Click “Blocked” at https://lemmy.cafe/instances - they barely block anything except those big 3. Unless they do it without it appearing there, which is possible, but highly doubtful. In any case it looks awesome from that perspective.

Also the welcoming messages at the top of the server are amazing - “Have you installed ublock origin?”, “check out !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca”, etc.

Mbin I think doesn’t “block” even places such as Chapotraphouse - or at least Kbin did not - but it uses an entirely alternative voting scheme with “favorites” rather than upvotes and “reduces” rather than downvotes. That means that the popularity of something is only determined by the people on other Mbin/Kbin servers, with the upvote information still visible but not used by the sorting schemes. Also, the identity of people who use “reduces” against you are visible, so you can block them rather than have to suffer in silence, if they are super annoying about it e.g. reducing everything you’ve done without regards to its content. But yeah, I don’t know about actually hiding messages from people from particular instances - that’s what we are wanting here, and I imagine that if it is not doable now then it hopefully would be in the works?

I also don’t think I want Mastodon… or maybe I do? But anyway I don’t think we need it from the same account. Lemmy is topic-based rather than person-centered and that seems to make the most sense to me. Likewise Discord and Slack, but those are more unwieldy e.g. not indexed by search engines (such as DuckDuckGo, what else would I mean by that?:-P).

PieFed sounds the best in theory due to high integration with all those other services. Unless I end up not using or wanting those other services? I haven’t so far… then again they’re all so brand-new.

Sublinks sounds really exciting - you can even view a working demo - as it has been for the last half year with no updates that I’ve seen. Perhaps any day now… maybe…

And until my instance upgraded from 0.19.3 to 0.19.5 I enjoyed the Lemmy web UI. Now I dislike it - for a long reply (as I am wont to make myself:-D) up and downvote counts can be multiple (and variable!) screen rolls / pages away from the buttons on the bottom, and sometimes are on the right of the screen while other times on the left, having been wrapped around by a long name - go home UI, u r drunk! 😜

dubvee.org has iirc a single owner, which is usually not a sign of stability - but damn it is impressive! https://dubvee.org/about he did it all, then doesn’t even accept donations for it and guides people to give to other projects instead - that’s the opposite of capitalism, not just making fun of capitalism as people do on lemmy.ml constantly but rather living one’s literal and actual life according to one’s principles. Also I think he’s stated somewhere that he’ll switch to Sublinks rather than Lemmy as the backend when it’s ready. So… it’s a strong option as well, if a bit outside of the Lemmy ecosphere, and yet fully within the Fediverse and fully compatible with Lemmy, plus like PieFed additional multimedia enhancements of its own.