There are very few people who can "unfairly" block you.

Elected representatives, emergency responders, government agencies: their role requires a duty of access to you, no matter how difficult you are.

The rest of us have a right, maybe a responsibility, to manage where our attention goes. There are no objective criteria whatsoever in who we choose to follow and who we choose to block. We are the sole arbiters of our attention and there is no court of appeals.

If someone blocks you, it's a great time for self reflection. Were you in the wrong? Should you reconsider how you treat people?

Or was the person who blocked you too thin-skinned? Was there a conversation you should have had that didn't happen? How can you approach such people in the future differently?

Or did you say the hard thing that needed to be said? Was it worth burning the relationship to deliver some hard truth?

I don't know if it's a good time to blame the blocker, especially publicly. You don't know what people are going through. If they set a boundary, respect it and move on. It's a big world out there. Lots of other people to talk to.

@evan if someone blocks you without telling you why, there's very little that can be learned from that (you can try to guess the reason, but it's impossible to know whether your guess is accurate unless they tell you)

@noisytoot @evan I had someone block me because they thought I was someone else.

I only know this because the last message they gave me was to review my message history for the argument we had had the previous month... Which didn't exist, because it didn't happen. *sigh*

@evan
Please, I urgently need $35 to buy Ventolin medication for my father so I can give him nebulizer treatments to help him breathe. 🙏

@Hanadi95 Do not spam .. and please don't tag random ppl or write random comments on foreign threads.

@hackbyte I can speak for myself.

@evan what throws me is getting blocked without knowing what those boundaries were. All of a sudden *boom* the block drops with no chance to apologize or rectify the situation. That's an emotional blow and feels unfair.

@lakelady you might value the relationship more than the blocker does.

@evan
There is a difference between the right to do something and it being fair.
Yeah, you can block whoever you want for whatever reason you want, but it doesn’t make you any less of an asshole when you use that right to be an asshole.

@flesh how can cutting off contact make you an asshole? It's a really healthy impulse -- a lot better than getting in fights with strangers on the Internet.

@evan Read what you just said again, slowly.

@flesh do you find yourself getting blocked a lot?

@evan apparently so as they have tons of followers and I'm just a few pixels among many. :(

@lakelady that's too bad.

@evan as a former elected representative this was one of the hardest things that I struggled with. I felt very strongly that I should be open and communicate to all… but the level of abuse at times was absolutely insane. That is why you see people or agencies turning off comments and just go to a one way information service. The abuse people feel justified to unleash is not sustainable to communicating with the wider public.

@chris I think especially if people are replying to your personal accounts.

@evan historically, almost universally, bans or blocks have been temporary. An hour, a day, a week, maybe a month. Permanent blocks come from centralised social media due to griefing, spam, etc. They are also kind of created for the purposes of e-celebs, who are just sorting people into customers or not.

I see this as a tool problem, which then manifests as a social problem. "Block" becomes a term, and therefore a disposition.

As for the negatives, well there's literally a black mirror episode on it.

@bakuninboys what would you change in the tooling?

@evan Well, blocks for individuals would just have a time associated with them (or a forever option). Just bringing it up to someone would be enough to have them ask "wait, what is the reason for doing what I'm doing?". Maybe most of them would just fall on a particular number (say, a week) being a good enough solution for whatever the problem is.

This also opens the door for moderators to just block a user or even a domain for a short time period, as it has no long term impact. The rules can be more flexible and the cost for doing the wrong thing (as a moderator doing the banning) is much lower.

Obviously, the actual time scales would differ based on the tool, so IRC tends to have very short ban windows, like 20 minutes or an hour, and a day is considered long, but the counterpoint to that is that you can ban for very little. People will do a 20 minute ban as like a joke on IRC.

EDIT: maybe to make my original point clearer: Even just the change in concept of what a block means (has a time limit) changes the social implications of the tool. It's not seen as a serious thing in forums, IRC, etc. It's way more serious on Twitter, Instagram, etc.

@bakuninboys So, doesn't "Mute" serve that function on the Fediverse?

@evan mute also doesn't have a time associated with it? IIUC the only difference between Mute and Block is that a Blocked user cannot view content, whereas a muted user simply won't be seen by the person muting the user. Others can still respond to them, and they can still reply.

@bakuninboys Yes, mute has a time associated with it. There are a lot of differences between Mute and Block, but the main one is that Mute doesn't have any permanent effects. Block cuts off any following/follower relationships, in either direction.