dump_stack() @[email protected]

@kaniini I agree, everybody getting along is completely unrealistic and I wouldn't force such a standard on the fediverse. But that's not what I'm criticizing here. The problem is the blocking behavior by many admins and the way blocks work in fedi servers.

When I first joined the fediverse via a Mastodon, I had no idea that instances block others for god knows what reason. I didn't even think about this, I just looked for an instance whose topic and community looked good to me.
But as time passed, I noticed that I couldn't see certain users or posts on my instance that users I followed were referencing. I became aware of instance blocking and the different reasons admins give for their blocks (if any). Some made sense to me, and others... not so much.
The recent bullshit about admins blocking mstdn.io for it not blocking Gab opened my eyes on how badly instance blocks are misused by many admins. But what's even worse is that even if you are on an instance that has a sane blocking policy, the behavior of completely unrelated admins can affect your community experience on the fediverse. During this mstdn.io debacle, the only people who are penalized are the users of mstdn.io for the sole reason of being fucking EXPOSED to Gab. They didn't even have to BE "nazis" to get blocked. How fucked up is that?

This meme basically mirrors my experience with the fediverse up until now. I expected things to just work, but the reality is completely different.

I think that blocks shouldn't be forced onto users with no way to circumvent them. They should act as sane defaults that the user can partially or fully override in the settings via a personal rule list. Of course, this should work in such a way that no other user is affected by overrides one user enables. If someone communicates with a user that is blocked by default, then this conversation shouldn't be visible in timelines unless the current user has disabled the same rule.
This way, admins would still have full control over their instance-specific community, and users would have full control over their fediverse-wide experience.

Last time I described this solution, I was told that silencing is somewhat similar, but unfortunately it doesn't work at all how I'd like. It doesn't allow users to organically find other users from blocked instances via the timelines. Instead, you have to know about affected users beforehand in order to follow and thus unsilence them. If you wanted to see all posts from a blocked instance "instance.xyz", my solution would simply require you to uncheck the "block instance.xyz" rule. With silencing, you'd have to follow each and every user from instance.xyz. That's not only cumbersome, it also messes up your follower list and you somehow have to keep track of new users.

Anyway, these are my thoughts on this topic. I have absolutely no idea how doable any of this would be and what kind of problems might arise, but that's simply how I wish it would work, as a user.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B01HWsilRqs