The fediverse is public

A lot of people seem to be making complaints about the fediverse that basically boil down to them not understanding how public things work. When you post something on the fediverse, it is public.

Perhaps the most common complaint I see is people being surprised that search engines are indexing what they post on the fediverse. search.social caused a lot of controversy at first because of it's indexing, even though all it does is index public posts. However, it respects the "opt out of indexing" tag in Mastodon's settings, along with robots.txt, so anyone who doesn't want to be indexed can easily avoid it, for just themselves or their entire instance.

Don't defederate

First, I should split between the different types of blocks. There's what the end user does, which is what I'll call a "block", and what admins do, which is what I'll call "defederation", though some call it an "instance block".

Instance blocks tend to be thrown around far too happily on the Fediverse. If a single bad thing happens anywhere near your instance, you get blocked forever. Many instances follow a "guilt by association" policy when they decide to block someone. If there's a single "bad" post on your federated timeline, they'll block you. So unless you block Gab, Kiwifarms, Spinster, FSE, and whatever other instances they tell you to block, you'll be getting blocked too. blob.cat, my personal favorite instance as of right now, is blocked by many because it doesn't block Gab.

Another problem is caused by sharing and using other people's block lists. It's caused the fediverse to become split, as there's the "good" side which blocks anyone they deem "bad" on sight, and demands all others block as well, and the "bad" side which doesn't block people randomly. I personally think instance admins should hide from the public timelines and block media before they fully defederate, but that's not my place to choose.

Blocking is dumb

The block button the end user gets is also pretty useless. At first, it sounds good, as it hides all your posts from the person you blocked. However, it relies on two assumptions, which are very inaccurate.

1. that they are using an instance which respects federated blocks
2. that they won't just log out to look at your post

Federated blocks honestly just lead to more harassment than they prevent, as they actively tell the other person that you are trying to ignore them. Muting lets you ignore them without having to deal with them knowing you're ignoring them, so they won't go out of their way to get on alt accounts to harass you more.

Locked accounts

I saw some controversy about how some Mastodon forks (and perhaps Pleroma forks?) allow users to follow locked accounts without asking for a remote follow. The person bringing this up seemed to be scared of privacy, and was going to defederate with said instance.

However, such a tool would not actually let someone see any posts you weren't letting them see otherwise. It would only be able to show them public posts, which they can just see by checking on your profile, or subscribing to it via RSS.

In the end, my advice is simple: Don't post something publicly if you don't want it to be public. Don't get mad at things for working as they're supposed to.