Since I’ve put effort into no longer making feature requests for Micro.blog — I used to do this a lot and now think it’s better for other people to be heard — an interesting thing has happened; it has become clear exactly what my most wanted feature actually is.

Mute specific conversations.

@SimonWoods I agree with this one, I find it really tough sometimes. No one is necessarily doing anything wrong but tools like muting topics and content warnings are important for other reasons than a topic being wrong. I think reading a book like Design for Real Life could be useful for trying to push for this change.

@anniegreens Oh thanks for the recommendation! Whenever I see somebody talk about any of the A Book Apart collection, I just know I want to read them all. Given that this one is written by Anil Dash, it goes right to the top of my list.

I agree on what you say; it's never even about right or wrong for me, instead I hold a fundamental belief that in-person conversations are always better — even those held via the internet — and impersonal, text-based exchanges invariably lead to destructive outcomes.

@SimonWoods Amen to your paragraph 2! In timeline exchanges, for example, we're always subtly (sometimes not so subtly) different when we know that we're playing to an audience rather than communicating one-to-one.

@JohnBrady Yep. The night-and-day difference I have witnessed in people when comparing to their online persona is striking to say the least. It's also of course not new at all; we just all have easier access to seeing it unfold now, which combines terribly with the illusion that we are present in that moment.

@SimonWoods I think Anil only wrote the foreward. Instead it was written by the duo Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and centers around harms that design can cause. For example, by not allowing muting of terms or conversations, someone may be exposed to very real pain if those terms or conversations bring up past or current trauma.