@Lauren Weinstein But "useful real world impacts" depend on personal choices. I am seeing many complaints about Mastodon, especially from people who have contributed working code and had it rejected. Mastodon's dominance is "reality" this week, but it will not continue until the end of time.

I only see three choices:

• Complain about Mastodon but keep using it although it is unsatisfactory.
• Fork Mastodon, or use and contribute to an already-existing fork, and improve things.
• Use and contribute to one of the dozens of different projects, many of which lack Mastodon's shortcomings, or start a new one.

Cool, now I've also learned how to use util/config.

Can this also be done by editing .htconfig.php?

App::$config['uafilter']['deny'] = 'useragent1,useragent2';

Would that work?