Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
Blocking an instance just hides posts to communities from there. I have ml blocked but still see posts and comments by their users. I don’t know whether this is somehow magically different for everyone else since every discussion I’ve seen on the matter has at least one person claiming otherwise.
PieFed allows true instance blocking. Lemmy’s “instance block” function is so misleadingly named that it might just qualify as disinformation. While it does hide communities located on that instance, it still allows: users on that instance to see, reply to, and vote (brigade) on your content, and to send you DMs, which originally did not trigger notifications but then the Lemmy devs reversed that to allow these “blocked” users to spam your DMs even while triggering notifications every single time. Which btw I note can last for WEEKS and WEEKS if you make the mistake of saying something remotely controversial (or not supportive enough of their chosen echo chamber talking points).
So PieFed users can do it, while basically nobody else on Lemmy can, at least not very easily (there are some antiquated apps that allowed it, but iirc those have not been updated in years, so then to make it happen you basically have to use the web interface exclusively - which most people dislike for some reason, and then implement a custom uBlock Origin filter code… and even that only hides their comments from your view, while they can still e.g. vote on your content in return).
Actually, now that I think about it, I suppose there is an easy way: simply make a comment that the devs do not like on their instance, and they will quickly ban you from it! That might do the trick, I dunno?
That sounds about right, thanks.