In short i just jumped into the whole Mastodon blocking drama and am somewhat disappointed to see it as childish as reddit's power mod drama. Accelerated by the fact that a Limit/Mute option exist just fine, i wonder why Block/Defederation is an option at all. It only moves power from the user to admins without anything in return. With just Mute, as far as i can tell, one still wouldn't have to look on certain instances, but could interact/whitelist certain individuals and we'd get rid of the multi account requirement overnight. So why isn't it that way?

Edit: For those annoyed by the same siloing issues, look into ATProto. Bluesky may be a big unknown, but the protocol itself looks a lot more promising in terms of user freedom.

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[–] Plopp 28 points 8 months ago

Defederation is an absolutely necessary tool. There are instances out there you don't want any part of, with CSAM etc. But with that said I think defederation should mostly be used for such things. Block lists (containing instances, users, hashtags) that users can subscribe to would be a better way to handle the rest, and instances could recommend and/or curate lists for their users and maybe activate them by default.

Instances defederating from another instance because that second instance hasn't defederated from a third instance is a good way to ruin the future of the Fediverse I think. It's just an immature and destructive behavior leading to fragmentation.