Re:Mastodon’s Eternal September Begins
by simfree on Saturday November 12, 2022 @03:54PM
(#33576958)
Followers only posts and requiring followers to be approved by the account they are following is common on the Fediverse.
This is what vulnerable folks I follow do to protect themselves, along with their instance admins often blackholing (IP tables dropping & blocking in their instance config) shit holes like https://freespeechextremist.com
I say this as a person banned by https://freespeechextremist.com , apparently my toots on that Pleroma instance should have been racist, and most other speech is unacceptable there.
This just makes no sense. You can't paint a message on a billboard and then get angry when cars driving by can read it. If a group of people wants to post messages secretly amongst themselves, the Fediverse is the wrong place to do it. Use Telegram or a private Discord server or something, but even then screenshot leaks are bound to happen eventually.
If you are truly concerned about the safety of "vulnerable folks," you should be all for educating them on the true workings of the internet so that they can avoid publishing things they don't want the world to see. You are saying it's fine for them to use a system whose stated purpose is blasting messaged all across the internet to whoever wants to see them and then expecting all the recipients to know about and follow the unwritten rules they are somehow bound to when handling that message. That is not a realistic expectation.