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I don't block anyone because I do not like to shove other perspectives out of view and pretend they don't exist. Also I grew up on old internet where having a thick skin was a necessity.
There are other reasons to block people than to hide differing viewpoints.
If you're talking about people who do illegal or objectively terrible things, this is a terrible use case. As Lemmy's block system is really meant only as a feed curation tool. It's for things that you "don't wike and don't wannna to see 👶". So to use it on people who are actually bad actors is not a good idea, and certainly isn't a good idea to encourage its use in that manner. After all if everybody ignores these people and nobody reports them then they are allowed to run wild for much longer if not indefinitely. That's why reporting is encouraged, it helps take care of bad faith users.
I think a lot of people need to get used to the idea that it is partially their responsibility to deal with bad faith users by reporting. On big tech platforms it didn't make much of a difference because they didn't care, instance admins here do care though, and many don't have the legal defenses that those companies have especially when it comes to illegal shit that might be posted by some of these awful depraved individuals. Let them know about it sooner rather than later, report the trolls.
Apologies if I came off as a bit harsh.
Most of the people I've blocked haven't broken any rules. Reporting them would be pointless.
That's fair, most of the people I've dealt with who I thought about blocking usually were, either they were directly harassing or attacking me, were blatantly alt-right trolls attacking other people for their presentation or they were simply being rude and hostile for no reason.
I guess those things might be different on lemm.ee but generally here those things earn people comment or post removal, community bans, and sometimes even site bans (account termination if this is their home server). Same is true for other servers I'm on. Including the Mastodon server I'm a part of.
I probably have way lower criteria for blocking than most other people. I deliberately go to threads about Elon Musk for example and block everyone making snide remarks about him. Not because I'm a fan of Musk but because I'm not interested in dealing with people who use social media to talk shit. The people I have had the most insightful conversations with don't post replies like that. My blocklist is way over 500 users long already and I add several people to it every day. I'm simply just trying to improve the signal to noise ratio.
I understand this, but I think one of the prevailing uses for blocking has sadly become to shove away voices that one wishes not to hear.
Agree with this perspective and this is also why I've not got anyone blocked on here. However it's possible both of us are fortunate enough to have never encountered a stalker or some kind of determined harassment campaign.
I agree with this very much, I don't really have any desire to hide opposing viewpoints either. Which is really the only reason why you would block somebody on Lemmy using its highly crippled blocking system.
On other platforms like Mastodon and Reddit most of the reason why I block people stems around bad behavior, like legitimately objectively harmful behavior. Things that are considered objectionable even by instance admins, and also these platforms allow you to view blocked users and their content after they have been blocked and also submit reports if they continue to behave badly. It's more like a soft moderation tool than a content feed curation tool on those platforms.
When it comes to blocking on Lemmy blocking these types of people is actually a bad idea. These people need to be reported so that they can be dealt with and they don't cause more harm to the community. What they don't need is to be blocked and ignored so that they can continue perpetrating their evil shit without other people getting upset. This is especially true in the case of people who do illegal stuff, that stuff can get the instance in trouble.