It appears shadowbans are now standard fair over at mastodon.social. I contacted the admins to get their response, lets hope im mistaken, but the more I look into it the more corrupt the joinmastodon and mastodon.social organizations are starting to look. Uncovered some really nasty stuff these past few weeks.
I'll share the full details in a post later today. I'd like to see if the admins actually respond first.
@freemo shadow bans???
@DavidBond
Yea basically they silence you but select the option not to notify you that you've been silenced.
@freemo what does that mean? silence your instance?
@DavidBond
No our instance isn't silenced. This happens to accounts on M.S though they did do it to our instance once in the past but when I caught them and appealed to the admins they reversed our silencing.
@freemo Mastodon.social has been pretty bad in general. Looking at what and how they ban simply makes me cringe. They are supposed to be advocating the Fediverse, not stifling it. Looking at their blocklist shows that they block those with whom they disagree. They use "harassment" as a blanket term. Well, they never had issues with harassment with some of those instances, because they never federated with them to begin with.
An admin should only block another instance when they actually have problems with that instance, and there is no other way to resolve it.
@freemo I'm confused. Is it not general right to ban anybody without telling her/him explicitly I'm going to do it?
@Rado1 Yes you certainly can. a shadowban is not a ban coming frrom an individual user. It is a type of ban issued by an instances moderator and effects that user across the whole server. It is very different.
@freemo
Here's is a perfect example of why the word "harassment" always raises a huge red flag for me.
@matrix I mean harassment has a legitimate place, as im sure you realize. If im literally making 20 cloned accounts and blasting you with messages like "die <explicative>" its harrassment, its wrong.
But if someone asks "are you ok, anything i can do to fix the situation" and that is labeled as harassment, then we have a serious problem as a people and are clearly abusing the word IMO.
@freemo
I agree, anti harassment policies have their place although I would classify your example as spam at that point.
I only have anecdotal evidence, but from my experience, the term harassment is barely used as "consistent unwanted advances" and is more used as a more malicious alternative for "I don't like you, fuck off". Especially by Americans.
@matrix No arguments
@freemo M.S is a snowflake fed with trigger happy mods. I left there immediately.
I originally had two accounts. One being in Mastodon social. I think 4 days into being there one and a mod told me "I should leave and go find another instance" because some snowflake had reported me. I don't even know why they reported me.
I snapped to attention, gave the mod his zeighail salute and left and never looked back.
I wouldn't recommend MS to anyone.
I want to update everyone to say that the claim from admins was that there was a bug in the notification system and that i simply wasnt notified and it was an accident.
Ultimately the claim was i engaged in harassment because I reached out to admins of others instances through M.S to inquire if they saw any harassment from our instance and if so if I could be of any help as an admin.
I was told that is harassment apparently.. I'll let anyone reading this decide what they think about that.