I have a little bit of personal experience with blocklists, so it's interesting seeing the fediverse litigating the pros and cons of them.

When Twitter first started serving up "promoted" posts, I started manually blocking any account that posted one, in effort to keep my timeline free of ads. A little while later, I built myself a browser extension that automated this process. Whenever a promoted post appeared in my feed, the user would get blocked. Then I made the extension actively scroll through my feed, clicking on any promoted posts to block, which would load that profile page, surfacing more promoted posts.

Then I decided I wanted to share the fruits of my labor and made a "Promoted posts" blocklist shared on blocktogether. However, there were a few pitfals along the way.

When I first started thinking about sharing the blocklist, I was really paranoid about accidentally blocking anyone who "didn't deserve it" and discovered that part of my logic was broken. I was blocking whoever posted the post, when, in some cases, the post was promoted by someone who didn't even post it. So I adjusted the logic to try to determine who actually promoted it, and in the cases where it wasn't possible to determine, it did nothing. Then I purged the thousands and thousands of blocks and started fresh.

Then I saw stories about how Wil Wheaton was being accused of being anti-trans, it turns out that he subscribed to a blocklist about one subject or another that the author had also started including trans people in. Wil had no idea he was blocking trans people en masse. This made me really concerned about sharing blocklists.

Then I had to blow away all my blocks again, because I couldn't be sure that I'd never, ever blocked someone just for being an asshole.

At that point, I realized that, at least with blocktogether, there's no such thing as "a blocklist," it's literally a list of every user one user blocks.

Even someone like me who's really strict about only blocking those "that deserve it," can end up accidentally including someone unexpected.

So at that point, I finally was confident that my existing blocks were safe to share, and published my blocklist. Last I looked at it, it was up to 65,000+ brands blocked, and several hundred people were subscribed to it. When blocktogether finally shut down, I was immensely relieved, because by simply deciding to provide this "service" of blocking promoted posts, I had inadvertently made my experience using the platform much worse.

The power in one person being able to get several hundred people to instantly block someone is something I don't think anyone should have. The fact that some blocklists had thousands of subscribers horrifies me still.

I was intensely strict about it, but I still can't say for absolute sure I didn't cause someone to be blocked that shouldn't have been.