This is why I favor Matrix, I don’t have to give anybody any info and it would be hard for the government to build a social graph of my contacts if we use VPN’s or Tor to connect.

I mean a lot of this would depend on the situation. You could basically try to get their IP and maybe put it under the hashtag #fediblock, maybe other admins will block it, but seems unlikely. It would be nice if we could have a regex based block function, but we don’t currently. You could change your username and picture to make it harder to find you, but I don’t know what other tools you might have.

So my personal impressions is that mainstream services are garbage, but that mirrors the mainstream culture that consumes them. If most people want to stay on Instagram or Facebook, I would prefer they do, because as we saw when they did the Instagram Boycott on the 20th, we got a lot of new users, but it brought a lot of toxicity over from Instagram and once again somebody who really wasn’t a bad person at all got bullied off the platform by a small, but loud group of people. I came over here to escape the toxicity of the big social media platforms and found something resembling leftist solidarity. I appreciate that most of these services don’t tolerate bigotry to nearly the same extent as the mainstream services, that I would say often amplify hateful things because controversial content gets prioritized by the algorithms. The reason I like the fediverse is quality, not quantity. Mainstreaming these services would require either conforming to the norms of the mainstream internet culture, or somehow getting the mainstream internet culture to conform to our norms here. Both of these tasks seem pointless. Maybe the goal shouldn’t be total market saturation, but sustainability of the communities we have come to love. I think we get a lot of user share, but more than that we get a lot of really great, friendly and welcoming people for the most part. I think the toxic voices tend to get drowned out over time, because we have tools to filter that out and while we may have shitty things that happen from time to time as will any community, a lot of our instances function as a community and really do feel like a home on the internet.

I really think this would/could be a pretty cool addition to the fediverse, would love to see something with a trading section, mutual aid section for both people requesting support and groups organizing support and some kind of employment/gig section. That’s just my 2 cents.