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@dysfun @TechConnectify @JustinH if I understand the problem, imagine every time you made a post you got thousands of replies, some of which you'd like to interact with, but a significant number of them are from accounts you've never interacted with on random other servers that are borderline abuse.
No amount of moderation on your server instance can address this problem, because your server is doing nothing wrong.
@dysfun @TechConnectify @JustinH what is being asked for (I think) is to first recognise the problem. This thread shows that this is far from happening.
Second you need some tools and policies to filter the poor behaviour. Less than a ban, but more than "don't look at messages that are addressed to you, that might upset you"
At least I think that's what is being asked for.
@cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH exactly. One thing that I've just realized is that, when we compare this platform to email, subject lines are effectively content warnings. I don't go to my inbox and see every email that's been sent to me, I see a list of content warnings.
Here, though, it's as if I open my inbox and am reading every single email.
Social media is a different beast from email. A feed full of content warnings is tedious and boring. But there has to be filtering.
holly 
️
@TechConnectify @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH I want this platform to work for folks like you, so I'm trying to wrap my head around this. I assume that the volume of block requests you would have to submit is unworkably high, not that your instance is ignoring your block requests? For instance, we're quick to block accounts that are aggressively annoying our users, but we're only like 5 users with the most followed having under 5k followers, so we only get about 1 request/wk.
@holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH On the bird site, this sort of stuff was just... not a thing I ever had to do.
I blocked maybe half a dozen people and muted perhaps a dozen.
The sort of behavior that's bothering me here simply didn't cross my feed on twitter /because they had automated systems to detect it/ and it was hidden.
I'm really asking for a jerkwad detector - not for a means of recourse when I encounter jerkwads. Because, frankly, not much of what they do merits real moderation.
@TechConnectify @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH Huh, wow. I'm now wondering if large-follow-count accounts had a very different experience of Twitter than us plebs, and I'm wondering if that's what's contributing to all the talking past each other that's going on over this topic.
I'm assuming it's only a matter of time before someone who doesn't mind digging into the code and is seeing all this creates a fork with filtering tools built in.. but then who knows when those stars will align.
@holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH I've been coming to this conclusion myself.
I think some of the people who use language like "took refuge" here were caught in the crossfire of these automated systems. And I can understand how frustrating it would be to feel deprioritized in that way (let alone be one of the folks who regularly experienced actual threats etc.)
Those systems made scale tolerable, though—and perhaps the necessity of those systems is why scale is so frowned-upon here.
@TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH I wonder also how your experience in the real world goes. A friend of mine is a YouTuber with >6m followers (you've done videos with them). Whenever we go out for a meal people come up to say hello, or asking for a photo. I have to always in a way play defence "we got a shoot to get to" or "a train to catch". Which is hard when you're just having ice-cream. People forget that people like you and them are humans, and deserve some privacy.
@quixoticgeek Heh, my jacket does wonders for people not recognizing me in public. When I'm not wearing it I look very different.
So far I've been pegged in a crowd only three times I know of for sure, and a few other times I suspect based on glances/stared.
@TechConnectify hadn't thought about that. Said person does wear the same hoodie or t-shirt all the time...
Back to the original topic. I hope you find a solution that allows you to remain on Mastodon. Your contributions make it a better place, and I enjoy your toots, even the ones I don't agree with (which are very rare).
@quixoticgeek I suspected I knew who you were talking about!
But thanks. And say hi for me!
@TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH I think there's a few different issues here.
The first is just time. I've been on Mastodon a couple years now but in the past year or so my feed has gone from literally just my own bots to several posts per minute nearly any time of day. Twitter has had years to develop these tools; but I don't think Mastodon had much use for them even just a few months ago. I remember even after I'd been using Facebook over a decade you still couldn't be a member of any large groups without getting hardcore porn in your feed near daily (the "Linux" group in particular was SO BAD)...
The second is that a lot of interesting tools do exist, they just have no big VC budget for the polish and advertising. There's hundreds of people with interesting little Mastodon tools on ther own personal websites (I got a couple myself!) that aren't really going anywhere right now. There might be a tool out there that does what you need, but good luck finding it!
And finally there's the culture issue. And that's one place where I think the email analogy really helps. We intuitively understand (and to a certain extend even the spam filters "understand") that your university email and your corporate email and your personal email all have different rules and different conseuences. (And also different funding sources!) Many of us even have multiple personal accounts depending on how much we trust whoever is asking for it. Mastodon has the tooling and infrastructure for that same kind of diverse landscape, but in reality we've got most of the network on like four servers that don't have nearly the resources of a Gmail or Hotmail so they can't quite handle it. Plus there's this tension between the desire for a diverse ecosystem against the practical reality of doing that within a single server with a single moderation policy.
Ultimately I think the solution might be paid/business servers designed for creators or other higher profile users. That'll provide the budget for more moderators or devs to patch in baysean filters or LLMs or something on notifications. I think there's gotta be a revenue model for it though. Could be ads in feeds...but that doesn't even keep Twitter afloat so not sure how it'd work on smaller instances...although maybe a creator instance could be more focused and therefore charge more per impression...