This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.
Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.
Two months on, I’m wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I’m just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?
The block button doesn’t have a set of rules and there is no morally right or wrong way to use it. No one owes people explanations for their use of it. This new idea that you should only use it for specific reasons is not only absurd, but it is unsafe for a large swath of people and it is a toxic idea to keep spreading that as a message. It hurts no one to use the block button and keeps many people safe.
I agree with all of this, I was just pointing out that common understanding (read: my own) of civil and rational discourse doesn’t usually include immediately blocking people who don’t agree to you telling them they are wrong in absolute terms.
I could be wrong however, happens a lot.
Edit: that is not to day I don’t personally block people I think are being arseholes, i 100% do, I just don’t claim to be doing so in the defence of civil or rational discourse.
I guess it depends on who you are and what is being said, there’s a lot of people I might block ahead of time just to spare myself the issues down the road or the frustration. I try to not reply to them though because they aren’t going to change their mind and I’m going to be left feeling crummy after it all. Sometimes talking to certain people even makes them more angry and then they go out and double down and go after other people so I don’t want to cause that either if I can help it.
Each to their own, I too have pre-blocked on occasion.
I probably wouldn’t hold myself responsible for angry internet people, if I’m engaging in good faith and they get angry that’s not on me, trolls gonna troll, but again each to their own.