Comment on TIL blocking users on Lemmy is nothing but a placebo
Character_Locked@lemm.ee 3 days agoAccording to another user in here, blocking on Mastodon actually works. So seems like it is possible to do in the Fediverse.
The only way I could see that working is if the list of users you blocked were federated too, and effectively made public
I actually thought blocks were public already. And personally I don’t see how it would be an issue if people that I haven’t blocked can see who I’ve blocked.
As far as I’m aware, on Reddit blocking a user doesn’t hide your comments from them
According to Reddit themselves on their support page: “Redditors you block won’t be able to access your profile or see or reply to your posts or comments”
Then what happens if you post in a community where someone you’ve blocked is a moderator?
Let moderators see comments from users that have blocked them in communities that they moderate but nowhere else. Or do whatever Reddit does in this case.
russjr08@bitforged.space 3 days ago
I was not aware of this, but their implementation of how they do this does bring up the limitation I mentioned. The other user cannot see your posts only if you are on the same server:
They’re not, well - the operator of your instance could go into the database and view it that way in the same way that they can see your email address. But aside from someone who has database access to your instance, blocks are not public. What is public is the list of defederated (“blocked” so to speak) instances for an entire instance (this can be viewed by going to
/instancesof any instance), which might be what you were thinking of?How exactly would you enforce that, though? If your blocks were public, all the person who you’ve blocked would need to do is open a private browsing window and look at your profile to see that they’ve been blocked.
If we’re looking at blocks as being a safety feature, I would think that having your blocks broadcasted to every single instance would be classified as harmful and a breach of your privacy. This is why although an instance that you register with has to have your email address that you signed up with, they don’t broadcast it to all other instances (same with the encrypted value of your password) - because otherwise it would effectively be public.
Perhaps I’ve just got the wrong stance, but considering that you can never block someone from viewing your content with an absolute guarantee (if the blocks were broadcasted, you still couldn’t prevent someone from just simply logging out, or standing up their own instance and collecting the data anyways) I would not consider that tradeoff to be worthwhile. Not that my stance has any weight since I’m not a maintainer for Lemmy (or any of the Fediverse software), but I wouldn’t be surprised if that has at least come up to those who are developing the various Fediverse software.