I had to block a few users yesterday. Today, I noticed about ten notifications from users I’ve blocked—they replied to me, continued to make up lies about my heritage, and I continued to see their comments in my notifications.
It seems that the only effect of my blocking them is that I can no longer see their comments in context—although I am still notified of their harassment. This is quite the opposite effect from the one I was going for—I mean, I’m happy to spend less time engaging with them, but the block feature seems to be guaranteeing these bigots the “last word” and preventing me from even reporting them. They can then follow me anywhere on kbin and continue to harass me, the block function is only stopping me from doing anything about it.
At least one of these users is on the same instance as I am, kbin.social.
Why doesn’t blocking work?
Thanks for the writeup, it helped me see things from your perspective. I don’t fully agree, but I get now why you’re asking for this.
What I’m wondering now is, does the fediverse actually support the kind of block that’s being asked for here? Like, is there precedent on this being implemented on other platforms like Mastodon or Lemmy? The issue here is that kbin isn’t in control of who sees your posts, I wonder if it’s actually possible to implement this in the first place.
If you actually believe this, you’re a bit shortsighted. This is the fediverse, people can just jump onto a different instance. And even on Reddit multiple accounts for the same person were allowed.
People can also run their own personal instance which doesn’t honor those blocks.
Yeah, Mastodon has separate block and mute functions. Somebody just accused me of “playing the underdog card” for saying that babies should have their heads attached to their necks, in a whole long chain of comments where he frequently mischaracterized my points, so yes, I blocked him.
well, multiple reddit accounts to get around a block or ban were specifically forbidden, but you’re right, it’s possible.
the thing you’re still confused about is thinking that it’s something everybody does the second they get banned. There is a limit to the amount of work people actually end up doing to troll others on the internet. Some trolls have an iron will and are stubborn to no end; the vast majority will lose steam eventually and just go do something else.
If you set up your own instance just to troll people more effectively, and somehow manage to stay federated with your victims’ servers, you might just be a corner case.