I found that things became much more pleasant on here when I blocked hexbear. I recently blocked lemmy.ml as well, but I may reverse that if I find that I’m missing too much good content.
I’m open to other ideas on how to mostly avoid people who love conflict or argue in bad faith.
Yeah, at the API level, instance blocking is really just “block all communities from that instance”.
I think some 3rd party UIs extend the behavior of instance blocking to also hide posts/comments from users of those instances, but I don’t think the default UI does.