Conversation

The fediverse has a weird form of dispute resolution that doesn't work at all.

1. Someone does something that someone else disagrees with.

2. Person B blocks person A. So far so good.

3. Person C finds out that Person B blocked Person A when mentioning them both in a post. Far from optimal, but whatever.

4. Occasionally, Person C asks what went wrong. If Person A sees this (either by a third party posting about the incident or because it was a public post that got shown to them through some weirdness of federation), they can fix whatever went wrong. That's probably the worst possible way to deliver that information, but let's keep going.

5. Now Person A has stopped whatever thing they were doing. Problem solved, right?

6. Except it isn't solved because Person A has no way of apologizing to Person B, and Person B has no way of seeing that Person A stopped whatever they were doing.

7. The conflict remains unresolved forever.

Person A has no way of resolving the conflict at this point and Person B has no way to find out that the conflict can be resolved. Person B will never forgive Person A because their final interaction was the block.

Everyone feels bad forever despite the problem appearing to be solved to an uninvested third party. Because they're now frozen in the worst part of their relationship forever.

Protecting people is great, and we do need the block system to be there. But we also need a way of *solving* problems.

You can't just stop the conflict. There needs to be a way it can be *resolved*.