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.
No, it doesn’t. It means that if piefed.social bans you (and you’re based on a piefed instance) you wouldn’t be able to post on any piefed.social community. That previously didn’t happen, and you could still post on communities from instances that you were banned on - they just didn’t federate out. This was a blindspot as trolls could continue to harangue communities on instances they were banned from locally and the community moderators, not being from their instance, would not even know.
It would not affect your ability to post anywhere else on any other instance in those specific circumstances.
To be fair, I can see the point of needing to ban users from entire servers but just who gets that power is the thing bothering me, obviously the server owner should have it but do random mods or bots get it.
Because something like that would make me think why comment at all.
Community moderators can’t instance ban. Only instance owners and appointed staff can do that now.
Cool ignore my comments on this I was reading it badly wrong just didn’t like the sound of a community mod being able to ban for basically all communities on the same server or even worse more servers.
My bad.