Yeah. Usually, the bullshit accounts I do not block, because I think it’s worth talking with them and sort of shining a light that they are bullshit. At least for a little while. UM is different because he’s extremely upfront about being bullshit, so there’s nothing to prove by the interaction.

There’s this weird kind of Stockholm-syndrome-by-proxy going on with Lemmy’s moderation. The old-school system was that the operators of the network were supposed to make sure it was going to be free of overt crap, and otherwise, let people do what they wanted to do. It turns out that there are a couple of technical features that make it pretty difficult to do that on Lemmy (bad moderation tooling, easy and anonymous account creation, distributed nature of the system making it hard to take a global look at certain types of abuse). But, there are technical features that make it really easy for moderators to enforce a weird little space where you have to be “polite” to everyone at all times, no matter what, and often also where only certain types of opinions that line up with the moderator’s opinions are allowed.

And so, that first thing doesn’t happen as much as it should (although TBF they do filter out a large amount of crap), and that second thing happens all the time.