I’m trying to work out why there are posts in here about users being banned from communities, when neither the user or the community are under their control. Is this being mirrored from somewhere, or is this something that’s limited to what people on their instance see?
They are also, apparently, banning users that have never been to their instance.
That’s literally impossible; every action taken has to be against an entity known to the instance. However, I can ban people from communities that have never posted there (which is what you’re seeing). That is to close a loophole where someone is instance banned here but can still interact with the local copies of communities on their home instance.
In such a case, those local interactions would not be moddable on that instance except by the admins. Any reports for that user would not be seen by the mods on my instance, and no mod actions could be taken by them. I think 0.19.4 or 5 addresses that, but that’s’ not the version we’re on right now, so this is how we’re handling that.
You can be known to the instance by interacting with communities they federate with, without ever interacting with a community on that instance, right? They’d just have to know your username to block you.