why is there a blank post
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
60 points (96.9% liked)
Fediverse
30613 readers
916 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Why does this comment look like a shadow?
Nope. The protocol is way too public for shadowbanning.
You can be banned by other instances than your home instance, when that happens no new post/comment from you will federate to that instance in particular but the others still sees it as normal.
For example, I could ban you on my instance, and I wouldn't see anything from you ever again, but my instance would be the only instance to see that ban.
If you get banned from LW or lemmy.ml then a lot of people won't see you so that could definitely feel like a shadow ban, but there's nothing shadow about it you can see it in the mod log.
Yep the closest you will get is a server will fail to reach out to another server because of a technical issue. But the very nature of activityhub means that it will likely reach out again. Plus it will probably not just be your post that doesn't make it's way, it will be a whole collection.
Every action is public in the mod log so I don’t think shadow bans are possible although you might not know to check the mod logs in the moment
What if the instance owner blocked your IP (or even a MAC address if they could) from connecting to the server? That would effectively "shadow" ban a user in the sense nobody else would know they got banned (nothing in the modlog either). The user might not know they were banned, and just assume there's an issue.
Instances can ban you without others being affected. Your comments could be visible on one instance and not on another, so there's a level of shadow banning going on.
Real shadow banning isn't implemented in Lemmy. It could be, but it'd only work for accounts on the same server. It'd also be pretty easy to detect, although the same also goes for other places that do effectively use shadow banning to fight trolls and bots. The people shadow banning works against aren't smart enough to verify that they haven't been caught in the first place.
out of all the many temptations to be a troll, it's just not working for me on lemmy. i am appreciative and chill.
Just scroll down the page and search yourself
Technically every ban here is a shadow ban as you don't get notified for it.
Shadow banning is more than just not telling you. It also doesn't stop you from posting or interacting with anything; but hides all that from everyone else so you don't even know you're not visible. It's worse than a regular ban because it also wastes your fucking time.
i was very confused when my mother explained how to move the phone handset to the other thing and make the crazy modem noises and i guess i'm behind