The problem with blocking is this. It’s not a communally accepted part of any website. Here’s what I mean by that. Lots of websites say they allow you to block people. What they mean is they allow you to mute people. This can mean something as simple as you can still see their posts but you can’t interact (but they can see and interact with your posts (upvote/downvote etc), but can’t talk to you. That’s problematic. I feel like a block should mean block. I. E. The web host or platform completely isolated you from one another so that it appears on the user side of things as if you never existed. But that’s problematic too. On Lemmy, if I block someone I lose all post history related to that section of the post where the interaction took place. I can’t go back to my own comments. I cannot see my own comments.

Then there’s the problem of block or mute lists having a finite number. If you have a ten year old account somewhere and you have been muting or blocking people for all ten of those years, eventually you will run out of available space on the block list and there’s no good way to purge the list. You very often can’t back it up, can’t auto purge accounts that are dead or no longer in use, can’t even generally see if the people you blocked are still active in a way that insulates and protects you.

If the goal is to suppress speech that implies that the person/entity doing the suppression is in a position of authority and not following the will of their constituency. So if a mod gets hundreds of reports about a post or comment, some action is warranted because the community is speaking out against it.

That’s important to what we’re talking about here.