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?
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?
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.
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.
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.