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Written by Kat the Leopardess on 2024-11-17 at 16:29

I know there are some abuser-enabling/victim blaming takes re: blocklists. This take is not one of them, but I do want to get my thoughts out here.

I have always been against "bulk block lists" (e.g, Block Together back in the Twitter days). While it may save users some time in proactively blocking bad actors...the feature also became a tool that was abused, also. I'm not against the idea of people vocalizing to others about the trash that is in [community/fandom] . I appreciate friends and peers being proactive enough to observe and report (in small person-to-person conversations) when a problematic/hateful/dangerous person is in our midst. However, things like Social Media Callouts and Mob behavior show that not all block lists and methods can do the job without causing collateral damage to the good/chill people.

Mass blocklists have (some) potential to be abused -- by others in your community who wanna turn it into a beef list. Additionally, bad actors (outside of a given community) may create blocklists to align one group of people with certain behaviors or labels. (one example being that TERFs have created blocklists under the guise of a CSAM list, but the list just consists of queer people.

All that I have said here is not directed at any specific social media platform. It's not directed to any one fandom or community. These are social issues that come up, regardless of the platform you use. The social platform only makes a difference re: what self-moderation tools are at your disposal and what options you have if you need to escalate the matter to admins.

However, I do wanna call out the shortcomings of Bluesky. There are risks from having one's personal list of people (that they have blocked) being publicly viewable (Clearsky can show a BS users' list of people they have blocked.).

There is an abusive person (in fandom) who I make a point to avoid and not interact with. In every social space I find them, I just wanna block them and move on. BS is the first social network (that I have dealt with) that has made a users' personal block list as publicly viewable. Bluesky's Lists feature also seems to not have any privacy toggles, and Im reminded how much this same Lists concept was abused back on Twitter. Lists and Blocklists, if anything, should be options that have privacy toggles on them.

Given the legal threats that [AbusivePerson] has made towards us and (seperately) towards one of his victims, I'm not interested in my blocks being public. Part of me knows [AbusivePerson] may not be serious about these legal threats. However, I'm still not trying to leave anything out there that [AbusivePerson] can use as evidence for a Defamation/Slander style lawsuit. (SLAPP)

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