This was discovered by Jim East:
https://slrpnk.net/post/27305276/18006810
I must say it fails the principle of least astonishment. If a user blocks Lemmy.World but subscribes to !linux@lemmy.world, for example, they obviously want to exceptionally see content in the subscribed community but nothing else from that node. But what happens is the instance block overrides the specific community subscription. So the general rule is prioritised above the specific rule.
And worse, when visiting the subscribed community it just shows no posts without reminding the user that they have a relevant block in place.
This current behaviour does make the most sense to me. But I think it was the Tesseract dev who was experimenting with a “soft block” system that would provide the behaviour you want. You would be able to set a full instance block on the instance that works exactly as it does today, or you could instead set a soft block on it that allowed you to whitelist particular communities/users that you would still like to see.
