They shouldn't be able to do that!
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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I'm more expressing frustration that they have been approached multiple times about fixing the broken blocking by either renaming it muting (what it actually is), or creating an actual blocking feature. The excuses they provide are nonsensical.
Blocking protects users. Why would a federated platform not want to protect users?
I've got a top-level comment about why I'd rather not have a feature of the form OP requested. Reddit's block feature originally worked the way the Threadiverse's block feature presently does. It was later changed, and that change introduced problems.
However, that being said, I do think that there may be a real UI issue if people think that they're preventing responses, but aren't actually doing so, and get frustrated. That'd be a legit UI issue.
considers
I don't think I'd use "mute". In IRC, "mute" refers to a moderation action more analogous to what OP wants. I think that that could still produce confusion.
Usenet uses "kill", for "killfile", in the sense of "automatically killing posts from a user". Probably not a great choice either.
Maybe "ignore" would be better than "block", though. I think that that would make it unambiguous what the operation is doing. I'm guessing that the Lemmy devs just chose "block" because Reddit happened to use it, didn't put a whole lot of thought into it.
Related story: I once worked with a guy who had worked on Yahoo Maps, way back when. It was one of the first mapping services to provide navigation instructions. He told me that he was the one who had, at some point, suggested "bear" as a verb for the navigation decisions (e.g. "bear right"). It was a pretty off-the-cuff decision, but apparently it's confusing to some people, since "bear" isn't a terribly-commonly-used term and can potentially be confused with the animal of the same name. IIRC, Yahoo Maps ultimately changed it, years later, but I understand that not only did they use the term for quite some years, but some other services also copied it, so it had considerable inertia.
kagis
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/kid-gps-instructions-bear-right/