They shouldn't be able to do that!
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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I'm sorry, but I feel like you need to support the statement "This comes from discussions I’ve had with minorities about the harassment they face on Lemmy and mastodon" a bit more. Your whole argument for limiting the speech of others is predicated on this statement.
I'm not saying that minorities couldn't face harassment on Lemmy, but Lemmy is by far the most liberal and minority supportive online forum I have ever experienced. Part of the reason Lemmy is so niche is because it doesn't have the mainstream attention other platforms have and is heavily moderated.
If you are engaging in an instance where harassment is occurring the moderators generally ban the person quickly. If the moderators of that instance aren't doing their job people generally leave and the instance dies from lack of content (there just aren't that many people on Lemmy). If someone follows you from a different instance to another the current instance moderators will likely ban them even if the one you met them on doesn't. Finally, if they are direct messaging you you can block them, they can continue to message you but you won't see their messages and neither will anyone else.
What minority group have you talked with that are receiving harassment and what extra protections were needed that aren't already here?
the discussion was 2 years old, so I'm a bit fuzzy - it looks like it was only 1 person. but it was enough to convince me from basically saying what yall are saying here "don't expect privacy on a public site" to "there should be an attempt at privacy, and people facing harassment should have some measure of control to protect themselves"
I didnt feel the need to make the provide their credentials as a minority and prove to me that they're being harassed and that muting the harasser wasn't enough. What they said made sense.
Looking at the post you reference the person you talked to is a transgender person who moderates both LGBTQ+ and Transfem in Lemmy.blahaj.zone, they provide more than enough evidence of their minority status, but that wasn't really needed. The question was what group was being harassed and thus this interaction would imply that the LGBTQ community is being harassed on Lemmy.
What I feel like you missed in your previous discussion is that the other person was talking about privacy in the context of being outed in the real world. The harassment being referred to was in the context of your real life identity being revealed or connected to your online conversation.
Under this context they are looking for a feature similar to how Facebook (at least previously) allowed you to pick who could see your post as you were posting it. That way you could individually disallow specific people or groups from seeing them.
This doesn't imply that the issue is that someone is being harassed on Lemmy and thus we need better blocking options. It's really only an issue for someone who wants to dox themselves and still have private conversations, in which case Lemmy and most online forums can't accomplish that natively across all instances/subreddits/groups. The only solution is to have a private instance with vetting and heavy moderation. If you don't dox yourself you can generally avoid the whole issue here.
Based on this I think you're making a different argument than what the block feature is or ever could be.