I’m generally trying to go off of a conversation I had with someone 2 years ago in lemmy. I was generally of the opposite opinion to my current stance, and they explained how the current “everything is public, dont even try to hide it from people” stance is problematic to persecuted minorities. It was 2 years ago so I’m a bit fuzzy on the details - I had to go look it up because someone didnt believe that the conversation even existed, but i didnt re-read the whole comment section.

their point was that, while total privacy in a federated service is likely impossible, you want to make it non-trivial for harassers to do harassment.

reporting is absolutely more appropriate than blocking, but blocking has a few advantages:

1. its immediate, you dont need to wait for mods/admin.
2. you don’t need to prove to an admin that something that the harasser said about you is actually a lie.
3. mods/admins don’t need to be up-to-date on all the current dogwhistles
4. it doesn’t need to actually affect the harasser beyond you. they dont need to get banned from the whole community or instance, unless the community or instance feels like they should be. its lower impact. This is important for lemmy communities that represent real communities, like classes or teams or neighborhoods.