Fediverse memes

blocking on mastodon, that user ceases to exist, and is no longer able to see, vote, or comment on your content. on mastodon, blocking is blocking

on lemmy/mbin, blocking only serves to mask that users content, though they are still able to see, vote, comment, and mine your content for descriptive data which can, has, and will lead to doxxing

"blocking" on lemmy/mbin is dangerous misnamed bullshit

Reddit implemented this, and it was abused heavily to push trolls posts and disinformation up the algorithm, since by blocking people who disagreed with them, after multiple attempts the naysayers could no longer see the posts.

Somebody tested it, and was able to get their testing misinformation posts heavily upvoted after just a few days.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/

There is value to the blocked person not being able to find out in any way, whether you've blocked them.

And if they really want to see your content, on federated social media, where you can't enforce a login requirement to view the content, they'll always be able to find your content if they really want to.

Stopping them from being able to comment on your posts would be nice, tho. Even better if they can comment, but it doesn't show up for you or anyone else.

Implementing such a block would be tricky, though. It is not as simple as community bans, as communities are always governed by their home instance.

If you post or comment in a community that isn't local, someone from a third instance could interact with that content without ever communicating with your home instance.

It can still be done, but it's a much more involved implementation than community bans.

Bluesky/twitter/etc are person centric - you follow the person

Lemmy/reddit/etc are topic centric - you follow a community

It makes sense for blocking on Bluesky to completely hide you, you've severed the person - person relationship.

On Lemmy severing a person - person relationship shouldn't disadvantage the user from interacting with the community. Communities don't want duplicate posts so if you post some big news in a popular community now all the users you've blocked would be cut off from that content. Their personal beef with you shouldn't disadvantage them in the communities this way.

I would prefer if people I block couldn't see anything I post

I don't think this type of block makes sense for a more forum-like environment. In fact I think it's more absuable for bad actors to be able to conceal their rhetoric from anyone they know would oppose it.

IDK, seems like blocking behaving like that on Lemmy could backfire, actually encouraging abuse.

For example. What happens if someone being malicious blocks you and then starts talking shit about you elsewhere in the comment thread? The person being abused would never know.

This is one of the major gripes I have with Reddit. So often do people just block me when they are losing a debate against me, making it impossible to reply. A public forum should not behave this way if you want a healthy debate culture

Just a short hypothetical: You start this thread or even top level vomment and I don't agree with you. Then I reply something and block you immediatelly after. That could be another tool for trolls, but I guess there could be some solutions that fix this problem.

(Not dissagreeing with the OP, just brainstorming)

Another missing feature is the ability to stop inbox notifications for any any particular comment you made.

Look, sometimes I just want to say something inciteful and then just dip out without the fear of dealing with the fallout, okay?

There's no such thing as "public except for that guy in particular."

If any logged-out rando can see a thing, preventing a specific logged-in user from seeing it doesn't work and shouldn't be tried. It's ridiculous. And it's a great incentive for assholes to just make a new account.

The worst way to do it is how reddit handled it, where any asshole can have the last word, for free. You can't reply to anyone if someone in the thread blocks you. You can't even reply to your own comments in the chain, to notify people, 'hey, some asshole blocked me, I'm not just ignoring you or the argument.'

They wield the instance ban hammer for themselves, while tools for the common plebes are lower priority:-P.