I keep seeing people ask for this. There are basically only two ways, neither of which are terribly easy unless you are willing to switch to a Lemmy alternative and then it can be a breeze with just a couple of button clicks.
First, note that on base Lemmy, it basically cannot be done, short of either spinning up your own instance or trying to do some advanced programming with spamblock filtering rules (that is likely to mess up the pages in some way). There is a related feature though - in User -> Settings -> Blocks -> scroll waaay down -> Block instance - except that unlike blocking a community or a user, this does not actually “block an instance”, and instead merely (& misleadingly?) hides the communities on those instances. You will still see comments from those users, they can still downvote you, and ping your notifications, etc.
About the only thing the above approach offers beyond blocking those communities individually is that if ever new communities were to be made from those instances, they would be automatically hidden from your account. So not all that helpful imho.
(1) Use an App
I have heard that the Sync and Connect apps (+ maybe others?) offer this, as well as a plethora of other features. Note that Voyager does not work for this - it is the same type of blocking as mentioned above.
Check them out? If anyone wants to supplement this section, please submit a post to this community to help people who want to know! (and/or at least add it in the comments here)
(2) Lemmy Alternatives
What I do use is PieFed.social, which in addition to this feature also offers several other advancements not currently available in Lemmy such as Categories of Communities that makes finding additional content a breeze (though overall it is not as feature-rich or easy to use as base Lemmy; and yet its choice to use Python rather than Rust should help it to catch up extremely quickly, plus the admins are extraordinarily responsive to deal with any issues).
To block all users from a PieFed instance, the easiest way is to start from a user on that instance, click their account, then click More -> Block everyone from [instance_name]. Or you could go to a page with the instance name in the url, like https://piefed.social/instance/lemmy.ml and just click “Block everyone from [instance_name]” there.
PieFed also offers additional opportunities in-between blocking trolls vs. not doing so: accounts that meet certain criteria levels will have icons placed next to the account name, so that you can still see their content (rather than have it automatically removed) but not have to spend as much time parsing it as you would something that is more likely to have been offered in good faith.
Mbin likewise offers Categories, and cross-connection with Mastodon. Overall I find that whole style confusing - e.g. “communities” become “magazines”, downvotes become “reduces”, upvotes are both “favorites” and also upvotes exist too that are entirely separate from that, plus you can see who offers favorites, but only from other Mbin/Kbin users and you cannot see the same for reduces. Though if you want Mastodon integration with Lemmy in one account, this is definitely the way to go (b/c it’s the only one that does both:-). From @nictophilia@fedia.io:
It’s not anywhere in the settings at all, lol. Like a hidden option. You have to go to the url
https://fedia.io/d/[instance_domain_name], like https://fedia.io/d/lemmy.ml. Then it will give you the ability to block, and that block will be reflected in your settings page.
Edit: according to @DarkThoughts@fedia.io, this does not actually work:-(.
Either of these alternatives should make you quite happy with the result!:-)
(3) Honorable mention: relying upon an instance admin
As a normal user, not an admin yourself, you cannot implement a custom block of users from any specified instance. However, you can either ask your current admins to implement such a block for you (would need the support of the entire community on that instance ofc), or move your account to one that has already done so?
The only instances I’ve ever heard of that block the big-3 (lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml) are:
- lemmy.cafe - has very welcoming messages, including a link guiding new users to this community!:-)
- Tesseract on dubvee.org - extremely impressive, if not for everyone, but definitely worth a look
- quokk.au
The caveat to all of these is that each is a single-admin instance. Those of us who recall the story of e.g. Kbin.social (or dmv.social or so many others) know how worrisome that can be in that it could vanish overnight with little to no warning. Then again, unlike Kbin.social, they seem quite healthy for now - definitely worth at least taking a look?
Ah, another downside to trying to work with a single-admin instance - if they ever get sick or go on vacation or some such, you’re screwed. I see that it self-reports only 3 active monthly users, and only 12 users total? Lemmy.cafe has 10x that and is still considered very tiny.
I finally figured out how to see activity stats for dubvee.org: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list says that there are only 5 active monthly users. Even then I strongly considered joining it, it’s kinda impressive, especially irt multimedia support, and the admin is very active on the Fediverse himself and seems quite friendly. He would not be so friendly with e.g. a tankie, but that’s kinda the point isn’t it?:-)
PieFed.social reports 107 active users, of 400 total.
The largest Mbin server has 439 active monthly users, of >5k total (though their signups are either closed or else https://fedidb.org/software/mbin is falsely claiming that fact). The next largest is 119 and all the other instances have <50 monthly active users.
There are only 9 instances that have >1k monthly active users, and none of those defederate from Lemmy.ml. And people have been talking about this issue for months now, so if I missed a mid-sized instance I would have hoped that someone would have mentioned it by now.
Basically there are no “great” options, only ones with varying degrees of complexity to implement. And ofc you could just block every user individually, along with every community, and avoid discussion about either politics or Fediverse drama - that would work as well:-). For us I mean, whereas every single new user to the Fediverse will continue to have to discover such afresh on their own.
Dubvee is run by a really nice guy. Technically it’s only open to people from West Virginia, but if you hit it off with the admin they might invite you to make an account.
Oh I did not know that. Tbh the interface is a little confusing to me - but I suppose I could get used to it, and actually most of that affects the mobile rather than desktop. Anyway, every single thing I continue to hear about it continues to impress me still further - e.g. they now have “post flairs”, which act like the Reddit ones i.e. they are basically “tags”, which Mbin and PieFed also have but Lemmy lacks - and yet even while still running on “Lemmy”, Admiral Patrick made it happen. Plus it runs YouTube videos natively inside of it. It’s basically an open-source app that doesn’t need you to download it but instead runs inside of the web browser - not an easy accomplishment by any means. And then there’s this little gem:
Also, he will switch the back-end from Lemmy to Sublinks when that becomes available. Or maybe Sublinks will use something more like Tesseract natively, I have no idea (I never hear about Sublinks anymore these days - I seem to be the only one that continues to mention it, that I see at least).
But anyway, it’s impressive AF. And yet it might disappear at a moment’s notice - well, dubvee.org might, whereas Tesseract is open-source code so anyone could take it up and continue that if they wanted. In terms of blocking a custom instance such as Lemmy.ml, I would naively guess that what it took to implement that would be a combination of both Tesseract (the software making it possible) and dubvee.org (as the instance admin) - i.e. if someone else were to run Tesseract then they could decide differently, as admin of their own instance.
I have never not enjoyed any conversation I have ever had with Admiral Patrick. Others hint that they have seen differently but nobody will respond with any details or links to anything so… I can only go by what I see, which is impressive.
Don’t forget that a lot of users have historical lemmy.ml accounts from before the exodus. I know a few lemmy.ml users that are nice, and it’s kind of hard to tell them to switch instances because their admins can do some power tripping.
Yes and as I wrote up the first draft for this I definitely included that disclaimer but it got too long and so I took it out (along with a bunch of other stuff). Whether someone wants to block any particular instance at all - whether hexbear.net or lemmy.ml or midwest.social or whatever - is up to them, and I covered that already in the previous post in this community.
Talking more about it now though: I agree that it is more than a little unfortunate then that such users would get lumped in together with the kind of “spam” that comes out to us across the Fediverse from inside that instance. It isn’t their fault, either directly, nor do they have anything to do with either the other users on their instance or the policies of their admins. I can well imagine having discussions entirely locally inside of lemmy.ml on communities such as !firefox@lemmy.ml or !linux@lemmy.ml or !privacy@lemmy.ml etc., but never once encountering such users as I have mentioned elsewhere here - and perhaps they have likewise blocked them even.
But for myself, and many others, the trade-off is worth it. It narrows our experiences of the Fediverse sure, but I no longer wish to participate in a community where their content and userbase are held hostage by the tankie philosophy. This approach increases the false negative / type 2 “misses” of federated content, while substantially decreasing the false positive / type 1 “spam” that can get blocked.
You for instance do not participate in political communities. What we want to do or not do is up to each of us, and may even change over time. Therefore what I am a HUGE fan of is the democratization of that choice: how can someone take matters into their own hands, even without support of an admin, and improve their experiences on the Fediverse?
And although I deleted from the OP, I would have loved to have included an entire section on why blocking is inferior to merely “labelling”. What if instead of the binary yes/no there was a third choice? PieFed already provides such btw, in the form of “reputation” labels that are put onto user accounts. e.g. if you have received more downvotes than upvotes you will get a label that, while not restricting your activities in any way, will alert users (of instances running PieFed) to that fact. Similarly there is a new account label, etc. The advantages are numerous - e.g. rather than taking equal time to parse every single comment that you see, only realizing at the end that someone is spewing propaganda (or gish gallop, reverse gish gallop, controlling the conversation, strawman, the card says moops - the list goes on and on and on and on), you can see the label and deprioritize it.
This is a fully game-changing advantage that restricts the users of an instance in no way, yet still allows for something in-between full defederation vs. full allowance, as if they were speaking in good faith when in fact they may not be. However, this sounds to people like it is “karma” - notably it isn’t, not really, b/c e.g. there need be no difference between +1000 vs. +10000 - so I don’t expect people to be a big fan of this. But still, it’s there if someone wants to use this rather than blocking.
And Mbin does similarly, by while still allowing upvotes, also adding “favorites” from people on instances running Mbin, which tend to be more pro-Western oriented, therefore the large number of upvotes for a post in something such as hexbear.net’s ChapoTrapHouse will not necessarily make that content appear high up in a list sorted by Hot or Top, and instead content gets sorted by the favorites / alternative votes.
Anyway, it’s a super complicated subject. Lemmy is in beta, and the entire concept of Federation is being tested right now, on the fly. And some people cannot wait for perfect solutions to come out and be vetted - so for those of us who simply want the spam to be GONE, I am glad that I finally found a way that doesn’t mean that, like all of my irl friends, I have to leave the Fediverse entirely to make it happen.