Yeah it's probably client-side. Boost... that's good to know, thanks!:-)
OpenStars
Do you do it individually, or use like an app or something? Bc the Lemmy instance block does very little - only blocking communities but not users from that instance.
PieFed btw allows user blocking of any custom instance you want though:-) - I just switched to it today and think I am going to be happier here. It's not quite as polished as Lemmy, but on the other hand I don't see true user-level blocking ever being added to Lemmy no matter how long the wait. So I decided that I was tired of wading through the garbage rooting for treasure, and just decided to block it all.
Do you might if I ask how you accomplished that - by using some app? Or did you just mean the standard Lemmy instance block, which blocks only communities hosted there but none of the users especially their comments everywhere across the Fediverse?
PieFed allows custom user instance blocks, of whatever instance you choose, and I think Mbin at least used to (although I also saw a bug report saying that it doesn't work right now). And Tesseract on dubvee.org and lemmy.cafe have specifically defederated from lemmy.ml, but I was curious what other methods would work as well.
Fwiw, I just abandoned Lemmy in favor of PieFed. It allows you to block whatever custom instance you want - in my case Lemmy.ml - it has "categories" of communities so you don't have to browse on All, it has a "reputation" feature that puts icons next to users doing patterns of extremely obvious trolling (like a <1-month old account with negative karma - note that such are not "banned", merely "labelled", so that you can make your own determination of what to do or not about such), and it has a fairly polished interface. It has its quirks, like searching for a user is different than searching for posts, but it keeps improving all the time and the developers are extremely receptive to feedback.
Unlike Lemmy, where 0.19 was supposed to allow user filtering of instances, but what was delivered in 0.19.3 fell far short of desires, then 0.19.5 rolled back what little protections had been previously offered. At this point I don't think you'll ever be able to block all users from lemmy.ml, so long as you remain where you are. Lemmy.world admins could do it, but it seems highly doubtful so long as certain communities such as [email protected] are located there.
Lemmy.cafe and Tesseract on dubvee.org have defederated from lemmy.ml though. And maybe some apps allows user-level defederation I dunno. So those seem to be your options - which aren't a lot but at least they exist!:-)
PieFed allows you to block entire instances. All of the users, all of their posts, everything.
Otherwise as people have suggested, it is just dubvee.org or Lemmy.cafe.
I believe so, though I cannot find great examples to prove it. e.g. [email protected] exists but is empty. Then again, I saw similar occurrences with my old instance, Discuss.Online, when nobody had yet joined [email protected]. So I joined it, waited a day or two, and then all the posts showed up - this is the way that communities used to have be federated, before Blaze went around to virtually every instance and joined almost literally every community to make it already happen for people:-). Anyway, Blaze seems to not have done that for PieFed yet, so I will do it myself.:-)