I was never going to share this, because I feared for aggressively being fought with and being labeled as problematic or anti-moderation. But I think it’s worthwhile to offer different viewpoints, and datapoints.

I hear a lot of discussions about shared blocklists on the Fediverse. And I know some of them are about instances blocklists, but I’ll tell you about my experience with shared account blocklists.

One day I made an, admittedly stupid, comment on Twitter, about Wil Wheaton. It was just an opinion, but I should have said nothing at all. But it was no big deal.

He saw what I said and he blocked me, as he 100% has the right to do. That’s what it’s there for. What I didn’t know was he was a part of some kind of shared Twitter blocklist that would completely change my experience on Twitter after that day.

It started slow, I’d click on somebody’s profile and see that they had blocked me, even though we didn’t know each other. As time went on an increasingly growing number of people I had never met were blocking me, until it was materially impacting my usage of the platform. I’d click on people’s profiles multiple times a day and see they were already blocking me and they wouldn’t even know why. Over time I felt like Twitter was borderline unusable for me because I simply couldn’t talk to some percentage of the users.

The system worked as it was designed. The design was faulty. I’d hate to see that replicated here.