Instance blocking is dependent on client implementation, as it isn’t provided by lemmy itself.

edit: no longer the case

I think you are correct, but not having the opportunity to participate in a thread on those instances because you can’t see them anymore is part of the ways to avoid troubles.

I was planning to, but ultimately didn’t. I have handed out personal blocks to obvious trolls and a brunch of hexbear users that spammed gifs in every single thread though.

I’m not on the internet or lemmy to make the world a better place, I’m on here to kill time/enjoy myself/learn some things. I dont have the mental space to deal extremists, and particularly extremists that have a world view thats incompatible with itself if taken at face value, and I certainly dont have anything valid that I can learn from tankies, and as such, my block list has gotten quite large, and my general mood has increased because of it

This operates under the assumption that there are good decent people on every instance, but instances like Hexbear and Lemmy.ml are inherently corrupt and run by people who want to sow misinformation and chaos to negatively impact western powers. I’m not saying the whole thing is a Chinese operation, but if it were then it would be run exactly the same way it is now.

If I’m not allowed to have a discussion or disagreement with you, and get kicked out instead, I’ll just go to places where they will talk with me

I actually tried to, and if it was possible to have rational and polite discussion, without straw man arguments, dog pilling, personal attacks and finally threats of violence, I would have continued to try. But sadly all of this happen, multiple times.

At some points I considered leaving Lemmy, thinking that this federation as a whole was not safe for debating. But then I started understanding patterns, either it was from the users from a specific instance, or it was communities from a specific instance that turned like that. Overall the pattern seem to be that if the instance mentions extreme political ideologies in its description or if the profiles of its admins do, then debating is not possible.

If they want to stay connected to people to avoid the circle jerk, they have to work on themselves too (ex: learning to debate politely), you can’t except us to absorb all the damages to help them avoid radicalization. It’s like walking towards a terrorist group with flowers while they are shooting around and expecting them to be inspired by your pacifism.

I do enjoy debating and questioning my own beliefs, but I am not on Lemmy to consume my mental health, so I need to take some actions to protect it.

I “blocked” hexbear, because a mod didn’t take the time to use their brain, labeled me a “pedophile apologist” and banned me from the entire instance. If they moderate based on “I don’t care what actually happened, I’m mad” then I’m not going to bother interacting with them.

Being able to block what you want is great, having other people decide what to block for you is not.

blocked

Because engaging in discussion with certain groups, does nothing but legitimize and amplify their messages of hatred and bigotry you fucking genius.

You don’t engage in polite discussion with people that want you dead, that want to seize power and implement fascist authoritarianism, and who want to purge the “impure”.

How you deal with it is by aggressively reacting to and putting down their bullshit, and denying them platforms which to spread their messages and hatred.

People like you, who want to wring your hands and play nice and polite with nazis and their ilk, are doing nothing but pushing their agenda for them. People like you are nothing but collaborators, and people like you will end up on the wrong side of the stick alongside everyone else once you’ve outlived your usefulness.

I eagerly await your reply of “oh well that just means you’re intolerant and that makes you worse than the (insert authoritarian flavor of choice) that i want to politely talk with!”

Yeah, I don’t block instances, just individuals that have proven to not act in good faith. I try to expose myself to as many diverse opinions as possible, but know if the people holding those opinions can back it up with facts, or are at least willing to consider the possibility that they’re wrong, and I try my best to do the same.

“let’s block people with opinions I don’t like”

I don’t think a lot of them are actually people, but rather LLMs. Also, does it count as “people with opinions” when it’s shills paid to spread authoritarian propaganda?

I do agree we should limit personal blocking, but that’s because we need to collectively manage the Fediverse. There’s no budget for countering misinformation campaigns, just us.

Instances blocking propaganda instances, on the other hand, is fantastic. It’s what we need for the Fediverse to survive instead of going the way of Voat and other extremist communities.

Lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and Hexbear.

Lemmygrad and Hexbear are the most obvious ones, sadly lemmy.ml is also part of them in my experience despite not being obvious about it (you have to check the admins and mods profile to see the link) and having some good content when it’s not about politics such as tech. There may also be some defederated by my home instance admins that I may not be aware of.

I’d say they are more common on Lemmy.ml than Lemmy.world