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.
The reason is the same why ad in public spaces are bad.
„People can just look away!“ I hear you say but all you display is a lack of knowledge about how the human mind works and why advertisement is nearly a trillion dollar business.
Blocking known bad actors (meta) is indeed taking action for a whole community and should not be done without democratic vote. But once done, people who are unhappy can just leave.