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.

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.

@Aissen @gynvael You don't need to know the software: in the end, it's just a handful of parsing strategies, not a bug that is only available between 2 specific versions of a specific software.

So, just use a generator, use the files, and see the results.

Some files targeting gmail are more advanced than classic ambiguous or polyglot files.