Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this.
curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days agoYou can block the instance, which blocks those communities, but that doesn’t block those users on them to be fair. That has to be done individually.
Personally I am comfortable ignoring individuals (and not painting everyone on an instance with the same brush) and would prefer metas/groups/whatever you’d like to refer to them as for my subscriptions, so I’m definitely not the target user of this post.
But just being clear, a user blocking an instance doesn’t block the users from that instance, so if that’s their goal, no, that’s not enough.
but that doesn’t block those users on them to be fair. That has to be done individually.
It blocks notifications of replies.
Sometimes I’ll notice a .ml responded to me, and if they seem decent I’ll reply back. But I’ll never get a notification and that’s almost always as far as it goes.
Which is fine. Lots of people can make one civil comment to rope someone in a conversation.
You will lose that ability as soon as Lemmy.world upgrades past 0.19.3. My instance likewise had 0.19.3 until like a week ago, and ever since it “upgraded” to 0.19.5, I get notifications now from users from blocked instances. The developers of Lemmy seem adamant that people are not allowed to ban whole entire instances, which I find… ironic for… reasons:-).
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Defederation has it’s own uses, yes, but that also ironically makes it more difficult to avoid trolls. When you defederate from an instance for X reason, only the more irrational users are going to create alts to attack. Defederation is often over-used.
curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Not advocating for defederation, I’m just pointing out that blocking an instance isn’t going to achieve their goal.
Obviously defederation is too large scale. Ideally, there would be an option for people to block users from the instance when blocking an instance, or something like that.
This would avoid the exact scenario you mention because it would come down to the user level, so that troll would have to put in quite a bit more effort to get around that. Unfortunately, that’s not currently an option, along with some other features I’d love to see on Lemmy.
Again, I’m just pointing out that blocking an instance does not achieve their goal.