Precisely because blocking here doesn’t do anything really. On a different platform the feature made me invisible to the person and it helped reduce their obsession with me massively. Out of sight out of mind is true for a lot of people.
If you’re concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system — which is what OP is talking about in terms of “blocking” would be – on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not — both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.
In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you’re going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.
You can choose to federate with a specific server. I believe some mastodon servers would honour requests to only share with specific accounts, but that’s it.
You could possibly have some encryption key shenanigans go on at the client side and build it ontop of the fediverse. It might be possible.
Some stalkers might notice and circumvent, but most won’t because in their mind they aren’t doing anything wrong so why would they check if they got blocked. But apparently if the solution is not perfect it’s not worth doing anything to deter it seems.
A lot of people here never had a stalker and it shows.
I don’t think blocking is an effective measure.
Precisely because blocking here doesn’t do anything really. On a different platform the feature made me invisible to the person and it helped reduce their obsession with me massively. Out of sight out of mind is true for a lot of people.
If you’re concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system — which is what OP is talking about in terms of “blocking” would be – on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not — both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.
In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you’re going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.
You can choose to federate with a specific server. I believe some mastodon servers would honour requests to only share with specific accounts, but that’s it.
You could possibly have some encryption key shenanigans go on at the client side and build it ontop of the fediverse. It might be possible.
Some stalkers might notice and circumvent, but most won’t because in their mind they aren’t doing anything wrong so why would they check if they got blocked. But apparently if the solution is not perfect it’s not worth doing anything to deter it seems.