Fediverse

Unfortunately it's still a very weak type of blocking, for you on Lemmy.ca unless you are using an app like Sync or Connect. It's basically a "community mute", equivalent to unsubscribing from all the communities there individually, but unlike user blocking, the users from that instance will still show up in other communities, they can still send you replies, which will trigger Notifications, and therefore they can harass you by continually sending you replies for WEEKS and WEEKS at a time (this actually happened to me twice, once with hexbear.net and another time with lemmygrad.ml).

Anyway, it's better than nothing!

You may be interested to read some of the ways that PieFed is advancing democratization of moderation.

I think you've just (perhaps independently) discovered the (in my mind very important) idea that moderation is different from censorship. I think the fediverse structure implements that distinction a lot better than most other platforms nowadays do.

Good to hear!

Never had a reason to block an instance, here or in mastodon.

I agree. It also works the other way in terms of censorship.

My original account was on an instance that once censored one of my comments. I don't remember if they deleted my comment or banned me from the community.

On reddit, I had come to just accept that as a fact of life and every few years I would delete my old account and register a new one.

On Lemmy, I just switched to a different instance which is much more tolerant of free speech and I haven't had issues since.

The irony is, my comments on the old instance can still be deleted, but only for users from that instance.

I don't know the full details, but Lemmy definitely has the more 2000-2010 type of culture that allows people to speak their mind freely.