I want to know when and why younger people seem to think that blocking inherently works both ways. It's almost never worked like that. If you block someone, you are hiding them from your sight; not hiding yourself from theirs. This is the most common way blocking works, with very few sites working the way OP thinks it should.

I'm not sure how or why it hasn't been mentioned yet, but one reason blocking is the way it is, is because in a public forum like this, blocking somebody else from seeing your content is extremely open to abuse, while providing no real benefit from a protection perspective. As accounts are essentially free and unlimited, any malicious user can logout or spin up a new account to bypass your block.

On the abuse issue, it was previously shown with some testing on Reddit that by posting something offensive and controversial, then blocking everybody who responded in a negative manner, you could within 3 - 5 rounds of blocking reach the point where you could post practically anything and have it seen like a popular opinion, since everybody who disagreed with you and was willing to call out your bullshit couldn't see it any more. Hence technical reasons aside, there are very good systemic reasons the blocking mechanism works the way it does.

Oh you were new to even reddit. The thing you want is something that was only added there a few years ago. Before it worked the exact same way as it does here.

Sorry, we just expect you to be an adult and not care about the numbers. That's why there isn't a count on your page. Do you know how often I have people follow me around in my comments to downvote me? A lot. Know what I do? Nothing because I'm over 30.

You use "stalk" for "see what you publicly publicized". You block people to not be annoyed, not to be safe. Consider that AN UNLOGGED, ANONYMOUS user can also see your posts. How is blocking supposed to work in this case?

I think the utility of blocking people on a public platform is kind of fake anyway. If someone is harassing you, and you block them, it's obvious that you did it so they'll just log out and suddenly they can see your posts again. Accounts are trivial to make on the fediverse too so they can always just spin up a new one to harass you.

I think silent filtering is better for that reason because they can't tell that you did it so they won't just immediately switch to a new account and keep going.

Active blocking like you're talking about only makes sense if there's such a thing as "follower-only" posts imo. Otherwise it's a false sense of security because they can see everything anyway just by logging out or switching to another account.

This is an obscure forum with fake internet points 🙄

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.

I mean, okay.

If I already said something publicly, I expect it to be read publicly.

The block tool is because I'm tired of dealing with their bullshit, not because I'm afraid of them reading what I've posted.

Still nice to know though, I guess.

I understand your frustration and I, too, thought that blocking went both ways before seeing your post.

If you encounter someone who is harassing you and attacking your reputation without your knowledge and down voting your whole history, you should gather the proof and contact your instances mods. There's a very good chance they'll ban them either temporarily or permanently from the instance. Or contact the mods from their instance as well.

Anyway, I hope this helps.

It's a different blocking philosophy. Reddit used to work like Lemmy does, for example. The keyword here being "used to". Here's their announcement post from when they changed it.

I personally prefer this method of blocking, because you're not a moderator or administrator and thus should not get to customize the experience of other users than yourself. Yes, there's the legitimate use case of stopping mass downvoters. But two-way blocking can also be (and has been) used maliciously. You can slander someone and then block them, making them unable to defend themselves or even know what happened, for example.

Same thing happened to me. If I block someone on Mastodon or another Fediverse microblogging instance, they're blocked. Because that part of the Fediverse was built by people who had been harassed and doxxed off other platforms.

Here? Blocking just means you don't see the troll, but they can continue to inflict all kinds of havoc on your post scores. Ironically, "karma" isn't a thing on Lemmy like it is on Reddit, but votes are still used to rank your posts.

I guess there are a hundred great folk on here for every preteen edgelord, but that kind of nonsense really spoils the fun of this platform. Sorry to see you get downvoted for a perfectly reasonable post.

Piefed seems to implement bidirectional blocking

✅ blocking – users, communities, domains, instances. bi-directional.

https://join.piefed.social/roadmap/

@rimu@piefed.social @Snoopy@piefed.social @fxomt@piefed.social

Your post comes off pretty aggressive, phrase it as a feature request or bug report and you would get a nicer reception. As it is your post feels more like a rant than anything.

I don't particularly care about the downvoting, but I do prefer bidirectional blocking when possible. Obviously a public profile is still visible, but if someone blocked had to make a new account to interact with you, that'd be nice.

That's just a preference. Whatever the consensus is, I'll be fine with it. The most important thing is that it's clear and known how it works. Someone with a stalker should quickly be able to get how things work to decide if they want to be on here.

Be that as it may, I love seeing a reply to one of my posts from someone I've blocked.

Lets me know that whatever bullshit they wrote is going to go eternally unanswered, and I hope it frustrates them.

That is how blocking works on most platforms.

So, there's a inherent problem with blocking working both ways on a forum style site or platform like Lemmy.

When you block someone and the block goes through, if it works both ways, that means your comments or exchanges with that person disappear. The problem with that? They disappear for you and the person you blocked. Anyone else who comments can see the thread. But you both no longer can. So say someone comes along and responds to you on that thread. Or to the other person on that thread? Will their comment go through? Will you be able to see their comment? Will you be able to reply to their comment?

It becomes more complicated and further can affect users not related to or involve with the block depending on how it's handled and for the most part that's problematic.

I think we should be differentiating a "block function" (and neither the twain shall meet) from a "mute function" (a one way filter).

I feel like this might genuinely just be better than giving people a false understanding of what the filter they are using does.

I never heard of redit. Is that like ribbit? Or some new fangled app or something?