Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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Blocking a user behaves more like mute. Proper blocking needed to prevent harassment. (slrpnk.net)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The block feature should be renamed to “mute”, which is what it seems to actually be. Currently I can apply this to a user and they can still see all my posts. So it’s a good mute feature but a terrible block feature.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I agree. I've seen cases of harassment before when one person would block the other, but then the blocked person would comment on most of the blocker comments to harass them further.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

ActivityPub implementations generally don't allow this.

This comment will, when I click 'Reply', be sent to your instance (dormi.zone), that instance should then run it's filter/block checks on it and if it's happy it will forward it onto the lemmy.ml instance for further disemination amongst the subscribers of the group.

If you were to have blocked me then my reply will appear on my instance only (which is admitedly tiny - at 1 user) and go no further. This kind of falls apart if I were to be on a bigger instance as more people would see the reply.

That said, Lemmy may not be doing that quite right as the whole Groups/Communities thing is sort of an extension of the main protocol. I hope it's doing it the right way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

That's what I thought too, but then I had a look at Sharkey (and I guess Mastodon does the same), and it is possible to have private profile, that needs to accept requests before people are able to follow them.

https://nerdschalk.com/make-mastodon-account-private/

So I guess it's still possible even with ActivityPub?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately Lemmy isn't like that and does not follow activitypub spec in that regard, in their current form the block doesn't seem to do that at all and simply hides the blocked user from the blocking user as if the blocked user didn't exist. There are no checks on interactions.

Also if you're wondering how it works with Mastodon, Lemmy basically ignores Mastodon's blocking system and freely allows interraction with Mastodon accounts in the thread even if they blocked the user replying, and also the community actor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ah, well that is indeed unfortunate and realistically also a bit shit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Maybe one of the forks or backend replacements could implement an option using it to make it compliant. I wouldn't go with the OP's solution since privacy is non-existent on Lemmy, but just blocking interaction seems like it would be enough to make it compliant, and prevent the harassment issues mentioned, I made an issue which addresses this in the Lemmy Github, it proposes a new feature rather than changing the existing blocks because it's good to have mutes and blocks at the same time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yup this happened a lot on Reddit. As much as people complain about the newer two way blocking system on Reddit this type of harassment disappeared basically overnight when that rolled out. It largely was a good thing because for every user who was legitimately being abused by it, there were a lot who were benefiting from it by stopping harassment from others.