Yesterday I created a post on a regional community on lemmy.ca.
Fairly quickly thereafter, I got a DM saying that the post had been removed because someone who disagreed with me complained. Oddly though, the DM came from a @[email protected] - not the server hosting the community.
Furthermore, I still see the post when I go looking - and there has been a bit of discussion about it.
So my questions:
(a) Can a post be removed from a specific federated instance without being removed from the original instance? (b) Is there an appeal process for removed posts? I’m sorry that the guy got all butthurt, but my post was sincere, measured, and (I think) reasonable. If it offended someone, they should discuss it.
From what I understand, yes, moderation is not federated. That’s good in that instances can enforce their own mod standards, but it also means spam/harmful content has to be removed by each server individually.
No idea if there’s an appeal process but you could ask on the lemmy.world support community.
Moderation does federate out, but only from the originating instance, the one that owns the post on question.
If someone post spam on lemmy.ca and lemmy.world deletes it, it only deletes on lemmy.world. If a mod or admin on lemmy.ca deletes it however, it federates and everyone deletes it as a result (unless modified to ignore deletions, but by default Lemmy will accept it).
There’s some interoperability problems with some software, notably Kbin where their deletions don’t federate to Lemmy correctly, so those do need to be moderated by every instance. But between Lemmy instances it does federate.