Feature request: Allows users to block instances individually

[ghost]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Some instances federated with either have content, users, magazines, or something one would not like to interact with. For example an extremely political instance might not be sharing any content one would like to interact with.

Describe the solution you'd like

Allows users (not on instance level) to block anybody and everything from an instance.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Manually block everybody and everything from an instance. However this is time consuming.

Use a client (do such clients exist?) that automatically block depending on which instance the content is coming from.

Additional context

There is a "block domain" feature, but that seems to only block posts with links to instance. For example one creates a post that has the URL https://somebodysinstance.com/some/path and one has blocked the domain "somebodysinstance.com", then that post won't show up.

[BentiGorlich]

A lot easier to implement after #939 is merged

[melroy89]

PR #939 is merged. ~~I also think it's related to my findings here: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/1119#issuecomment-2353928287. What do you think?~~

[BentiGorlich]

Nope not related. The feature request is that individual users should be able to block instances

[melroy89]

Owh.. Updated title.

[Dark-Thoughts]

Yeah, I'm at 209 blocked communities right now. lol I do appreciate the ability to see defederated instances though.

Edit: How are we defederated with lemmygrad but not with hexbear though?

[vaguerant]

I'm sorry that I don't remember where I saw this (EDIT: lemmy.zip), but I know at least one Lemmy instance uses this feature to default-block some controversial instances. Newly registered user accounts are set up with instance blocks in place for those, reducing admin report fatigue since the only people who will see those instances are those who specifically go into their block list and remove them.

It would be sensible for Mbin's equivalent to include the same feature or greater, a way for admins to:

1. set which instances are default-blocked on new accounts, and
2. more dramatically, add (and remove?) instances in all local users' block lists.

If a new instance kinda.sucks arrives on the scene and is riding the line of acceptable community standards without crossing them, it would be nice for admins to be able to do a sort of "defederate-lite" by adding kinda.sucks to the block lists of all users, stemming the spike in reports and removing the objectionable content from the view of users who keep the block in place.

I know it's somewhat controversial for admins to modify users' block lists in this way, but before now, full defederation has been used in this scenario, the effective result of which is essentially the same, minus the advantage of being reversible at the user's leisure. As such, an admin imposing default-blocks is less impactful upon their users' freedom of choice than the current situation.

A defederate-lite (mass user-level instance blocking) would probably be communicated to users in the same way as defederations generally are, with a post to the instance's meta community. A software-side solution, e.g. some form of notification of admin-directed block list changes, could also be considered if it seems necessary, but does not seem essential to me.