Fediverse

I block individuals pretty freely, and it generally improves my experience online.

The reason I block is because I've lived through bullies and a shitty family, and I am familiar with the techniques bad people use to eat up my time/overwhelm me.

These days, I am also secure in myself and my emotional responses in such a way that I no longer feel bad or guilty (as I was conditioned to growing up) when I remove these people from my life. They are not owed my time or eyeballs.

I figure that if they behave in such a way that other people (such as me) decide it's better to remove them from their life and block them--that's their fault, not mine.

I also know my intellect well enough to understand that I'm not losing something irreplaceable intellectually if I block. I actually am better at learning and improving myself in a form that is NOT debate, or live, or putting pressure on me in the moment, because stepping away from the immediacy of something gives me the tools and breathing room to actually think.

So folks yapping and fretting about echo chambers forming if you block and curate your experience is weird to me...even pre-internet I went out of my way to learn new things. If you're in an echo chamber, you chose to be there, it doesn't happen on its own. And blocking asshats won't magically put you in an echo chamber unless you've chosen to be in one already.

Live debate with unpleasant people who often in this day and age have ulterior motives, including a desire to provoke an emotional response that will hinder one's thinking ability, is a technique used to manipulate others. By blocking and opting out of such things online, I can keep my temper more easily and use my brain instead.

So yeah. I block freely, whenever I feel like, and I've stopped feeling bad about it because I have quite a bit of experience on the internet now, and have seen the patterns in which people engage, and a handy block button is basically the only effective tool to manage it with.

I also block communities, but that's mostly just so I can browse Lemmy in public without looking like a degenerate with all the porn subs hanging out in the open.

Personally if I find someone very unagreeable I will check their account to see if this is their whole online personality or just one or two posts, everyone has bad days. If it seems like a a person I would rather avoid altogether I will block.

My blocked list on nextdoor is starting to max out. Have to block all the nazi's that live around me as they are a lost cause and just repeat constant propaganda.

My lemmy block list is zero and hope it will remain that way for a while. It's fairly tame discussions here and no real issues so far.

I personally do not block. I have always hoped to see changes of heart in people I disagree with, and I also have been on much more abrasive communities, lemmy is kept relatively tidy (at least from my instance's point of view).

I've become massively hardened to online discourse. I don't need to block users when I can just ignore and not need to get the last word in. I know this is an incredibly rare ability, but I just wanted to entertain the idea here that there are alternatives.

The exception could be for discoverability. If garbage trolling spam overwhelms your front page, then it'll be too time consuming to wade through it.. So blocking entire communities makes a lot of sense in this case.

I haven't blocked anyone here, but on Tumblr I started unfollowing folks who posted about doom and gloom all the time. That site's more conducive to memes and TV show discussions than it is discussion about news/politics, and I don't like scrolling through a bunch of superhero memes and then getting hit with a post about the latest atrocity in the world. That stuffs important, but it's not healthy to fixate on it all the time.

It's important to curate what you're doing so that you dont fall into a doomscrolling trap or get ragebaited into arguments that go nowhere.

Still rare, only trolls. If someone is judgy or confrontational I’ll move on. It’s only if they’re trying to start a fight, trying to create an ongoing argument that I’ll block them.

Blocking people is good mental health practice.

Every month or so I go through and lurge my blocklist of all bht the most aggregious posters.

i'm a shithead whose opinions can change after a good exchange tho 🥺🥺

I'm using Boost, so I've been using tagging a lot. It's useful to remind yourself whether someone routinely behaves in a way that you don't want to interact with.

I've probably untagged more people than I've blocked at this point. People are complicated, moods change with the weather.

Also helped me to correlate that the majority of my tags were on ml users. I've filtered that instance and, can't lie, using Lemmy is much nicer now.

Cool, block me too

I mainly block accounts that seem like they have an agenda. Usually new accounts they post a lot about one very controversial topic. Likewise, I block accounts that are concern trolling or arguing in bad faith. There are so many bots and bad faith actors on the internet I feel like you should be blocking them because they don’t deserve our attention.

Echo chamber time

I block bad writers. It hurts my brain reading their work and I get sad.

I generally just tag users, I've blocked a few though

I think the ability or willingness to have a decent conversation with people who have a different opinion is important for the advancement of ideas and a cornerstone of what we call civilization. I find it so weird to see how people "debate" these days instead of conversing, it's somehow more about winning than finding the truth of a matter. Watch for example how political discourse has changed over the last few decades, compare discussions from the 70s like Chomsky vs Foucault to the circus of today. People are already largely separated in different platforms, blocking only exacerbates the bubble effect. That being said, to each their own and I hope your life is better for it.

I have gone through phases of blocking very vocal idiots, but then as you said I feel at an informational disadvantage.

I've gotten recently into tagging people with descriptions of repeated behavior. That way I still know what's going on, but I know what to expect from them.

I've gotten more aggressive with blocks lately. Feels like there's been a lot more arguing and drama on here lately than usual, and I haven't been on as much because of it. Blocking at least drowns a lot of that out.

I block people who are dishonest or abrasive. I'm here for entertainment, not for any higher purpose. I'm not obligated to give those people any attention and I have nothing to gain by it.

I'm blocking maybe a dozen across all of Lemmy. Things are much more pleasant.

I am fast and loose with blocking on all platforms. No regrets.

It's often not even personal. Sometimes someone expresses a mild dislike of cats and I'm like "don't need your noise".

Repost a hilarious meme that I whole heatedly agree with, but with the word "fuck" poorly crossed out? "Algo-speak promoting motherfuckers", roll of the dice on my mood, probably blocked.

My Guild Wars 2 ignore list is full of people labeled "says boiz too much", "annoying fashion", "made bad joke about bees".

There are so many people on the Internet, it's fine. I've taken this approach since MUDs were in fashion and I am pretty confident that it's only served to improve my online experiences.

Im a big block proponent although I don't block all that many people. I usually give people enough rope to hang themselves as the old saying goes. That being said I think people need to treat internet media like real life. Do you go to bars you hate or hang around annoying people? Likely not. This whole your going to be stuck in a bubble is sorta bs. Hang with who you want to and avoid you like. Thats just life.

I block pretty freely, on all social media. Being both trans and religious means that people on any part of the political spectrum might think I'm subhuman, and I don't see the point of engaging when that's the case.

I block freely. My time and attention and mental and emotional bandwidth are limited resources, and to the extent possible I intend to spend them carefully.

It's great for your mental state.

Just be aware of any filter bubble you might create. If you block every person that has an opposite perspective, you'll fall into your own echo chamber.

I block people who are clearly trolls and that one moron who signed all their posts with an anti-ai signature that does nothing because it was either that or get banned by the mods on .world because “I’m harassing them”.

It's better to hurt old people's feelings than allow them to continue to debase themselves with the false belief that they're competent.

It's possible to have a readily applicable standard for polite interactions when we're not divided by fascist rhetoric.

The way feminists relate to men's issues is often founded in a universalizing noxious ideology of feminism. Men shouldn't be feminists, they should be allies.

What I'm trying to say is: blocking isn't the reason that our politics have entered into toxic polarization, fascism is the reason for that. There's nothing really wrong with blocking.

Keep it up. Don't let FOMO loosen your standards. If people acted like this to you in person, you would avoid them. Do it online as well.

Sadly we interact so much online that the bad behavior of social media is now informing people how to behave IRL.