They shouldn't be able to do that!
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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Blocking means you can't see them. It makes them non existent to you. It doesn't hide you from them. It's working as intended.
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.
Moderators are still able to ban people from communities.
Easier job to do when you're actually getting reports.
Lemmy communities and irl communities are different things that only sometimes overlap.
For example, the irl trans community could be harassed in a Lemmy gaming community. If mods aren't sympathetic, then they're torn between just accepting the harassment, or forking the gaming community. While this is what Lemmy was meant to do, practically most Lemmy communities aren't large enough to meaningful support more than one instance, so one of the instances is going to wither on the vine. And most Lemmy mods seem overworked, besides.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting. If a gaming community's members are harassing a trans community, could the trans community's moderators not simply ban everyone from that gaming community from the trans community? That's a power that moderators have. You could also report the gaming community to the administrators of their instance and if the administrators thought it was a problem they could shut down that community. You could also ask your own instance's administrators to defederate from the gaming community's instance. All of those things are things that can be done with the way the Fediverse is currently set up.
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.
And I maintain that it's not reasonable. You (and OP) want individual users to be able to control what other individual users can see and do on the Fediverse. They've tried that on Reddit. RunawayFixer found this experiment, for example. The results were not good from a pragmatic perspective, let alone a philosophical one.
I think you're going to have to accept that in a free environment there are going to be people saying things and reading things that you don't approve of. You can create a community with whatever rules you want to enforce there, but you can't enforce your rules on other communities. Just as they can't enforce them on yours.
If they are running their own communities yes they can. Mods can and do ban people from the communities.
lemmy communities and irl communities aren't the same, they only sometimes partially overlap.
That's unfair. It's rather fair they don't see me, I blocked them for a reason.
You get to control your own experience, not their experience.
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?
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 thought you blocked the person so you wouldn't have to read what they wrote
The only way to do that in a federated system would be to effectively make blocks public. That has its own disadvantages.
Sorry I'm a nurse, explain it to me like I'm five years old.
It's hard to control which Information other people get in a system where many servers share information like posts and comments. Think of it as throwing your post on a public wall. Everyone that walks by will be able to see it.
It's (relatively) easy to control what information you want to see. Or at least information from which sources you want to see, or not see.
Since each instance is its own 'website' that shares content with each other, your block would need to be publicly available so that every other site can see it and implement it.
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