Maybe I'm missing something, but I've found it very strange the concern over this change. I mean, it's only for public posts, which they could see if they just logged out or switched to a burner account anyways? Like, if it let them send a message or comment on posts, or see posts for followers only or something, I'd see the issue, but it doesn't seem like that aspect of the feature was all that meaningful anyways. Am I wrong?
I mean I assume if it's a big public priority of it's probably something terrible, so there must be more to it than how I'm understanding it currently.
Most people don't have burners or don't really log out of their accounts so blocks making it so you can prevent certain people from looking at your account is a small layer of protection. it's also just a convention in social media. it's how Facebook and Instagram (and I presume Tiktok though I don't have one) works.
Second, the reason behind it is very annoying. Elon is just mad that he's one of the most blocked accounts on the site and he knows that shitty fascist dudes get blocked on that site at a high rate, he just wants to make the site cater to their whims by making it easier for them to see around blocks. the blocking system was never perfect but it's still miles better than this.
I mean I guess? Seems like the people you'd want to be blocking in the first place are the exact type of people you'd expect to have a whole clown car full of obnoxious burner accounts in the first place. And FB and IG make more sense because those accounts are (at least theoretically) real id linked - you're not supposed to be able to just go make more accounts on a whim, and you're setting the privacy on posts to only show to mutuals. Just seems like the flimsiest protection imaginable.
And yeah obvs bellend does this stuff to help his impressively stupid followers, and it's definitely dumb, but I'd be a thousand percent surprised if he hasn't made the engineers over there work insane overtime hours just to hardcore his account with godmode viewing and posting powers. Hell, we saw the code for white(!)-listed hate speech filter bypass for him and his buddies, so they're clearly not above it.
Just seems like a really surface level thing to worry about that doesn't really affect any degree of safety or privacy. Still, stupid, yes.
I think someone just had a goofy meme idea and a made a silly, and then it stuck because it looks silly and lessens the pain of having to see that daft bastard's crufty mug again.
Already more thought than that turd-through-a-playdoh-spaghetti-machine-for-brains dork-waffle deserves, tbqh.
If this were actually a violation of the ToS you'd have to say goodbye to most apps with user generated content, because they work the same way (including lemmy). To my reading the Apple ToS doesn't even require that users can mute each other, just that the devs can block users to moderate the platform.