Paula013
commented
1 year ago I'm trying to imagine how this will work, for the persons who have been placed on a blocklist.
Imagine: you don't like people who share photo's of dogs, so you decide to block these people. This would then end up in a list of all people who share doggie photo's. Then: some people like to share photo's of spiders. So, if I don't want to see photo's of spiders, I will block these. This means that, if some of these people like to share photo's of dogs and spiders, they appear on both lists and that would mean they will be blocked for.. who? All users? People who have subscribed to a shared block list?
I will not say anything about the technical aspects of this, since I am not an expert on that part. But making lists of people by arbitrairy criteria, in order to avoid anyone getting harrashed, I don't think it is the way to go.
Then it is my preference to only make an individual block list. To prevent shared lists from taking on a life of their own with consequences I can't foresee at the moment.
As the network scales there needs to be a method for communities to collaboratively block other users. Requiring every member of a community (M) to block every bad actor (N) requires M * N blocks, whereas a single block list that can be shared requires N. The latter is often preferable especially as it avoids a bad interaction from happening at all, which the individual blocking method doesn't.
However, it raises the question of who gets to curate the list, and what about their own biases in creating the list? No community of more than 1 member will agree on every block. And the maintainer of the list can be subject to undue harassment due to the power they have in deciding who is and isn't on such a list.
My proposal for overcoming (some?) of the issues with a shared block list is to enable combining of shared block lists such that an account is only blocked if it exists on a (configurable) quorum of block lists. This is a generalisation of the current method of subscribing to a mute list (with the quorum set to 1).
Users of a block list provided by another then get to control how much they wish to trust others and by combining block lists in this manner removes some of the power of a maintainer of a block list.