Seriously what's that idea?
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All credit to you for advocating for needs of marginalized groups for protected spaces to communicate, but the fediverse simply isn't the right tool for that. It's entire philosophy, design and implementation is centered around making everything public, from posts and comments to votes and moderation actions.
Asking the fediverse, or the activitypub protocol to allow blocking a user from responding at all is rather like asking a car to be a bike. It's just not what it is. I can't really concieve any way of making a decentralized public forum work like that as there is no central point that can control permissions. It might be possible to design a system where communities can control membership and posting priviledges, but even then, if it's distributed, it would take very little for a hostile instance to simply ignore any central control and display its users posts locally, leading to the same effect as if you just mute them, leaving them visible to others, albiet only on their instance or others that cooperate with it.
I think that those who are in need of a controlled system should probably be looking at a centralized system that is run and controlled by someone, or a group, that they trust. That would give them the best chance to keep discussions private, and access to read or post controlled. Read access would need to be controlled too, or their discussions can just be mirrored to a hostile server and harassment can occur there where the poster is unaware, just as if they'd muted them.
communities arent decentralized, though.
so why not have a community that can control who can comment on what posts?the privacy part may be a struggle with the way activitypub works, but i dont see why blocking would be, since community banlists already work.
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At the time when I became inactive on Reddit, Azerbaijan was building up to finish the Nagarno Karrabach conflict once and for all. There was a lot of blatant anti Armenian, pro Azerbaijani misinformation being posted in relevant discussions (that they were tolerant, only wanting peace, there was never any ethnic cleansing,, ...), and most of those comments went without anyone posting a simple fact check to debunk it.
I suspected that they had been sharing a blocklist and had blocked most of those who would call them out on their bullshit. I didn't bother either since I just expected to be blocked as well and I had basically given up on the platform anyhow. I found swapping accounts to read threads annoying as hell, so it was easier to not comment and just be silently disappointed in humanity.
The fact checks that I did see at the time, were mostly posted as a reply to the top comment of the chain, hoping to go unnoticed by the one spreading misinformation, but that will only work for so long. Reddit is fucked when it comes to discussing political news or gauging public opinion (imo), it's now designed for spreading misinformation (imo again).
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They shouldn't be able to do that!
A lot of people here never had a stalker and it shows.
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They shouldn't be able to do that!
Blocking someone is not a tool to silence them. It's a tool to ignore them.
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This sounds like the words of an abuser.
Please rethink your life
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Please rethink your life
Huh . I will.
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Huh . I will.
Keep in mind, they edited their comment. It was pretty scummy before.
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Keep in mind, they edited their comment. It was pretty scummy before.
Luckily, I actually have a screenshot
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Luckily, I actually have a screenshot
deleted by creature
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I've never been on reddit, fucking crazy puritan.
and guess what: the developers of lemmy can change it if they want to.
but meanwhile here you are, insulting people for having differing opinions, and discussing why they have those reasons. huh, funny.wrote last edited by [email protected]fucking crazy puritan.
Where did this come from? lol What a bizarre thing to say over this.m, especially when you’re the one crying over people saying mean things behind your back lol.
and guess what: the developers of lemmy can change it if they want to.
No shit sherlock.
but meanwhile here you are, insulting people for having differing opinions
Where am I doing that?
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here, let me link you to the paradox of tolerance, you absolute mudcake.
try learning something.
lol ah the classic crybaby wannabe-fascist "paradox of tolerance" garbage. Just admit it, you can't handle people who have different beliefs and opinions to your own because you can't defend your own with any intelligence.
Classic leftist.
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Yeah, fuck those minorities, amirite? They don't deserve to use Lemmy anyways\
- you, a couple min ago
wrote last edited by [email protected]I had a feeling playing the victim and name calling was coming next after your last message.
But just in case anyone arguing in good faith needs it spelled out: Not every thing has to cater to every audience. Lemmy, at least for me, is primarily for sharing information, whether news, opinions or just memes. On such a site, I believe it is more important to avoid echo chambers and misinformation. So it requires a moderator or an admin to ban people. It's not as if Lemmy is an unmoderated hellscape, it just leans more towards free speech over creating perfectly safe spaces than you may like. Avoiding echo chambers and misinformation benefits all users, including minorities. Therefore, every site hast to find a balance for it's use-case. I would expect many people, whether minorities or otherwise, can handle occasional mean words or words they disagree with on their screens. But it is also alright if you are more sensitive or not in a good place psychologically and don't want to deal with this. There are other places on the internet you can go, that do have the kind of blocking you want. Some places will lean towards free speech, some towards heavy moderation. That's the great thing about the internet, not every place has to be the same.
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yes, we all want some censorship.
defederation is censorship.
instance bans are censorship.
community bans are censorship.\is your position that none of those should be allowed?
if so, thats a wild position to take, but you should say it with your full chest at least.
if thats not your position, why are you drawing the line here? and why are you willing to die on this arbitrary hill?yes, we all want some censorship.
Speak for yourself.
defederation is censorship.
instance bans are censorship.
community bans are censorship.\
And I disagree with them.
is your position that none of those should be allowed?
My position is that it should all be up to the user. Let me block instances and communities if I don't want to see them. Let me choose what content I want to see. I don't need some mods deciding what is and isn't acceptable based on their ideologies and beliefs, because as we all know and see every day, most abuse that power almost all the time.
if so, thats a wild position to take, but you should say it with your full chest at least.
It's not wild at all, and I have never tried to hide it. I've said it openly many, many times on Lemmy. I think all censorship is bad. Only weak minded people want or need censorship.
Nice attempted "gotcha" though.
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It also makes Lemmy objectively less safe because it's much less effective at limiting stalking and harassment. Especially since way blocks work on Lemmy isn't clearly communicated to the user.
The solution here is obvious - creating an instance and/or community with stricter moderation rules, much like blåhaj.zone.
Each instance/community has the ability to set their own general rules and whilst (yes) this means that an individual person can't guarantee their "safety" everywhere it does mean anyone can create their own little bubble and then pick & choose which parts of the fediverse to connect with.
The fediverse is at its core a free speech project, which is why I like it. There are many other platforms out there that focus on safety.
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People who only socialize online are often too cowardly to handle it, as they use downvotes sometimes as a way to disagree/show their disapproval without standing by it, and would be terrified if they had to explain why they did so.
95% of the time when downvoting content it's a question of...
Disagreeing/considering the content bad/thinking the user is behaving poorly.
Also, writing comments takes a lot more time, which (believe it or not) is a limited and valuable resource for most people on the internet.
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95% of the time when downvoting content it's a question of...
Disagreeing/considering the content bad/thinking the user is behaving poorly.
Also, writing comments takes a lot more time, which (believe it or not) is a limited and valuable resource for most people on the internet.
That's okay, but it should be visible to everyone that you agreed or disagreed, for the sake of clarity, honesty and responsible communication. Ideally, votes wouldn't exist (and if you don't have anything to say in the forum or simply don't want to, well, you just don't and you lurk quietly), but if such low-level ways of engaging with the topic are allowed then we shouldn't be afraid to at least have that vote public, IMO.
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A lot of people here never had a stalker and it shows.
If you're concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system --- which is what OP is talking about in terms of "blocking" would be -- on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not --- both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.
In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you're going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.
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That's okay, but it should be visible to everyone that you agreed or disagreed, for the sake of clarity, honesty and responsible communication. Ideally, votes wouldn't exist (and if you don't have anything to say in the forum or simply don't want to, well, you just don't and you lurk quietly), but if such low-level ways of engaging with the topic are allowed then we shouldn't be afraid to at least have that vote public, IMO.
for the sake of clarity, honesty and responsible communication
No? We're already using pseudonyms, which is intentional and has a purpose.
at least have that vote public, IMO
It already is public, just not easily accessible. Why do you want to know all the votes? A voter is not an active part of the conversation. I'd equate it to the audience cheering or booing on a talk show.
For the ones actively participating you can read their comments and it'll be obvious what their stance is.
Ideally, votes wouldn’t exist
Absolutely disagree on that one. Votes are a fundamental part of this type of social media, and the low-pressure interaction of up/down votes encourages a large number of people to interact and rank content. This shifts focus from the loudest/most active people dominating the space to the most widely appreciated content dominating the space. This is explicitly one of the parts I like about it.
Also, more replies are not necessarily useful. Consider all the "This!" or "Same!" comments from Reddit. An up/down vote is much more information dense.
Honestly it sounds to me like you actually want a forum based on fundamentally different mechanics. Technically it wouldn't be that difficult to create a Lemmy clone that just scraps votes entirely from the UI, but you'd need a new way to rank content.
In an ideal scenario I'd actually prefer the votes be entirely anonymous, but that's just not feasible with the fediverse system.
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If you're concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system --- which is what OP is talking about in terms of "blocking" would be -- on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not --- both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.
In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you're going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.
Some stalkers might notice and circumvent, but most won't because in their mind they aren't doing anything wrong so why would they check if they got blocked. But apparently if the solution is not perfect it's not worth doing anything to deter it seems.
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Blocking someone is not a tool to silence them. It's a tool to ignore them.
I could see someone being frustrated that from a third party, it looks like you are not responding to a reply and that person could spin that as a concession that they were right
I could see a compromise, where a direct reply from such a blocked/muted person is allowed, but indicated so that people are aware a response could not have been done.
