2y ago

Are bans propagated to other sites?

This morning I was forced to ban about 18 users for being obvious spambots. That deleted their content on my instance. Are they now banned on other instances, too? I'm just trying to figure out what the best process is for eliminating these spambots for good before they flood all of our feeds.

41 comments

no, think about what that would imply. Anyone could practicaly delete any other profile by creating an instance and banning that profile on that instance. That would be insane.
- Having to play whack-a-mole banning on a per-instance basis if the account's home instance admin isn't cooperative isn't exactly ideal, either.
  Perhaps what we need is to implement some sort of happy medium, such as having instance bans be "votes" towards some threshold that, if met, would result in banning the account network-wide?
- I have my own instance where I'm the only user and only admin. I have only banned two users (porn spam bots), but my ban list has hundreds of users, and I have no idea how they got here. I can see who banned them in the modlog and why, but how did they get banned on my instance?
  
  Are they banned from a community that you follow?
- But if you mean whether these posts are also deleted for people viewing your instance through another, federated instance, then yes, that is the case.
  
  If you want to get rid of spam bots, ban them on your own instance and defederate any instance that doesn't do the same.
- User bans do federate. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1298
  
  Yes, but only from the original community moderators / instance admins the community is on. This happens so a mod removing content also removes that content on any other instance following this community.
  If you ban a user on your own instance, but originating somewhere else this will only make posts and comments by this user invisible for users on your instance.
  
  how can a user comment from another instance?
  my user on lemmy.ml cannot login on other instances, or can it?
As far as I understand it, the instance that hosts the user and the content is the only instance that can propagate deletions of the content/user. So if that user's home instance bans them, then the ban propagates. Otherwise, the ban is only local.
- So is the right process to report the post? (I'm assuming reports go to the home instance's community moderator.)
  And if that's the case, does that mean we need to avoid clicking the checkmark to "resolve" the report on our instance until the remote moderator has done something about the problem?
  
  I'm actually not clear on how the reports work, but my assumption is that they go to both the instance you're reporting from and to the instance that hosts the content. I would also assume that the resolve status is local to each instance so it shouldn't matter when/if you click the resolve button.
  But these are all assumptions, I don't actually know how the reports work.
As I understand it, the account is registered on a given instance, and then that account interacts with other instances via the instance theyre registered on.
They cannot log into another instance with the same details (they need to create an account on each instance).
IE, to interact with you on .ml i’m logged into .world. The instances are federated so I see your post on this .ml community on .world
If I was banned from .world I can’t access the instance and thus any .ml because my interaction is via world instance. I can’t use the same account to log onto ml, I would need to make a new account there

41 comments