edit: Gotcha. Thanks peeps.
I think the term block is misleading, and is more akin to muting on other platforms like Mastodon. Anything you personally do on your Lemmy account only impacts your experience with Lemmy, and has no impact of what other people can see.
Server admins on the other hand can defederate from another server. If the server you’re on defederates from another server, any existing content from the blocked server will still appear, but no new content will come in from the blocked server. Anything you post to that server will not federate over and would only be seen by people on your server.
I’m pretty sure blocking goes one way. You can’t see their posts but they can see and reply to yours.
Hmm, I’ll test it out with you. I’ll block you and 30 min later I’ll unblock you. See if you can see me in the meantime.
It’s seventeen minutes after you replied to me and I can not only see your reply, I’ve upvoted it and made this reply.
And unblocked. Interesting. When I blocked you, I couldn’t see my own comment made to you anymore, nor your comment. Couldn’t find or up-/downvote you.
But for you inversely, it works. Interesting.
It’s a very personal shadow ban.
You can’t see them is all.
You may make a post and they could see it and reply to it. But you won’t see the reply, others will.
In fact I have seen ghost replies on my account (comment showing 1 reply that I can’t see) when I crosscheck from a different account the reply is from someone I blocked. The same happens with bots too since I have them blockednon this account.
From a technical point, blocking would only be obvious to the blocker. The server would remember your settings and not show you anything related to the person you blocked.
The blocked being unable to see you would require a lot more technical work. Easy if you are both on the same server as the server could register the block. If they blocked is on a different server then both servers would have to accept the block registration. And then another server needs to spend resources making sure that their blocked user gets content filtered out that contains your name from seeing them.
Call me super dumb (and please do call me out if so), but whar about an inverse method, where the default is blacklisted, and you’d have to individually whitelist?
Could it work that way? Actually, hm… wouldn’t that be akin to a sort of shadowban?
Individually whitelisting means your “approve this?” inbox would be massive every single day
hmm, I see, thank you for explaining :)
