Twitter (the X social media site)
I've gone in to this in depth elsewhere, but the difference is in the number of drive by bigots encountered, and how easy it is for those drive by bigots to interact.
So, in an open fediverse, with no defederation, and only user level filtering, drive by bigots will come along and hate on someone. That person will block the bigots instance (after being exposed to their hate), but even after that, the bigots will still be able to interact, and other vulnerable folk will still encounter the bigot dog pile. This is exactly how things work on twitter currently.
But when you can lock down posts to limit who can see them and defederate from instances that attract bigots, then less bigots will randomly see the content from vulnerable folk in their feeds in the first place, meaning less drive bys and less dogpiling. It doesn't stop targeted bigotry, and it doesn't stop dogpiling completely, but it makes it far more manageable.
You can take my foldable out of my cold dead hands!
Because user level blocking isn't really blocking. It's just filtering. The bigots can still see the content of people that have blocked their instance, and they can even reply to it. The only person that can't see it is the user who configured the "block"
I used instance block as a synonym for defederating. Now you know what I meant, can we get on with the discussion instead of arguing about things I didn't mean
You seem to be more interested in the semantics than the point I was making
Instance blocks have been admin/instance level before user level instance blocks were a thing. User level instance blocks are more accurately user level filters. Only admin level instance blocks are true blocks.
Admin level blocks are what I'm referring to in this conversation and that most people assume when they see the term "instance block"
Defederating = instance block
Their question was literally "do we still need instance blocks"
Yes, and thus you have one giant mega community in which every bigot can access anyone and everyone else. Which is what a Fediverse without instance blocks would be like
We partly moved to ice shrimp, but it was quite divergent from Hajkey, and after being burnt by our Calckey experience, we lost a lot of momentum and energy, so it's sort of sat there in a mostly working state, not ice shrimp and not Hajkey for a while now.
Once we're both back from South America though, we'll do a migration to Sharkey (a direct soft fork of Misskey). After that, Kaity will look at gradually adding our Hajkey specific features directly in to Sharkey where possibly.