It’s what happens when someone with underdeveloped empathy gets caught doing something they know is wrong, resulting in emotional overload.
It’s textbook toddler tantrum.
With stunted empathy, people seeking an explanation and apology are met with increasingly greater resistance.
And like textbook, they claim to be the victim. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are lying about receiving death threats.
What’s crazy is they could have simply:
- Apologised
- Explained the intent to reduce toxicity
- Agreed there was a lack of transparency
- Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature
But no. They were caught while they were secretly trying to play internet dictator and refused to empathise with others that were hurt and shocked to find out a tool they were using was receiving undisclosed payloads to use to censor communities and individuals.
I strongly implore everyone to leave this developer alone. Jokingly asking to be added to the list etc empowers them to continue to play the victim. They do not deserve attention.
No! The whole point of the fediverse is not to have centralised blocklists. Having blocklists baked in to the code, especially ones that get updated in a centralised manner with no accountability and without telling users they’re on it is absolutely antithetical to the platform and one of the main reasons why people are leaving reddit and coming here. If you want to curate the experience of a user in that manner, what you do is open an instance and advertise it as such. That way people can, at least on lemmy, know where they’re banned from without having to dive into the code or pull API endpoints manually. In fact how a lemmy instance federates and how it curates this experience is one of the distinguishing features among the instances. You have instances like lemmy.zip that federate all that will have them, instances like hexbear that are very quick to defederate in order to keep a safe-space and instances like blahaj that are somewhere between.
A front-end (or any piece of code that is made for being deployed on multiple instances) should be agnostic to all of this. It’s up to the admins of the instances and not the devs to curate and this is one of the main reasons why I don’t trust the piefed dev. Sure you can disable almost everything, but that still means that an admin has to do work in order to get to a neutral place from where they can then curate.