Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.
It is definitely a “quirk” of lemmy. When I’ve brought it up, the answer I got was basically, “everything on Lemmy is public, so blocking wouldn’t do anything.”
That’s not how it works on most other social media (for example in mastodon, which is similarly public), but there you have it.
I get that you can’t stop people from commenting on your posts but you can still filter it out from the results.
Mastodon is arguably easier to deal with since you’re replying directly to someone, so the user’s server can reject it and be done with it. On Lemmy it really should behave as if you blocked the user: just hide it from view. Simply because if you’re on instance A, blocked instance is B and the community is on C, B has no problem posting to C as it doesn’t know you’ve blocked it on A. But even defederation doesn’t address that either: you can reply to defederated users and they’ll never know for the same reason.
I think on this type of social media, not seeing it is the best you can do regardless.
If they used the native instance blocking feature to “completely block” the instance that actually only hides posts from that instance.
From https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-12-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.0_-_Instance_blocking,_Scaled_sort,_and_Federation_Queue
Huh, guess I mixed it up with the admin version of it.
That seems dubiously useful to me, if a user blocks lemmygrad they probably want none of it, not just hide the posts.
It is definitely a “quirk” of lemmy. When I’ve brought it up, the answer I got was basically, “everything on Lemmy is public, so blocking wouldn’t do anything.”
That’s not how it works on most other social media (for example in mastodon, which is similarly public), but there you have it.
I get that you can’t stop people from commenting on your posts but you can still filter it out from the results.
Mastodon is arguably easier to deal with since you’re replying directly to someone, so the user’s server can reject it and be done with it. On Lemmy it really should behave as if you blocked the user: just hide it from view. Simply because if you’re on instance A, blocked instance is B and the community is on C, B has no problem posting to C as it doesn’t know you’ve blocked it on A. But even defederation doesn’t address that either: you can reply to defederated users and they’ll never know for the same reason.
I think on this type of social media, not seeing it is the best you can do regardless.