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.
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?
I haven’t checked that specifically, but that seems plausible. Do users banned from communities get federated with the community?
Yes, bans on a community are federated, so your copy of the community also removes their content.
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?
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.
Today some spam bots posted about 20 or so posts, and they originated from thegarden.land, feddit.nu, lemmy.film, lemmus.org, feddit.nl, pricefield.org, lemmy.world, and geddit.social. I’m not sure I’m ready to defederate lemmy.world over a single account. There must be a better way.
Being able to ban people across instances would defeat the entire point of the fediverse. The best solution would either be to just defederate from instances that spawn lots of bots, or to contact those instances and work on the issue with them. There isn’t really any other better way that I can think of