I made some off-hand comments on a post on 196 and didn’t realize they’d be taken the wrong way. I made a few more comments to help clarify my idea but caught a blanket ban from blahaj.zone with no warning or message.

https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=588349

I’m mortified :( It’s never been my goal to make others feel bad online. I had a quibble with the wording on a meme and clumsily worded my idea of “Our differences shouldn’t be minimized because they make us special” was seen as transphobia/TERF rhetoric.

But with no prior warnings or even a message from a mod to ‘cool it’, I got banned from the entire instance. I love these communities (feel free to look at my 2.5 years of comment/post history) and I would like to be able to continue to participate.

So, is there a formalized method of ban appeal beyond messaging mods? Their instance has like 12, so I don’t want to spam them and have it seen as harassment.

  • stabby_cicada@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    8 hours ago

    I think any sort of fediverse-wide appeal community, or process, would risk compromising the whole point of the fediverse, ie, decentralization. The fact that admins have the final say on their own instances is part of what keeps the largest instances from controlling smaller ones and keeps the fediverse free of centralized control.

    I mean, can you imagine a coalition of the largest instances coming together and telling a small instance “the appeal community agreed this user was banned unfairly, unban them or we’ll all defederate you”? Because I can imagine that sequence of events, if an appeal community got any kind of formal backing from the big instances, and that would pretty much end decentralization.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      I wasn’t talking about anything like this. More about of a way for banned people to have a public place to appeal. For just calling out bad behaviour and putting peer pressure, there’s [email protected]

      • stabby_cicada@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        But people already have a public place to appeal. This sub, the sub you linked, pretty much any other instance that has a meta discussion community. But posting here, or there, isn’t an actual appeal process - it’s just publicly complaining about administrators.

        And that was the answer to OP’s question: that there’s no single fediverse-wide place to appeal a ban, you have to follow instance specific appeal procedures, if they exist, and/or contact the instance’s administrators directly.

        Which is a good thing, because it helps keep the verse decentralized.

        I think, if there was a single location where the fediverse started telling people “if you get banned, post here to appeal”, users would expect some sort of formal response to their post, and get upset when people tell them posting there doesn’t actually do anything. Which would be bad. And if that location could do anything to encourage administrators to reverse ban decisions, via peer pressure or otherwise, that would also be bad, because it would compromise the independence of instances. That is to say, a fediverse wide appeal community would be at best useless and at worst harmful to the fediverse.

        So I think the only appropriate response to “I was banned, what can I do” is “that’s between you and the people who banned you”.