One of the more pernicious ideas to have bubbled up over the last couple of decades is the idea that it’s a moral good to constantly engage with, usually on social media websites, people who disagree strongly with you. It led to a culture on Xitter of believing you have to engage with–and thus ‘win’ arguments with–people whom you ordinarily wouldn’t give the time of day.

I think part of this stems from a misunderstanding of the First Amendment–the right to freedom of speech also entails the right to have other people listen to your bullshit. It didn’t help that social media also was used by writers and others to promote their work, so blocking people from seeing your posts meant you were limiting your PR reach. Of course, most people aren’t trying to promote their careers, they just want to see cat pictures and find interesting things to read.

That’s why I find the ethos of Bluesky (for now anyway) of ‘block often’ to be very refreshing. There’s a whole genre of blogging about coping with awful relatives you can’t avoid (The Thanksgiving Uncle of Doom), the talk to everyone concept, in hindsight, was going to make us crazy. No one can–or should–be forced to tolerate people they can’t stand as a hobby, for someone else’s pecuniary gain no less.

And Bluesky makes this easy, because blocking on Bluesky is a hard block. No ‘you still can see the post if you click this link’ dodges that make it possible to cheat. And when you block, replies from a blocked person are knocked out of your threads. In real life, we wouldn’t tolerate assholes, and we tend to avoid them. No reason not to do so online either.