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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s mostly true; it’s optimized for wide dissemination of information, and the idea of keeping a specific person from seeing information that’s shown to the rest of the world isn’t very compatible with that. It doesn’t really work on Reddit or web forums that are visible without logging in either since a person you’ve blocked can still view your posts anonymously.
A bit more looking brings me to the ActivityPub spec. Your server should tell the blocked user’s server about the block, and the blocked user’s server shouldn’t allow them to interact with your posts or comments (that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to see your posts or comments).
The thing is, in network protocol documents, should means the behavior is optional. Fediverse software doesn’t have to support blocks at all according to the protocol.
Imagine a hypothetical situation where I have beef with you. I create a second account and block you. I use this account to scout your posts, then using that other account, I go to all of the posts you’re commenting on, and post comments calling you out for being… I don’t know, whatever nasty thing I want to call you out for. Because that account has blocked you, you can’t see those posts (and presumably not the replies to them, either), and can’t defend yourself.
The problem you’ve solved is that they’re not harassing you in your spaces, and your communities.
If they wanna cry about me in their basement with their own friends, that’s ok. But I want to put hurdles, at least some inconveniences, between myself and their ability to harass me in my communities. Force them to manage 30 accounts, etc.
It sounds like what you want is for moderators to ban people for you, which they will do if you report them and the moderators agree that what they are doing is unwanted in the community.
They would likely not like or agree with what the moderator decided, as moderators are ether fairly hands off unless needed or hated by the community. They want the ability to police others just due to them conversing with them.
I would like that, except moderators are already overworked without being forced to stay up to date on all the current dogwhistles.
and the lemmy community in general is too small in general to sustain a healthy pool of mods.
how fast can mods realistically respond to reports?
What if I want an alternative where I’m fine with them being in the community as long as they stay away from my content?
what I dont care what the mods say, I dont want them to be able to say things that I find hurtful to my friends in the comments of my posts?
they’re not harassing you in your spaces, and your communities.
They would be, though. That’s exactly what they’re saying could happen - you just wouldn’t be able to see it. In effect, what they described is exactly what you’re claiming to be a problem, except worse because it’s exclusively in control of the harasser.
so then whats the solution here? I’m assuming you want harassment to stop.
so the reddit way is a problem because the victim can’t see it.
so the solution is to provide a way for the victim to not be able to see it, without actually stopping the harassment?
like… i dont get it. how is that an improvement? at least with the reddit way, the victim can put up hurdles to prevent the harasser from coming into their comments and flooding them with foul shit.
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
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?
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*
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.
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.
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.
Thanks Final conclusion, no offence: Blocking is rather useless in the Fediverse, unless you submit to complete ignorance.
That’s mostly true; it’s optimized for wide dissemination of information, and the idea of keeping a specific person from seeing information that’s shown to the rest of the world isn’t very compatible with that. It doesn’t really work on Reddit or web forums that are visible without logging in either since a person you’ve blocked can still view your posts anonymously.
A bit more looking brings me to the ActivityPub spec. Your server should tell the blocked user’s server about the block, and the blocked user’s server shouldn’t allow them to interact with your posts or comments (that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to see your posts or comments).
The thing is, in network protocol documents, should means the behavior is optional. Fediverse software doesn’t have to support blocks at all according to the protocol.
Imagine a hypothetical situation where I have beef with you. I create a second account and block you. I use this account to scout your posts, then using that other account, I go to all of the posts you’re commenting on, and post comments calling you out for being… I don’t know, whatever nasty thing I want to call you out for. Because that account has blocked you, you can’t see those posts (and presumably not the replies to them, either), and can’t defend yourself.
What problem have we solved?
The problem you’ve solved is that they’re not harassing you in your spaces, and your communities.
If they wanna cry about me in their basement with their own friends, that’s ok. But I want to put hurdles, at least some inconveniences, between myself and their ability to harass me in my communities. Force them to manage 30 accounts, etc.
It sounds like what you want is for moderators to ban people for you, which they will do if you report them and the moderators agree that what they are doing is unwanted in the community.
They would likely not like or agree with what the moderator decided, as moderators are ether fairly hands off unless needed or hated by the community. They want the ability to police others just due to them conversing with them.
I would like that, except moderators are already overworked without being forced to stay up to date on all the current dogwhistles.
and the lemmy community in general is too small in general to sustain a healthy pool of mods.
how fast can mods realistically respond to reports?
What if I want an alternative where I’m fine with them being in the community as long as they stay away from my content?
what I dont care what the mods say, I dont want them to be able to say things that I find hurtful to my friends in the comments of my posts?
They would be, though. That’s exactly what they’re saying could happen - you just wouldn’t be able to see it. In effect, what they described is exactly what you’re claiming to be a problem, except worse because it’s exclusively in control of the harasser.
so then whats the solution here? I’m assuming you want harassment to stop.
so the reddit way is a problem because the victim can’t see it.
so the solution is to provide a way for the victim to not be able to see it, without actually stopping the harassment?
like… i dont get it. how is that an improvement? at least with the reddit way, the victim can put up hurdles to prevent the harasser from coming into their comments and flooding them with foul shit.
Well multi accounting is the next problem… Just live an unpeacefull live then…
Multi-accounting is a feature, not a problem. Any “solution” I can think of to it would lead to far worse consequences than whatever you’re imagining.
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