Currently you don’t get notified you got banned.
If I was able to transfer my block list, I’d like to try an instance with more up time, but I don’t want to ban evade. How am I even supposed to find out? It’s not plausible to go through modlogs of every single federated instance looking up my nickname.
@Sprite I don’t think this is really possible in a distributed system like Fediverse since there isn’t a centralized list of bans.
You’d have to go to every instance one by one asking if you’re on their ban list, and since that list of instances is huge and changing by the day it’s just not practical under the design of this system.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to make it so system automatically sends users notifications if they were banned or if their posts were removed? Currently moderation is really pointless since the offender doesn’t even know they did something wrong.
@Sprite I could imagine two schools of thought on that.
(and I’m not saying one is right or not)
The other side is I imagine a ban represents an intention to disconnect, including the connection that would be required to let the person know they’re banned.
That also avoids drama that a misbehaving user might stir up in response to the ban.
Technically, in this distributed system, banning is more about ignoring someone. Instances can’t trust each other, so by keeping banning on the receiver side instead of the sender side, the ban-er has more control over the banning.
Moderation in the Fediverse is about making sure MY users on MY instance get the experience they want, regardless of what any other instance does.
It all comes down to the distributed structure here.
If that were true, we wouldn’t be having so much user migration. So far moderation on fediverse lacks any transparency and frequently appears to be power tripping.
Otherwise, block function exists.