because it shuts out everyone on that instance.
But it doesn’t. Unless they’ve changed the functionality in the last 3 major revisions or so, a user blocking an instance blocks all posts from that instance. Not the users or their comments on other posts.
It’s an easier way than blocking each community from that instance individually.
Anything supposedly said by “Anonymous” as a hacker group should always be treated with immense skepticism.
There do exist somewhat legitimate sub-factions that actually take serious actions and do serious ops, and also semi-legitimate “outlets” for their statements… but there’s also an overwhelming amount of smokescreen bullshit “anon news outlets” and little script kiddies running around. It’s important/intentional that those continue existing as smoke screen for the more “serious” factions.
Beyond that, being an anonymous group with no real methods of confirming membership to outsiders (insiders can just check if you’re in the private IRCs and etc) it means that just about anyone and everyone can make some big declaration like this. The proof will be in the results, not some announcement that could be made by a rando.
No matter who is really making these threats/warnings, I think things are going to get pretty dire in the US government IT space. It’s been well known for decades that most government orgs have absolutely abysmal cyber security, and now you have a bunch of young adult tech-bros with no true accountability running roughshod over all of it. Then there’s the fact that more than one of them have “serious black hat hacker” backgrounds.
Going to be one wild ride.
A user blocking an instance does not block the users from that instance from interacting with the user who blocked.
It’s not well explained, but my understanding is that an instance block just prevents communities from that instance, and posts made by users on thay instance, from showing for the user that blocked the instance. Comments from users of that instance still show for the blocking user, and the block is one way anyway.