Seriously. The amount of times I see people whining or laughing about being blocked when they 'haven't even done anything' just tells me that not many of you know its actually a really good way to properly curate your online space, and its not something to be offended over.

Blocking is a form of protection. Its also a form of mutual protection.

Especially on websites that don't offer more extensive or usable filtering, tagging and avoidance options. Twitter, for example.

Blocking isn't some personal insult. Its a method of saying; hey, we clearly shouldn't interact, so I'm gonna build this soundproof wall between us to make sure we can't.

To use The Salmon Analogy, if I run a restaurant based on salmon as the main ingredient, and you're allergic or or severely dislike salmon, me refusing to serve you isn't a personal sleight. Its me recognising that you can't or really don't want to eat salmon, and its me protecting you from an unpleasant experience and myself from you inevitably screaming at me for serving salmon.

If you are someone who enjoys 'objectionable' content, such as gore, and you stumble across an extremely anti-gore blog, its absolutely a viable option to pre-emptively block them. Maybe your paths never would've crossed, but its better to ensure they don't than potentially wind up the victim or hate or harassment.

Nobody needs to be comfortable with every content. I can understand if people have triggers and if people have topics that just make them feel uneasy.

I also have both, but I owe that server, some of the people there and the admin that they helped me to reduce my triggers just with fictional content. I had avoided my triggers for 12 years and only recently I slowly got better. And I don’t mean that on a purely fictional level. My irl triggers that popped up every time I saw a father interacting with their child were reduced, too.

So this whole incident made me also so mad. Before that, I just blissfully ignored people like them. I thought they eventually grow out of it. I haven’t cared to look closer what damage those fandom policers could cause to others, until that. I wasn’t at the sideline, but I also wasn’t directly in the epicenter of it and I still felt terrible.

I started to recognize what fandom has done for me for more than half of my life. I remembered how fandom and kind people built me up piece by piece many times and that this kind of support is now endangered for many people out there who could also get called with bullshit accusations. I don’t know where I would be today, if I had encountered death threats and similar things when I just turned 18. And I realized that despite my depression and fluctuating mental health, I’m much stronger now and less impressionable. I want to give something back, I want people to feel safer in their fandom space again.

I encourage everybody to make their own internet experience as safe and comfortable as possible. If someone’s content makes you uncomfortable, feel free to block them and/or blacklist the tag they use for that certain content. I have seen many creators who were very kind and understanding if someone asked them to tag certain things, so they could blacklist the tags but could continue to follow the artist.

Nobody should force anybody else to look at content they don’t like. That is wrong! You have to have the freedom to decide for yourself when you want to expose yourself to certain things.