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?
Everyone is better off not using .ml
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.
Voyager DOES allow you to user-block entire instances, it’s in the settings menu under “filters and blocks”
Hrm, I see. But that block seems to just set Lemmy's default "user-level instance blocking", which does not block users from the instance, only communities. i.e., it's the same as the Lemmy web UI, and in it I see that I've already blocked Lemmy.ml, for all the good that it does - which I mean to say is not much.
So I meant here that the app does not provide additional functionality beyond the web UI, to do something that the web UI can or will not.
And this is why I don't want to write a post about this topic - it's terribly confusing, with so many fine-grain details that can trip someone up. This would be better written by a team of people who each know more about the various aspects, i.e. the different apps and methods of accessing the Fediverse. But at least here I offered what little I do know personally.
ooh i didn’t even realize there was a difference. you’re right, it is terribly confusing hahaha
It's done that way on purpose, blocking the users from an instance can disrupt the flow of communities. It's purpose isn't to filter out users, it's to filter out all communities on that instance. It's not an alternative or replacement to defederation it's an alternative to blocking every community from a specific instance, which is long and tedious.