Do you have a criteria for what qualifies as block-worthy offence or are you just doing it when you feel like it?
Bonus question: how long is your block list?
I think Lemmy’s devs seem to not understand this problem otherwise they would’ve kept a version of two way blocking in Lemmy and wouldn’t fight this idea so much:
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4041#issuecomment-1777961579
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4205
Proper blocking systems for preventing harassment need to at a basic level stop people from replying to the user or their content. People can argue that this can be abused but not having it will be abused more in exactly the same way you said.
I think that it would be possible to implement true/two-way blocking while minimising the amount of abuse, if the blocklist is public. As in, if Alice simply mutes Bob, nobody knows it; but if Alice blocks Bob, you can see in Alice’s profile “blocking: Bob”.
I also think that the mute / block user option needs to have a confirmation window. From this thread it’s obvious that a lot of people are muting bad faith users, instead of reporting them. That’s bad because the problems never reach the ears of those who can act on them.
(I’m just throwing ideas around, mind you. Take them with a grain of salt, there might be some catch that I didn’t realise.)
Yeah I do think there needs to be confirmation since it is way too easy to just quickly mute a lot of people in rapid succession.
I’m not sure if making them public is a great idea, since people might be bad faith trolls but that might not be apparent to other people at first glance. I probably would have at least 50 on my list if it were a feature, to someone who doesn’t know it might seem like I’m abusing the system but almost all of those people were either harassing me or others. Many have been banned but not all of them. Maybe it could be visible to admins, but not general users.
I’m not even really sure how big of an issue blocking abuse really is in reality, since on Reddit many of the people who complain about it are trolls in and of themselves, some of the people complaining about the changes to the blocking system are actually suspended currently. So not really sure it is a real problem. Abuse of the muting feature though is a much more serious problem because if all or most people just do this all the time instead of reporting eventually instances and communities become overrun with trolls and bad faith actors because people are not reporting them, meaning the only ones who would get actioned are the ones caught explicitly by the mods and admins. Not good.
