They shouldn’t be able to do that!
When I block someone, I don’t want to see their posts anymore. I know they can still comment on my posts, but that’s okay, I just don’t see their contributions any longer to make me angry.
I have no issue with this whatsoever. I block people so that I don’t need to see their posts, not that they couldn’t see mine. If you don’t want others reading what you post online, then don’t post online.
Also, while other locations in the Fediverse might disable access to unauthenticated persons, comments and post in Lemmy are generally public in that way. So, a blocked user could simply logout (or visit from a different instance) to see the content.
Also, as a third-party I do want someone (e.g. a fact checker) to be able reply to a comment with more information, so that I can see it, even if the commenter doesn’t want to see replies (from the “woke mob” or wikipedians, e.g.).
I understand some people think the reply thread under their comments is somehow “owned” and should be “controlled” by them, but I don’t agree. I think this should also be true in most places on the Fediverse, tho it isn’t (as I understand it) on Mastodon (and the like).
This sounds like the words of an abuser.
That’s just an unhinged thing to say.
I’m more annoyed by losing the “Block Community” button when a sub’s admin blocks me.
That’s why I love Voyager for mobile viewing. Not sure the feature’s exclusivity, but you can tag people and add up or downvotes to their accounts total. For instance, you were at +70 upvotes from me. But if I didn’t like you, I could add a tag to your account with why or whatever, and add -1000, effectively highlighting, for me, how much less I enjoy your input compared to others. It doesn’t hide their bullshit but makes it super obvious who sucks complete ass!
Along the vein of blocking, I like how lemmy does it. I can see the block person left a comment and choose to read it or ignore it.
How do you do that? I’m on voyager and didn’t know about this. I would love tags
Settings>User Tags>Track Votes! :D
Awesome! Ty!
Yup, it’s pretty rad! To add or remove stuff on a user account, tap their name then use the three do a in the upper-right to get to tags. From there, it’s easy peasy!
Thanks that’s useful!
You’re +8 for me!
And you cook better than you insult!
That could be. I guess I’ve got a tag!
But I know what I mean, have a good day!
And its on froid
Blocking means you can’t see them. It makes them non existent to you. It doesn’t hide you from them. It’s working as intended.
I’d call that “muting” rather than blocking.
And it leaves vulnerable communities open to abuse, because they’re unable to police their communities and kick out harassers.
Do those communities not have mods? Oh they do? Report them if they’re breaking the rules then. If they’re not breaking the rules then you just need to harden up.
You need to harden up even if they are breaking the rules though.
If they are running their own communities yes they can. Mods can and do ban people from the communities.
lemmy communities and irl communities aren’t the same, they only sometimes partially overlap.
That’s unfair. It’s rather fair they don’t see me, I blocked them for a reason.
You get to control your own experience, not their experience.
My experience is, I see that there’s a comment, I can’t read it, I can’t upvote or downvote it, and I couldn’t report it, wonderful!
Why would you want to read a comment by someone you’ve blocked, and why would you want to upvote, downvote, or report a comment that you haven’t read?
Ask yourself that question when it’s about time.
I have on occasion unblocked people just to see what was in a thread. I’ve never really been glad that I did so. I blocked them for a reason. I shouldn’t want to engage with their posts. I’m happier and it makes things more calm when I’m not fighting with morons over shit anyone can see is wrong.
What you are asking for is closer to something like being able to personally ban another user from all your own content.
This would be more like if you made all your comments and posts in your own personal community, and then banned a user from it.
This, your suggested paradigm, can also be entirely defeated by someone just… making another account.
Or even: Logging out, and viewing as a guest.
Closer to message board styled systems are not twitter, are not instagram.
If you wanna try to develop something like a ‘private profile’ mode for lemmy, where you would have to grant access to every individual user you wanted to be able to see your posts and comments, good luck, go for it, code’s open source, best I can tell, all dev work on it is unpaid, volunteers.
I am reasonably confident this is basically impossible given how lemmy is architected, but hey, maybe I’m wrong.
I used to agree with you until I actually spoke with people from communities that get regularly harassed.
Muting is great if all you want to do is hide content you don’t like. But if you need to defend yourself against a campaign of harassment, this only gives power to the harassers.
Yes all the have to do is make a new account, but it’s another hurdle they have to cross. Better than no hurdle and also blindfolding yourself
I used to agree with you until I actually spoke with people from communities that get regularly harassed.
Oh great, this again.
Wtf does that even mean?
I mean…
I am describing a technical reality of how lemmy works.
You can ‘disagree’ with that, but uh, you would just be wrong.
Not in the sense of ‘I do not have enough empathy to consider the plight of a regularly harassed person’.
More in the sense of … ok, then don’t use lemmy, if you don’t like how it works.
Or… make it work the way you want it to work, by actually coding it.
Like, I wasn’t joking when I basically said ‘I am reasonbly confident it is impossible to make lemmy work the way you want it to.’
Thats not my opinion, in a… how should things work in an ideal world, sense of ‘opinion’.
It is my opinion, as a person who understands a bit (certainly not all) about how the code just actually works.
If you can figure it out, I’d be impressed.
Alternatively, if you’d like to pay me $50 an hour to attempt to develop that, I may have some room in my schedule.
I could do it at 48/h, js
I know, i had a whole discussion about this 2 years ago, which is why I changed my mind about this very topic (I used to be very much "things are public by default, no expectation of privacy in a social network).
but that doesn’t make it good. this is a problem with the design of lemmy IMO. Lemmy is the best popular option we have right now, and unfortunately popularity is important. Lemmy is already a ghost town, i cant imagine moving to an even smaller alternative.
better than reddit, but far from perfect.
I thought you blocked the person so you wouldn’t have to read what they wrote
The only way to do that in a federated system would be to effectively make blocks public. That has its own disadvantages.
Sorry I’m a nurse, explain it to me like I’m five years old.
It’s hard to control which Information other people get in a system where many servers share information like posts and comments. Think of it as throwing your post on a public wall. Everyone that walks by will be able to see it.
It’s (relatively) easy to control what information you want to see. Or at least information from which sources you want to see, or not see.
Since each instance is its own ‘website’ that shares content with each other, your block would need to be publicly available so that every other site can see it and implement it.
Thanks Final conclusion, no offence: Blocking is rather useless in the Fediverse, unless you submit to complete ignorance.
That’s mostly true; it’s optimized for wide dissemination of information, and the idea of keeping a specific person from seeing information that’s shown to the rest of the world isn’t very compatible with that. It doesn’t really work on Reddit or web forums that are visible without logging in either since a person you’ve blocked can still view your posts anonymously.
A bit more looking brings me to the ActivityPub spec. Your server should tell the blocked user’s server about the block, and the blocked user’s server shouldn’t allow them to interact with your posts or comments (that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to see your posts or comments).
The thing is, in network protocol documents, should means the behavior is optional. Fediverse software doesn’t have to support blocks at all according to the protocol.
Imagine a hypothetical situation where I have beef with you. I create a second account and block you. I use this account to scout your posts, then using that other account, I go to all of the posts you’re commenting on, and post comments calling you out for being… I don’t know, whatever nasty thing I want to call you out for. Because that account has blocked you, you can’t see those posts (and presumably not the replies to them, either), and can’t defend yourself.
What problem have we solved?
The problem you’ve solved is that they’re not harassing you in your spaces, and your communities.
If they wanna cry about me in their basement with their own friends, that’s ok. But I want to put hurdles, at least some inconveniences, between myself and their ability to harass me in my communities. Force them to manage 30 accounts, etc.Well multi accounting is the next problem… Just live an unpeacefull live then…
Go back to Reddit? This system stops witch hunts, effectively stops echo chambers from gaining traction, and helps protect against power tripping mods.
Much like someone else told you, you can control what you see. If you don’t see the trolls do they really exist for you? If you don’t go looking for their “ghost” you won’t find it
Lemmy (ActivityPub protocol) doesn’t have great implementation for getting the last word. There’s no feature that allows you to send a message, verify they read it, then prevent them from responding.
A lot of people here never had a stalker and it shows.
If you’re concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system — which is what OP is talking about in terms of “blocking” would be – on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not — both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.
In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you’re going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.
Some stalkers might notice and circumvent, but most won’t because in their mind they aren’t doing anything wrong so why would they check if they got blocked. But apparently if the solution is not perfect it’s not worth doing anything to deter it seems.
Because it would allow people to push narratives and not get called out if they block everyone against them.
Imagine a civil transphobe pushing some narrative that flies below the radar of whatever mods are moderating that comm. If they block all the trans users they cannot get called out on their stuff anymore.
I think there was some discourse on this on black mastodon?
Blocks work the way you want them to on Reddit. And all it did was allow people with fringe political beliefs and misinformation fetishes to stop decent people from refuting them. This is for the best.
It also makes Lemmy objectively less safe because it’s much less effective at limiting stalking and harassment. Especially since way blocks work on Lemmy isn’t clearly communicated to the user.
The solution here is obvious - creating an instance and/or community with stricter moderation rules, much like blåhaj.zone.
Each instance/community has the ability to set their own general rules and whilst (yes) this means that an individual person can’t guarantee their “safety” everywhere it does mean anyone can create their own little bubble and then pick & choose which parts of the fediverse to connect with.
The fediverse is at its core a free speech project, which is why I like it. There are many other platforms out there that focus on safety.
That style of blocking makes sense for more personal social media, but I don’t think it fits a public forum like the Threadiverse. On Reddit, bad actors were able to weaponize blocking to hide from anyone who would disagree with them, anyone who would push back against misinformation. That did a lot more harm than good.
Everything you post here is public, and you should expect that anyone can see it, even people you do not like. If you don’t want to see someone you don’t like, that’s what blocking is for, but you shouldn’t expect to be able control who can see your posts when they’re all public to begin with.
If something is so sensitive that you think you need to hide it from someone you don’t like, then this probably isn’t the platform to post it on at all.
For anyone wondering how the blocking feature has been weaponized to spread misinformation, in 2022 a redditor did an experiment: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/
Afaik, the blocking feature is still in the same state as in 2022, which makes modern reddit a heaven for spreading misinformation.
I’d call what you’re describing “muting” rather than blocking.
I used to agree with you, but then I spoke with some people from persecuted minorities, and this style of blocking just gives power to their abusers rather than keeping their communities and themselves safe.
Yes they can get a new account, but it’s another hurdle, and if we erect enough hurdles then it’ll catch enough of them. Defense in depth.
We’ve seen the problems with Reddit’s style of blocking already.
If someone’s being truly abusive, that’s something you should report to moderators or instance admins.
I agree it has problems, but that doesn’t mean that anything is better.
Reporting someone is good, but isn’t that subject to the exact same reasons why “it won’t work”? If reddit style blocking someone isn’t effective anyways, why would admin bans be effective?
This assumes that admins and mods even have the capacity to deal with all this shit, which seems to be very uncertain.I don’t understand what you mean. Moderator bans do work, that’s a moderator’s job.
a common response I’ve been getting is “blocking doesn’t work, they just need to make a new account”
but then they say “if its really a problem, then they just need to report the user”
but if making a new account would defeat blocking, then making a new account would defeat reporting a user. its either effective in both places or neither place.That isn’t what I said. You’re replying to me to talk about somebody else’s argument, while completely ignoring mine.
sorry i was getting it mixed up, i’ve had a very similar conversations a few times and that rebuttal came up multiple times.
mods and admins are overworked, and they can’t always be expected to keep up to date with dogwhistles along with everything else they have to manage. besides, harassment doesn’t always appear to break ToS - starting rumours and spreading lies about someone can be very difficult to prove to a mod, but can have huge repercussions in some communities.
and besides, it can take a while before mods/admins are able to take action.IMO I think a few things should exist.
I should be able to prevent someone from replying to my content even if I can’t prevent them from seeing it.
Additionally, I think there should be a best effort to make invite-only/private communities. I know that the fediverse makes this technically difficult, but having something is better than having nothing.
Two sides of the medal…
Thank you for explaining to me why I didn’t like blocking but couldn’t express why.
I think the way it works is good.
-
If the blocked user browses on another account (or not logged in at all), they can’t tell that you have blocked them.
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Bot/spam accounts can’t use the blocking system to stop users who target these accounts to call them out on their disguised malicious behavior. This became a problem on Reddit when they changed their blocking system away from what we have here.
Edit: I guess there is a downside of if so many of the sane users block the same nutjobs, then there won’t be anybody to downvote or refute those nutjobs
I guess there is a downside of if so many of the sane users block the same nutjobs, then there won’t be anybody to downvote or refute those nutjobs
This has nothing to do with the block system. No matter how it worked, this would be the case. What you’re describing isn’t a block system, it’s moderation, which we still have (though it’s obviously up to the moderators of any given community). That is to say, blocking only affects what you see. Moderation affects what everyone sees, which is what you’re talking about here.
if so many of the sane users block the same nutjobs, then there won’t be anybody to downvote or refute those nutjobs
Don’t worry, a lot of us never block anybody, specifically so we can do exactly that.
i used to do that, but my sanity suffered, now i block liberally
But the nut job will be stuck in his own bubble unable to talk to everyone, which is more sane than engaging them
True…
-
How the Threadiverse works today — blocking hides content from blocked users, but doesn’t affect their ability to comment — is how Reddit originally worked, and I think that it was by far a better system.
Reddit only adopted the “you can’t reply to a comment from someone who has blocked you” system later. What it produced was people getting into fights, adding one more comment, and then blocking the other person so that they’d be unable to respond, so it looked like the other person had conceded the point.
A thousand percent this.
Reddit’s new system makes a ton of sense until you see it in action in a cat fight with the blocked user having to edit their previous comment to clarify they’re now unable to respond to anything the other user is saying and everything turns into a mess.While I could totally agree neither method is perfect, it only takes one heated thread on Reddit to see why (IMO) this new method is much worse than the previous.
I’m not totally sure about the chronology, but I think that the “old->new” block change on Reddit may have been due to calls from Twitter users. Most of the people I saw back on Reddit complaining about the old behavior prior to the change were saying “on Twitter, blocked users can’t respond”.
On Reddit, the site is basically split up into a series of forums, subreddits. On the Threadiverse, same idea, but the term is communities. And that’s the basic unit of moderation — that is, people set up a set of rules for how what is permitted on a given community, and most restrictions arise from that. There are Reddit sitewide restrictions (and here, instancewide), but those don’t usually play a huge role compared to the community-level things.
So, on Twitter — and I’ve never made a Twitter account, and don’t spend much time using it, but I believe I’ve got a reasonable handle on how it works — there’s no concept of a topic-specific forum. The entire site is user-centric. Comments don’t live in forums talking about a topic; they only are associated with the text in them and with the parent comment. So if you’re on Twitter, there has to be some level of content moderation unless you want to only have sitewide restrictions. On Twitter, having a user be able to act as “moderator” for responses makes a lot more sense than on Reddit, because Twitter lacks an analog to subreddit moderators.
So Twitter users, who were accustomed to having a “block” feature, naturally found Reddit’s “block” feature, which did something different from what they were used to, to be confusing. They click “block”, and what it actually does is not what they expect — and worse, at a surface glance, the behavior is the same. They think that they’re acting as a moderator, but they’re just controlling visibility of comments to themselves. Then they have an unpleasant surprise when they realize that what they’ve been doing isn’t what they think that they’ve been doing.
Yeah, looking through a Twitter’s user lens I can see why they’re confused. What on Reddit was a block, on Twitter would be a Mute. Maybe they should call it that.
I’d also add, for people who feel that they don’t have a good way to “hang up” on a conversation that they don’t want to be participating any further without making it look like they agree with the other user, the convention is to comment something like this:
“I don’t think that we’re likely to agree on this point, so I’m afraid that we’re going to have to agree to disagree.”
That way, it’s clear to everyone else reading the thread that the breaking-off user isn’t simply conceding the point, but it also doesn’t prevent the other user from responding (or, for that matter, other users from taking up the thread).
EDIT: Also, on Reddit, I remember a lot of users who had been subjected to the “one more comment and a block” stuff then going to try to find random other comments in the thread where other users might see their comment, responding to those comments complaining that the other user had blocked them, and then posting their comment there, which tended to turn the whole thread into an ugly soup.
Also, with Reddit’s new system, at least with some clients and if I remember correctly, the old Web UI, there was no clear indication as to why the comment didn’t take effect — it looked like some sort of internal error, which tended to frustrate users. Obviously, that’s not a fundamental problem with a “blocking a user also prevents responding” system, but it was a pretty frustrating aspect of Reddit’s implementation of it.
It… Makes perfect sense?
YOU blocked them. They didn’t block you.
It’s like when you were a kid and told to ignore the kid bullying you; except that it actually works.
If I block them, I want to stop them from engaging with me.
I don’t want to let them continue to engage with me and other people in my comments, but just lose my ability to see what they’re saying about me.
That’s like saying the purpose of a locked door isn’t to keep people out, it’s to prevent you from seeing what they’re doing in your house
If I block them, I want to stop them from engaging with me.
That’s exactly what happens. They can no longer engage with YOU because YOU no longer see THEM.
It’s a curtain, not a door.
Engaging with me is more than my ability to respond.
Them replying to my content is still engaging with me, no matter if I can see it. Them telling misinformation to other people in my thread is still engaging with me.You are (I know this is a shock) not the centre of the internet. Your inability to police what other people say is not a bug, but a feature.
you are (I know this is a shock) not the center of society. your ability to harass people without repercussion is a bug, not a feature.
This is not harassment. If you feel otherwise please use the tools provided and report.
whats not harassment?
Nah, in a public discussion, you/authorship isn’t the primary concern, the text & interest of the public is primary. Whether you want to see that text is your liberty. The liberty of the public, however, is to likewise decide for themselves whether to read the text no matter who authors it regardless of petty disagreements between authors. Your disagreements aren’t ours.
Just like in offline public discussions, no one should decide whether the public gets to see a marvelous takedown of text you happened to write just because you disagree with the author of that spectacular takedown.
I disagree that all content on lemmy should be treated as strictly public. I think that there are (or should be) nuance to that.
I realize that federation creates technical challenges to meet that strictly, but a best effort is better than no effort.
for example, I think its reasonable to have communities that are invite-only. AFAIK thats not currently possible in lemmy, but giving a best-effort to make that happen would be better than nothing. Instances known to ignore it could be defederated, clients known to ignore it could be blocked. swiss cheese defense.
I disagree that all content on lemmy should be treated as strictly public.
Acknowledging your disagreement, it’s observable fact that it is. It’s readable to the public & open to public input. That input may be more concerned with responding to ideas (eg, as a criticism or corroboration) and presenting that to the public reader than for communicating specifically to the author of the text that inspired it. I certainly read primarily for content & ideas and respond accordingly like I’m trying to show the public something. Anyone can respond.
Comments I release to the public I treat as the public’s & not really mine. If that’s not for you, then I don’t think you’re identifying a technical limitation but a disagreement with design goals: the design of lemmy makes much sense for public discussion.
With private, direct messages, you may have a better argument.
so just a point here - the OP never actually said that the blockee shouldn’t be able to see what the blocker posted, they weren’t actually complaining about visibility of their own content.
they were complaining that when they blocked someone, the blockee could continue the harassing behaviour and the blocker would just be ignorant of the slander being said of them. if the blockee escalated to doxxing or something, they wouldn’t even know, and the blockee could do it and would be unlikely to be reported since reporting on behalf of someone (i expect) is much less common unless the offense is both egregious and trivially verifiable.They were complaining the blockee could write any public response even an impersonal one.
Doxxing & other issues likely already violate rules & I don’t see how that would happen, since we don’t reveal much about ourselves. I don’t see how defamation would happen without a real identity. Harassment likely wouldn’t fit the legal definition: at most, some call being incredibly annoying harassment.
I’ve seen threatening replies I didn’t report (because I consider online threats vacant hyperbole) result in bans.
I think that the important thing to keep in mind is that not every lemmy community is a community of strangers. some lemmy communities can overlap significantly with IRL communities, like sports teams, neighborhoods, and classes. Many people in these lemmy communities may know eachother, even if the mods dont know them.
I dont have specific examples of this, since im an old fart and not a school kid with a bunch of extracurricular activities, but are the kinds of cases I’m worried about.in these kinds of examples, the harassment may be both especially potent and especially subtle, because they’ll be using dog whistles and inside jokes, so it may not be something a mod is equipped to handle. Ideally parents would get involved (in the case of schoolkids), but we know that doesn’t always happen.
You don’t get to make that decision.
you dont get to make that decision
I didn’t say I do - the software developers of Lemmy did. If you don’t like it go back to Reddit where they do exactly what you are asking for.
I’ve never been on reddit, fucking crazy puritan.
and guess what: the developers of lemmy can change it if they want to.
but meanwhile here you are, insulting people for having differing opinions, and discussing why they have those reasons. huh, funny.fucking crazy puritan.
Where did this come from? lol What a bizarre thing to say over this.m, especially when you’re the one crying over people saying mean things behind your back lol.
and guess what: the developers of lemmy can change it if they want to.
No shit sherlock.
but meanwhile here you are, insulting people for having differing opinions
Where am I doing that?
I love you, but I hate you!
The way Reddit does is abusive. I called out a guy for spamming, he blocked me, he’s the one who creates TV discussion threads, I can’t participate anymore.
Why not start your own TV discussion threads with blackjack and hookers?
Evento better, with blahaj and hookers.*
The way Reddit does is abusive.
Yes, but counterpoint: it was also petty and satisfying as fuuuuck hammering someone with your last point and then blocking them so that after they write up their long-ass reply outlining why eugenics is the true path to a glorious white future, they end up getting an error message.
Yah, it was very bad for actual discourse, but that ship has sailed. people don’t care about debate and discourse anymore, on almost every social media site people post things as stand-alone displays to viewers for points, never engaging with each other unless there’s a contentious point that can be leveraged for up-arrows and thumbs.
We have to get back to talking to each other in real life and stop pretending having introversion or social anxiety is anything but an obstacle to community and a better world
they block evade by using another account to restart the conservation, or they get mad if you block them, then they try to mass report you.
From a technical standpoint, doing it in another way requires your blocks to be public.
He and you are both publishing individual comments with metadata telling which thread and where in it that these entries go. The instance hosting the community simply pull all these entries together. To cut off that response then your instance must tell that hosting instance to detach that reply from the blocked user. Currently Lemmy doesn’t support any such thing.
