There’s a kind of person who is the reason that blocks and bans exist. They’re also the ones who argue loudest that blocking is evil, and you’ll be stuck in a filter bubble or an echo chamber if you deprive yourself of their sparkling wit. You should block these guys faster than anyone.
I recently had an encounter with one of these guys – and they are always guys – myself. They see you blocking them as some kind of cowardice, and they see tools which let you control your own information environment (filters) as a refusal to engage with whatever views they believe to be correct and important.
Bluesky's moderation service is optional – you can turn it off, and be exposed all the hate speech you want. But people like Dorsey and my random guy don't want you to be able to block or filter views you disagree with. What they want is a form of coercive control, the ability to override what you desire to make it what they think is good for you. Think Elon Musk, putting himself into every single timeline and proposing to make people (i.e. him) unblockable.
Filtering is another kind of user agent, a representation of my control over what I want to see and do online, and that's a good thing. Similarly, genuinely federated services like Mastodon (but not Bluesky, yet) allow you to devolve moderation to a trusted administrator (for your instance) and add your own personal blocks and filters too. In this way, Mastodon allows the creation of genuine communities, which share values and also decide to what degree they want to connect to the rest of the world. They can be as isolated or federated as they wish.
