I just had my first experience blocking an instance, and it made my realize now nice the lemmy content curation experience is vs the centralized model.
Recently I started noticing a lot of posts from that I just found annoying. There was nothing inherently wrong with them, they just came from a culture I don’t understand and so I found them cringey. Since they all came from one community, realized most of them come from the same instance. I just added that instance to my blocklist and the problem is solved!
Now think about in the centralized model. I would be forced to either just accept that these posts are in my timeline, or block each community and user individually. The instance gave me an easy way to manage my content.
I also appreciate that instances can manage the blocking for their users. So the most horrible stuff I don’t even see. But it also preserves free speech, as those users who want to say horrible things can do so in their own instance, and most people will just block it.
Anyway, just impressed again by the fediverse!
I don’t think there’s anything democratic about publicly singling out some users as pariahs. If a user is disruptive, just get rid of them. If they’re not, leave them be. If the jury’s still out on this one, well, don’t bias the jury against them.
Democracy means allowing the people to decide, as opposed to authoritianism where a central group (mods, admins, facilitators or whatever) makes all the decisions for people. PieFed still allows for authoritian control, mind you, e.g. on PieFed.social (the flagship instance) both hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml are defederated. But in addition to that, this opens up a new possibility where someone who is perhaps controversial yet not over a hard line can be allowed to remain, yet merely labelled.
And then people can decide for themselves, rather than solely an authority figure, what they wish to do about it. You are free ofc to debate whether this is “good” or “bad”, but either way it does seem more “democratic” to me, bc it places the power and therefore responsibility into the hands of the user to decide.
Which is sorta how our brains work anyway all the time, so these icons act as a shortcut to help jog people’s memories or realize something about the target that they would eventually figure out anyway.
The point is that the icon means… whatever you want it to mean. A “new account”, a “potential unregistered bot”, a “noted controversial person” - the authorities no longer control these meanings, only the recipient. Hence “democracy”.