Why thank you for deciding for everyone else that hundreds of users should be quietly silenced by default because you’re so thoughtful and awesome. This is the kind of shit tech bros like Musk do on their platforms because they see themselves as kings of their domain. I bet you’re still using Tesseract and can’t even see this, asshole.

It’s funny you picked Admiral Patrick as a username since the character was a right bastard who wanted to unilaterally surrender the Federation to the Dominion. Leave Lemmy and go haunt some other community that shares your values. r/conservative should be right up your alley. If by chance you see this and reply with some stupid “high road” remark just know that whatever you say will be regarded about as much as a stepped on turd.

Basically I was just banking on people not noticing until they’ve already had some kind of feeling that “Lemmy just feels more friendly lately” and putting two and two together when realizing why.

You took it upon yourself to make a decision for thousands of users without their knowledge and consent. That is far more problematic than any of the reasons why you created the block list in the first place or why you hid it.

When you offer something up to the internet, especially too a gitrepo where a lot of software is FOSS, just like when you offer something up on any public forum, you can expect that most people will take things at face value. You deliberately took advantage of that to progress your own agenda and ideology.

The people talking in these comments about using your product and thinking they were doing something wrong should be enough to illustrate time, and work, and irritation that they put into this because you couldn’t be up front.

If nobody by you used your front end, would that have been so bad?

There’s no good way to do what I wanted without either sounding like a dick, calling people out, or otherwise causing mass ire

And yet you did it and think it was a good idea still? Mental gymnastics…

The fact that you never intended the list to go public is absolutely damning. I trust instance admins to moderate and necessarily hide certain types of content from my view, but that’s an agreement I consent to when I join the instance and can verify if I really want to. I do not expect a client to do this moderation, especially not when the repo says nothing about what it’s doing.

It’s almost like you knew nobody would want to use your software if you were honest and transparent about what it was. You want to create this “nice little fediverse,” but were also likely aware that most of the people you wanted to influence would never sign up through your instance or even use your biased client. To some extent I get this desire to influence the discourse in some way. It’s what I usually do on my blahaj.zone main, fostering positive community through leading by example and moderating directly. However, I would never dream of moderating without transparency, or trying to win over people through deception for that matter.

As someone who was raised ideologically liberal I don’t know where you got the idea that making decisions for others without their consent is ok. The main reason I walked away from that ideology wasn’t because my principles changed, but because I felt like the main advocates of it really didn’t stand by them. It’s the same reason why I don’t like tankies; they give their states a pass for directly compromising their own values. When liberals on the fedi act even more authoritarian than the open Marxist-Leninists, it becomes clear to me that they have the same sort of brainrot as tankies.

So now that the truth about Tesseract is finally out in the open, I can freely choose to not take part in your “nice little mini-fediverse.” I mainly use this platform to create the gay transfem equivalent of your “dick joke” humor. However, since even that is too radical for you, I humbly request that this account be blacklisted from your client as well.

I think your goal is admirable, but centralizing the blocklist defeats the purpose of a decentralized social media network.

We already have filtering at the instance level, so it seems to me that any client level filtering features must increase user/admin agency, rather than putting that agency in the hands of the client dev (regardless of how noble they may feel their opinions are).

There’s no good way to do what I wanted without either sounding like a dick, calling people out, or otherwise causing mass ire.

It sounds like you fully understand why this was so negatively received.

I really hope people stop harassing you. Despite our differences, we are all on the same platform for one reason or another, and we all deserve respect and some nuanced understanding.

All you need to do is make the list customizable at both an instance and user level

Oh and provide some justification for the bans within the list itself

Let the users decide. Let the instance admins have control. That’s how the fedi works

Also please add me to the list please

Edit: on or off isn’t enough. Also add me to the list plz.

Edit 2: also you need to announce features better. Someone pointed the changelog where this feature was apparently announced and I can’t find it at all!!! (Add me to the list plz)

Wow dude u kinda suck. This is a horrible take

It’s one of the things that most frustrates me about the Fediverse. Some users are incapable of nuance and see any slight against them as a sign that the other person is The Enemy.

I’ve been a moderator (and am a moderator) many places and… that is true of most of them. Doesn’t matter how blatant the rule violation or how clearly the rule was stated, a lot of people take very personal offence. It’s one reason many mods in many places end up rather jaded and stop bothering to explain because it doesn’t help most of the time.

I try my best to be patient first, because I’ve found that like 25% of the time or so I can at least get someone to understand that it wasn’t personal or anything like that. I’ve certainly had people in subreddits I’ve moderated as well on an open-source game forum I host/administer/moderate turn around and become good community members.

But it is moderately rare, and these days after I’ve been patient and try to explain once, I go to zero tolerance quickly and just ban, mute, move on.

It is a pervasive problem of anonymous or semi-anonymous internet. Generally a price worth paying considering alternatives (identity requirements), but it is a choice and a price.