I used to agree with you until I actually spoke with people from communities that get regularly harassed.
Muting is great if all you want to do is hide content you don’t like. But if you need to defend yourself against a campaign of harassment, this only gives power to the harassers.
Yes all the have to do is make a new account, but it’s another hurdle they have to cross. Better than no hurdle and also blindfolding yourself
Ok, lets walk though this. You have spoke with people from marginalized communities that get regularly harassed, correct?
Then please explain it to us the way it was explained to you. After all it convinced you about the value in speech control, a very high bar for most rational people to overcome.
But here is the thing, you have not. You have just stated over and over that this is a needed feature to “protect” marginalized groups. You have not even hinted at the group (hell it could be that its some hexbear talking point or that there is no group at all). And no, naming a marginalized group who sees regular harassment is not an issue, unless the group in question’s very existence is offensive. Although there are a lot of nuances between what is and is not offensive, there are still some clear lines (think about say furries being ok vs the man boy love association being not ok).
Also criticism is not harassment, if you feel you are being harassed then use the report button. But don’t get upset if not everyone else agrees with you.
My mind is going in overdrive thinking of the possibilities on this. This is like the argument equivalent of trying to pay with an IOU. “I have the best reasons, but you don’t know them as they live in another country” sort of stuff.
I am thinking there are a few possibilities (please add if you can, this is fun):
There is no group in question and its just a lame tool to try and win an argument.
The group in question did/does have issues with harassment, but does not have an opinion on this exact thing (so they are not being named as the poster knows they will not get support)
The group is so very unpopular that the very mention of them will lower the credibility of the poster (hexbear, pedophiles, people who don’t put their carts back, etc.)
The group is not being harassed at all, but like the poster does not like that people can criticize them
oh hey, fuck you 👍 here is part of the conversation I had where I was convinced. Forgive me for not remembering all of the specifics, it was 2 years ago, and I failed to ask for the credentials as a minority. It took me a while to search it up.
the conversation wasn’t just about blocking, it was about how private social networks should be. I was saying that they should be default public, and users should have no expectation of privacy, and then this person explained how problematic that is for people who get persecuted, and why simply muting problematic people isn’t sufficient.
The whole conversation is branching IIRC so just walking up the context one comment at a time might not give the full story.
can I explain it like they did? no. I’m not a minority, and this conversation was fucking 2 years ago. I’ve explained it the best i could, but since you think I’m lying or (god forbid) engaging in a post on hexbear, then you can go and fucking read the conversation for yourself. If you’re not happy with their explanation, feel free to necro the post, but it was enough to convince me that just saying “shit is public and you can’t expect to be able to prevent people from interacting with your content” isn’t sufficient.
so as ada (the person you are claiming has shown you the light) said:
The Fediverse though, even though it has hate filled cesspits, gives us tools that put barriers between vulnerable groups and those spaces. The barriers are imperfect, they have booked holes and be climbed over by people who put the effort in, but they still block the worst if it.
In fact reading this I don’t think ada (we could just ask them) would take the same position as you on this. They are talking about overall systems and that public systems are not safe for people who have to hide their identity (I don’t 100% agree but do see the point). I would not try to put words into their mouth, and I would not use a conversation from 2 years ago in vague memory to argue a point.
Actually lets ask them @Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone , discourse is healthy after all and like most users on this platform they likely have something of substance to say.
that is fair. I shouldn’t be putting words in their mouth. I don’t think I was. I think i was being pretty clear that this is my current opinion after talking to ada, where I used to have similar beliefs to the majority here (public is public, dont expect privacy) and they convinced me that thats not a reasonable position to take if you value the safety of persecuted minorities (although I have to admit idk if that was what they were hoping I’d take away from that conversation).
Presumably they can do a much better job of explaining the concerns than I can. I have no idea how/if their views have changed since then, or how they apply specifically to blocking.
but my opinion, after talking with them, is that its not a reasonable position to take that public is public, so there should be no expectation of privacy. To me the idea that blocking people only hides their content from you is an extension of that. this comment will maybe give you a better impression of what I got out of that conversation
See, At least this is a reasonable argument. I don’t agree with it, and think you are conflating the need for private spaces and the existence of public ones.
The root of our impasse is that you think every public place needs to have drastic tools to protect people in the hands of all users, regardless of what that does to a platform.
and that was nearly the exact argument that I had 2 years ago.
I think that public forums still need a reasonable ability to counter harassment at the individual level, and not every single thing needs to be sent up to a mod.
preventing a single user from interacting with another single user’s content is almost the exact opposite of drastic, it is nearly the least impactful action you can take that is actually an action. it doesn’t stop the blocked person from interacting with the rest of the community, or even necessarily seeing the blocker’s content.
sending things to mods can take a while, and mods may not actually be able to identify harassment with enough confidence to ban someone.
like if i say “you live at 221B Baker Street, London”, we know that is Sherlock Holmes’ address and I’m clearly not doxxing you, but what if the joke wasn’t so obvious and I got reported? What if the insult was a dogwhistle that the mod didnt know about? dogwhistles, by their nature, are designed specifically to provide the kind of plausible deniability that would satisfy a mod.
give the victim a low impact tool that they can use to mitigate the harassment a bit. And to be clear, I don’t consider “closing your eyes” to be a sufficient mitigation.
I know, i had a whole discussion about this 2 years ago, which is why I changed my mind about this very topic (I used to be very much "things are public by default, no expectation of privacy in a social network).
but that doesn’t make it good. this is a problem with the design of lemmy IMO. Lemmy is the best popular option we have right now, and unfortunately popularity is important. Lemmy is already a ghost town, i cant imagine moving to an even smaller alternative.
You entirely missed my point, or just disregarded it.
Yep, it ain’t perfect.
… Got any… useful ideas about that?
About how to rework that design?
How we gonna make that happen?
What’s the plan?
Or do we just want to agree that perfect would be better than not perfect?
Talk is cheap, most of it is near totally useless noise, hosting all that talk though, facilitating all that blather, in a functional, much less ideal manner… now that’s complicated and expensive, and lemmy’s budget is basically zero, and all the devs are volunteers.
I didn’t disregard your point, but i may have missed it.
afaict your point was “lemmy doesn’t work that way, so either put up with it, fix it, or go elsewhere”
I dont think thats a very reasonable stance to take, if that was your stance. I strongly don’t believe in the motto criticism without a suggestion is destructive criticism. I believe there is a ton of value in getting criticism from people who don’t understand what a fix would look like, or only knowing superficially what it’d look like.
right now we’re engaging in a discussion about what change, if any, should even happen. I want to come to a consensus so that those volunteer devs aren’t wasting their time working on things that make peoples’ lives worse.
I’m trying to say “hey, what OP wants isn’t an unreasonable thing for a person using a social network to want” and try to explain why i think its reasonable for them to want.
Ok, so you’ve chosen ‘we are both going to agree that perfect would be better than not perfect’.
For what it’s worth, I’m not downvoting you.
But I will be blunt: I don’t think you are capable of describing a coherent, implementable version of what you want.
What is your proposal for what, precisely, should be changed?
How are you, or … apparently you would be asking other people to do this … how is this change going to be compatible with lemmy as it currently exists, such that every instance could easily adopt it as an update… or… some instances could adopt it as a compatible sort of ‘add-on’ or ‘plugin’?
Who is going to implement that change, or, how is that change going to come about?
Seeing that you don’t appear to be willing to code this yourself… how are you going to convince someone else to do this?
What I am saying is ‘OP actually does want an unreasonable thing, not from the standpoint of an end user of software who is.concerned about their safety in the abstract, but from the standpoint of being able to outline something that might actually work and also ever be designed.’
What they are asking for is more or less an entirely fundamentally different system than lemmy. They are asking for an entirely new kind of software that works from a fundamentally different paradigm.
Its more like uh, outlining that cars could be safer, and they think they are asking for airbags to be installed, but what they are actually asking for is someone to design a public transportation system.
Thats about the scale and scope of how mechanisticly different what they are asking for is, from how things curfently work… even though, to them, its just a ‘way of how they get from point a to point b’, and thus seems trivial to them.
The implementation serves the application, not the other way around.
Lemmy would still be Lemmy, if overnight all insurances miraculously switched to a different protocol that provides the same functionality.
To say that it’s too difficult to implement is fair. I’d argue that this being so difficult would indicate a fundamental design flaw, rather than a user making an unreasonable request. Maybe a flaw was part of an intentional tradeoff, but that doesn’t make it less of a flaw.
An I going to personally redesign activitypub? No.
I tried to read the spec and i disliked it enough to stop before I got very far into it. But although I dislike the spec, I like the apps people built on it. For the most part.
And I strongly disagree with the sentiment that feedback is only useful if it provides solutions. I dont think that it is bad for OP to point out that this is confusing and seemingly punitive to the blocker, even without offering to fix it themselves.
You are still at the ‘this system is not perfect’ stage, which I agreed with many comments ago in this chain… and you have no solution, as I predicted you would not.
Do you want me to just validate the your ability to identify a problem, endlessly?
Do you need me to praise your ability to identify something we both already agreed that we both identified, what, days ago now?
Lemmy would still be Lemmy, if overnight all insurances miraculously switched to a different protocol that provides the same functionality.
If an apple transformed into the same apple, it would be the same apple.
… What are you saying?
A protocol with the same functionality would be the same protocol, and would not include any new features, like the one you think it is reasonable to request be added.
You have said a tautology and don’t realize it.
Further, it isn’t a design flaw.
It is a design paradigm.
The current paradigm is geared toward many communicating with many, aka, a simulation of a grand public square.
The paradigm you seem to prefer would necessarily be geared toward few communicating with few.
It would be primarily exclusive and impermissive, whereas the system that exists is inclusive and permissive.
You saying this is all a ‘design flaw’ is like being unsatisfied that an automobile cannot fly.
If you wanna drive, get a car, if you wanna fly, get an airplane.
If you want to endlessly dote that it sure would be neat if a hover car existed, sure, ok, you can do that, I am not stopping you.
But unless you are taking practical steps to achieve a hover car, then you are fostering a literally unproductive conversation, by definition.
Broadly, nearly all the time, I very much agree that user feedback is indeed very valuable and should be taken seriously.
But in this instance, what is being requested is very likely impossible to implement without a total, foundation level rewrite of the entire system (which would break and destroy every app using it), or, would necessistate the creation of an entirely different system.
This is because the requested change is antithetical to the core foundation of how the system works.
This is an engineering problem, a software engineering problem.
More people than myself have tried to explain how this particular request is basically impossible to implement without basically doing a complete rewrite.
So again, in this instance of this particular request, it is a very unreasonable request, that is not likely to be accomodated.
There is likely no way to make a system that is both capable of being freely federated and defederated, which also, somehow, has a grand, overriding, centralized, authoritative and authoritarian, total ability to prevent any users anywhere in the system from being able to view any other particular user’s posted content.
If you could design such a system that is somehow capable of this, that would be a revolutionary achievement in software engineering.
Failing that, we have to deal with the trade offs of different design paradigms.
You can have centralized control from the core of the system itself (and thus a core set of admins, who we all know never ever abuse their powers) and ‘personal safety’, or, you can have decentralized control in the hands of users and instance admins, and have only the safety of manually curating your own experience within the system.
When people ask for the kind of blocking system that we are talking about here, they do not realize they are asking for a centralized system, which is antithetical to the entire concept of what ActPub is.
I needed to step away for a week because this comment section was giving me anxiety.
I know we both agreed the system is not perfect.
I haven’t come up with a solution
and you refuse to acknowledge that treating OP like dog shit isn’t an appropriate reaction for a non-technical user complaining about the confusion behaviour of a poorly named feature.\
I came into this conversation because people kept mocking OP. I’ve been pulled off on tangents fighting about stupid shit because I can’t keep my eye on the ball worth shit, but that’s basically it. People are dragging OP for daring point out that the way “block” works here is confusing and feels bad to use.
Even if it cannot be implemented, it is not unreasonable for a user to request it.
I also absolutely refuse to acknowledge that blocking is antithetical to decentralized systems. Just because it’s not possible with the current design of activity pub doesn’t mean that it’s not possible in other decentralized systems. I’m not looking for perfection, I’m looking for improvement.
Here:
In mastodon, if Alice from instance A follows Bob from instance B, then instance B will send Bob’s posts to A. In addition to that, when B sends Bob’s posts to A, it can also send new block requests.
These block requests are public, and it is up to the subscribing instance to honor them, but it’s most of the way there, and instance admins can choose to defederate with instances that don’t honor it (like they already do with malicious instances).
Lemmy isn’t mastodon, but it still uses activitypub, so decentralization isn’t the limiting factor here.
With Lemmy it’s actually more enforceable, since content in a community is owned by the instance hosting that community. If Charlie is on instance C, and tries to reply to Bob’s post on instance A, instance A could have subscribed to Bob’s blocklist, and will reject Charlie’s reply because it’s in reply to Bob’s post. On Lemmy it doesn’t even matter if Charlie’s instance is malicious or not, as long as A isn’t.
Malicious is the wrong word, but I think you get the idea.
I used to agree with you until I actually spoke with people from communities that get regularly harassed.
Muting is great if all you want to do is hide content you don’t like. But if you need to defend yourself against a campaign of harassment, this only gives power to the harassers.
Yes all the have to do is make a new account, but it’s another hurdle they have to cross. Better than no hurdle and also blindfolding yourself
Oh great, this again.
Wtf does that even mean?
Ok, lets walk though this. You have spoke with people from marginalized communities that get regularly harassed, correct?
Then please explain it to us the way it was explained to you. After all it convinced you about the value in speech control, a very high bar for most rational people to overcome.
But here is the thing, you have not. You have just stated over and over that this is a needed feature to “protect” marginalized groups. You have not even hinted at the group (hell it could be that its some hexbear talking point or that there is no group at all). And no, naming a marginalized group who sees regular harassment is not an issue, unless the group in question’s very existence is offensive. Although there are a lot of nuances between what is and is not offensive, there are still some clear lines (think about say furries being ok vs the man boy love association being not ok).
Also criticism is not harassment, if you feel you are being harassed then use the report button. But don’t get upset if not everyone else agrees with you.
*crickets chirping*
My mind is going in overdrive thinking of the possibilities on this. This is like the argument equivalent of trying to pay with an IOU. “I have the best reasons, but you don’t know them as they live in another country” sort of stuff.
I am thinking there are a few possibilities (please add if you can, this is fun):
oh hey, fuck you 👍
here is part of the conversation I had where I was convinced. Forgive me for not remembering all of the specifics, it was 2 years ago, and I failed to ask for the credentials as a minority. It took me a while to search it up.
the conversation wasn’t just about blocking, it was about how private social networks should be. I was saying that they should be default public, and users should have no expectation of privacy, and then this person explained how problematic that is for people who get persecuted, and why simply muting problematic people isn’t sufficient.
The whole conversation is branching IIRC so just walking up the context one comment at a time might not give the full story.
can I explain it like they did? no. I’m not a minority, and this conversation was fucking 2 years ago. I’ve explained it the best i could, but since you think I’m lying or (god forbid) engaging in a post on hexbear, then you can go and fucking read the conversation for yourself. If you’re not happy with their explanation, feel free to necro the post, but it was enough to convince me that just saying “shit is public and you can’t expect to be able to prevent people from interacting with your content” isn’t sufficient.
Ah thanks for sharing the source!
Really that is helpful.
so as ada (the person you are claiming has shown you the light) said:
In fact reading this I don’t think ada (we could just ask them) would take the same position as you on this. They are talking about overall systems and that public systems are not safe for people who have to hide their identity (I don’t 100% agree but do see the point). I would not try to put words into their mouth, and I would not use a conversation from 2 years ago in vague memory to argue a point.
Actually lets ask them @Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone , discourse is healthy after all and like most users on this platform they likely have something of substance to say.
that is fair. I shouldn’t be putting words in their mouth. I don’t think I was. I think i was being pretty clear that this is my current opinion after talking to ada, where I used to have similar beliefs to the majority here (public is public, dont expect privacy) and they convinced me that thats not a reasonable position to take if you value the safety of persecuted minorities (although I have to admit idk if that was what they were hoping I’d take away from that conversation).
Presumably they can do a much better job of explaining the concerns than I can. I have no idea how/if their views have changed since then, or how they apply specifically to blocking.
but my opinion, after talking with them, is that its not a reasonable position to take that public is public, so there should be no expectation of privacy. To me the idea that blocking people only hides their content from you is an extension of that. this comment will maybe give you a better impression of what I got out of that conversation
See, At least this is a reasonable argument. I don’t agree with it, and think you are conflating the need for private spaces and the existence of public ones.
The root of our impasse is that you think every public place needs to have drastic tools to protect people in the hands of all users, regardless of what that does to a platform.
and that was nearly the exact argument that I had 2 years ago.
I think that public forums still need a reasonable ability to counter harassment at the individual level, and not every single thing needs to be sent up to a mod. preventing a single user from interacting with another single user’s content is almost the exact opposite of drastic, it is nearly the least impactful action you can take that is actually an action. it doesn’t stop the blocked person from interacting with the rest of the community, or even necessarily seeing the blocker’s content.
sending things to mods can take a while, and mods may not actually be able to identify harassment with enough confidence to ban someone.
like if i say “you live at 221B Baker Street, London”, we know that is Sherlock Holmes’ address and I’m clearly not doxxing you, but what if the joke wasn’t so obvious and I got reported? What if the insult was a dogwhistle that the mod didnt know about? dogwhistles, by their nature, are designed specifically to provide the kind of plausible deniability that would satisfy a mod.
give the victim a low impact tool that they can use to mitigate the harassment a bit. And to be clear, I don’t consider “closing your eyes” to be a sufficient mitigation.
I mean…
I am describing a technical reality of how lemmy works.
You can ‘disagree’ with that, but uh, you would just be wrong.
Not in the sense of ‘I do not have enough empathy to consider the plight of a regularly harassed person’.
More in the sense of … ok, then don’t use lemmy, if you don’t like how it works.
Or… make it work the way you want it to work, by actually coding it.
Like, I wasn’t joking when I basically said ‘I am reasonbly confident it is impossible to make lemmy work the way you want it to.’
Thats not my opinion, in a… how should things work in an ideal world, sense of ‘opinion’.
It is my opinion, as a person who understands a bit (certainly not all) about how the code just actually works.
If you can figure it out, I’d be impressed.
Alternatively, if you’d like to pay me $50 an hour to attempt to develop that, I may have some room in my schedule.
I could do it at 48/h, js
Fuck you!
I was first!
rofl
I know, i had a whole discussion about this 2 years ago, which is why I changed my mind about this very topic (I used to be very much "things are public by default, no expectation of privacy in a social network).
but that doesn’t make it good. this is a problem with the design of lemmy IMO. Lemmy is the best popular option we have right now, and unfortunately popularity is important. Lemmy is already a ghost town, i cant imagine moving to an even smaller alternative.
better than reddit, but far from perfect.
You entirely missed my point, or just disregarded it.
Yep, it ain’t perfect.
… Got any… useful ideas about that?
About how to rework that design?
How we gonna make that happen?
What’s the plan?
Or do we just want to agree that perfect would be better than not perfect?
Talk is cheap, most of it is near totally useless noise, hosting all that talk though, facilitating all that blather, in a functional, much less ideal manner… now that’s complicated and expensive, and lemmy’s budget is basically zero, and all the devs are volunteers.
I didn’t disregard your point, but i may have missed it.
afaict your point was “lemmy doesn’t work that way, so either put up with it, fix it, or go elsewhere”
I dont think thats a very reasonable stance to take, if that was your stance. I strongly don’t believe in the motto criticism without a suggestion is destructive criticism. I believe there is a ton of value in getting criticism from people who don’t understand what a fix would look like, or only knowing superficially what it’d look like.
right now we’re engaging in a discussion about what change, if any, should even happen. I want to come to a consensus so that those volunteer devs aren’t wasting their time working on things that make peoples’ lives worse.
I’m trying to say “hey, what OP wants isn’t an unreasonable thing for a person using a social network to want” and try to explain why i think its reasonable for them to want.
Ok, so you’ve chosen ‘we are both going to agree that perfect would be better than not perfect’.
For what it’s worth, I’m not downvoting you.
But I will be blunt: I don’t think you are capable of describing a coherent, implementable version of what you want.
What is your proposal for what, precisely, should be changed?
How are you, or … apparently you would be asking other people to do this … how is this change going to be compatible with lemmy as it currently exists, such that every instance could easily adopt it as an update… or… some instances could adopt it as a compatible sort of ‘add-on’ or ‘plugin’?
Who is going to implement that change, or, how is that change going to come about?
Seeing that you don’t appear to be willing to code this yourself… how are you going to convince someone else to do this?
What I am saying is ‘OP actually does want an unreasonable thing, not from the standpoint of an end user of software who is.concerned about their safety in the abstract, but from the standpoint of being able to outline something that might actually work and also ever be designed.’
What they are asking for is more or less an entirely fundamentally different system than lemmy. They are asking for an entirely new kind of software that works from a fundamentally different paradigm.
Its more like uh, outlining that cars could be safer, and they think they are asking for airbags to be installed, but what they are actually asking for is someone to design a public transportation system.
Thats about the scale and scope of how mechanisticly different what they are asking for is, from how things curfently work… even though, to them, its just a ‘way of how they get from point a to point b’, and thus seems trivial to them.
The implementation serves the application, not the other way around.
Lemmy would still be Lemmy, if overnight all insurances miraculously switched to a different protocol that provides the same functionality.
To say that it’s too difficult to implement is fair. I’d argue that this being so difficult would indicate a fundamental design flaw, rather than a user making an unreasonable request. Maybe a flaw was part of an intentional tradeoff, but that doesn’t make it less of a flaw.
An I going to personally redesign activitypub? No.
I tried to read the spec and i disliked it enough to stop before I got very far into it. But although I dislike the spec, I like the apps people built on it. For the most part.
And I strongly disagree with the sentiment that feedback is only useful if it provides solutions. I dont think that it is bad for OP to point out that this is confusing and seemingly punitive to the blocker, even without offering to fix it themselves.
Ok, so we’re still doing this apparently.
You are still at the ‘this system is not perfect’ stage, which I agreed with many comments ago in this chain… and you have no solution, as I predicted you would not.
Do you want me to just validate the your ability to identify a problem, endlessly?
Do you need me to praise your ability to identify something we both already agreed that we both identified, what, days ago now?
If an apple transformed into the same apple, it would be the same apple.
… What are you saying?
A protocol with the same functionality would be the same protocol, and would not include any new features, like the one you think it is reasonable to request be added.
You have said a tautology and don’t realize it.
Further, it isn’t a design flaw.
It is a design paradigm.
The current paradigm is geared toward many communicating with many, aka, a simulation of a grand public square.
The paradigm you seem to prefer would necessarily be geared toward few communicating with few.
It would be primarily exclusive and impermissive, whereas the system that exists is inclusive and permissive.
You saying this is all a ‘design flaw’ is like being unsatisfied that an automobile cannot fly.
If you wanna drive, get a car, if you wanna fly, get an airplane.
If you want to endlessly dote that it sure would be neat if a hover car existed, sure, ok, you can do that, I am not stopping you.
But unless you are taking practical steps to achieve a hover car, then you are fostering a literally unproductive conversation, by definition.
Broadly, nearly all the time, I very much agree that user feedback is indeed very valuable and should be taken seriously.
But in this instance, what is being requested is very likely impossible to implement without a total, foundation level rewrite of the entire system (which would break and destroy every app using it), or, would necessistate the creation of an entirely different system.
This is because the requested change is antithetical to the core foundation of how the system works.
This is an engineering problem, a software engineering problem.
More people than myself have tried to explain how this particular request is basically impossible to implement without basically doing a complete rewrite.
So again, in this instance of this particular request, it is a very unreasonable request, that is not likely to be accomodated.
There is likely no way to make a system that is both capable of being freely federated and defederated, which also, somehow, has a grand, overriding, centralized, authoritative and authoritarian, total ability to prevent any users anywhere in the system from being able to view any other particular user’s posted content.
If you could design such a system that is somehow capable of this, that would be a revolutionary achievement in software engineering.
Failing that, we have to deal with the trade offs of different design paradigms.
You can have centralized control from the core of the system itself (and thus a core set of admins, who we all know never ever abuse their powers) and ‘personal safety’, or, you can have decentralized control in the hands of users and instance admins, and have only the safety of manually curating your own experience within the system.
When people ask for the kind of blocking system that we are talking about here, they do not realize they are asking for a centralized system, which is antithetical to the entire concept of what ActPub is.
I needed to step away for a week because this comment section was giving me anxiety.
I know we both agreed the system is not perfect.
I haven’t come up with a solution
and you refuse to acknowledge that treating OP like dog shit isn’t an appropriate reaction for a non-technical user complaining about the confusion behaviour of a poorly named feature.\
I came into this conversation because people kept mocking OP. I’ve been pulled off on tangents fighting about stupid shit because I can’t keep my eye on the ball worth shit, but that’s basically it. People are dragging OP for daring point out that the way “block” works here is confusing and feels bad to use.
Even if it cannot be implemented, it is not unreasonable for a user to request it.
I also absolutely refuse to acknowledge that blocking is antithetical to decentralized systems. Just because it’s not possible with the current design of activity pub doesn’t mean that it’s not possible in other decentralized systems. I’m not looking for perfection, I’m looking for improvement.
Here:
In mastodon, if Alice from instance A follows Bob from instance B, then instance B will send Bob’s posts to A. In addition to that, when B sends Bob’s posts to A, it can also send new block requests.
These block requests are public, and it is up to the subscribing instance to honor them, but it’s most of the way there, and instance admins can choose to defederate with instances that don’t honor it (like they already do with malicious instances).
Lemmy isn’t mastodon, but it still uses activitypub, so decentralization isn’t the limiting factor here.
With Lemmy it’s actually more enforceable, since content in a community is owned by the instance hosting that community. If Charlie is on instance C, and tries to reply to Bob’s post on instance A, instance A could have subscribed to Bob’s blocklist, and will reject Charlie’s reply because it’s in reply to Bob’s post. On Lemmy it doesn’t even matter if Charlie’s instance is malicious or not, as long as A isn’t.
Malicious is the wrong word, but I think you get the idea.