It sounds like you have never worked on a platform frequented by mobs of abusers (situations where abuse is targeted and high-volume enough that the "victim should just block" alternative is untenable for the victim).

Or a platform used by children.

The alternative, which you're welcome to use, is a fully decentralized/unmoderated platform. That alternative doesn't work for a lot of people. For them, the ability to report is often critical, quite literally, for their physical safety.

I get your point, but words like "wrongthink" are poisonous to a conversation. It's a privileged position to not routinely receive death and rape threats (c.f. women and trans on twitter) so please don't minimize the other side of the debate.

> Personally I would prefer deniable encryption

May I ask why? If you are not willing to stand behind something that you said then do not say it at all. Anyway, I do not think that deniable encryption is useful at all, after all potentially edited screenshots are taken as truth all the time. At least if you are using a non-deniable communication method you will be able to ask for proof that you wrote the post which they claim that you wrote.

What about spam and legitimate abuse? Do you think these things should be allowed to run rampant just because you believe that an admin's decision to not communicate with you is that terrible?

>What about spam and legitimate abuse?

You can block the spammer yourself. I'm not sure if the feature is about only private communication between two users or in channel, but if it's in channel, there can be bot logging messages. That way the bot's owner still knows who posted what and can ban/moderate as needed.

>Do you think these things should be allowed to run rampant just because you believe that an admin's decision to not communicate with you is that terrible?

I have no idea what are you talking about. Are you reacting to what I wrote or to your own projections about my beliefs?

If the spammer spams thousands of people, it's a better use of everyone's time if an admin bans it once and for all.

Spamming thousands of people can be detected without knowing the content. And if you accept messages from other people than those you are following, you have to accept you will inevitably get some spam. It's like getting PGP encrypted email - you can't expect server spam filter to catch it based on its content and if you report it as a spam, server spam filter doesn't see the content.

There are other solutions to this problem that don't require 3rd party intervention. For example, users could follow each other's block lists.

If Bob spams thousands of accounts he'd quickly get on multiple block lists.

Is Bob a verified, known identity, or does he simply create unlimited accounts and continue the spamming or abuse?

Mastodon is federated, so you already get to choose who your content moderators will be when you pick a server. Blocklists are just an informal and spammy-by-default version of that.

>You can block the spammer yourself.

This is nonsense. Do you really think everyone should have to deal with spam themselves? Do you disable spam filters on your email and deal with all of that on your own? Do you think, on a site like HN, we should have to filter spam ourselves too?

The internet would be completely unusable if it was expected that everyone deal with spam themselves. This is ludicrous.