Today I found out that on this platform, “block” is just a fancy word for “filter”. Just had an individual user go through my entire profile and downvote everything. So I blocked them, thinking that this would make me safe from any future stalking. But I was just informed that no, any user that you ‘block’ is actually still able to see everything that you post and vote freely.

All that ‘blocking’ actually does is hide the person from you. But they’re still free to stalk and do as they please. I just tested this out for myself using my other account and sure enough, it’s true.

I just want to know, how is this acceptable? I bet you that if I called out this user publically, I would probably end up in hot water myself for harassment or something. And yet ‘blocking’ is completely fkn useless too. So what recourse does a user actually have here when faced with a hostile user that wants to ruin their experience on Lemmy?

Coming from Blåhaj, I thought I would try ‘moderating’ my own experience for a bit. But you can’t ‘moderate’ your own experience if the tools to do so are fkn useless and only trick you into thinking that something has been achieved, without actually doing anything useful.

And now I’m starting to see a new value in instances like Blåhaj. Because you actually need admins that give a shit around here or else you’re just left to the wolves on a platform that seems more interested in protecting abusive users than allowing users to protect themselves.

Edit: watching you all upvote the person talking shit about how this works on other platforms while downvoting the actual correct information that comes with a source has certainly taught me a thing or two about this platform and the people on it. You all actually prefer misinformation to fact as long as it suits your vibe or opinion more. Like a bunch of fkn MAGAs. I really wish there was a way to disable notifications for this post (another feature missing here) because watching you people upvote misinformation is enough to make me no longer give a flying fuck what anyone here says or thinks.

  • haverholm@kbin.earth
    9·
    1 day ago

    Same thing happened to me. If I block someone on Mastodon or another Fediverse microblogging instance, they’re blocked. Because that part of the Fediverse was built by people who had been harassed and doxxed off other platforms.

    Here? Blocking just means you don’t see the troll, but they can continue to inflict all kinds of havoc on your post scores. Ironically, “karma” isn’t a thing on Lemmy like it is on Reddit, but votes are still used to rank your posts.

    I guess there are a hundred great folk on here for every preteen edgelord, but that kind of nonsense really spoils the fun of this platform. Sorry to see you get downvoted for a perfectly reasonable post.

    • ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      If I block someone on Mastodon or another Fediverse microblogging instance, they’re blocked. Because that part of the Fediverse was built by people who had been harassed and doxxed off other platforms.

      Evidently you missed the many (many) discussions that took place maybe 5 years ago by some of those exact builders about how this is, and remains, only a fig leaf which requires every server to cooperate in maintaining the illusion.

      I wish I’d saved links based on how often this comes up. There are fundamental issues with how federated systems in general and ActivityPub in particular work, and “real” blocking is one of them. People running other instances can modify the code however they want, and no technical measures have been implemented (because it turns out to be very difficult to do so) to prevent any node operator from removing the fig leaf.

    • Character_Locked@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      66·
      1 day ago

      If I block someone on Mastodon or another Fediverse microblogging instance, they’re blocked

      I too enjoy when the proper meanings of words get used and things work as advertised. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills that this is such a controversial topic here. Imagine wanting moderation tools that actually work, the nerve!

      • ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        There have in fact been huge discussions of this in the past, which maybe you’d already know about if you didn’t come in hot mouthing off about how things need to be changed to fit your preferences immediately, chop chop!

        Turns out the type of blocking you want requires a great deal more code than you (clearly) can imagine in order to be actually functional, as opposed to a fig leaf requiring the full cooperation of every server involved.

        This was discussed ad nauseam maybe about 5 years ago, with long hellthreads in microblogging fedi, complex deep-dive technical blog posts, the whole nine yards. No I didn’t save links and I wish I had because this and related issues (Mastodon’s fig leaf “privacy” settings, E2EE DMs) keep coming up.

        The answer is that what you are asking for can either be implemented as a porous fig leaf which falls apart the very first time some asshole spins up an instance which doesn’t respect it and vacuums up your posts en masse, or it can be implemented using cryptography which requires an enormous amount of work by extremely well-educated CompSci types to implement a standard, and then implement code libraries, and only then can the developers of platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon get started on implementing the actual feature. No one is paying anyone to do this, and it’s not clear that people with the necessary expertise are even available to develop the standard and the code, nor is it clear that everyone would adopt it if they did. So up til now, it hasn’t been done.