The block feature should be renamed to “mute”, which is what it seems to actually be. Currently I can apply this to a user and they can still see all my posts. So it’s a good mute feature but a terrible block feature.
The block feature should be renamed to “mute”, which is what it seems to actually be. Currently I can apply this to a user and they can still see all my posts. So it’s a good mute feature but a terrible block feature.
Unfortunately Lemmy isn’t like that and does not follow activitypub spec in that regard, in their current form the block doesn’t seem to do that at all and simply hides the blocked user from the blocking user as if the blocked user didn’t exist. There are no checks on interactions.
Also if you’re wondering how it works with Mastodon, Lemmy basically ignores Mastodon’s blocking system and freely allows interraction with Mastodon accounts in the thread even if they blocked the user replying, and also the community actor.
Ah, well that is indeed unfortunate and realistically also a bit shit.
Maybe one of the forks or backend replacements could implement an option using it to make it compliant. I wouldn’t go with the OP’s solution since privacy is non-existent on Lemmy, but just blocking interaction seems like it would be enough to make it compliant, and prevent the harassment issues mentioned, I made an issue which addresses this in the Lemmy Github, it proposes a new feature rather than changing the existing blocks because it’s good to have mutes and blocks at the same time.