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Heh, we figured mute would be good enough to keep you gremlins satisfied for like a month or two. Gonna start work on blocks next week

Thank you 💜 For some of us marginalised folks it’s a safety issue. It’s not just that we don’t want to hear what certain people are saying, it’s that we don’t want them to be aware of us.

Oh yeah, we totally get it. We (incorrectly) assumed that people who others want to block wouldn’t make it into the site while things were invite only

this is not true — jeromy was not here for the decision to do mutes and not blocks. the team was just 4 people then, and we did mutes and not blocks because the federation architecture was not finished, and blocking requires cooperation across all entities in a network

i block someone on my server. ok. where does that information get stored? just my server? then other servers don’t know to respect it. ok, i publish it then. what if the other server doesn’t listen? what if there’s services beyond servers? (there are)

what if i don’t want my blocks to be public? what do we do if an aggro server refuses to respect my block? we had to answer all these questions, about an architecture that was not settled. it was simply not possible on the time constraints we had with 3 engineers.

we worked the week between christmas and new year to get mutes and basic moderation functions in to prioritize safety before we even got to 1k users. what you’re seeing now is the effects of unexpected hype/growth overtaking us. if you cannot deal without blocks, come back later. this is a beta.

we’re a small team, working as hard as we can, juggling multiple priorities to build a usable social app at the same time as a decentralized social protocol. we chose to do this hard mode (both protocol and product) so we could show, not tell, that the AT Protocol works. thanks for kicking the tires

we are human and need sleep. so bear with as we implement blocks (a week or two? juggling), along with sandbox-mode federation to test it all out. if you code and want to help, apply for a job. you will work intensely hard with us, but you may help remake the social web. come if you want to ride.