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.

This assumes I’m married to having a block that is exactly like reddit, which I’m not. I just replied to you in another thread with a suggestion that more or less accounts for all of these concerns.
It cant account for “simply asking loaded questions with ultimatums then blocking the person” but that seems like it’d only be a problem in communities where the mods were already in on it, right? Otherwise these people would just be banned by the mods for clearly bullying. If mods are able to do their jobs, as you say they are, anyways. would mods not be able to handle this?

you have repeatedly explicitly stated how unqualified I am to be a mod, and here you are telling me to be a mod.

You sound like you want to be a mod but the worst kind of biased one. They want the ability to police others just due to them conversing with them. you don’t want the responsibility, just a bit of the power.

why are you telling me to be a mod then?
you think that I’ll make a bunch of people miserable, that will teach me some kind of lesson? if not, then what?
were the admins of lemm.ee lying about it all? were the old reddit mods lying about it before the mod purge?
i dont get what your goal with telling me to mod something.

i didnt just say that someone else told me its bad, i explained it to you.

and also reddit-style blocking isn’t the only way to satisfy what OP (and I) want. its just the clearest example.
the reddit style blocking is a problem because malicious party can pre-emptively block people they’re going to shit talk and then the subject of the shit-talking wont know about it. but you can still block interaction without blocking the visibility.

you can block a harasser from posting harassment on the victim’s content without the reddit problems.

I think that the important thing to keep in mind is that not every lemmy community is a community of strangers. some lemmy communities can overlap significantly with IRL communities, like sports teams, neighborhoods, and classes. Many people in these lemmy communities may know eachother, even if the mods dont know them.
I dont have specific examples of this, since im an old fart and not a school kid with a bunch of extracurricular activities, but are the kinds of cases I’m worried about.

in these kinds of examples, the harassment may be both especially potent and especially subtle, because they’ll be using dog whistles and inside jokes, so it may not be something a mod is equipped to handle. Ideally parents would get involved (in the case of schoolkids), but we know that doesn’t always happen.

let me combine what you just said with something from that other 2yo conversation with something someone else just made me think of:

What if blocking just prevented replying/voting, and didn’t actually prevent the blockee from seeing the content? The crux of the issue with the reddit-style block is that people could pre-emptively block people and then say shit about them without them ever knowing. So let them know, just don’t let them respond back directly on the other person’s post.

additionally, what if the block was community-specific so that this wasn’t something that needed to be federated everywhere, making blocks public, and impacting behaviour across the entire fediverse? If someone wanted a wider block, then a client would be able to send out multiple blocks to different communities. or maybe instance-level instead of community-level.

and finally, what if we had invite-only/private communities? afaict this isn’t supported in lemmy, and there is no way to make it totally private, but we can make a best effort so that its not trivial for harassers to invade these communities and exfiltrate the info. instances/server-software/clients that didn’t respect the privacy could be blocked by instances.

I think that together these are pretty reasonable and would satisfy OP.

and that was nearly the exact argument that I had 2 years ago.

I think that public forums still need a reasonable ability to counter harassment at the individual level, and not every single thing needs to be sent up to a mod. preventing a single user from interacting with another single user’s content is almost the exact opposite of drastic, it is nearly the least impactful action you can take that is actually an action. it doesn’t stop the blocked person from interacting with the rest of the community, or even necessarily seeing the blocker’s content.

sending things to mods can take a while, and mods may not actually be able to identify harassment with enough confidence to ban someone.
like if i say “you live at 221B Baker Street, London”, we know that is Sherlock Holmes’ address and I’m clearly not doxxing you, but what if the joke wasn’t so obvious and I got reported? What if the insult was a dogwhistle that the mod didnt know about? dogwhistles, by their nature, are designed specifically to provide the kind of plausible deniability that would satisfy a mod.
give the victim a low impact tool that they can use to mitigate the harassment a bit. And to be clear, I don’t consider “closing your eyes” to be a sufficient mitigation.

😐

oh thats rich.
let me quote to you every reply you’ve given me so far in this thread. this will be a good laugh.

They would be, though. That’s exactly what they’re saying could happen - you just wouldn’t be able to see it. In effect, what they described is exactly what you’re claiming to be a problem, except worse because it’s exclusively in control of the harasser.

how would preventing the harasser from commenting on my posts give the harasser more control than letting them comment on my post?

How? One new account that blocks the victim and it’s exactly what you’re arguing against, except now the user doesn’t get the choice to ignore it or fight back. It’s completely invisible to them.

With how it works here, it’s the victim’s choice to endure it or isolate themselves from it. Do you not see how that’s better?

You still haven’t explained how control is being handed to the harasser. In fact, you said the victim is getting blocked, so I’m not clear who you even consider to be the victim here. And in fact, it doesn’t need to be invisible to them.

You’re hinging on the wrong part. The only difference between the scenarios laid out is who has the choice. In the one you are arguing for, the choice is in the hands of the harasser.

again, you haven’t explained how control is being handed to the harasser

I have. Multiple times.

no, you have not.

and that is every reply that I can find that you sent to me.

but meanwhile I actually went into detail about who would be able to do what, and what that would mean for both parties.

so… thats pretty embarrassing for you.
I know it can be difficult to keep things straight with so many threads going on, but have a bit of humility.

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.

here, let me link you to the paradox of tolerance, you absolute mudcake.

try learning something.

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?

there are so many threads.

its not but minorities its “based on this discussion I had about privacy and anti-harassment needs that minorities need”.

harassment is bad. minorities are especially vulnerable to harassment.
reporting is good, but reporting is only one tool
the current “block” tool doesn’t actually blocks, it mutes
that is confusing to users, who are surprised when they block a harasser that the harasser is still harassing them out of sight.
It’d be nice if, in addition to the report tool, and the mute tool, if there was a tool that could stop someone who is causing you mental anguish from doing so directly in your comments.
because people who are scared of the comments aren’t going to post\

we need more tools to combat harassment
a tool where you can stop someone from commenting on your content is a good self-service tool that is low-enough-impact that a mod doesn’t need to be involved, because it doesn’t affect the community itself.

and at the very least, what OP is saying is reasonable. that is confusing AF, the person you’ve blocked isn’t blocked from doing anything, the blocker is just hamstrung

so just a point here - the OP never actually said that the blockee shouldn’t be able to see what the blocker posted, they weren’t actually complaining about visibility of their own content.
they were complaining that when they blocked someone, the blockee could continue the harassing behaviour and the blocker would just be ignorant of the slander being said of them. if the blockee escalated to doxxing or something, they wouldn’t even know, and the blockee could do it and would be unlikely to be reported since reporting on behalf of someone (i expect) is much less common unless the offense is both egregious and trivially verifiable.

care to elaborate on that?

because in the way it works now, all the victim can do is shut their eyes and pretend. thats a choice, but its not much of one.

in the scenario I’m supporting, the victim can stop their harasser from doing the harassment directly on their front lawn (eg in the comments to their own posts, in the replies to their threads). thats a more impactful choice.

I’m not saying that lemmy should get rid of muting, I’m saying that I shouldn’t depend on a mod to kick someone out of the whole community just to get relief from them saying shit in my own comments.

i didnt say you were harassing anyone. i said you were protecting the ability to harass people. which is a really strange thing to do. kinda like American 2nd amendment freaks.

I’m not trying to enforce rules on other communities.
im not even trying to enforce rules on any community

reddit-style blocking would allow the person to continue to be in that community, they wouldn’t even need to be kicked out.

its crazy that you’re framing personally blocking someone so they cant reply to it as though I’m changing the rules for lemmy communities.

Like, OP wasn’t even saying that blocking someone should hide my content from the person I blocked, just that it should stop them from replying to it. it doesn’t even have to be reddit style, it just has to be more than shutting your eyes and ears and saying “lalalalala”

lemmy communities and irl communities aren’t the same, they only sometimes partially overlap.

I didnt say you were harassing someone, i said you were protecting the means by which to harass people.

They’re related. Often, the ability to limit your audience is about making it non trivial for harassers to access your content rather than impossible. fuck you

go make a community? you’ve already been accusing me of being a power hungry mod, and now you’re telling me to go make a community to mod?
i dont want to be a mod, being a mod sounds miserable, like ive repeatedly said.
and lemmy doesn’t have enough users to be splitting up communities anyways. its built to do it, but practically you can’t, despite it being “encouraged”

LOL at standing up an instance as being a reasonable solution to anything for a normal user or small community.

I didn’t disregard your point, but i may have missed it.
afaict your point was “lemmy doesn’t work that way, so either put up with it, fix it, or go elsewhere”

I dont think thats a very reasonable stance to take, if that was your stance. I strongly don’t believe in the motto criticism without a suggestion is destructive criticism. I believe there is a ton of value in getting criticism from people who don’t understand what a fix would look like, or only knowing superficially what it’d look like.

right now we’re engaging in a discussion about what change, if any, should even happen. I want to come to a consensus so that those volunteer devs aren’t wasting their time working on things that make peoples’ lives worse.

I’m trying to say “hey, what OP wants isn’t an unreasonable thing for a person using a social network to want” and try to explain why i think its reasonable for them to want.

that is fair. I shouldn’t be putting words in their mouth. I don’t think I was. I think i was being pretty clear that this is my current opinion after talking to ada, where I used to have similar beliefs to the majority here (public is public, dont expect privacy) and they convinced me that thats not a reasonable position to take if you value the safety of persecuted minorities (although I have to admit idk if that was what they were hoping I’d take away from that conversation).

Presumably they can do a much better job of explaining the concerns than I can. I have no idea how/if their views have changed since then, or how they apply specifically to blocking.

but my opinion, after talking with them, is that its not a reasonable position to take that public is public, so there should be no expectation of privacy. To me the idea that blocking people only hides their content from you is an extension of that. this comment will maybe give you a better impression of what I got out of that conversation