My accounts are not anonymous. Not even my Lemmy account is, for example my husband is also a follower of my account here because I want to interact with people I know about the things I see.
But you never know how things turn out with people. You give someone you think is a friend your name on a social platform because you think you could share a meme once in a while, and it turns out they are mentally ill and screenshot all your posts, print them out and decorate their house with them. Creepy af. You make a comment about how some product looks cool and they send it to you in the mail and expect you to be grateful for it even when you don’t want it from them and never asked for it. You make one comment that can be vaguely interpreted as being unhappy with your partner like “lol my husband bought cucumbers instead of zucchini” and he will bombard him about how he is about to get dumped for being stupid and how he will replace him. Absolutely mental. But turns out if you block these kinds of people, they just forget you exist. They don’t even bother checking if they are blocked because in their head they never did anything wrong so why would they be.
If you’re concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system — which is what OP is talking about in terms of “blocking” would be – on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not — both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.
In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you’re going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.
You can choose to federate with a specific server. I believe some mastodon servers would honour requests to only share with specific accounts, but that’s it.
You could possibly have some encryption key shenanigans go on at the client side and build it ontop of the fediverse. It might be possible.
Some stalkers might notice and circumvent, but most won’t because in their mind they aren’t doing anything wrong so why would they check if they got blocked. But apparently if the solution is not perfect it’s not worth doing anything to deter it seems.
Precisely because blocking here doesn’t do anything really. On a different platform the feature made me invisible to the person and it helped reduce their obsession with me massively. Out of sight out of mind is true for a lot of people.
A lot of people here never had a stalker and it shows.
How can you have a stalker on an anonymous internet account? Or do you mean like a person who comments on your public Internet posts?
My accounts are not anonymous. Not even my Lemmy account is, for example my husband is also a follower of my account here because I want to interact with people I know about the things I see.
But you never know how things turn out with people. You give someone you think is a friend your name on a social platform because you think you could share a meme once in a while, and it turns out they are mentally ill and screenshot all your posts, print them out and decorate their house with them. Creepy af. You make a comment about how some product looks cool and they send it to you in the mail and expect you to be grateful for it even when you don’t want it from them and never asked for it. You make one comment that can be vaguely interpreted as being unhappy with your partner like “lol my husband bought cucumbers instead of zucchini” and he will bombard him about how he is about to get dumped for being stupid and how he will replace him. Absolutely mental. But turns out if you block these kinds of people, they just forget you exist. They don’t even bother checking if they are blocked because in their head they never did anything wrong so why would they be.
If you’re concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system — which is what OP is talking about in terms of “blocking” would be – on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not — both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.
In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you’re going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.
You can choose to federate with a specific server. I believe some mastodon servers would honour requests to only share with specific accounts, but that’s it.
You could possibly have some encryption key shenanigans go on at the client side and build it ontop of the fediverse. It might be possible.
Some stalkers might notice and circumvent, but most won’t because in their mind they aren’t doing anything wrong so why would they check if they got blocked. But apparently if the solution is not perfect it’s not worth doing anything to deter it seems.
I don’t think blocking is an effective measure.
Precisely because blocking here doesn’t do anything really. On a different platform the feature made me invisible to the person and it helped reduce their obsession with me massively. Out of sight out of mind is true for a lot of people.