remove users from follower list if they block

[certainLemming]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

yes, privacy issue. Scenario: Some malicious account is carthographing users of a certain peergroup. Users of the peergroup block that account, The users are still in the follower list of the blocked account, therefore the account can still act as an unwanted index/register for that peergroup.

malicious User A ----follows ---> User B User B ----- block ------> mal. User A

User A has user B still on follower List.

Describe the solution you'd like

As given in the Scenario above. User B should be removed from User A' follower list, once he is blocked by user b.

Describe alternatives you've considered

not applicable

Additional context

Certain peergroups (Minorities like Natives|Indigenous/BiPoC/Neurodivergent/Queers), are constantly targeted and harrased by people with abusive intent ,while blocking protects from actions of a certain accounts such an accounts follower list can be still used to continue harrassment with new/other accounts and allows to "carthograph/map" peergroups and make that data easily available for coordinated actions against certain groups targeted for whatever reason.

[theqaguy]

Fully agreed, the current behavior is problematic.

[devinivy]

Thanks for the report! When a user is blocking another, the intention is to omit those users from each others' follow lists 👍

I am having trouble reproducing this issue: when I block an account, they no longer appear in my follows list and I also don't appear in theirs. This is enforced as a business rule at the appview in the app.bsky.graph.getFollows and app.bsky.graph.getFollowers methods. Where and how are you observing the follow list?

[certainLemming]

tested it with a odd account called 4transrights.bsky.social . users block him and still appear on list of accounts he/she follows. (using android handy app)

[certainLemming]

also it does not really remove accounts from the list, if i block somebody and unblock, person follows again. By my understanding the entry should be removed in such scenario.

Thanks for looking into the issue

[yamarten]

also it does not really remove accounts from the list, if i block somebody and unblock, person follows again. By my understanding the entry should be removed in such scenario.

This is difficult in Bluesky. The follow entries are owned by the follower and cannot be operated by other users, including the followee. Block function only hide it. If you unblock, there is no hiding, and the entry is still there.

Probably the best measure is not to unblock. Otherwise, you can report to the PDS administrator of the user. The current clients has no function to report follow, so you should report the entire account. In that case, the final judgment will be made by the PDS administrator.

[kjarex]

also it does not really remove accounts from the list, if i block somebody and unblock, person follows again. By my understanding the entry should be removed in such scenario.

I agree with your initial point but not with this one. I would expect unblocking someone to result in the same situation as if I never blocked them. I might have blocked them accidentally (eg. I wanted to block a different user or I might have misread their skeet which made me blocking them) and I should be able to undo my mistake (or simply change my mind) all by myself

[eikotoda]

This thread may be related to my problem. I wrote a comment in a Bluesky Safety post, but I've received no reaction, and I created an account here. I have 2 followers, but they are hidden. Most likely I blocked the second follower; I saw the first follower hidden, and exactly at the same time, the second one followed me (which was displayed) and almost immediately I blocked it (a typical troll), but the number of followers remains 2 (I waited a few days to see any change). It's also likely that I had blocked the first follower too. This seems to be an elementary issue, yet it hasn't been solved it seems. Could anyone forward this information to Bluesky?