Two assertions:
1. There are serious challenges for marginalized groups on the fediverse, including for the groups that are relatively overrepresented here compared to other spaces.
2. We are not going to solve those problems even transiently through "better blocklists."
There are a variety of solutions that we can talk over. I've talked about quite a few of them, as have others, but the quest to "build a better blocklist" is at best a distraction and at worst actively harmful to solving this
Blocklists have a role, blocking has a role, defederation has a role.
But.
If you go around using a hammer to cut boards you are generally going to have a miserable time of it and end up with a lot of damage to the boards.
Use hammers for nails. Use saws for cutting boards.
If you don't have a saw and all you have is a hammer, breaking boards with a hammer is still probably not the best solution: help get a saw or manufacture a saw, and a better blocklist is not even an improvised saw.
Also, just to reply indirectly to something:
"No one had a problem with blocklists before marginalized people started to use them" is so incredibly untrue that it makes me question that we live in the same consensus reality.
People have had problems with blocklists since their use in DNS, there are entire RFCs around this.
There was a massive fallout over GG Autoblocker and Wil Wheaton that were in no way novel but also were not _subtle_. Oliphants has long been criticized.
I don't fault people for not knowing this history, but there's this confident assertion that "oh before this recent incident no one talked about this."
I've been in this space for a long time. Both personally and professionally.
It is talked about a _lot_. Large swaths of trans people in particular will never use blocklists or have sworn off all but the most minimal and most validated of blocklists due to this history back on twitter. When I ran one this is one of the things I saw constantly.
@hrefna Yeah I feel like if someone thinks nobody had a problem with blocklists before they were just flat out not paying attention.
@hrefna On a different scale, I think this discussion of how to exclude/draw boundaries is also emerging in other influential (or "influential") spaces.
On Bluesky there are entire continuing convos about how best to block early and often, all in the service of creating a non-Twitter culture of safety for marginalized groups. If I'm reading it right, not so much about blocking instances, as about blocking individuals and their entire (known/discoverable) networks.