The existence of one bad actor doesn’t make the principle any less true.
Kbin has long since surpassed what Ernest is capable of handling by himself. Either he’s going to have to learn to delegate, or it’s going to collapse under its own weight.
He is doing an excellent job, and I do not mean to denigrate his work when I say the task is beyond any one person, no matter how talented and dedicated. Look at the issues that went on recently while Ernest was indisposed, and we had months of federation issues that led to communities migrating away and Kbin.social getting defederated by other instances.
This project is getting too large for any one person, and it’s far too important to have one point of failure. And even someone as great as Ernest needs an understudy.
As I understand it, federation is not necessarily reciprocal. If your Kbin server federates with another server, you will see their content, but if they don’t also federate with your server, they won’t see yours.
For the record, I’m on a Lemmy server and I can see content from Kbin.social just fine.
Honestly, I feel like blocking someone should prevent them from interacting with your posts in any way, or even seeing them. I would think that’s the entire point.