They shouldn't be able to do that!
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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All credit to you for advocating for needs of marginalized groups for protected spaces to communicate, but the fediverse simply isn't the right tool for that. It's entire philosophy, design and implementation is centered around making everything public, from posts and comments to votes and moderation actions.
Asking the fediverse, or the activitypub protocol to allow blocking a user from responding at all is rather like asking a car to be a bike. It's just not what it is. I can't really concieve any way of making a decentralized public forum work like that as there is no central point that can control permissions. It might be possible to design a system where communities can control membership and posting priviledges, but even then, if it's distributed, it would take very little for a hostile instance to simply ignore any central control and display its users posts locally, leading to the same effect as if you just mute them, leaving them visible to others, albiet only on their instance or others that cooperate with it.
I think that those who are in need of a controlled system should probably be looking at a centralized system that is run and controlled by someone, or a group, that they trust. That would give them the best chance to keep discussions private, and access to read or post controlled. Read access would need to be controlled too, or their discussions can just be mirrored to a hostile server and harassment can occur there where the poster is unaware, just as if they'd muted them.
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.
Community block lists or bans are handled at the protocol level (I think this is task that did that), and are pretty simple, in that they just tell a server not to let a particular user comment or post on a particular community. Thats straightforward enough, and as long as the user's server obeys that, the user doesn't get to post.
Trying to do something similar for every user becomes much more complex as it requires coordinating each user's settings to all the relevant servers every time they change. It also leaves open the issue of what happens if a user you'ce blocked simply posts a sibling comment to yours, as you won't see it, but the rest of the community will.
Personally, I would like to see invite only communities where posts and comments are public (it's activitypub, so there's no huding them), but only whitelisted users can post. I know there's a WomensOnly community here that has a hard time stopping men wading in (I'm guilty if that, I saw an interesting postvand didn't notice the community name, but the mods were very nice about it). I'm sure they'd like a way of vetting first time posters and commenters.