I just had my first experience blocking an instance, and it made my realize now nice the lemmy content curation experience is vs the centralized model.

Recently I started noticing a lot of posts from that I just found annoying. There was nothing inherently wrong with them, they just came from a culture I don’t understand and so I found them cringey. Since they all came from one community, realized most of them come from the same instance. I just added that instance to my blocklist and the problem is solved!

Now think about in the centralized model. I would be forced to either just accept that these posts are in my timeline, or block each community and user individually. The instance gave me an easy way to manage my content.

I also appreciate that instances can manage the blocking for their users. So the most horrible stuff I don’t even see. But it also preserves free speech, as those users who want to say horrible things can do so in their own instance, and most people will just block it.

Anyway, just impressed again by the fediverse!

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    Unfortunately it’s still a very weak type of blocking, for you on Lemmy.ca unless you are using an app like Sync or Connect. It’s basically a “community mute”, equivalent to unsubscribing from all the communities there individually, but unlike user blocking, the users from that instance will still show up in other communities, they can still send you replies, which will trigger Notifications, and therefore they can harass you by continually sending you replies for WEEKS and WEEKS at a time (this actually happened to me twice, once with hexbear.net and another time with lemmygrad.ml).

    Anyway, it’s better than nothing!

    You may be interested to read some of the ways that PieFed is advancing democratization of moderation.

    • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      they can harass you by continually sending you replies for WEEKS and WEEKS at a time (this actually happened to me twice, once with hexbear.net and another time with lemmygrad.ml).

      Honestly you really shouldn’t be on an instance that federate with those places to start with.

      You may be interested to read some of the ways that PieFed is advancing democratization of moderation.

      Personally I’m not a fan of the way PieFed uses upvotes and downvotes to basically do statistics on users in order to profile “bad actors”. That feels like karma from Reddit all over again.

      There can be many legitimate reasons why a user might downvote a lot, and a user being downvoted a lot is not necessarily problematic. They may just not be following the “hive mind”, and honestly we could use more of those users.