There are two differing thoughts on federation I have seen.
That servers/instances are only a means to provide people access to the network. They should be not gate keep or restricted access to the entire network. In this case it's like email were you expect to be able to send anyone a message no matter who is their provider. In this case blocking instances is only to stop malicious and misbehaving instances.
As a way for seperate distinct communities converse with eachother. In this case if there is an instance that is detrimental to the culture of your instance you can block it from interacting with your instance.
While I appreciate the theory of the first idea in practice I believe second out come can't be stopped as people self sort into communities.
They are explicitly trying to make a safe space for their users, and they are very explicit about that. The good thing about federation is that you can decide what kind of community you want to be part of, and there are plenty of instances with a more open policy.
Thanks for this. I actually suspect it's rather valuable, as part of the value proposition of decentralisation is to create a diversity of cultures, which manifest most clearly in the blocks that each instance have and are subject to. Without this information, it becomes nigh on impossible for users to actually be informed and act accordingly about this supposed value.
Over on mastodon and the microblogging fediverse, this information is, AFAICT, frowned upon and so most have no idea where their instances stand in regards to blocks. There's a reason for this, which is, AFAICT, bad faith actors will target those instances which block them or are heavy blockers with spam, DDOS or whatever else, and so hiding this information becomes a defensive measure. A potential side effect of this, perhaps, is that discussions around blocking can become rather heated over on mastodon/microblogs, and even have a feeling of shock and offense around them. I would imagine this is because it's not really information people are accustomed to.
If the #threadiverse can be more open about blocks, in the same way that moderation activity is also open, it might lead to a healthier decentralised ecosystem where it's simply appreciated that blocking is part of the character of an instance, and finding your "home" (or multiple "homes") with this information in mind is just part of being a user here.