There have in fact been huge discussions of this in the past, which maybe you’d already know about if you didn’t come in hot mouthing off about how things need to be changed to fit your preferences immediately, chop chop!

Turns out the type of blocking you want requires a great deal more code than you (clearly) can imagine in order to be actually functional, as opposed to a fig leaf requiring the full cooperation of every server involved.

This was discussed ad nauseam maybe about 5 years ago, with long hellthreads in microblogging fedi, complex deep-dive technical blog posts, the whole nine yards. No I didn’t save links and I wish I had because this and related issues (Mastodon’s fig leaf “privacy” settings, E2EE DMs) keep coming up.

The answer is that what you are asking for can either be implemented as a porous fig leaf which falls apart the very first time some asshole spins up an instance which doesn’t respect it and vacuums up your posts en masse, or it can be implemented using cryptography which requires an enormous amount of work by extremely well-educated CompSci types to implement a standard, and then implement code libraries, and only then can the developers of platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon get started on implementing the actual feature. No one is paying anyone to do this, and it’s not clear that people with the necessary expertise are even available to develop the standard and the code, nor is it clear that everyone would adopt it if they did. So up til now, it hasn’t been done.

If I block someone on Mastodon or another Fediverse microblogging instance, they’re blocked. Because that part of the Fediverse was built by people who had been harassed and doxxed off other platforms.

Evidently you missed the many (many) discussions that took place maybe 5 years ago by some of those exact builders about how this is, and remains, only a fig leaf which requires every server to cooperate in maintaining the illusion.

I wish I’d saved links based on how often this comes up. There are fundamental issues with how federated systems in general and ActivityPub in particular work, and “real” blocking is one of them. People running other instances can modify the code however they want, and no technical measures have been implemented (because it turns out to be very difficult to do so) to prevent any node operator from removing the fig leaf.

Including Germany, which has draconian laws against criticizing Israel’s genocidal actions and fascist regime, as demonstrated by the recent drama over feddit.org?

Laws aren’t identical across the EU. If you are aggregating content from a bunch of instances, there will be content aggregated that’s illegal in one place and not another.

But I don’t like them and don’t want them in my feed.

Mass-market slop troughs exist for a reason.

I, and a lot of other fedizens, don’t want the type of people who use BlueSky and Facebook in my ActivityPub fediverse.

Fedi is cool because it’s small, weird, and highly enriched with people I’m actually interested in communicating with. I don’t need or want the pool to be diluted with an ocean of piss.