this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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This is what I suspected. I can get behind blocking actual Neo Nazis and hate groups, and illegal content, but when it becomes "blocking anyone who disagrees with me" that can easily be abused, especially if the people running the list can't tell the difference between Nazis, MAGA, Republicans, Centrists, and Libertarians. Or someone who can't tell the difference between a tankie, a communist, a socialist, a democratic socialist, or an anarchist. Contrary to some people's beliefs, all of these things are not the same.
People are welcome to block whomever they wish and have the power to curate their own feeds, but when someone else does it, and there is no way to opt out of that, then it becomes censorship or suppression of information.
We've seen this happen a lot with Mastodon instances, where people have various beefs and disagreements, and it sometimes results in people advocating everyone blocks an instance regardless of what actually happened. Unfortunately, people are more likely to hit the block-button based on hearsay than they are to do research on whether the instance is actually a bad actor.
It gets super ugly sometimes, and has been abused in the past.