I wrote out a very long and detailed reply to someone, citing sources and putting quite some time into crafting my message, only to be presented with a message "replier blocked" in red font. Or if I attempt via a direct URL to the comment, I get a different presentation of the similar message saying "Your reply was not accepted because Replier blocked", in black text against a pink background (in my dark mode view with PieFed theme, using Firefox on Android).
I am fairly certain that the person I was attempting to reply to has not blocked me, as we talk all the time including DMs even. So I suspect it is the account above them that has me blocked?
Although in this case, why am I able to see their content, if I am "blocked"? The person I attempted to reply to is on a Lemmy instance, but the person who I suspect blocked me is on the same instance as me, PieFed.social. I can see their profile too, but attempting to enter the page to send a DM confirms that one of us has blocked the other, and their username is not in my block list so it must have been them blocking me. I am writing all of this out to show my process of discovery.
Can a visual indicator be added to comments that are going to result in me wasting (potentially significant amounts of) time attempting to reply to but that will result in failure?
Otherwise this amounts to shadow-banning, which is not going to be a good look for Piefed and will hinder its acceptance in the community.
Left to my own devices, while surely I could place a visual icon next to the names of such accounts, there are too many problems with that approach to make it viable. (1) I would have to discover the situation first, (2) plus as seen above what if I am incorrect in my determination there, (3) plus that situation might change over time - e.g. if a block was added accidentally, or otherwise reconsidered and removed.
Having been blocked is crucial information, which is preventing me from discoursing with my actual friend in this case. And currently the only way I seem to be able to discover this fact is to either enter the page to send them a DM or not merely open the reply box but go ahead and compose and make a FULL attempt to send off a reply message to either them or also including everyone who has replied below them as well.
The indicator of this phenomena needs to have occurred MUCH sooner in the process, to avoid frustrations. No means no, I totally respect that much at least, but I wish I had been told that, somehow?
I searched and found only one single comment in the entire Threadiverse to the term "Lemmy official". It had no upvotes.
A search instead for "official instance" reveals many comments saying that it is not an official instance. So saying that it is an official instance is disinformation, easily disproven by spending roughly two seconds looking it up.
Probably you meant it as a tongue-in-cheek meta-commentary, but those of us who are too unintelligent to be able to read your exact thoughts can only glean information from what you actually shared with us? This detracts from your very real point when you interject your own biases, without a clear distinction - like a /s would have gone a long way there, but especially for the title, you would have gotten better responses if you had just left that phrase out entirely. Sometimes life isn't about IQ, it's about wisdom, specifically knowing when not to do something.
What is more relevant is that the instance is used for testing new code prior to deployment across the rest of the Lemmy instances. Except even then there are so many loopholes and caveats, the top one being that PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, and soon(-ish?) flarum all exist on the Threadiverse alongside Lemmy, but also several instances barely ever update their codebase and/or otherwise have an extraordinarily heavy modification process (e.g. beehaw.org, Lemmy.World and Hexbear.net). As one of the comments in my second link explains:
In short, read more before speaking if you want a higher quality discourse, and also show concern enough for others to speak your mind clearly and succinctly. Otherwise people will simply ignore the noise and move on.