@luna
That's why I'm telling every instance admin that instance block should be the last resort. Like when malicious domain without real users appears. If they're afraid of another instance, why not just LIMIT it? This way their users may still follow users on that instance.
But no, a lot of them so full of themselves and think that they're the right person to decide for you. And when I call them out on that, they say that "it's easy to move!".

I like to groan at such moments. They're too stupid to understand that untill full server block is considered the last resort by everybody, users won't have a peaceful place anywhere. It's just useless to move if you have 100 friends and each one of them are unavailable from somewhere.

@luna

"My instance Admin gets into a fight"

"Friends’ instances defederate from mine"

"I want to see my friends' posts"

The same happened to me. It wouldn't happen to involve .art, would it? The Queen of bullying and punishment by selfish block abuse? And reputation attacker?

I need a good reason before I block an instance, even if the instance Admin is a jerk. Members come first. I wish Admins would understand the impact on people when they block.

You are right to want to stay connected to your friends. You are right to expect it. You were made an implicit promise when you joined Mastodon. Someone broke the promise.

I'm sorry you've had to deal with this nonsense.

@luna Reminds me of a social media idea I had lying around in the back of my head when I considered this problem. It involved clients managing their own local feed and then passing it to either an 'aggregator' to coalesce it with others for ease of discovery by other clients (matching the purpose of an 'instance', but without having to have your account there and deal with migration when you want to leave), and/or 'relays' for direct comms between two mutual parties (in order to allow people with the ability to manage servers to contribute to keeping the network running without having to resort to *everyone* having to be a sysadmin). When you don't want someone or somewhere to see your posts, you just, well, don't send 'em.

... Considering this is effectively just RSS with extra steps, though, I get the feeling that's probably what's gonna happen. Someone makes a specialized RSS client with good microblog social media UX and a couple infrastructure bundles anyone can set up, and markets it like a new platform, bam. they win.