@FediTips

Users cant defederate, but can block instances. How do users "PRE block" these instances?

@kevinrns

Users can't really block instances unfortunately. All that the user level domain block really does is hide stuff from that you. The bigoted material can still mislead/radicalise other people on your server.

The blocking needs to be done by the server admins for it to have a protective effect.

@FediTips
I'm sorry, I'm having trouble following your reasoning here.

Your complaint is that a user blocking an instance still leaves posts from that instance visible to other users? How else would you possibly expect that to work?

@hybridhavoc

I'm not complaining!

I'm saying that in this situation (where radicalisation is getting people killed) the main action has to be taken at the instance level, in order to prevent radicalisation.

Having said that, Kevin Russell responded with the valid point that they wanted to avoid boosting Threads posts by accident so I did a reply with info on how to block domains at user level.

@hybridhavoc

Ah okay, that needs a bit more detail yes.

When a user blocks a domain on Mastodon, it hides that domain's posts from the user, but it doesn't hide that user's posts from the domain.

That's what I mean by it not really being a block.

This is different to instance-level defederation which is more like a proper two-directional block.

@hybridhavoc

Just to give a real world example, when FediTips was on another person's server and I blocked domains at user level, I'd still see people from those domains showing up in my replies when I logged out. But I didn't see them when I was logged in, because my user-level domain "block" hid them from me.

When I moved to my own instance, I was able to do a proper instance level block and no longer had replies from those domains even when logged out.