this has been somewhat confusing to me, especially with federation. ive tried to search for info online but havent found anything that goes into detail, and im very curious about how it works. like i know when they get banned i never see them post anything ever again, but what do they see? are they still posting comments on their instances version of the community and we cant see it, or is the ban enforced across instances through federation? do they even see posts from the community theyre banned from at all?
A remote user that is banned from this instance will also be banned from the communities on this instance, and those community bans federate, so they can’t interact with remote versions of the community.
They can still see the content in the community though. I think there is a gap around communities that they had never interacted with. They can’t subscribe to those communities because of the instance ban, but I think in theory they can still post to them, but that content will only be visible on their remote instance. I’m not certain of the details of this particular edge case though…
If they reply to users on those communities their replies will federate if the users aren’t blahaj users. I’ve seen people instance banned from blahaj.zone replying to comments and posts of non-blahaj users in blahaj communities federate to other servers. Since the federation is handled by the server of the one they’re replying to.
It’s the same way it works on Mastodon or Miskey. If they post to the community itself, it won’t federate, but their replies can still federate. That’s why in Lemmy 1.0 communities will store the bans of site banned users so this won’t be possible anymore. I’ve heard piefed already does that.