I agree that there is a huge difference between blocking hate (who the site should be blocking anyway due to breaching the community guidelines) and blocking someone you simply disagree with or are offended by.
When it comes to being offended it’s different, we can all agree that hate shouldn’t be tolerated, but offence is in the eye of the beholder.
I could block any users that I find to be offensive and live in a lovely online community where everyone agrees with me but I personally don’t want a community that doesn’t reflect the real world and I find it mentally unhealthy to pretend that offensive people and/or people with different points of view don’t exist.
Why? Why is it a virtue of some kind if when I go online I allow the same people to continually make that experience worse for me?
Choosing to allow that is a valid choice, but it’s not necessarily a healthy one, and choosing not to allow it is a reasonable choice for people to make for themselves for the sake of their own health or happiness.
Social media isn’t the entire world. Personally blocking the people I don’t want to interact with on specific platforms (or even all platforms) doesn’t remove my ability to interact with the world and the events going on within it, nor does it remove my ability to hear other opinions.
Edited to add - I fully support someone such as yourself choosing to NOT block people. But I don’t like that we’re normalizing the idea that we all just have to accept what is coming to us from social media in the name of “considering other opinions”, nor that doing so is inherently virtuous. I can consider other opinions and create an online environment for myself that is not toxic.
You do you, I’m not here to tell anyone what their Lemmy experience should be, I’m just saying I personally believe that it’s unhealthy to surround yourself only with people that agree with you, we all have to go back to the real world at some point.
There was a post yesterday where a guy was not going to his brother’s wedding because they’d had a fall out over the whole Musk thing. I think that’s terrible.
I agree that there is a huge difference between blocking hate (who the site should be blocking anyway due to breaching the community guidelines) and blocking someone you simply disagree with or are offended by.
When it comes to being offended it’s different, we can all agree that hate shouldn’t be tolerated, but offence is in the eye of the beholder.
I could block any users that I find to be offensive and live in a lovely online community where everyone agrees with me but I personally don’t want a community that doesn’t reflect the real world and I find it mentally unhealthy to pretend that offensive people and/or people with different points of view don’t exist.
Why? Why is it a virtue of some kind if when I go online I allow the same people to continually make that experience worse for me?
Social media isn’t the entire world. Personally blocking the people I don’t want to interact with on specific platforms (or even all platforms) doesn’t remove my ability to interact with the world and the events going on within it, nor does it remove my ability to hear other opinions.
Edited to add - I fully support someone such as yourself choosing to NOT block people. But I don’t like that we’re normalizing the idea that we all just have to accept what is coming to us from social media in the name of “considering other opinions”, nor that doing so is inherently virtuous. I can consider other opinions and create an online environment for myself that is not toxic.
You do you, I’m not here to tell anyone what their Lemmy experience should be, I’m just saying I personally believe that it’s unhealthy to surround yourself only with people that agree with you, we all have to go back to the real world at some point.
There was a post yesterday where a guy was not going to his brother’s wedding because they’d had a fall out over the whole Musk thing. I think that’s terrible.