this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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Lemmy
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The person you blocked can still see, and reply to, everything you say. It only denies you the opportunity to respond, allowing them to discredit you and turn others against you without your knowledge. It also doesn't stop them downvoting you at all, leaving them free to retaliate via vote bombing.
They should be the ones unable to see any comments you make. They should be unable to reply or respond to you. They should be unable to vote on any of your comments or even posts at all.
But it's the opposite, and therefore completely broken.
Unfortunately, if they were to do this I'd imagine they'd be able to know you blocked them - as your instance would need to tell the other instance (and if they were a single user instance they could grab that record from the database) to hide your comments/posts. Which could cause even more problems as there are definitely people who'd go scorched earth over it. Even if they didn't go on a rampage about it, they'd still be able to just then logout and see what you're saying because of that.
From what I recall in the ActivityPub spec, transmitting blocks is already there, but I imagine no one implements it for that reason.
I'd take that over the situation now. At least if they had to resort to bannable offenses to retaliate, they'd actually get banned.
All blocking does now is give them free reign to harass you, which completely defeats the point.
Like if we have to be afraid of vengeful users who want to win something, why have blocking at all then? We might as well just bend over and hope they use lube.