@tillshadeisgone rejection is painful. we've evolved to feel almost-physical pain upon rejection. it is punishing and often unfair when done to a collective (like people of an instance for maybe one or a few of them), it is punishing when done by a collective. i understand thematic instances doing allowlists, and i don't think there's any problem with that. i understand users doing domain blocks and i don't think there's any problem with that. those are examples of people exercising their personal boundaries a priori.
criticism doesn't have to mean you're doing something right. there are probably many trolls creating noise and drowning legitimate interest in improving the moderation situation, but listen though. people are expressing concern that social decisions are being made for them, or against them, that they don't feel direct involvement in.

and if anyone thinks "just go to another instance", it doesn't work like this. every instance has a different view of fedi, just because federation is not full distribution. a move is not without losses. fragmenting your social media identity across different accounts is similarly not something many enjoy.

i don't think our current blocklist mechanisms for general-purpose or public-forum-like instances should be regarded with the same level of acceptance (as an effective moderation mechanism) as allowlists or user level domain blocks. i see many issues.
i also don't think expressing being upset about e.g. fediblock should be equivalent to, or example of, abusive/troll/harassment behavior...

people would rightfully feel upset at the prospect of arbitrarily losing the opportunity to connect and interact with whole instances of other people. both those of the blocking instance and of the blocked instance. they would feel even more upset at the prospect of such denial being catastrophic and not an instance-by-instance decision, or even user by user decision. that is, it is especially upsetting when those mechanisms feel lump-summed.
and created as they are, there's really not enough emphasis on putting the effort to explain why, with evidence, a certain instance was blocked whole. and currently the focus is on blocking whole lists of instances for varying short-sentence reasons rather than vetting on instance-by-instance basis or tagging instances with a predefined set of tags so that blocking is customizable based on each instance people's set of values.

currently it feels like many instances are their own monarchies doing alliances and driving schisms in the fedi community at large, rather than collectives of people with similar interests drawing their own boundaries which they all agreed on.
i've seen many blocks "by federation" or "by running software", not even association.
also, once added on a blocklist, there's usually no streamlined mechanism to appeal and retract the blocking. admins would usually have to go on an instance-by-instance quest and/or directly contact whomever runs things to explain why that was a bad decision. it's much easier to just say fuck it, their loss.

i've talked in length before about why i think fediblock sucks in its current form. probably raised other points that don't come to mind currently. ironically, even after being invested in improving it, im writing this from a single-user instance that is currently blocked by a whole bunch of instances for one of those false-positive decisions.