I like the discussion on nicotine, but yeah. Op’s “medical moment” seems unrelated to nicotine!

Why do you care about downvotes? You sharing your opinion and perspective is what makes the platform better. Other people clicking an arrow means nothing :)

I’m starting to think the splintering caused by instances blocking each other is going to cause users to abandon Lemmy entirely. At the moment instances can suddenly decide to block other instances, and that is going to hurt both users on the instance that put a block into place, as well as users on the blocked instance.

The blocking is awful for an average Lemmy user, because you can get cut off from communities you already subscribed to, without any notification! So you might post and comment without realizing that your content is not getting published, even though you and your local instance still see it.

The user experience would be improved by getting a warning if you try to contribute to a community in this case. And also your subscriptions should show warnings about not working anymore, and those should come up as notifications on the account.

An instance can crash, close down or somehow disappear at any time, and if that happens all the users, communities and content in those communities from that instance is lost forever. Right?