They shouldn't be able to do that!
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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Looking at the post you reference the person you talked to is a transgender person who moderates both LGBTQ+ and Transfem in Lemmy.blahaj.zone, they provide more than enough evidence of their minority status, but that wasn't really needed. The question was what group was being harassed and thus this interaction would imply that the LGBTQ community is being harassed on Lemmy.
What I feel like you missed in your previous discussion is that the other person was talking about privacy in the context of being outed in the real world. The harassment being referred to was in the context of your real life identity being revealed or connected to your online conversation.
Under this context they are looking for a feature similar to how Facebook (at least previously) allowed you to pick who could see your post as you were posting it. That way you could individually disallow specific people or groups from seeing them.
This doesn't imply that the issue is that someone is being harassed on Lemmy and thus we need better blocking options. It's really only an issue for someone who wants to dox themselves and still have private conversations, in which case Lemmy and most online forums can't accomplish that natively across all instances/subreddits/groups. The only solution is to have a private instance with vetting and heavy moderation. If you don't dox yourself you can generally avoid the whole issue here.
Based on this I think you're making a different argument than what the block feature is or ever could be.
You're right, that was a different conversation. And I'm not part of that group so I can't say for sure.
What I'm trying to do is take what I learned there and extrapolate it. I think there is some overlap.
At the very least, I don't think OP deserves to be dragged like they were for what is to me a pretty reasonable take. In Lemmy, blocking someone acts like getting blocked on pretty much every platform, which is going to be confusing for many
I can agree that I understand the confusion and I also don't think the OP deserves to get dragged for their initial post, but I think their opinion is fundamentally flawed and the reason they got dragged is mostly because they went in the comments trying to defend their opinion. The problem is that the term "Social Media" has gotten so hackneyed that multiple different things are all called Social Media and the rules of the most common version are expected in the others.
Growing up Social Media referred to Social Networks which are user-centric platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace (I guess potentially TikTok) where you create an account which is central to your experience on the website. Connections on these platforms are made through creating individual friends lists and following specific users which makes it super easy to block someone in the manner described. Now basically everything is called Social Media, including forums and image boards. On an image board or forum you might have to create an account, but the experience was more defined by going through an index of posts not connected to your account. Places like Digg, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, 4chan, and any random ass forum functioned pretty similarly to how blocking works on Lemmy. In most cases the blocked user can still see any public posts you make; they may not be able to search for your posts within their account or respond to your messages directly, but they typically could still see your posts and respond to other people in a thread (even your own). The only exception to this is if they posted on a forum (or subreddit/instance/board/blog) you moderated or otherwise controlled. In some cases Social Networks and image boards are similar, if you run a blog on Tumblr it functions more like a Social Network but if you only browse other people's public blogs then it functions like an image board
The whole argument is basically "Why don't forums work like social networks?"