1. There's no mute conversation button on someone else's post

2. Hit reply on the post - note by default it says public and includes the person's username

3. Change the post visibility to private

4. Make a junk post

(Continued)

Now it allows you to mute conversation

@hwll This isn't even specifically about mutual aid folks. It can be anyone for any reason. People shitposting about something you don't care about. People with a really popular political post that keeps getting boosted into your timeline but you don't want to see it. A meme you just hate for whatever reason. It doesn't matter. Your timeline is your own.

@CarbonCarrot It's more likely a Mastodon limitation. My HYPOTHESIS is that each conversation has a ID on it, which is how it decides on conversation threading and such. Your instance won't allow you to make any changes on other people's posts - for obvious reasons. The mute conversation feature may be working by setting a metadata tag on one of your posts where it suppresses anything with that particular conversation ID on it from appearing on your timeline. But it's still a crappy UI/UX for what should be basic functionality.

@JessTheUnstill *Thank you*! I've wanted this capability for a long time.

@JessTheUnstill I thought if you take out all the usernames it stops being part of that conversation? Good to know

jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange the inability to mute someone else's conversation seems to arbitrary. Maybe there's a technical reason behind it but there needn't be...

@JessTheUnstill I do something similar to this, instead I add a poll to remind me of the post in X days. I wonder if it work with a mute?

@JessTheUnstill

Is there some reason these steps cannot be automated, and exposed as a single control in the UI?

webhat@infosec.exchange oh my god, using a poll as a hack for snoozing is genius

@julian thank you, I don't think I came up with it originally

RE: https://mastodon.social/@aslakr/109789888503839904

@julian @JessTheUnstill Muting/following conversation and sub-conversation (threads) is one of the things I miss from usenet.

@8r3n7 a 3rd party client could probably automate some sort of hidden meta-post, but no idea how fragile that might end up being. And yeah, Mastodon devs could build something to fix it, but I don't think it's on their roadmap anytime soon.

@julian @JessTheUnstill After a brief dive into the mastodon API documentation, it seems to be a protocol limitation indeed. You (or rather your client program) do not get to see the conversation ID until you join that conversation, so until then, you do not have the correct piece of information to request muting of that conversation.

Some references:
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/timelines/#home
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/conversations/#get

@JessTheUnstill
I know you're talking about the default web client, but for what it's worth, some clients do include this mute option.

#fedilab

ticho@mas.to hey, I sort of disagree. While the protocol itself doesn't contain topic level information, it can be inferred from context.

This is how NodeBB achieves it. It also sends contextual information so it's explicitly available as well.

@JessTheUnstill this is an exceptionally useful tip. It's also grotesque that it would be needed in the first place.

@julian While in general, I agree, you could implement some sort of heuristics, there is one huge difference - a NodeBB server is centralized and sees everything. With Mastodon, half of the posts in a conversation might not be visible to you, either because of being outright blocked, or the post simply not hitting your instance because of where the participants post from.

Any heuristic based on unrelated metadata would be inaccurate at best, but more often than not outright misleading.

@JessTheUnstill
> Reply to a post, set the visibility to "Private Mention", remove everyone's username from the post. Post it. Then you can click "mute conversation" on THAT post, and it silently mutes you from the conversation

That's a really smart hack. It never would have occurred to me. I'd never even noticed that you can only Mute Conversation in your own posts!

(To be fair, that might not be the case in the third-party apps I use; Moshidon, FediLab and Enafore.social)

#FediTips

@julian This could theoretically be solved by simply adding the conversation id to each Status object in the timeline (and likely also any other post-like object that your client is receiving), but someone familiar with the entire protocol would need to look at this change, since it might bring compatibility issues.