I think you've just (perhaps independently) discovered the (in my mind very important) idea that moderation is different from censorship. I think the fediverse structure implements that distinction a lot better than most other platforms nowadays do.
Unfortunately it's still a very weak type of blocking, for you on Lemmy.ca unless you are using an app like Sync or Connect. It's basically a "community mute", equivalent to unsubscribing from all the communities there individually, but unlike user blocking, the users from that instance will still show up in other communities, they can still send you replies, which will trigger Notifications, and therefore they can harass you by continually sending you replies for WEEKS and WEEKS at a time (this actually happened to me twice, once with hexbear.net and another time with lemmygrad.ml).
Anyway, it's better than nothing!
You may be interested to read some of the ways that PieFed is advancing democratization of moderation.
they can harass you by continually sending you replies for WEEKS and WEEKS at a time (this actually happened to me twice, once with hexbear.net and another time with lemmygrad.ml).
Honestly you really shouldn't be on an instance that federate with those places to start with.
You may be interested to read some of the ways that PieFed is advancing democratization of moderation.
Personally I'm not a fan of the way PieFed uses upvotes and downvotes to basically do statistics on users in order to profile "bad actors". That feels like karma from Reddit all over again.
There can be many legitimate reasons why a user might downvote a lot, and a user being downvoted a lot is not necessarily problematic. They may just not be following the "hive mind", and honestly we could use more of those users.
Good to hear!
I agree. It also works the other way in terms of censorship.
My original account was on an instance that once censored one of my comments. I don't remember if they deleted my comment or banned me from the community.
On reddit, I had come to just accept that as a fact of life and every few years I would delete my old account and register a new one.
On Lemmy, I just switched to a different instance which is much more tolerant of free speech and I haven't had issues since.
The irony is, my comments on the old instance can still be deleted, but only for users from that instance.
I don't know the full details, but Lemmy definitely has the more 2000-2010 type of culture that allows people to speak their mind freely.
Never had a reason to block an instance, here or in mastodon.
That is not the point, the point is that you can. You can curate your feed yourself instead of relying solely on an algorithm or a curation team
I blocked lemmynsfw so that I don’t see straight up porn in my feed but can still see posts labeled nsfw from other instances because a lot of posts that get labeled nsfw are just things like explicit text or the OP labeled it nsfw because it’s not exactly nsfw but also not completely regular either.
On mastodon I follow a lot of hashtags and so I will mute foreign language accounts so they don’t show up in my home feed. Thankfully I’ve never had to block an entire instance but I chalk that up to troublesome instances already being defederated from my instance
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
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