In short i just jumped into the whole Mastodon blocking drama and am somewhat disappointed to see it as childish as reddit’s power mod drama. Accelerated by the fact that a Limit/Mute option exist just fine, i wonder why Block/Defederation is an option at all. It only moves power from the user to admins without anything in return. With just Mute, as far as i can tell, one still wouldn’t have to look on certain instances, but could interact/whitelist certain individuals and we’d get rid of the multi account requirement overnight. So why isn’t it that way?
Edit: For those annoyed by the same siloing issues, look into ATProto. Bluesky may be a big unknown, but the protocol itself looks a lot more promising in terms of user freedom.
I do think there could be some features added to help avoid full defederation. Like if instance admins could set a default list of banned instances, and the users could choose to unban those instances for themselves. Of course defederation could still be necessary sometimes like for illegal content, software bugs, or malicious attacks.
Or because the other instance’s users keep breaking rules. I guess even then there could be an option to ban them from all your comms but still show their comms.
"Like if instance admins could set a default list of banned instances, and the users could choose to unban those instances for themselves.”
Which is exactly what a list of limited instances would allow the user to do.