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.
Yes yes, I know, it was a very bad instance, but I don’t think it’s a good reason to make this decision in all the other instances.
Let Me put Myself on the other side of this. Imagine that MULTIVERSE develops a cooking community where we share recipes and food photos. Someone from .world posts their hamburgers. I remove their post for gore. They keep posting meat. I instance ban them.
Well, in that case, even though I’m ethically opposed to that person’s treatment of animals and don’t want them around any of our users, I believe in the principles of the Fediverse strongly enough that I think they should be able to post their hamburgers to the .world local copy of our food community, and share their burgers with the .world people who like to see hamburgers. Even though I think they’re doing a bad thing, I support the rights that enable them to do it.
I think that if someone is banned from an instance, it makes sense that they literally cannot post or comment on any community from that instance. The ban may well be unjust, but I think if an instance is run like that to begin with, and you don’t like it as an instance admin - that you have bigger problems.
I don’t, really. I think this is a hole that is being used for abuse and niche cases don’t really justify the utility of this vector for harassment and annoyance being plugged. There are plenty of other cooking communities banned users could post to.
Maybe, if we get into the meat of this it could become some instance-level setting, but I think this is highly niche.
Well, I’ve said My piece, and I’m satisfied that it’s been considered. My opinion on this issue is by no means firm. Both you and I have spoken only in gut feelings, not in data, and that is because I don’t care about this issue all that much, and I suspect you don’t care to debate it either. So have a fun day.