/0 @lemmy.dbzer0.com Unruffled [he/him] @lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 mo. ago

How to block another instance to curate your Lemmy experience

Many newer Lemmy users still don't know they can block users, communities, and even whole instances they may not want to see in their feed or interact with.

This is a very basic guide to doing this on lemmy.dbzer0.com using the default web UI.

Open your profile Settings page:

Switch from the Settings tab to the Blocks tab

From this page you can block by User, Instance, or Community

That's all there is to it.

Edit: No offense to !truecomics@midwest.social for appearing in my community block list. It's just there as a (hopefully) inoffensive example.

32 comments

Timely info, thanks!

Bye bye hexbear...
- I sought out and discovered this feature existed only last week right after I wondered if I could block all of hexbear.
  
  Blocking an instance only blocks the communities and you have to block the users individually when they post on communities of other instances.
  
  I'm hoping for an additional option to block all users of an instance to be added.
- You also need to block everyone from Hexbear. I don't have the same reaction to everyone from ML (though I have that instance blocked too), but after I interact with them, they usually get blocked anyway.
  
  fun fact: they can't reply back to you if you block them. I only found that out because I would get errors trying to reply to people who hate me.
  
  There's about 15% of .ml that is unaware, and are pretty regular. And then there's the rest that make you go, "oh... Hm...."
How dare you block Everett True comics
- He's in for a walloping
You can also do it for individual users or communities from their respective landing pages after clicking on their name (or sidebar for communities) which often time is more intuitive to do immediately when you run across some particular bad stinky bullshit.
- Good point, thanks.
- And the easiest way to handle blocking in many apps too, quick and easy peasy.
Another good non-offensive example is communities that speak a different language than you.

/c/ich_iel, you all seem very nice, but I never know what the hell you are yammering on about. BLOCKED.
- Ich_iel bothers me because you shouldn't have to block it. Lemmy has language filters built in. You should never see anything in a language you haven't told Lemmy you speak.
  
  But ich_iel doesn't use that filter. Their users leave their posts' language seeing as unspecified. So everyone ends up seeing it.
  
  Anyone tried actually talking to their admins?
  
  Yep. I chalk this up to some poor advice of people telling new users to use unspecified instead of their language in their posts. You can't really choose to not see unspecified language posts because then you wouldn't see anything because hardly anyone picks a language.
  
  Edit: to be clear, I believe that everyone should use unspecified and all languages they speak as content they see but mark all content they post as the language they're using in that content. If the onboarding experience was better about making people always use their language of choice for content they post then I wouldn't necessarily recommend people include unspecified in the content they see.
  
  I would try to reach out to the mods again. I remember doing it once, and someone said they had changed it, but I guess they forgot to remove "undefined"
Oh no... I cannot block my own instance 😭
How do you guys come across all these marxist? I only browse "all" and I don't see anything
- A lot of us are of the opinion that they're just falsely claiming to be Marxists.
  
  It primarily comes from a specific instance though and they're slowly becoming more and more isolated. If you stick to the defaults on .world, you may not see them that much. Say something about China though and they'll find you.
  
  Yeah. Some are real Marxists. I disagree but respect and appreciate them, they're welcome here. A huge chunk are fake accounts run by the Kremlin or CCP.
- Because you aren't federated with certain instances?
- /c/all will definitely show instances like lemmygrad where it's very common
- lemmy.world (your home instance) is currently defederated on an instancewide level from the main perpetrators of the CCP/Putin-sponsored drivel: lemmygrad and hexbear. They caused too many problems, and too many use abuse brigades/dogpiles, so they excised the cancer.
  
  Defederation means that lemmy.world does not ask for, and does not accept, any kind of new content from either of those instances, nor does it send out new content from .world to them. They're effectively completely cut off.
  
  you'll still see it from time to time on lemmy.ml, especially in their "World News" community (where you are banned for remotely indicating Russia is bad) as a lot of that is tacitly allowed and encouraged by .ml admins and the Lemmy devs. but it's a lot more subdued and easier to just ignore.
I'm using connect for lemmy and a few weeks ago I ended up blocking entire instances because of lemmyshitpost and some variants. No regrets so far, and browsing Lemmy got so much better.
Lmao, almost blocked op when I saw this at first
If only we could have a keywords tab right there.
- http://piefed.social/ has
  
  Thank you!
Lemmy got a hell of a lot better when I blocked most of the Russian/Chinese agitprop bull shit.

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