effort

Need to pump those numbers up, rookie numbers

There's some truth in that, but Lemmy is not society for me. I come here for memes, comics, other funny stuff and once a week I'll discuss what books I'm currently reading. I don't want to read about politics here, and I don't want to interact with assholes.

We live in a society, if you want it to be a better place you have to engage with others.

Not without boundaries. It's amazing to be able to interact with people from all over the world, but not all interactions are useful or genuine.

I don't have issues with people blocking me or the communities I am active in. I found the whole tesseract thing shady because it wasn't transparent, but I don't think some great harm has occurred because people can't see me yap.

I routinely block communities that aren't interesting to me, so that browsing All is easier. I also block comms or people that make me compelled to argue (vs discuss). For example, if I am feeling compelled to defend myself to someone who is putting words in my mouth instead of asking me what I meant then I think the wise thing for me to do is probably just block and move on. They aren't interested in understanding me and I'm just wasting energy. I don't always achieve this, but it's certainly healthier than trying to dissect where the interaction went wrong and getting angry at a stranger. They can fuck up and make assumptions just as well as I can. They don't need my anger in their life.

It's draining enough to work on effective communication IRL. I'm not going to be able to do that for the whole world.

driving on the other side of the road

"pssh, there's hardly any traffic over here, and the ones here get out of my way and cheer me on with honks and flashing their lights."

See, I'm engaging with others! :D

I happily engage with others, sometimes through flashes of annoyance. But as soon as I find myself deleting the text in the comment box because it’s not worth it, I just block to prevent myself from being baited. And it works well for my mental health and overall experience of the platform.

I think this is my approach also. But I can also understand not everyone wants the same things from their time here that I do :)

Only people I've blocked are the weird hybrid bot reddit reposters who spam shit and regularly post gross sexist shit.

I wish they'd just leave but any time you critisize them they just get mad and call you a "reddit agent" 😅

, if you want it to be a better place you have to engage with others.

I'll just buy a news channel.

Tesseract was a fairly well-made Lemmy front-end, except it silently blocked about a thousand people that the creator thought were toxic, including me.

God forbid I wanna watch a guillotine bounce off the rich.

Why block? You can’t report them every time you see them then! I only block spam accounts that don’t get removed after like a month of reporting, it’s impossible to keep an eye on transphobes or nazis if you block them.

It does, some styles of rhetoric basically require a context of contentious argument, especially if they revolve around mockery/bullying and contempt for reasoned debate, so depriving them of your actual and apparent attention is the best you can do because it leaves them without anything to work with.

Oh ok. Why would anyone do that?

TBH its both but more so the normalization of echo chambers. Conflict and discourse builds and changes people, avoidance does not.