I was on a … notorious community from a notorious instance lemmy.world is still federated with the other day, engaging in some spirited debate (dispelling a straw-man that generalizes a group I arguably belong to that is vilified in that instance as their favored punching bag), when I noticed a reply to a comment that wouldn’t load. Backing out back to my profile, I noticed all of my comments under that post are missing.

I logged out and checked via their instance, and the mystery reply turned out to be a moderator of that community (that I haven’t blocked) jumping in to add to the dogpile I was receiving. I coincidentally also saw the red Banned From Community next to my username.

Their instance doesn’t appear to have a Moderation History option to click on like I’m used to seeing on lemmy.world to see if/when/why I was banned.

Is there some fediverse feature I’m unaware of where I can look into what’s going on?

I DM’ed their moderators as I was recently told that was the only “modmail” feature the fediverse has, so maybe one of them will shed some light on what’s going on:

As you can see, one of them is “Banned” (from what?), but strangely, they were the one involved in the discussion I mentioned above.

One of them replied, confirming I was banned:

Still wondering if there’s a way to see this kind of thing from our instance, as I didn’t and still don’t see any way to do so via theirs.

  • HCSOThrowawayOPEnglish
    2·
    12 days ago

    Thanks for your help.

    How do I find the modlog of an instance? I’ve always just clicked the hamburger menu on someone’s comment to view it, and that’s not available on yours.

    vs.

    Just to be clear, as I said via DM, I’m not a sealion but I recognize polite disagreement is indistinguishable from sealioning. I think it’s bad practice to proactively ban dissenting people just in case they might be a sealion, but you’re obviously free to toss that advice in the trash.

      • HCSOThrowawayOPEnglish
        2·
        12 days ago

        I really don’t think 90% of people who do or should use the fediverse are regularly hopping onto other instances directly to check their mod logs, nor do I think they should be expected to.

        This is turning into a feature request, but there should be some way of viewing federated instances’ mod logs from your home instance. Or maybe a ban/removal notification?

        People less technically inclined are just going to shrug their shoulders when they encounter obvious QoL bumps like this and just go back to Instagram/Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/etc. rather than take the time to make a Lemmy.world Support post and/or DM every mod (as I was previously told is the fediverse equivalent of modmail).