Ask Lemmy

why it is a silly suggestion

Once again, just because it is technically unfeasible doesn't make the idea bad. Just because a system is limited in its ability doesn't mean that what the user wants isn't a desirable thing to have. That's I think the sticking point in this specific thread with you specifically.
People aren't saying "we can't do that" they're saying "that's a bad idea because we can't do that", and there is a pretty significant difference between those.

I guess you've never interacted with an actual developer before, who isn't also their own PR department

Pretty baseless statement, but there is nothing I could say to convince you of my credentials.
It's not the technical discussion that is anxiety producing, it's how some of these threads got wildly out of pocket, and I was getting way too emotional and it didn't feel good. I didn't open the app for like a week because seeing those waiting notifications of people hurling insults was not was getting me into a bad place. Testy is fine, this was not testy.

I feel that such a 'Block' feature is actually morally bad, as it is a form of lying, providing false promises

This is exactly how I feel about the current "block" functionality. Most platforms would call this "mute" or "hide" to indicate that the effect is purely on your side and it has not impacted them at all.
Which is exactly what OP is talking about in this post.

the only way to actually ensure [...] if you want to actually guarantee certain people cannot see some or all

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
We don't even have to use the word "block". We can use another term to indicate this doesn't block them from seeing, only from taking action.
And besides, your concern about visibility is already a "problem" on other networks like reddit, and the people asking for this are ok with that. And really, I'm not against the current block (mute), it's just poorly named and insufficient by itself. It could be combined with a reddit style block.
Maybe you could tap "block" and then be presented with 3 checkboxes: block them from my feed, block them from interacting with my posts, block them from seeing my posts.

Private communities is a whole other topic (which is where I actually became convinced of this, I used to be totally on your side).
This public-only (almost) design is going to exclude people who would be really nice to include. I know that it doesn't have to be for everyone, but I think it hurts the culture to exclude the groups who would benefit from these privacy and protection functions.

For a long time I've been toying with the idea of a public group chat where privacy comes from out of band exchange of private keys and identifying information, but without all the crazy complexity of duplicating each message for each chat member (which, at the time I was thinking about it, is how signal did it. Idk what they do now). But cryptography is not my strength so the design never really left the basics concepts stage. But this is a pretty significant tangent.

Anyways, I'm sure I'm not the first person to suggest this design to the devs, after all as you mentioned, this is more or less what mastodon does. The devs chose not to take action on it. I can still be unhappy about that lol