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?

  • e569668@fedia.io
    1·
    9 months ago

    does the fediverse actually support the kind of block that’s being asked for here?

    Yea, that’s where I’m thinking the hangup on this might be. A block could be implemented, but it’d come with the caveat of that all it’s doing is giving you the idea they aren’t continuing to engage with you on your instance. On their instance, and any instance that federates with them, they and others will continue to see the replies.

    Personally, I would like to see block renamed to mute to be more accurate and a block from replying added with the note about the drawbacks of them being able to tell you blocked them and their posts still going out everywhere else. That at least empowers the user to make the decision themselves on what they’re most ok with. My reasoning is: changing the UI for, let’s say an aggressor, gives them a reason to retaliate. To me, either blocking method is a lose-lose; either it doesn’t stop engagement which some users clearly want it to, or it makes it obvious someone is being blocked which start aggressors down the retaliation path. That’s kind of why I’d want users to make their own risk assessment on actions.

    Anyways, that’s all very unlikely to happen. Most of all I’d like the bug about notifications fixed because that is clearly not working as intended.