i understand if someone comes into your mentions to call you names and spam you, but the majority of people that you dont follow, who slip into your mentions, thats normal behaviour. happens on twitter too, for fucks sake (well, at least it did back when twitter didnt mute every other post from a thread). it isnt a new phenomenon
so i dont understand why there are still people who choose to be incredibly upset when two or three people give them an opinion
I feel like instance blocking is resulting in the Fediverse becoming more fragmented, and it's sad that the only workaround is hosting single-user/extremely tiny instances. Not everyone has the ability to host their own instance (most Fedi instance software is a huge pain to work with for small instances), and new users shouldn't be forced into a filter bubble.
Instance blocking was designed as a last-resort kind of thing to protect against spam, but it seems like every Mastodon instance is using instance blocking to keep away everyone they don't like. You can get your instance blocked simply for federating with an instance with federates with Gab or Spinster. Instance blocks are also shared between instance admins, so if one instance blocks your instance for a dumb reason, many more will follow.
New users are going to eventually end up with two very bad choices: Either join an instance which blocks half the Fediverse, or join an instance which is blocked by half the Fediverse. We're building the filter bubble that we were originally trying to avoid.
Note: I'm fine with individual users being able to block instances if they want to, it's just that admins shouldn't force instance blocks on all their users.