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@CIMB4 apologies if I misread your post, but if you really want to move to a different instance, it's not that difficult (although admittedly scary!) – I've done that twice with this account.

Your followers and follows get migrated automagically, but your posts remain on the old instance. I thought this will bother me a lot, and in the end it did not. Some other things can be moved manually.

Here's the documentation:
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

And here's a friendly guide:
https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-another-server/

@graue
This feature has made it possible for a sockpuppet troll to harass me all day long on occasion, and is why I stopped recommending activists who might organize around contentious topics join Mastodon
@Gargron

@inquiline @graue @Gargron Technically, once you block them, they are no longer harassing *you*. They are polluting the *conversation* that occurs in response to your thread.

Curating the *conversation* is a joint responsibility of the people in it.

The solution isn't "let me enforce my content filters on other users".

It's "everyone offended report the offender to their server to take action that deletes the offensive post/account/server federation".

@robotistry @inquiline @graue @Gargron IMO it should work like deleting spam or harassment comments or ping backs (remember those?) from a blog post. If you remove it, as far as your thread is concerned it's out of the picture.

People can still see the offending post on the blocked user's server, and maybe it can still link back to the original, but the forward connection should be severed to whatever extent is possible so that when someone views your post, the thread doesn't include the removed one.

My knowledge of ActivityPub isn't deep enough to know offhand whether that's doable or practical, and I expect it gets complicated when someone further up the chain blocks a reply to someone else further down, but from the user perspective, that's how I would expect that it should work.

@kelson @inquiline @graue @Gargron This is a key distinction.

Some of the people here view each post as a "microblog" - a curated experience for their audience - and want to moderate for their followers.

The others view their activity here as participating in a giant mass of cocktail party conversations, where each person is responsible for their own experience, and there is no real difference between a "reply" and any other post.

@robotistry @kelson Respectfully, I’m very familiar w these arguments, & this position soft pedals (significantly) the potential and actual harm that occurs, to say the people are responsible for their own experiences, that it’s infantilizing or censorship to be able to control replies or delete them. Social norms at a cocktail party don’t include another guest coming up to one & saying something simply awful. Let alone approaching one to do this repeatedly

@inquiline @robotistry @kelson

"Social norms at a cocktail party don’t include another guest coming up to one & saying something simply awful."

I've had some version of this argument SO MANY TIMES in other online venues, too, where people yell about blocking being "censorship."

No, it's my refusal to subject myself or my guests to your assholery.

@robotistry @kelson @inquiline @graue @Gargron

Your starting point— "technically, once you block them, they are no longer harassing *you*"— already doesn't hold up in light of libel, which is one version of harassment.

The damages done by libel do not involve someone falsely saying directly to me that I do abhorrent things. Instead, it's usually precisely when they lie about me elsewhere that the harms are perpetrated.

Your framing here is profoundly individualist and transactional, as though people exist only in a single space and time and only communicate directly.

None of this is how humans operate. Legal systems across the globe often reflect these extended types of existence and nuance.

Instead of attempting to naively argue from first principles—again, a profoundly individualistic approach—looking at how humans already have learned to handle harassment legally shows that it's not merely done face-to-face.

@robotistry I disagree. If someone says something offensive in a reply, and I block them, and the reply is still there, the fact that it takes a few extra clicks now for me to see the reply doesn't mean I'm no longer being harassed. The harassment already occurred. Blocking isn't a time machine.

Separately, as a reader of other people's replies, I don't want to have to report offensive bullshit that another person has already reported and blocked. If someone is calling my friends names and they've dealt with it and hidden it, that should be enough. We all deal with a lot of bullshit already, I don't see why we need obstacles to removing it. That's not community, that's aid and comfort for assholes. @inquiline @graue @Gargron

@robotistry @inquiline @graue @Gargron thanks for articulating this so clearly, robotistry! it raises two follow up questions for me: one is whether the person starting a conversation *should* have more control over it and two, how that interacts with the emphasis here on conversation ‚with‘ as opposed to ‚about‘ (as part of the original motivation for not having quote posts)?

or to put it differently, is there a potential difference in point of view regarding how people see their own

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