I hope this is the right place to discuss a potential feature for lemmy.
I've been reading a lot of the defederation calls from instances and their users. More often than not, this was due to very specific elements of those instances; trolls, extremists, etc... But in my opinion, defederating a whole instance because of that is a sad pity.
I was thinking a way to solve this would be to have a federated blacklist.
Instance Admins would ban user accounts from their instance and that would be added to a list that could be consulted/automatically used by other instance owners. They would ideally be able to set parameters, like banning users from a list accepted by a number of other instances, a specific reason for the ban, or banned by specific instances.
This would lessen the administrative load, protect instances, allow different instances with shared concerns to help each other while allowing their own users to interact with the 'compatible' users and communities from other instances.
Just an idea and wanted to bring it up and hear some thoughts.
Bans are already propagated across instances. I've got close to 2,300 banned users on my personal instance.
Those must be bans from communities, I assume. A community is linked to a single instance so it can control who is banned. But banning a user from an instance is only meaningful on that single instance. At least that's my understanding..
Those are bans where the user has been banned from their home instance. It actually doesn't make a lot of sense that they show up in our admin panels since a user banned from their home instance won't be able to authenticate and access remote instances with that account.
Oh, yeah in that case I guess Lemmy propagates this information so other instances can show the "banned" information on a user profile.
Exactly, though I'd like to get a PR in to not show that on the admin screen, or in the very least to make the list collapsed by default. I think I'll work on that today.
Best I can tell, from limited experimentation, is that if you get banned on your home instance it propagates across the federation. If you get banned on a remote instance it only reflects on that instance.
Can you choose which ones to apply and which ones not to?
No. If they get banned from their home instance it propagates federation-wide. If they get banned outside of their home instance, it only applies on that instance.
What exactly is the point of that list? If the user is banned on their home instance i would think there account would become locked so their home instance wouldn't allow them to post on another instance anyways.
You are correct.
The value is part of the person object so it just propagates naturally. Whether remote instances actually act on the information in any way other than populate the BANNED USERS list in the Admin UI, I don't know. As you pointed out, they can't login in the first place.
You can unban them
While you technically can unban them it won't really have any effect since they can't login to their home instance where the ban took place.
Instance admins can ban users that aren't on their own instance. I can ban you, right from your comment. Of course this only affects my instance.