First, does PyLova even have a hidden list of communities blocked at the admin level? Lemmy does, for example this one at programming.dev: https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/, and blocking things without telling people seems like something that Rimu would do so I presume PieFed does as well, but... does it?

The instance federation/defederation lists shown on Lemmy are very helpful, but annoyingly the list of those communities blocked at the admin level, unlike instances, is not something that is exposed for people to be able to read (or if it is, since there is no link to it from any page that I've ever seen, people do not know how to find it). Nor, I would guess, are users blocked at the admin level (like instances or communities).

Being able to read an instance's hidden blocklist of communities, like the defederation listing, would be useful to people evaluating whether they want to join it or not.

Plus who doesn't like transparency, rather than opaqueness!? Do it, do it, do it... you know, if you want to 😜. I think it would be cool anyway 😎.

Unless PyLova, unlike PieFed, aims to block nothing and therefore doesn't need to expose an empty list? Though I would think that someone spinning up a new instance might choose to block certain well-known (cough Jordanlund cough) communities on Lemmy.World, for example, but someone else considering whether to join it or not would have no way of checking which communities are pre-blocked that way, except by checking for each and every case one by one. So even if used rarely, the transparency makes people feel welcomed, like their preferences matter to the software devs who go out of the way to expose such information. Like using (Arch) Linux btw!! :-P

PyLova has that and you can find that information on the About page at the bottom.

https://quokk.au/about

Most of the blocked ones are the defaults that came from PieFed. I added a feature to give explanations as for why the block was placed, but have not blocked anything since and as such they all list no reason. Most of them are far-right/nazi places.

Edit: Oh that's communities you're after. I'm not sure if that's even a feature for PF/PyLova.

Edi2: There is an ability to delete a community, but I'm not sure that stops it being re-added? I'll look into it and if not I can add the ability to block individual comms and also add them to the about page censorship list.

I LOVE seeing all these new features continually popping up in PyLova!! And I love specifically these Transparency options!!!

I am not pushing for the ability of PyLova to block a community, although Lemmy has it and in general PieFed was built to have more features than Lemmy, which PyLova would have inherited, so it stands to reason that it might? And if PyLova does have this feature, then yes it would be great to see it added to the Transparency section like the others.

Yes, agreed that fascists need not be platformed automatically on every instance across the entire Fediverse - blocking is not a bad thing.

You guys / gals / other are awesome, thank you for all your efforts to improve things 😎.