Islands of trust, in an archipelago of less-trust, in a sea of no-trust, is probably pretty okay.

Real islands have coast guards and customs offices.

If Usenet newsgroups had come with default killfiles — which users could choose to override — the whole thing might have turned out differently.

It turns out Lemmy has a mechanism for federating block lists.

So if you get banned by lemmy.ml for "Orientalism", you get a fediverse-wide ban? That doesn't sound like a better system than reddit, that sounds like a worse system! At least reddit mods could only kick you out of their own subreddit, not the whole site.