@mevenlennonbertrand

I am surprised I never noticed this myself before. I had previously performed the deletion manually for years.

@FediTips : perhaps you can advertise this mechanism more widely (and the philosophy behind it).

(For the sake of mere curiosity, I'd be interested in knowing if other people can reproduce the above behaviour in different scenarios (or even the same).)

Replying to my own post: I just realized something I didn't notice before.

If you reply to a post in a thread, then automatically the person you reply to is not "selected", and the other people are.

So if you just press backspace, then you delete everybody automatically, except the person you are replying to.

At least this works in the following situation:

(1) Mac.
(2) Web interface to ma(th)stodon.
(3) Firefox.

I don't know what happens in other scenarios, but now I will have an easier life replying to the person I want to reply to.

Of course, if I want to reply to several people, I will need to manually delete the ones my reply doesn't apply to.

But usually I want to reply to either everybody or to a single person.

Mastodon feature request.

A reply should only name, by default, the person you are replying to, giving you the option to reply to everybody in the thread, if *you* decide that it is pertinent to do so (or maybe a subset).

I often find myself quoted in things that have nothing to do with what I said earlier, and I find this very annoying.

In the absence of such a mastodon feature, please delete manually the people to whom your reply doesn't apply.

This would make the experience here much better for everybody.

If I am deleted from a reply, as I often wish I was, I will still follow the thread, with interest, and maybe contribute to it.

But I don't like people saying things with my name on it, unless what they say explicitly refers to what I said.