Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
What if social networks had public blocklists that users could decide to use or not for themselves? It could be run like a comm, but slightly different. A user would create the blocklist and ultimately control it. “Posts” to the list could be proposals for additions or removals of users, comms, or instances. Votes on those posts guide the mod(s) on accepting the change or not. Apps could subscribe and update automatically.
I’ve been thinking about this ever since the tesseract debacle.
because 98% of users won’t ever use that feature.
most users only use blocks when it’s a BIG SHINY button they can smash. when they see something they don’t like.
they will never look at their block list