I block pretty freely, on all social media. Being both trans and religious means that people on any part of the political spectrum might think I’m subhuman, and I don’t see the point of engaging when that’s the case.

I’ve gotten more aggressive with blocks lately. Feels like there’s been a lot more arguing and drama on here lately than usual, and I haven’t been on as much because of it. Blocking at least drowns a lot of that out.

I have blocked hundreds of communities to sanitise my ‘all’ feed, and a few foreign language instances. But only a handful of obnoxious users. The users I’m inclined to block often end up banned anyway

Cool, block me too

Only disappointing thing is they can still see and respond to my posts, just that I can’t see it. I wish they couldn’t see anything I posted either.

I’ve seen this view in discussions of blocking before and it really bugs me. You’re desiring to unilaterally control what I can see and do on the Fediverse.

This is how it works on Reddit and it’s a terrible mechanism. It means you can preemptively ensure that anyone who might refute misinformation will be excluded from your threads before you post them. It means you can step into a conversation I’m having with someone, derail it, and then prevent me from responding to your derail. Over on Reddit by far the most common use I see of the block tool is to get the “last word” in on whatever argument is going on, posting some sort of seemingly clever comeback and then instantly blocking me before I can point out the flaws.

For anyone wondering how the blocking feature has been weaponized to spread misinformation, in 2022 a redditor did an experiment: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/

I blocked like that on reddit but here there’s fewer users so I have a higher block threshold.

Plus I want to give people credit for choosing to be on the fediverse - that earns almost everyone a “well maybe you just had a bad day”.

I wish there was a hide posts option, rather than a flat out block. There are some overly prolific posters that i would like to block, but their comments are not an issue, just the 40 rapid fire posts they made.

I block freely. My time and attention and mental and emotional bandwidth are limited resources, and to the extent possible I intend to spend them carefully.

People who I notice just dont get jokes and are in 20 different meme communities being all serious? Blocked.

I’ve become massively hardened to online discourse. I don’t need to block users when I can just ignore and not need to get the last word in. I know this is an incredibly rare ability, but I just wanted to entertain the idea here that there are alternatives.

The exception could be for discoverability. If garbage trolling spam overwhelms your front page, then it’ll be too time consuming to wade through it… So blocking entire communities makes a lot of sense in this case.

I hardly ever block individual posters, but communities, I’ve blocked 936 of them at the time of making this post. Sports, porn, anime, or furry shit are all block on sight. Plus a handful of randoms that I’m just not interested in.

I’ve finally got All where it’s pleasant to browse. Takes some doing, but worth the effort if you want to customize your feed reductively vs actively seeking out and subscribing to communities.

I’d say there could be two styles:

• In one, you want to see the “real” unfiltered Internet, or try to not wrap yourself in information bubbles.
• In another, you make your Internet space more welcoming and inspiring.

Both have their merits, with the first improving your grip on real state of affairs, and the other stimulating you to be productive and positive, and being on the Internet as a place to enjoy life.

Personally, I go with the first, since I’m very concerned about how societal attitudes shift in the world. Granted, Lemmy itself is a bit of an echo chamber, but this is not the only place I hang around.

I don’t ever want people I blocked to not be able to see my stuff when the account is public. It’s just a weird limitation and gives a false sense of security. Though not being able to directly reply to things would be nice.

More people need to make use of the curation tools available to them in my opinion. Too often I see people browsing /all and then complain about seeing tons of stuff that they don’t like. There are tools that are available to them to help them create a more pleasant experience that they just aren’t using. The fediverse doesn’t have some algorithm that learns the type of content that you most often engage with and feed it to you, you have to more proactively do the curation yourself.

Just as an example, I was in a conversation with one of the lemmy.world admins a while back. We were talking about instance blocks and how infrequently users actually use them. Across all of the users on lemmy.world, only about 700 of them actually created an instance block for the most-blocked instance (lemmynsfw). Only two instances had more than 500 users block it.

i do the same you are not alone. besides nazis, PROPaganda, or conservatives. condescending, passive aggressive, or “actually this is or that is wrong, and why you should do this or that to be better” i will block them too. or try to correct you on what they believe his “historically correct of a mythos”, like an example couple weeks ago i was commenting on the nature of a specific “angel” and someone said actually i dont believe your interpretarion is corrects, its not to my view of the angel mythos, i dont want to know which one of your opinion is correct on a fabricated being. i regurlarly did this on reddit, it has saved me from getting into reportable arguements from time to time. confrontational and judgemental are also up on my list of blocks.