Okay, let me say not blocked. Yes linking is automatic, but if an instance appears in the linked column, it can’t appear in the blocked column. You want to check that neither instance is blocked, which is the same as saying both instances are linked.
Further more: what is exactly the purpose of knowing who is blocked by whom?
There’s good reason as a regular Lemmy user. To properly interact with a remote community you need the instance of the community linked on your sign-in instance and you need your sign-in instance linked on the remote instance.
For example if I sign in on lemmy.ml and I want to interact with a community local to beehaw.org, I have to go to beehaw.org/instances and check lemmy.ml is linked. Then I have to go to lemmy.ml/instances and check beehaw.org is linked. It’s kind of an unruly task with the /instances lists as large as they are so a tool to check that for you is very useful.
People have to come from somewhere. Since Lemmy is “Reddit like” and Reddit is the biggest of its type, well that’s what’s where people are going to come from. I mean if you don’t new get users you’re not going to have a community.
I first took a look at Lemmy some time ago and honestly is was like, “hey man, this party is dead.” It wasn’t until the recent influx of users that Lemmy got active enough to keep my attention.
There’s always going to be clueless people that don’t understand how things work. Rather than complain about them I’d rather try to be positive and help them. Though some people just can’t be helped and you have to let them slide.
Another issue is the more people you get into a community the wider the range of attitudes. You will get people that don’t have nice things to say and there’s no avoiding that. It’s something that has to tolerated. Of course moderation can help a lot, but it’s not going to preclude anybody from ever getting offended.
This is going to happen a lot as Lemmy grows. There will be more communities with the same name over different instances. Though the full canonical name is the actual name of the community, not just the prefix name. For example !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !piracy@lemmy.ml are two different communities with two different names.
There’s no federation wide rules about reusing the prefix name of a community. You can have as many repeats as people create. It’s just the nature of how the decentralized architecture works. In other words you can’t duplicate names on a particular instance, but the entire Fediverse doesn’t care because it differentiates by instance name.
I have a number of duplicates I subscribe to and it’s transparent when I look at the front page of subscribed communities. However I have to look at each duplicate individually when selecting a community to view. An option to look at communities in groups would be helpful. I think that’s a reasonable feature to incorporate. It could be as simple as adding a checkbox to select more than one community to view at a time.
I don’t think it will ever be possible to physically merge communities across multiple instances at a base level. It’s likely something that exceeds scope of design.