I'm going to talk about sexual harassment online for just a little bit here.

Bear with me.

Like many women online, I get sexual harassment in waves here on the good ol' fediverse.

Today was a rough day, other days are less rough, all of it is unwelcome, and that's a bigger problem than one online community. I don't expect Mastodon (or any other ActivityPub thing) to solve that problem 100%.

When I see it, I block it. Often enough it's a bad server, and I defederate.

This impacts the visibility of the comment.

So here's what happens practically:

First, I get a disgusting remark (or several) and block/defederate/whatever.

This remark does not pass through to other servers, who often enough *also* are blocking/defederating/whatever.

That means you, dear end-user, don't know that any of this happened.

So when I say something like "harassment is rough today", you're not seeing what I saw.

I personally feel like that's a problem. It gets in the way of understanding the scope of the issue.

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.