Then they're part of the problem. Just don't subscribe to them. I'd prefer to see the world how it is, including all idiots and extremists. Closing your eyes does nothing.
(Assuming you're not on a single user server) The problem is, in order for a user to see them, they don't need to explicitly subscribe to them, they need to not block them, which is the default state. Sure, your home feed is people that you're subscribed to, but searching (via hashtags and otherwise) and your federated feed are both looking through all content that the server has found that hasn't been explicitly blocked. Not to mention replies to posts aswell could be from anywhere. This will inevitably, at some point, by the nature of anyone being able to post anything on their own servers, include "unsavory" photos including: Literal suicide, murder, abuse, uncensored pornography, death threats, witch hunts, and more. And yes, this will be included in normal use. I myself saw a spammer that spammed uncensored pornography to a bunch of "welcome to Mastodon" hashtags in the first 30 minutes of my server being up.
> Closing your eyes does nothing.
While this will not cause the actions occurring to stop existing, acting as if the mental health of the viewer is irrelevant is not acceptable. I've known servers where people weren't able to sleep at night because someone spammed videos of animal harm/abuse... and in that case, the admins eventually deleted it and banned them. Your suggestion is to just "let it be shown" and "let the user block it if they don't want to see it". While seeing things once and then blocking is better than not being able to block at all, trusted authorities (admins?) should have the ability to stop content from being spread to users that trust them to handle unwanted content. Sometimes never seeing things is the best option.
Perhaps the middle group here is to allow users to disable administrative "suggestions" and see all content, if they so choose? (Although this is not truly possible with Mastodon, perhaps future federated networks could implement a similar idea)
There's a fine line between closing your eyes to reality and having to endure pictures of brains on the floor. Spamming and fraud is another issue which even Twitter sucks at and I don't have a good idea how to solve that.
I'd just like an internet where people don't entirely live in a bubble and become triggered by everyone and everything. But that doesn't mean that we should have to look at sensitive content if we don't want to. It's a very fine line between a dystopia and freedom of speech tbh and I don't have an answer ;)
No, but throwing away the trash leaves a nicer common area for the people that hang out there. The Nazis will pop up in your replies, your followed hashtags, fuckin' everywhere. It's dramatically nicer without them.