It’s a horrific oversight that the designers thought it would be okay for instances to block instances, but not users. Why are we cool with letting others control what we see but not ourselves? Either I block all NSFW or I’m showered with porn? I’d rather have the ability to block porn instances than have to block every user posting on them. It’s also really stupid because these users could be posting something elsewhere that I’d like to see. All in all, I’d like the designers to take a good, cold, hard look at who is making these decisions and why they’re listening to them.
It really doesn’t make sense to give instances this control but not users. I’m a huge fan of empowering users to be their own moderators, not relying on overlords with an agenda to do it for them.
Instances aren’t really blocking others, they’re defederating. That means not communicating with certain url’s. That’s something you can accomplish on a system level, even if the “feature” isn’t in the application you are running. (lemmy/kbin)
The devs didn’t “give” this ability to instance admins, it was always there.
As for users being able to block instances, I agree. It should be a feature. For now, you can still get there the long way round, by blocking every community on a given instance.
But the vitriol in your wording is entirely unwarranted.