I’ve only been using snac/the fediverse for a few days and already I’ve had to mute somebody. I know I come on strongly with my opinions sometimes and some people don’t like that, but this person had already started going ad hominem (in my reading of it), and was using what felt to me like sketchy tactics to distract from the point I was trying to make and to shut down conversation. They were doing similar things to other people in the thread so rather than wait for it to get bad for me I just muted them. People get so weirdly defensive so fast when you disagree with something they said online. Not sure I fully understand that.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Hmmm what does “ad hominem” mean? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net attacking the person, not the idea. It’d be like if you said “yarn is better than mastodon because it isn’t push based” and someone who disagreed with you said “well you think that because you’re an idiot” or something like that.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Ahh I see 🤔

Well the experience you describe is one of the reasons I also don’t like Mastodon/Activity Pub as it trends towards being “too much” and if everything is pushed at you, you have little choice but to either mute or block at the server level 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net Well, you can mute or block individual users, and you can mute conversations too. I think the tools for controlling your interactions aren’t so bad (they could definitely be improved ofc). And in my case, I was replying to something this person said, so it wasn’t outrageous for his reply to be pushed to me. Mostly, I was sad to see how quickly the conversation went bad. I thought I was offering something relatively uncontroversial, and actually I was just agreeing with and amplifying something another person had already said.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci I was more referring to the network-level control which you have little to no control over.