do have problems with massive shitstorms in normal usage.
@woozle @dave

@yacc143 @woozle @dave For that kind of material, it's the number of separate posts you have to mute that's bad - though if you . As few as five can more than ruin your day if it's not the first time round (let's face it: the wrong individual one can) and having to manually filter to get to anything else in your notifications is a thing. Especially when you're a normal enough user that it's not routine to you to start by looking at mentions only.

Stop thinking like a Twitter/X survivor and start thinking like a normal (if hopefully more aware) human being about this stuff. As you say, "normal usage" isn't supposed to include this shit happening to you, but you have to do the work to ensure that's not the case for any given category of people.

(and yeah, I have to admit I twitch in the aftermath every time I say something funny in response to a particular mutual and that's not even anything nasty coming my way: while I once made a particular high-profile list, I literally had worse on usenet)