They shouldn't be able to do that!
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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My experience is, I see that there's a comment, I can't read it, I can't upvote or downvote it, and I couldn't report it, wonderful!
Why would you want to read a comment by someone you've blocked, and why would you want to upvote, downvote, or report a comment that you haven't read?
Ask yourself that question when it's about time.
I have on occasion unblocked people just to see what was in a thread. I've never really been glad that I did so. I blocked them for a reason. I shouldn't want to engage with their posts. I'm happier and it makes things more calm when I'm not fighting with morons over shit anyone can see is wrong.
What you are asking for is closer to something like being able to personally ban another user from all your own content.
This would be more like if you made all your comments and posts in your own personal community, and then banned a user from it.
This, your suggested paradigm, can also be entirely defeated by someone just... making another account.
Or even: Logging out, and viewing as a guest.
Closer to message board styled systems are not twitter, are not instagram.
If you wanna try to develop something like a 'private profile' mode for lemmy, where you would have to grant access to every individual user you wanted to be able to see your posts and comments, good luck, go for it, code's open source, best I can tell, all dev work on it is unpaid, volunteers.
I am reasonably confident this is basically impossible given how lemmy is architected, but hey, maybe I'm wrong.
I used to agree with you until I actually spoke with people from communities that get regularly harassed.
Muting is great if all you want to do is hide content you don't like. But if you need to defend yourself against a campaign of harassment, this only gives power to the harassers.
Yes all the have to do is make a new account, but it's another hurdle they have to cross. Better than no hurdle and also blindfolding yourself
Oh great, this again.
Wtf does that even mean?
Ok, lets walk though this. You have spoke with people from marginalized communities that get regularly harassed, correct?
Then please explain it to us the way it was explained to you. After all it convinced you about the value in speech control, a very high bar for most rational people to overcome.
But here is the thing, you have not. You have just stated over and over that this is a needed feature to "protect" marginalized groups. You have not even hinted at the group (hell it could be that its some hexbear talking point or that there is no group at all). And no, naming a marginalized group who sees regular harassment is not an issue, unless the group in question's very existence is offensive. Although there are a lot of nuances between what is and is not offensive, there are still some clear lines (think about say furries being ok vs the man boy love association being not ok).
Also criticism is not harassment, if you feel you are being harassed then use the report button. But don't get upset if not everyone else agrees with you.
*crickets chirping*
My mind is going in overdrive thinking of the possibilities on this. This is like the argument equivalent of trying to pay with an IOU. "I have the best reasons, but you don't know them as they live in another country" sort of stuff.
I am thinking there are a few possibilities (please add if you can, this is fun):
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:
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 @Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone , discourse is healthy after all and like most users on this platform they likely have something of substance to say.
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
See, At least this is a reasonable argument. I don't agree with it, and think you are conflating the need for private spaces and the existence of public ones.
The root of our impasse is that you think every public place needs to have drastic tools to protect people in the hands of all users, regardless of what that does to a platform.
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.
It is nether low impact or given to just the victims. The concept you have proposed has also been used to build echo chambers of extreme right wing ideologies, used to cancel discourse and bully any descension to an idea, and most of all used to bully minorities by simply asking loaded questions with ultimatums then blocking the person. What you are advocating for flies in the very face of what lemmy is trying to do, and you are so confident that this will help victims you are willing to "close your eyes" to anything other then a standing ovation in response to your half baked idea.
We have the tools to deal with harassment (and they can always be improved), you seem to think unfettered censorship is needed to fix an issue you seem to have little knowledge or experience of. You could gain some insight by just volunteering to do some mod work, but you are unwilling to do so, yet still think you can speak with any authority on the subject. It is laughable and pure arrogance to think that copying something that has killed the spark/drive of other platforms is a good idea.
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.
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.
Because that is how people learn.
and what lesson are you hoping that I'll learn from being a mod?
that being a mod is actually easy therefore i shouldn't be concerned with mods being too overworked or not up-to-date on dogwhistles? because that was my concern about mods. it seems really strange that you'd want me to learn that lesson, I'm not sure that thatd help you, your argument, or any lemmy communities.
I mean...
I am describing a technical reality of how lemmy works.
You can 'disagree' with that, but uh, you would just be wrong.
Not in the sense of 'I do not have enough empathy to consider the plight of a regularly harassed person'.
More in the sense of ... ok, then don't use lemmy, if you don't like how it works.
Or... make it work the way you want it to work, by actually coding it.
Like, I wasn't joking when I basically said 'I am reasonbly confident it is impossible to make lemmy work the way you want it to.'
Thats not my opinion, in a... how should things work in an ideal world, sense of 'opinion'.
It is my opinion, as a person who understands a bit (certainly not all) about how the code just actually works.
If you can figure it out, I'd be impressed.
Alternatively, if you'd like to pay me $50 an hour to attempt to develop that, I may have some room in my schedule.
I could do it at 48/h, js
Fuck you!
I was first!
rofl
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.
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.
Ok, so you've chosen 'we are both going to agree that perfect would be better than not perfect'.
For what it's worth, I'm not downvoting you.
But I will be blunt: I don't think you are capable of describing a coherent, implementable version of what you want.
What is your proposal for what, precisely, should be changed?
How are you, or ... apparently you would be asking other people to do this ... how is this change going to be compatible with lemmy as it currently exists, such that every instance could easily adopt it as an update... or... some instances could adopt it as a compatible sort of 'add-on' or 'plugin'?
Who is going to implement that change, or, how is that change going to come about?
Seeing that you don't appear to be willing to code this yourself... how are you going to convince someone else to do this?
What I am saying is 'OP actually does want an unreasonable thing, not from the standpoint of an end user of software who is.concerned about their safety in the abstract, but from the standpoint of being able to outline something that might actually work and also ever be designed.'
What they are asking for is more or less an entirely fundamentally different system than lemmy. They are asking for an entirely new kind of software that works from a fundamentally different paradigm.
Its more like uh, outlining that cars could be safer, and they think they are asking for airbags to be installed, but what they are actually asking for is someone to design a public transportation system.
Thats about the scale and scope of how mechanisticly different what they are asking for is, from how things curfently work... even though, to them, its just a 'way of how they get from point a to point b', and thus seems trivial to them.
I thought you blocked the person so you wouldn't have to read what they wrote