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.
Won’t pretend I understand this but it reads a lot to me like if a community mod decides to ban you because he doesn’t like an opinion or something you get banned from the whole server and every community in it.
As someone whose had many bans on places like Reddit for absolute junk reasons mostly not being an American and having my opinion on things this is giving me second thoughts about the whole fediverse.
Hoping I’m wildly misunderstanding.
Won’t pretend I understand this but it reads a lot to me like if a mod decides to ban you because he doesn’t like an opinion or something you get banned from the whole of piefed.
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.
After Facebook banned me, I moved to Reddit and am now preparing a backup plan in case all American social media platforms fall under Trump’s thumb. I like the idea of an open-source social network. But it’s still difficult to understand how it works. In any case, you shouldn’t invent your own algorithms, but rather follow the way ordinary users understand them.
I’m not sure I agree with this one, actually. If one of our users is banned from a remote instance for reasons I disagree with, I might still want them to be able to talk to our users in the comments on that remote community.
What seems useful about this change is that our users will no longer waste their time commenting in a community they don’t realise they’re banned from. That’s good. But I dunno. There are lots of reasons a user could be banned from a remote instance, but the local admin doesn’t want to do anything to enforce that ban.
Like that guy with the thorns! I love the þorns! If that guy comes to our instance and then gets banned from some other instance for a silly reason like “trolling”, I don’t want to help enforce that ban.
I’m not sure I agree with this one, actually. If one of our users is banned from a remote instance for reasons I disagree with, I might still want them to be able to talk to our users in the comments on that remote community.
The trouble is that if they’re a problem user, and being realistic, many would be - the community moderators wouldn’t be able to see what’s going on as the comments they post would not federate out. They would effectively be unmoderated.
We had a situation where a user recently banned from lemmy.blahaj.zone was still posting gore to lemmy.blahaj communities on their instance. Obviously it wouldn’t federate out, but people on that same users instance would still see it.
That’s what prompted me to try and deal with this issue, at least from Piefed’s perspective.
I’m not familiar with that drama, so I’m going to pretend that user came from .world to make what I’m about to say easier to explain. I think that’s a .world problem. .world users will see it, report it, the report will go to .world admins. Then, the .world admins get a chance to home ban this user, which sounds like it was sorely needed, and if it turns out the .world admins are okay with gore, then they can act according to their own values.
Of course I personally don’t usually agree with gore posting in the way it sounds like it was being done there, and I’ve removed a couple of gore posts from our instance that came from other instances. But some people actually like seeing gore, it doesn’t bother them. The two biggest examples of gore that people might not find offensive are guro porn, and meat. I wouldn’t remove guro porn if it were properly marked as NSFW and had the right content warning. And I know a lot of other instances are okay with posting meat. Hexbear allows meat if it has an appropriate content warning, for example. Oh, and how could I forget, video games. If there’s a c/doom it should definitely allow video game gore!
Now from your description it sounds like the gore incident you describe was very much not either of those two exceptions. But I’m using gore as a very general example to talk about how different people have different values. So I lean towards allowing instances to make their own decisions in cases like this.
I’m not familiar with that drama, so I’m going to pretend that user came from .world to make what I’m about to say easier to explain. I think that’s a .world problem. .world users will see it, report it, the report will go to .world admins. Then, the .world admins get a chance to home ban this user, which sounds like it was sorely needed, and if it turns out the .world admins are okay with gore, then they can act according to their own values.
That’s a flagrant example, to be sure, but users can get instance banned for behaviour patterns for less noticeable than that but still be able to comment on communities they are instance banned from. Note that as Lemmy works now, there are already some hard bans associated with being instance banned. When you are banned from a Lemmy instance, you are also automatically banned from communities on that instance that you have interacted in prior. It just doesn’t extend to communities on that instance that you have not posted in.
Also, there are instances that are less moderated than .world that a specific instance banned user operating like that would be a longer problem.
Of course I personally don’t usually agree with gore posting in the way it sounds like it was being done there, and I’ve removed a couple of gore posts from our instance that came from other instances. But some people actually like seeing gore, it doesn’t bother them. The two biggest examples of gore that people might not find offensive are guro porn, and meat. I wouldn’t remove guro porn if it were properly marked as NSFW and had the right content warning. And I know a lot of other instances are okay with posting meat. Hexbear allows meat if it has an appropriate content warning, for example. Oh, and how could I forget, video games. If there’s a c/doom it should definitely allow video game gore!
No, in this case it was directly against the specific communities rules - but because the user doing it was already instance banned, their gore-posting was not visible from the communities home instance perspective. They weren’t posting it in a gore-relevant community.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
