My blocklist is crazy long since I block all collaborators and changelings. Also anyone talking like a Romulan or anyone who speaks without honor...straight to the blocklist.
I have a lot of blocked communities, but only 5 blocked individuals.
Edit: Trump and Elon are filtered as well, as are two instances due to too many trolls and one because I don’t speak their language and they show up too often on /all.
To someone in the know, and who wants that, it's fine, and even enjoyable as you see. Whereas to a day-1 new user, it is far less so, if they wander into the likes of !Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net (edit: from All, without having read the sidebar text) or Lemmygrad.ml or say something that an admin at Lemmy.ml takes umbrage at, e.g. that Russia is attacking Ukraine, or that Uyghurs are being killed by China, etc.
My beef against it all is that it is opt-out by default, rather than opt-in, and I think it holds the Fediverse back from gaining new users who take one look at it and nope out, possibly never to return. Which since we are declining in number of active users, can be a real problem for us all, as it reduces our availability of content.
But even better than opt-out or opt-in, it would be nice to label it and leave the user to decide what they want to do about it. THAT'S the real problem imho: the lack of transparency as to what it is all about, affecting solely people who don't yet know - i.e. those of us who have climbed the ladder, will we do anything to help others who may follow?
I've even had constructive conversation on Hexbear before
I'm guessing you didn't go against the flow?
One time I said it's fucked up that Romani children are taken away from primary school and married off to have children.
Within an hour, I had crazy fucks publicly screaming at me how I'm a nazi and advocating genocide. Meanwhile I was also getting private messages about how they're hoping I would suffer and some shit.
My block list grew slower once Voyager implemented user tagging. Most of what gets blocked now is porn stuff. I don't mind it existing (and have an account just for that), but there's certain stuff that just isn't my bag, baby.
And yeah, I'll tag people as trolls/agitators, bigots, headline bots (even if there's a real person behind the account), [insert political label here], etc. I'll still block if I feel the need to, but a nice yellow and black "warning" tag lets me know to just not engage, and why.
Edit: you may need to go into settings -> user tags and enable them first.
Toxicity is relative. Cutting yourself off from people who are lashing out at others online is understandable... albeit you will be missing out on a lot of what the world has to offer doing that.