I posted about this issue a week ago:
Currently, instance bans and community bans are treated as two separate things. When a user is banned from an instance, you’ll often see in the logs a bunch of community bans alongside it at once (at least from Lemmy communities). These are communities that user has posted on. An instance ban automatically applies hard-bans to communities they have interacted in from that instance. But the problem here is its only communities they’ve interacted in.
The instance ban itself is simply a rejection of federation. It doesn’t block users from posting in communities on that instance - only the community bans do that. It just means their posts won’t federate out. This means that an instance banned user can continue to be a nuisance in most communities (or all, if they are pre-emptively banned) on an instance locally - and the moderators of that community and instance won’t even know because they don’t view their community from there. With larger numbers of users would also mean larger amounts of trolls and incompatible users, which could greatly increase the chance of people simply vandalising communities and no-one even noticing.
Lemmy 1.0 promises to fix this apparently from their end, but I think at least for as Piefed is concerned we could get in on this first. We need a hard block on all Piefed accounts from being to interact on any community that is from an instance they are bannedfrom. We also need a way before that for Piefed based communities to automatically throw out all comments made even locally by instance banned accounts based from Lemmy.
It’s now been implemented on the latest piefed. A Piefed user instance banned from anywhere will now be hard-banned from all communities on that instance to prevent them from being a local menace unbeknownst the moderators of those communtiies. But all Piefed instances need to update.
I generally get the logic of this, but I would clarify what the last part of the third quoted paragraph means. An instance ban on any server that uses the Lemmy platform is an instant ban on the whole of Piefed?
The last part is not included with the new changes. Basically this change only effects piefed-based users. I was suggesting at the end that a way be incorporated from Piefed’s end to automatically throw out comments or posts from Lemmy users posting in instances they’re banned on so that they don’t even appear locally on their instance - but that isn’t currently possible.
We have to wait for Lemmy to implement this change from their end for it to be universal.
I get the high level logic, I think it makes sense, but IMO including wording that suggests taking a measured perspective without any specifics regarding “an instance wide ban, on any server on all on Lemmy” is not practical due to publicly documented moderation rules that openly condtradicts reality (e.g. Moderation rules reject reality around North Korea).
Just some feedback and thoughts. I was thinking very high level and I don’t think a discussion around specifics is too helpful.
Well it means that if you were currently banned from lemmy.zip, you would be barred by these changes from posting or replying to any community based from there. You would see the message in the screenshot.
So the Piefed change does impact Piefed users banned from Lemmy instances. It’s just that the reverse is not true.