I think it has become more than apparent that our federation with Hexbear has degraded the quality of browsing on this instance. I’m generally for open federation, but the amount of brigading and general toxicity is not conducive to the friendly communications that make Lemmy great.
Like I said, it is app dependant. which are you using?
Connect
I use Connect too; it’s great. But you should know that “block instance” is unique to Connect, and not Lemmy-wide feature.