tal

If you’re concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system — which is what OP is talking about in terms of “blocking” would be – on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not — both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.

In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you’re going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.

I’m not totally sure about the chronology, but I think that the “old->new” block change on Reddit may have been due to calls from Twitter users. Most of the people I saw back on Reddit complaining about the old behavior prior to the change were saying “on Twitter, blocked users can’t respond”.

On Reddit, the site is basically split up into a series of forums, subreddits. On the Threadiverse, same idea, but the term is communities. And that’s the basic unit of moderation — that is, people set up a set of rules for how what is permitted on a given community, and most restrictions arise from that. There are Reddit sitewide restrictions (and here, instancewide), but those don’t usually play a huge rule compared to the community-level things.

So, on Twitter — and I’ve never made a Twitter account, and don’t spend much time using it, but I believe I’ve got a reasonable handle on how it works — there’s no concept of a topic-specific forum. The entire site is user-centric. Comments don’t live in forums talking about a topic; they only are associated with the text in them and with the parent comment. So if you’re on Twitter, there has to be some level of content moderation unless you want to only have sitewide restrictions. On Twitter, having a user be able to act as “moderator” for responses makes a lot more sense than on Reddit, because Twitter lacks an analog to subreddit moderators.

So Twitter users, who were accustomed to having a “block” feature, naturally found Reddit’s “block” feature, which did something different from what they were used to, to be confusing. They click “block”, and what it actually does is not what they expect — and worse, at a surface glance, the behavior is the same. They think that they’re acting as a moderator, but they’re just controlling visibility of comments to themselves. Then they have an unpleasant surprise when they realize that what they’ve been doing isn’t what they think that they’ve been doing.

I’ve got a top-level comment about why I’d rather not have a feature of the form OP requested. Reddit’s block feature originally worked the way the Threadiverse’s block feature presently does. It was later changed, and that change introduced problems.

However, that being said, I do think that there may be a real UI issue if people think that they’re preventing responses, but aren’t actually doing so, and get frustrated. That’d be a legit UI issue.

considers

I don’t think I’d use “mute”. In IRC, “mute” refers to a moderation action more analogous to what OP wants. I think that that could still produce confusion.

Usenet uses “kill”, for “killfile”, in the sense of “automatically killing posts from a user”. Probably not a great choice either.

Maybe “ignore” would be better than “block”, though. I think that that would make it unambiguous what the operation is doing. I’m guessing that the Lemmy devs just chose “block” because Reddit happened to use it, didn’t put a whole lot of thought into it.

Related story: I once worked with a guy who had worked on Yahoo Maps, way back when. It was one of the first mapping services to provide navigation instructions. He told me that he was the one who had, at some point, suggested “bear” as a verb for the navigation decisions (e.g. “bear right”). It was a pretty off-the-cuff decision, but apparently it’s confusing to some people, since “bear” isn’t a terribly-commonly-used term and can potentially be confused with the animal of the same name. IIRC, Yahoo Maps ultimately changed it, years later, but I understand that not only did they use the term for quite some years, but some other services also copied it, so it had considerable inertia.

kagis

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/kid-gps-instructions-bear-right/

EDIT: Sorry, I think it was actually MapQuest that he was working on, not Yahoo Maps.

Ehh. I don’t think that the underlying goal was to try to obtain some sort of “ban monopoly” on the Threadiverse. If they had, they had a ton of things that they could have done that they didn’t.

• Don’t support federation in the first place.

• Have lemmy.ml and friends simply disallow federation with other instances.

• Break compatibility in new builds to make it harder for people to run other instances. Don’t open-source Lemmy in the first place.

Like, I think that it’s pretty lame that some of the official Lemmy software support stuff is communities on lemmy.ml, which has an admin situation that I don’t really like. But…that seems like an awfully weak lever to be pulling if someone’s goal is to try to exclude anyone else from having the ability to restrict users.

I don’t really think that I have a range that’s anywhere near that narrow.

First, some of my favorite games are roguelikes (e.g. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or Caves of Qud), and they often have very few assets, which is where all the data in larger games comes from.

It looks like the largest release of Cataclysm (the one with the graphics and sounds) unpacks to be 586MB. Caves of Qud — actually, I’m surprised that it’s this large — has a 1.4GB directory in Steam after installation.

I have a hard time imagining a lower bound (short of maybe demoscene type stuff, where I’d be surprised that stuff could fit into so little space). But I have a hard time imagining avoiding a game because it’s too small.

Second, I don’t think that there are any commercial games out there that are going to cause me to not play them due to storage space. Starfield is probably the largest I’ve done, and while it uses enough disk space that I’m not going to leave it installed if I don’t plan to play it anytime soon, it’s not an issue to store it.

https://twinfinite.net/features/biggest-games-all-time-ranked-install-size/

This says that Starfield has a 125 GB install.

The largest that they have listed there is ARK: Survival Evolved , at 435 GB. That does seem a little excessive to me, but, I mean, you can get a 4TB NVMe drive on Amazon right now for ( checks ) ~$200, so that’s really $25 in storage, and when you’re not playing it, you can just uninstall it and put something else there. As gaming hardware goes, $25 just isn’t that big a deal.

In theory, I could imagine some sort of game that procedurally-generates a dynamic world as one explores that has massive save files or something, something in the vein of Minecraft-style games. Disk space there could be theoretically unbounded. So you could design a hypothetical game that I’d object to. But…I don’t really think that there’s really a practical limitation that excludes games for me today today.

Devs want a monopoly on the power to block people they don’t like through the use of bans

Admins can ban on a per instance basis. Moderators can ban on a per community basis. But devs don’t have any particular banning power.

I have not done so in the traditional sense in quite some years. My experience was that it was an increasing headache due to crashing into a wide variety of anti-spam efforts. Get email past one and crash into another.

Depending upon your use case – using the “forward to a smarthost” feature in some mail server packages to forward to a mailserver run by a SMTP service provider with whom you have an account might work for you. Then it still looks to local software like you have a local mailserver.

If I were going to do a conventional, no-smarthost mailserver today, I think that I would probably start out by setting up a bunch of spam-filtering stuff — SpamAssassin, I dunno what-all gets used these days on a “regular” account — and then emailing stuff from my server and seeing what throws up red flags. That’d let me actually see the scoring and stuff that’s killing email. Once I had it as clean as I could get it, I’d get a variety of people I know on different mail servers and ask them to respond back to a test email, and see what made it out.

I’d also add, for people who feel that they don’t have a good way to “hang up” on a conversation that they don’t want to be participating any further without making it look like they agree with the other user, the convention is to comment something like this:

“I don’t think that we’re likely to agree on this point, so I’m afraid that we’re going to have to agree to disagree.”

That way, it’s clear to everyone else reading the thread that the breaking-off user isn’t simply conceding the point, but it also doesn’t prevent the other user from responding (or, for that matter, other users from taking up the thread).

EDIT: Also, on Reddit, I remember a lot of users who had been subjected to the “one more comment and a block” stuff then going to try to find random other comments in the thread where other users might see their comment, responding to those comments complaining that the other user had blocked them, and then posting their comment there, which tended to turn the whole thread into an ugly soup.

Also, with Reddit’s new system, at least with some clients and if I remember correctly, the old Web UI, there was no clear indication as to why the comment didn’t take effect — it looked like some sort of internal error, which tended to frustrate users. Obviously, that’s not a fundamental problem with a “blocking a user also prevents responding” system, but it was a pretty frustrating aspect of Reddit’s implementation of it.

Sure, no dispute there.

When did an appreciation for free speech become the exclusive domain of the Libertarians? I don’t want you to be able to unilaterally silence me, therefore I’m a Libertarian?

Minor nitpick with your comment: there’s a semantic difference between “Libertarian” and “libertarian”, and I suspect you want the latter.

Small-l “libertarian” is used to refer to the political ideology.

Big-L “Libertarian” is used to refer to the Libertarian Party.

The same sort of convention also shows up elsewhere, like “democrat” and “Democrat”, “republican” and “Republican”, etc.

How the Threadiverse works today — blocking hides content from blocked users, but doesn’t affect their ability to comment — is how Reddit originally worked, and I think that it was by far a better system.

Reddit only adopted the “you can’t reply to a comment from someone who has blocked you” system later. What it produced was people getting into fights, adding one more comment, and then blocking the other person so that they’d be unable to respond, so it looked like the other person had conceded the point.