Blocking a user behaves more like mute. Proper blocking needed to prevent harassment.
The block feature should be renamed to “mute”, which is what it seems to actually be. Currently I can apply this to a user and they can still see all my posts. So it’s a good mute feature but a terrible block feature.
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The simple fact of the matter is, the Fediverse is public. It's a space specifically built on sharing. Finding your posts is trivial, and that's by design. Blocking another account from viewing your posts is an incredibly weak hurdle for someone to overcome, and it informs them that you have blocked them.
If anything, doing so risks the possibility of escalating or accelerating harassment.
All the more reason to rename the function from block to mute so that users don't get a false sense of security.
A better way. When users need a sense of security, they mute someone and are immediately banned from the Fedverse. This way no one can bother them and no one can harass them again, it's for their own good.
/s ?
Mastodon still implements privacy and blocking to an extend: https://nerdschalk.com/make-mastodon-account-private/
So it's still possible even within the Fediverse to have more granularity.
Mastodon's blocking can fuck right off. Very fascist neoliberals there routinely use it to censor anyone with an opposing viewpoint and because being blocked literally locks you out of content people are literally afraid to post anything lest they offend the creator's very fragile egos.
As a result the entire platform is basically you just shouting into the void where people who like you have a huge incentive not to engage. You want to know how how many conversations have had even a response? 2. Two. My entire time there, two times. People either agree with what you say and like it or they don't and block you on sight. Nobody wants to risk being left out so they just keep to themselves.
Okay… Would you please remove C----f------?
Yeah that's understandable. I'll avoid that language in the future. I changed it to very fascist, means the same thing anyway.
On other platforms like Twitter and Mastodon the block functionality is pretty helpful. Using block lists improves the experience of those that get most often targeted tremendously.
You're thinking about it wrong, a good blocking system doesn't need to hide the content but rather block interaction from the offending user, like a softer form of a ban, but only for that specific user. They can still see all content from the user but they just aren't allowed to interact anymore. Could they bypass it with alt accounts? Yes but they can also bypass bans as well using that same method, so it's not a good argument against something like that.