Impressive, I guess, but how many of those 2 million posts have a single comment? If 90% of these are just bots reposting things from Reddit with no further engagement…

So glad I got your approval.

If I ignore all, how will I ever find things to subscribe to? Just search? How will I know what to search for? Am I just supposed to remember to look for new communities every single day? Every week? What if there’s a great community out there that uses a weird name that doesn’t come up in a search? What if I don’t think of something I like and I never think to search for it? What if there’s something I never knew I liked so I would have never searched for it to begin with? What if something interesting happens in a community that I would have never subscribed to but also wouldn’t have blocked?

It’s just immensely more difficult and time consuming to find all the things that I might be interested in rather than eliminate the few things that I’m not. That’s like saying why not just listen to the same 3 CDs I already know I like rather than put on a streaming service and skip the songs I don’t care for. You get so much more content and variety rather than just sticking with what you already know.

Why would I, an individual, care about “defeating the purpose of a federation” when all I’m trying to do is cultivate a feed that only shows things that I’m interested in? If there’s an instance that only hosts things that I know I’m not interested in, why wouldn’t I at least want to have the option to block everything coming from that instance? It literally affects no one but me, why would you or anyone else care what I choose to see on my screen?

Personally, I’d love to see this feature just so I can block all instances that are in a different language from ones that I speak. It’s quite a task having to constantly block communities that only have things I can’t understand. That’s really not a task that I want to have to constantly maintain, and being able to choose to not see any current or future communities hosted on those servers would be a great timesaver for me.

Also, as another example, there’s one particular instance that is very welcoming to hate speech and ideas of violence towards people that aren’t like them. Not all communities in that instance are as open about it as others, but just a few minutes ago I clicked on a thread hosted on that instance and watched what I thought was an innocent comedy video. About halfway through I started noticing some subtle hate-speech that was being casually tossed in. I went back to the comments section to see what instance the video was hosted in, and sure enough, it was the one that I know of that allows for such content to flourish. So in that regard someone might block the more obvious hate communities, but then not notice the more subtle ones. And while I do appreciate the idea of the fediverse that I can choose to interact with those people if I want to, I personally have made the decision that I do not want to waste my time with literal haters, so I would love to have the option of blocking any and all current and future messages from anyone participating in that instance. It’s my choice. Why wouldn’t you want everyone to have that option even if you don’t want to make that decision yourself?