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.
It’s the lemmy modlog, it shows all federated actions.
You can see the same thing for lemmy.world here:
https://lemmy.world/modlog
I did have a look at their modlog for comparison. It seems counterintuitive that an action taken by a mod on another instance would show up in theirs. Wouldn’t the act of banning someone inherently federate by the fact their posts would no longer be seen?
I think part of it is transparency. As a mod on lemmy.world, it benefits me to be able to look at the modlog and see a users entire history, not just on lemmy.world.
That’s federation. You’re on lem.ee, still you don’t want all the spam and deleted content to show up when you visit the news community on lemmy.world. That community has some mods and they keep the community clean. And not just for their instance. It needs to spread throughout the network. So naturally every mod action shows up on lem.ee dubvee and everywhere after the originating instance forwards the action to them. Or you’d have a vastly different view on the same community, depending on viewpoint.
I get that, but can’t those actions federate without showing up in the modlog for everyone? Or have the option to only see actions from that instance in the log?
All mod actions on all instances and communities are relevant, why would users on a given instance only need to be able to see modlogs for their own instance?
They are interacting with the whole fediverse, so why shouldn’t they have access to the log of mod actions on the whole fediverse, too?
If I’m on my instance, and get banned from a community by a mod on another instance, in a community on another instance, I would still want to be able to check when and why that happened in the modlog on MY instance.
Or if some other user I know has disappeared, wherever mod actions have been taken agaibst them, should still show up on my instance.
I don’t know what client you are using, but the default webUI can apply filters and do searches in the modlog.
Mostly, I feel it adds clutter to the log, and is only tangentially related to the instance.
It’s good that we can see it, but I feel it would be better if we could filter it out.
How is displaying mod actions from federated communities any more “tangential” than displaying the posts from them in the “all” feed?
It’s like asking why anyone would ever need more than the “local” feed.
You can filter the modlog to only show actions related to a given user, which is by far the most useful one, and you’d want that to include ALL relevant entries, on or off-instance.
Because a moderator action taken by a mod of a community on a different instance to you, against a user from another instance again, isn’t likely to be of any concern to you. It’s good that we can access that information, but I would like to be able to filter the modlog to only show local actions, and perhaps the option of a global log.
Otherwise, there’s just too much noise.
Of course it is relevant.
That action may be what removed a post or comment from a community you frequent, or a user you like seeing. Or a post you commented on and get left wondering why the post disappeared.
Mod actions don’t apply to just the instance the mod or community is on, they apply fediverse-wide on all instances where there are subsribers to that community.
If the admin of MY instance removes one of MY comments, such as this one made in reply to you, you might want to see why.
You can already filter modlogs by user. And if you want to narrow things down more, you ARE aware that each community has their own modlogs that only show actions for that community?
It shows up per default because it affects you. If you like a filter, feel free to file a feature-request on Lemmy’s Github.
Make sure to include a proper description of what you’d like and why. Otherwise I doubt it’ll get accepted as it makes the modlog a bit counterintuitive to use. Things that affect you everywhere won’t show up just because of their place of origin. That might be unwanted on a federated platform. But feel free to disagree, just include your argumentation and let the developers decide.