Today I found out that on this platform, “block” is just a fancy word for “filter”. Just had an individual user go through my entire profile and downvote everything. So I blocked them, thinking that this would make me safe from any future stalking. But I was just informed that no, any user that you ‘block’ is actually still able to see everything that you post and vote freely.
All that ‘blocking’ actually does is hide the person from you. But they’re still free to stalk and do as they please. I just tested this out for myself using my other account and sure enough, it’s true.
I just want to know, how is this acceptable? I bet you that if I called out this user publically, I would probably end up in hot water myself for harassment or something. And yet ‘blocking’ is completely fkn useless too. So what recourse does a user actually have here when faced with a hostile user that wants to ruin their experience on Lemmy?
Coming from Blåhaj, I thought I would try ‘moderating’ my own experience for a bit. But you can’t ‘moderate’ your own experience if the tools to do so are fkn useless and only trick you into thinking that something has been achieved, without actually doing anything useful.
And now I’m starting to see a new value in instances like Blåhaj. Because you actually need admins that give a shit around here or else you’re just left to the wolves on a platform that seems more interested in protecting abusive users than allowing users to protect themselves.
Edit: watching you all upvote the person talking shit about how this works on other platforms while downvoting the actual correct information that comes with a source has certainly taught me a thing or two about this platform and the people on it. You all actually prefer misinformation to fact as long as it suits your vibe or opinion more. Like a bunch of fkn MAGAs. I really wish there was a way to disable notifications for this post (another feature missing here) because watching you people upvote misinformation is enough to make me no longer give a flying fuck what anyone here says or thinks.
Aside from the rest of the discussion that has already occurred here, I’m not actually sure how this would work from a technical perspective.
You and I are on two completely different instances, if I were to block you, how is your instance supposed to know this in order to stop you from reading my comment?
The only way I could see that working is if the list of users you blocked were federated too, and effectively made public (like votes currently are) - which seems counterproductive to the problem at hand.
Then what happens if you post in a community where someone you’ve blocked is a moderator? Or if you block the admin of another instance? If you can “cloak” yourself from being moderated by just blocking them, that seems like an exploit waiting to happen. As far as I’m aware, on Reddit blocking a user doesn’t hide your comments from them - but they can no longer reply to them, and I assume this is why that is the case. Unless that has very recently changed.
The biggest difference between Lemmy (and all software within the Fediverse - for example, I’m pretty sure Mastodon is this way as well), is that there is not one singular authoritative server. Actions like this need to be handled on all instances, and that’s impossible to guarantee. A bad actor running an instance could just rip out the function that handles this, and then it’s moot. I mean, they wouldn’t even need to do that - they’d have the data anyways.
You could enforce it if both users are on the same instance I suppose, but this just seems like it would only land with the blocking feature being even more inconsistent.
According to another user in here, blocking on Mastodon actually works. So seems like it is possible to do in the Fediverse.
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.
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”
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.
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.