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Pawlicker@sendpaws@mitra.pawslut.party (2026-06-08 08:21:43)
Wrote a post about how comically bad iOS fedi clients are
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2026/06/07/the-sad-state-of-ios-fediverse-clients/
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Jupiter Rowland@jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu (2026-06-09 19:27:05)
@Pawlicker About "reply gating": This, or something similar, has been a standard feature at least on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte from the get-go, i.e. from their respective creation on. Hubzilla has had it since 2012. All three rely heavily on permissions for anything and everything. They can make themselves and each other hide the reply button. When someone wants to comment from Mastodon or something else that doesn't understand these permissions, these three simply reject unpermitted comments before they even reach the inbox.

On Hubzilla, the channel-wide permission to comment also includes a permission to like or dislike something. I can generally allow
only myselfonly certain contactsonly my contactsonly my contacts plus those with an unapproved contact requestanyone on the same Hubzilla hub as meanyone on Hubzilla (strangely, this does exclude (streams) channels)anyone in the Fediverseanyone anywhere on the Web, even without a Fediverse accountto comment on my posts.

In addition, I can turn comments on and off for specific posts. Mind you, if it's a reply, it isn't a post, it's a comment, and I've got no control over it.

On (streams) and Forte, the channel-wide permission to comment is uncoupled from the permission to like or dislike. The channel-wide options are
only myself plus certain contactsonly my contactsanyone in the Fediverseanyone anywhere on the Web, even without a Fediverse account
On top of that, I can generally allow comments only for a certain number of days.

Again, I can turn comments on and off for specific posts. But I can also only allow my contacts to comment on specific posts, and I can define until when comments are allowed on specific posts.

In all three cases, I can even choose to preview technically unpermitted comments and then decide whether I allow or reject them, one by one.

In other words, where I am (I'm commenting from Hubzilla), this not only has been available for longer than Mastodon has even existed, but it's deeply e

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Phantasm@phnt@fluffytail.org (2026-06-10 03:22:04)
@jupiter_rowland @sendpaws 
>About "reply gating"
>This, or something similar, has been a standard feature at least on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte from the get-go, i.e. from their respective creation on.

I've written extensively about this before. Features like this simply cannot work in a federated network like ActivityPub broadly. Your instance might hide replies/comments to your posts to you and other instances running the same software, but it is visible to everyone else. So at best it creates a false sense of security/control.

The only way to implement it properly is by making the OP instance/user the sole authority of federating those posts, which requires a large paradigm shift in how federation works. FEP-171b: Conversation Containers is one such way and it is effectively broken for every other implementation beyond those listed. Hubzilla implements it. So you either limit your interactions to 4 fedi server implementations that most people don't use, or it doesn't work as expected.

Give my blog post about it a read if you are interested in how these settings can be disregarded.