Can someone explain how this moderation action works? A lemmy.ml user removed a post from a partizle.com user from a kbin.social magazine.

Otome-chan@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 30 points –

relevant magazine is /m/RedditMigration here on kbin.social. You can see it's the one and only report in the modlog yet the user who removed the comment is not listed in the moderators list, is not even a kbin.social user, and did not remove a lemmy.ml comment. Yet, it was removed for me as a kbin.social user.

How is this moderation working exactly? It's understandable that lemmy.ml mods can remove things for lemmy users, and mods on a magazine can remove things on the magazine. But it seems this is an unrelated user, removing a post of a user from an unrelated instance from a unrelated magazine.

How is this possible? what's going on here?

Edit: I checked on lemmy.world's copy and the comment is still visible, meaning the removal did not federate to lemmy.world.

30

I checked out the modlog and the mod in question is actually an admin at lemmy.ml. still shouldn't be able to reach in and delete things here though. https://lemmy.ml/u/cypherpunks

yeah they'd have to be an admin of partizle.com yeah? or be a moderator of the kbin magazine? that's why it's odd. perhaps the lemmy.ml admins can moderate every lemmy instance?

Bad news for the "who cares how evil the devs are, they can't affect anyone else" crowd.

Not really. That has to be a bug in kbin, not a problem with Lemmy. Lemmy allows admins to delete stuff off their own instance, but kbin shouldn't be just accepting that as a mod action from any admin on any server it's federated with. That doesn't even make sense. I assume it's just a weird interaction of different ways of handling things on kbin and Lemmy.

It honestly would be a terrible idea to allow some cross instance moderation to help ease the load. It would just require a lot of trust.

Edit: yes I meant wouldn't ^. don't want to change it now.

I assume you meant to type "wouldn't" at the beginning

Yes. Obviously only between instances that agree to it and trust each other.
There already seems a way for a lemmy user to moderate communities on other servers.

not sure if that's actually the case, but if it is... yikes.

That's a really interesting mod action you caught. Trying to make sense of it now but kbin is still having some issues; I'm still getting 503 errors when poking at the mod stuff.

"503 you broke kbin 🐈" I get it a lot tbh.

Damn, I'm still getting a 503 when clickin on the moderator list. Still wondering what's going on here!

@Otome-chan@kbin.social yeah, that's what needs to be tested:

  1. Is the originating instance the true copy? Or is every copy of equal status? Kbin's handling of having local copies is probably the issue here because other fedi protocols don't choose to do it this way (and it's probably because this reduces the load from all the fetching; big fedi accounts have been known to induce DDOS-like results when a post gets popular)

  2. If that can be confirmed/clarified, is the mod log a universal log only but specific instance changes not propagating? I think Q1 is going to be the pickle here - because it implies a lot in terms of coordinating copies across the kbin infra at least (not sure with Lemmy I've not poked around at all). Copy conflict is going to be inevitable at this point....

So I just checked on lemmy.world and the comment is not removed there like it is here on kbin. yet, kbin is the hosting instance of the community. if kbin thinks it's removed, then surely that removal should be sent out to others who look at it?

With ActivityPub there is no forced actions on other instances. When a delete happens on an instance, it sends a "this was deleted" announcement to the relevant instances it knows about. The servers that receive the message could easily ignore it and keep their copy of the message active/visible.

@Otome-chan@kbin.social oh yeah, definitely some kind of copy primacy/conflict issue for sure. I have no idea how to describe it well enough for the codeberg ticket tho - definitely worth raising.

I haven't used my mod actions yet, but my guess is that another user used the report function. A mod deleting the comment due to a report from another user is probably what happened

but that lemmy.ml user isn't a mod of /m/RedditMigration, and the removed comment wasn't by a lemmy.ml user? do random lemmy.ml users have the ability to remove comments like that? the only mods of /m/RedditMigration are you and ernest and neither of you were the ones to remove it?

I meant that because the mods of this magazine saw the report and deleted the comment, the credit in the mod log was given to the reporting user

oh, I see. yeah that makes sense then I guess? I would've thought that it'd be reported based on the mod that removed it? but I guess not. that explains it.

Again this is my supposition. We can test it if you want, I'm a mod at /m/RedditMigration you could try reporting a comment of mine there, I'll delete it and see who it shows
Edit: @Otome-chan i forgot what group we were in. Thought this was RedditMigration for a minute

@Otome-chan@kbin.social what's probably happening is that the mod action, like edits to a post do get federated along as well. The only time you won't see the changes propagate is if a federated mag is on an instance that gets defed, then no future changes will occur. Not sure if you've had a fedi account before this but if you do, it's like when you boost a post and the post owner edited it and you get a notification that your boosted post has been edited and you see the new text. So the kbin copy (this is where the threadiverse differ, in having local copies. One reason why 'copy url' has two versions, the instance copy and the original copy) may have the instance owner as the delegated owner of the mag but the original mod actions can still travel. So the mod is still the mod of the magazine in all federated copies of their community/mag.

ETA: I'm letting my comment stand but just noting, i didn't answer your question at all, i think. OTL

@Shortcake

I don't see why the lemmy.ml version would affect a partizle.com comment on the kbin.social "true" version? sure, lemmy.ml can moderate their own comments, but another site's on another instance's group?