So I try to make heads or tails of this situation. I got randomly banned from a community where I posted a youtube video showing something from a Convention. Then I wanted to post a question today but realised that I couldn’t since I was banned. That community is sadly the biggest of all Star Citizen communities (the next one would be from lemmy.world)
I took a look at the Mod log and see the following line in it:
So no clean up of violating comments or posts, just a strict out ban.
The community has a pretty standard ruleset:
further, the moderator @[email protected] hasn’t posted anything since a year, so what gives here, or was it some other mod that was able to declare the ban?
This has nothing to do with the community. The modlog shows that you were banned site-wide from lemmy.ml, which is implemented by a ban from each individual community individually (so despite how this says it was done by a “mod”, it was actually an admin):
It is an unwritten rule that you are not allowed to criticize China there. Or Russia. Or anything else that they do not like.
Oh damn now that makes sense. This site wide ban really needs to be conveyed better so I didn’t even thought of making that connection.
To bad that one of the biggest meme community is hosted on .ml
Everyone is better off not using .ml
Blocked them ages ago when they removed a silly meme that they thought might maybe be anti China, but was 100% unrelated.
The only ways that I know of to user-block Lemmy.ml:
non-Lemmy PieFed (you can block any custom instance you wish - it lacks some polish compared to Lemmy but it’s really growing up strong and is even ahead in some ways, e.g. this one) or Sublinks, in the meantime Tesseract on dubvee.org that says it will switch to use the latter eventually. Edit: I forgot to mention Mbin, b/c I am not sure if it can or not. Someone said that originally Kbin could user-block whole instances, but there seem to be reports that Mbin cannot for whatever reason, and I have not made an account to check it out personally or a post to ask someone.
lemmy.cafe that is very welcoming and has blocked all of the big 3, + threads, and interestingly, virtually nothing else. I think this should be among the new default recommendations really, the only downside seems to be that it has only a single admin so perhaps less stable than e.g. lemm.ee (though the latter allows lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml - which for some people is a good thing, but for people who want the opposite of that, without other additional restrictions, that’s lemme.cafe). It is notably running 0.19.6-beta.9 though, so the admin seems super on the ball, and it has really nice welcoming messages too, guiding people to a variety of helpful resources. Edit: oh I forgot about your instance, quokk.au, also only a single user, though it doesn’t block lemmygrad.ml for whatever reason, but yes that’s another option.
someone said that the Boost app allows user-blocking of instances. I cannot confirm personally nor know of others - Voyager (on Android) cannot, but what about e.g. Sync?
Lemmy ostensibly has a “user block of instances”, except it doesn’t really at all - all it does is block communities, not users, and what little protection it did offer irt the latter has actually weakened over time (e.g. for those in Lemmy.World running 0.19.3, users from blocked instances cannot trigger a “notification”, whereas for most people outside of that running 0.19.5 they can). At this point I don’t expect anything that will allow blocking lemmy.ml users to ever be released on any instance running the Lemmy codebase - the only options seem to be move to an instance offering defederation, leave Lemmy entirely, or suck it up and swallow what you’re given.
It makes sense that most instance admins do not want to defederate though, b/c some communities are still held hostage on the lemmy.ml instance - e.g. [email protected] with 3.6K MAU (monthly active users) vs. the next largest one [email protected] with only 0.7K MAU, that’s an enormous difference! Actually it would be best if communities, especially niche ones, were not held hostage by ANY kind of political maneuvering - except there is literally nothing these days that is not political, it would seem, including “facts” themselves.
But yeah, one reason to move communities off is that the mods themselves could accidentally get booted, or at the very least their users could at any point say something that sets off the ban hammer - and then never be allowed to post or comment in the community again? Unless it’s a community called I_fucking_love_Russia_and_China_too, it’s a risk that can seriously fragment the Fediverse, to tie that content to a certain brand of political thinking.
Especially one that is nowhere written down, and could change at any given moment, also without any prior notification.
But so long as you continue to use the Lemmy software, what right does anyone have to complain about how the devs wish to implement their own code, which they wrote for themselves, for their own desires and ends?
If we want better, we have to make things that are better, on our own.
There is a also another way, I saw someone suggesting that a person could contact a remote instance’s admins and have their accounts and data removed from the instance. Essentially requesting a ban.
The big drawback to all but one of the methods listed above is that they are false-assurance or cosmetic/curation blocks, not functional blocks. And with some of the more problematic instances out there, false-assurance is almost worse than nothing at all. With your posts and comments removed from your instance you’ll never receive replies or attacks from users on that instance, they’ll just never see your content anymore.
That’s why admins need to defederate it more often. If Lemmy.world alone gave them the boot it would slash their userbase in those communities significantly. It’s very likely that the moderators there would move or a large amount of other users would move. They’re not going to though unless they have to, and making it easier by keeping the door open only slows that down from happening.
I would say every reason since the nature of open-source code means you can fork it and use it how ever you want. Especially given that many people are contributors. I say if you want complete control and don’t want to hear complaints about your code and platform don’t license as GPL and make contributors waive their IP ownership to the devs when contributing code. They didn’t do any of this though.
Sublinks is looking very promising as a replacement for Lemmy not only is it written in a more well known language than Rust it’s also aiming to have more features while remaining mostly compatible with the Lemmy API.
What’s the Big 3? The instance I’m on is de-feded with ML, Hex, and Threads. Honestly my experience here has been much better than on any of the other bigger sites for that reason.
I don’t doubt it. Threads I thought was more of a preemptive measure though, since iirc Meta wasn’t ready to actually start sending any of its data towards the Fediverse. The “third” member of the big 3 then is lemmygrad.ml. Though most instances defederate from it, even if they don’t defederate from hexbear.net or lemmy.ml, so possibly even without having defederated from it explicitly you aren’t really seeing much content coming your way from it?
Oh no, your defederation is somehow wonky. I don’t see lemmygrad.ml communities, not that I wanted to you understand but it’s not in your defed list so they should be there, but I do see communities from both lemmy.ml and hexbear.net. Maybe simply adding the instance names is not enough and you need to “reinitialize” the data or some such? Here’s one: https://quokk.au/c/[email protected] and here’s another: https://quokk.au/c/[email protected]. But then again… all the posts are old, so maybe that’s how it is supposed to look? I dunno, so my message is probably confusing, but I thought I would offer it anyway just in case you didn’t know, and if that helps you figure anything out!:-)
When instances are defederated the connection between them is severed and data stops being exchanged. However communties, posts, and comments still remain on your instance from before. There just won’t be any new ones added. In order to remove the old ones they need to be purged but that’s not usually done since it takes effort and it’s not usually worth it unless the communities themselves contain objectionable/illegal content.
Give [email protected] and [email protected] a check, perhaps you’ll like one (or both) of them.
and [email protected] , [email protected]
No, just forget them.