Seriously what's that idea?
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I do think it would be less bad if it only prevented direct comment replies, and not replies to top level posts or replies to other comments by other people further down the thread.
I don't understand what you mean by it still occurs in the other direction though. Nobody can prevent people from commenting except moderators and admins, which is how it should be. Mute style blocking isn't moderation because it doesn't affect anyone's ability to comment, it's effectively the same as a client level filter.
Well think about it, you say it's abuse because someone can use blocking to change how conversations work right? They can make replies the other person can't respond. That same thing can still happen. Yeah harass someone to the point they block you and then you continue to harass them by making replies that they can't see and changing how the conversation of this forum works. It's the exact same thing. Just opposite direction.
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it prevents you from responding to it
it doesn't prevent you from responding. you're free to respond to everything else. you wouldn't be anywhere close to being silenced.let me rephrase, i'm open to learning about your suggestion. I don't really understand how that'd work. It sounds kinda like bluesky blocklists, where the blocklist maintainers are effectively like cross-community mods. A user wouldn't be banned in a given community, but if they're in a blocklist you subscribe to then as far as you're concerned they are (because they couldn't see your content and you couldn't see theirs).
if you're talking about something more lenient then that, then I'd need to know details. but the point I was making is that I'm open to alternatives - I'm not married to reddit style blocking, I know it has problems, i just find the problems to be less severe than the lemmy styleblockingmuting.I'm not a Bluesky user so I haven't seen this in operation first hand, but yeah, that sounds similar to what I have in mind.
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oh hey, fuck you
here is part of the conversation I had where I was convinced. Forgive me for not remembering all of the specifics, it was 2 years ago, and I failed to ask for the credentials as a minority. It took me a while to search it up.
the conversation wasn't just about blocking, it was about how private social networks should be. I was saying that they should be default public, and users should have no expectation of privacy, and then this person explained how problematic that is for people who get persecuted, and why simply muting problematic people isn't sufficient.
The whole conversation is branching IIRC so just walking up the context one comment at a time might not give the full story.can I explain it like they did? no. I'm not a minority, and this conversation was fucking 2 years ago. I've explained it the best i could, but since you think I'm lying or (god forbid) engaging in a post on hexbear, then you can go and fucking read the conversation for yourself. If you're not happy with their explanation, feel free to necro the post, but it was enough to convince me that just saying "shit is public and you can't expect to be able to prevent people from interacting with your content" isn't sufficient.
Ah thanks for sharing the source!
Really that is helpful.
so as ada (the person you are claiming has shown you the light) said:
The Fediverse though, even though it has hate filled cesspits, gives us tools that put barriers between vulnerable groups and those spaces. The barriers are imperfect, they have booked holes and be climbed over by people who put the effort in, but they still block the worst if it.
In fact reading this I don't think ada (we could just ask them) would take the same position as you on this. They are talking about overall systems and that public systems are not safe for people who have to hide their identity (I don't 100% agree but do see the point). I would not try to put words into their mouth, and I would not use a conversation from 2 years ago in vague memory to argue a point.
Actually lets ask them @[email protected] , discourse is healthy after all and like most users on this platform they likely have something of substance to say.
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Nah, in a public discussion, you/authorship isn't the primary concern, the text & interest of the public is primary.
Whether you want to see that text is your liberty.
The liberty of the public, however, is to likewise decide for themselves whether to read the text no matter who authors it regardless of petty disagreements between authors.
Your disagreements aren't ours.Just like in offline public discussions, no one should decide whether the public gets to see a marvelous takedown of text you happened to write just because you disagree with the author of that spectacular takedown.
I disagree that all content on lemmy should be treated as strictly public. I think that there are (or should be) nuance to that.
I realize that federation creates technical challenges to meet that strictly, but a best effort is better than no effort.
for example, I think its reasonable to have communities that are invite-only. AFAIK thats not currently possible in lemmy, but giving a best-effort to make that happen would be better than nothing. Instances known to ignore it could be defederated, clients known to ignore it could be blocked. swiss cheese defense.
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I know, i had a whole discussion about this 2 years ago, which is why I changed my mind about this very topic (I used to be very much "things are public by default, no expectation of privacy in a social network).
but that doesn't make it good. this is a problem with the design of lemmy IMO. Lemmy is the best popular option we have right now, and unfortunately popularity is important. Lemmy is already a ghost town, i cant imagine moving to an even smaller alternative.
better than reddit, but far from perfect.
You entirely missed my point, or just disregarded it.
Yep, it ain't perfect.
... Got any... useful ideas about that?
About how to rework that design?
How we gonna make that happen?
What's the plan?
Or do we just want to agree that perfect would be better than not perfect?
Talk is cheap, most of it is near totally useless noise, hosting all that talk though, facilitating all that blather, in a functional, much less ideal manner... now that's complicated and expensive, and lemmy's budget is basically zero, and all the devs are volunteers.
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i just want a new way to harass?
naw fam, i think you're looking to protect your existing way to harass people.
the fact that youre suggesting someone just goes and makes their own instance shows that you're being astronomically disingenuous.
Please show me where I am harassing someone, this would be valuable information.
And yes, I do think that what you are purposing would be abused and used for harassment.
the fact that youre suggesting someone just goes and makes their own instance shows that youâre being astronomically disingenuous.
You can go make a community right now, its not hard and very much encouraged. You can also make an instance but that is harder, and also encouraged.
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god you keep being like "dont put words in the mouths of others" and you cant help doing it yourself, can you?
Oh? does it not sit well with you?
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That's unfair. It's rather fair they don't see me, I blocked them for a reason.
Go back to Reddit? This system stops witch hunts, effectively stops echo chambers from gaining traction, and helps protect against power tripping mods.
Much like someone else told you, you can control what you see. If you don't see the trolls do they really exist for you? If you don't go looking for their "ghost" you won't find it
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I'd call that "muting" rather than blocking.
And it leaves vulnerable communities open to abuse, because they're unable to police their communities and kick out harassers.
If they are running their own communities yes they can. Mods can and do ban people from the communities.
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I'm sorry, but I feel like you need to support the statement "This comes from discussions Iâve had with minorities about the harassment they face on Lemmy and mastodon" a bit more. Your whole argument for limiting the speech of others is predicated on this statement.
I'm not saying that minorities couldn't face harassment on Lemmy, but Lemmy is by far the most liberal and minority supportive online forum I have ever experienced. Part of the reason Lemmy is so niche is because it doesn't have the mainstream attention other platforms have and is heavily moderated.
If you are engaging in an instance where harassment is occurring the moderators generally ban the person quickly. If the moderators of that instance aren't doing their job people generally leave and the instance dies from lack of content (there just aren't that many people on Lemmy). If someone follows you from a different instance to another the current instance moderators will likely ban them even if the one you met them on doesn't. Finally, if they are direct messaging you you can block them, they can continue to message you but you won't see their messages and neither will anyone else.
What minority group have you talked with that are receiving harassment and what extra protections were needed that aren't already here?
the discussion was 2 years old, so I'm a bit fuzzy - it looks like it was only 1 person.
but it was enough to convince me from basically saying what yall are saying here "don't expect privacy on a public site" to "there should be an attempt at privacy, and people facing harassment should have some measure of control to protect themselves"I didnt feel the need to make the provide their credentials as a minority and prove to me that they're being harassed and that muting the harasser wasn't enough. What they said made sense.
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Bear in mind that evrrything you do or say on the fediverse is public, so there is no possible way to stop someone seeing it. Likewise, because the entire system is federated, there is no way to stop an individual from replying to you. Even if the community server rejected their message their own server would be able to display it.
This works well for general discussions, but I can see where it isn't ideal for more sensitive topics. People having those sorts of discussions should probably be using a system that is better suited to their needs.
but the argument that I'm seeing is "its bad to even try to hinder it"
I know that the fediverse creates technical difficulties regarding privacy, but we can't even make a best effort so its not trivial for harassers?
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all of those are unrealistic options
I said that forking the community to begin with isn't realistic. There would be no "trans-friendly gaming" community because it wouldn't have enough members to sustain it. Lemmy is too small to sustain multiple communities for the same topic, for all but the most popular topics. When you see multiple communities for a topic, almost always all but one is a ghost town.
so splitting the community, or defederating aren't really options
hopefully going to mod, or failing that the admin, would be successful. but mods and admins are criminally overworked already, and lemmy is too small to maintain a healthy mod pool.I don't have great technical solutions here, unfortunately.
I'm just trying to explain that what OP wants is reasonable, and everyone here shitting on him is not being reasonable. -
But if you donât see what theyâre saying, why do you care? How does it affect you?
What you want is to be able to silence them because you donât like what theyâre saying, ie censorship.
me personally? I don't particularly care. i rarely use mute/block features.
but I understand that for some people, its a problem, because harassment doesn't just end at insults, it can also be spreading rumours and talking shit.
its not going to be obvious to onlookers that one person has muted another, so if the harasser goes all over the victim's posts saying terrible lies and rumours, then the victim should be able to know that and take action to stop it, even if the rumours aren't against the community/instance ToS, and the victim can't prove to the mods that the rumours are lies.
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But theyâre not being harassed because they canât see itâŚ..
thats not the entire extent of harassment. harassment extends far beyond insulting someone to their face.
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Itâs not your content when youâre posting it in public forums. Itâs public content.
If you want to be able to see when people spread âmisinformationâ about you, donât block people.
the fact that there are only public forums on lemmy is a problem itself.
If you want to be able to see when people spread âmisinformationâ about you, donât block people.
what are you even talking about here?
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You donât get to make that decision.
you dont get to make that decision
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Devs want a monopoly on the power to block people they don't like through the use of bans
Admins can ban on a per instance basis. Moderators can ban on a per community basis. But devs don't have any particular banning power.
Well, the devs are also the major community moderators and admins on the ml instance, which was the largest for a long time.
They still treat it like their private walled garden.
I may be overreaching with my assumption about their motivations, but then again I may not.
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Well, the devs are also the major community moderators and admins on the ml instance, which was the largest for a long time.
They still treat it like their private walled garden.
I may be overreaching with my assumption about their motivations, but then again I may not.
Ehh. I don't think that the underlying goal was to try to obtain some sort of "ban monopoly" on the Threadiverse. If they had, they had a ton of things that they could have done that they didn't.
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Don't support federation in the first place.
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Have lemmy.ml and friends simply disallow federation with other instances.
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Break compatibility in new builds to make it harder for people to run other instances. Don't open-source Lemmy in the first place.
Like, I think that it's pretty lame that some of the official Lemmy software support stuff is communities on lemmy.ml, which has an admin situation that I don't really like. But...that seems like an awfully weak lever to be pulling if someone's goal is to try to exclude anyone else from having the ability to restrict users.
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sorry i was getting it mixed up, i've had a very similar conversations a few times and that rebuttal came up multiple times.
mods and admins are overworked, and they can't always be expected to keep up to date with dogwhistles along with everything else they have to manage. besides, harassment doesn't always appear to break ToS - starting rumours and spreading lies about someone can be very difficult to prove to a mod, but can have huge repercussions in some communities.
and besides, it can take a while before mods/admins are able to take action.IMO I think a few things should exist.
I should be able to prevent someone from replying to my content even if I can't prevent them from seeing it.
Additionally, I think there should be a best effort to make invite-only/private communities. I know that the fediverse makes this technically difficult, but having something is better than having nothing. -
Well think about it, you say it's abuse because someone can use blocking to change how conversations work right? They can make replies the other person can't respond. That same thing can still happen. Yeah harass someone to the point they block you and then you continue to harass them by making replies that they can't see and changing how the conversation of this forum works. It's the exact same thing. Just opposite direction.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I've blocked a bunch of people, who may be replying to me with harassing comments, but that isn't influencing what I do. It might influence the overall conversation, and that could be a problem, but I think the way that problem is dealt with should be public, because the problem is public, it's not something that's exclusively my problem. I don't think I should have the authority to act to police any arbitrary community like that, especially without anyone being able to know that I'm doing it.
