Dear normal people being confronted with hardcore negative nerds (there are also a lot of positive, friendly ones) in your comments, there are two terms you need to know about, IMHO:
- Bike Shedding (AKA the Law of Triviality) [1] meaning that some try to move the discussion to a tangent that they know more about and
- Pigeon Chess [2] meaning that someone will completely ignore context and emotions because they want to make their point
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
[2] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pigeon%20chess
My personal advice when this starts to happen in the reply thread to one of your posts and you feel overwhelmed, attacked or insecure: It's YOUR post, YOUR timeline. Block and mute without regret. If things get out of hand but you want to make sure your point is accessible, Mastodon has an option called "Delete & Redraft" that allows you to post the same thing as a new post, with an empty reply thread. You will lose your likes and boosts, but sometimes that is perfectly acceptable. #LifeHack
Now unfortunately Mastodon does NOT offer a way to limit replies to only your followers nor does it offer a way to "hide" or at least mark unpleasant or aggressive replies in a thread, so "Delete & Redraft" sometimes is the only way to react. I have done it a few times. And I am not ashamed of it, seeing that I sometimes get stuff like this in the replies:
@larsmb@mastodon.online@jwildeboer I think unfortunately, as Mastodon / Fediverse grew and matured, they became both easier to access (meaning we see more of a ... less filtered cross-section of the population at large) as well as more relevant targets for troll (individuals, farms, and AI fakes).
I'm often thinking about how to counter that short of just blocking (which doesn't really take the content off).
@larsmb We are begging Mastodon continuously to move the visibility decision of replies to the original poster but so far they are not willing to implement that approach. Other fediverse/activitypub implementations have this since a long time.
@larsmb For the technical nerds: Replies are stored as collection to the original post in ActivityPub. So being allowed to decide which replies to the unique ID of the post are shared in that collection can be delegated to the OP (Original Poster). Mastodon currently doesn't enable that. Replies that reference said Unique ID can still be shared by other instances but some sort of indicator implying "not endorsed by OP" when not listed in the reply collection is quite simple to implement.
@jwildeboer @larsmb Authoritative servers for whole threads would also somewhat solve the "I only see half the replies so I'll respond with something that has already been mentioned by others, at length" issue.
@thilo @jwildeboer The original server is IIRC already informed (which is why some web interfaces suggest checking there), and in theory, clients (esp apps) already could check from there. I think some already do.
Of course, that comes at a significant traffic increase which might not be great for small instances.