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Make reblogs private after blocking a user

According to the help page on blocking, 'blocking a user means "I do not want to see or be seen by this user."'


However, if a user reblogs one of my posts, and then I block them, their reblog of my post is not deleted. This is surprising to me because my expectation is that after I block them, they will no longer be able to see my posts; making an exception for a post or posts that they have already reblogged is counterintuitive.


On the other hand, in the words of this feature request, "Blocking a user who makes an unwelcome reply prevents further interaction, but doesn't hide the reply; this is somewhat expected, due to a reply's characteristic of being a freestanding post instead of being subordinate to someone else's post." I understand that as well; it would be surprising to the person who has been blocked if the additional commentary they wrote on a reblog was lost to them forever.


So I suggest that if user A blocks user B after B has reblogged a post from A, the reblog should become visible only to B. I realize this also requires fine-grained access control at the granularity of individual posts, which doesn't exist in general right now. In my opinion, it's important to fulfill the "they can't see my posts and I can't see theirs" expectation as consistently as possible.


2 people like this idea

That seems excessive to me. Also incredibly confusing if you are the blocked person. I'm not going to call it gaslighting, but having a reblog vanish with zero warning or indication of what has happened is absolutely mindboggling. If anything, it's going to generate a lot more false positive bug reports because people think posts are breaking.


If you really don't want a blocked person to see your reblog, you can delete the entire post. The contents of a deleted post are replaced with "[deleted]". This won't stop someone from circumventing blocks with side accounts, but I'd assume staff would step in if bloggers are doing such an antagonistic thing.


1 person likes this

That's why I suggested making the reblog visible to the blocked person, but nobody else -- that way, it wouldn't vanish.


Requiring people to completely delete a post in order to stop an unwanted reblog seems excessive.

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