Technology

. I can put on my big boy pants and block them as I see them, instead of an admin doing collateral damage and preventing

Okay first, you have no fucking idea how online harassment works. I've seen numerous cases of people being attacked, even doxxed, hy hordes of assholes. Imagine a single mother who can barely have time to work and attend their children, to deal with this shit. And you know? It happens ALL THE TIME to BIPOC users on the fedi.

"Hey, the nazis are invading Poland, why aren't you on the frontlines carrying your gun?" As if there wasn no such thing as innocent CIVILIANS. In a world where speaking up is punished by dogpiling, harassing and doxxing, people just prefer to flee because their admins don't do shit to defend them. Ask ANY Black person on Mastodon what it's like to be harassed online.

Second, forcing people deal with the problems of harassment puts the burden of blocking on the end user. (From another POV, it's the e-mail spam problem if you think about it. Dogpiling is a social form of DDOSing someone, and there's no way to prevent it except by mass blocking the source of the attacks.

Letting an instance admin defederate from a problematic instance protects ALL the admin's users with minimal effort on their part. If a threads user is defederated they can as well switch to another instance, nobody stops them.

Are they not happy with how their instance is treated? Demand changes to the instance, after all they paid for it, didn't they? Oh they didn't? Then who's finacing and controlling it then?

Consider defederation the invisible hand of the market turned visible.

Defederation is NOT damage. On the other hand, people suffering emotional distress from harassment IS damage.