I haven't banned anyone, and as far as I know none of the other users on my instance currently have moderation privileges. So why am I seeing two users in a "banned" list when I visit my instance settings page? What horrible, unforgivable things did these users have to do for my instance to ban them seemingly of its own accord..?
(I have manually unbanned these users since taking the screenshot, since I didn't see any reason why they should have been banned in the first place.)
Nah, I believe it's just that a user that registered with lemmy.ml originally and is then banned in lemmy.ml can't interact with anyone. The instance basically stops supporting that user. That's kinda important, because an instance is in some ways responsible for their users.
If an instance gets a whole lot of brigading from users from a given instance, then they might consider blocking that instance. An instance blocking its own user is taking away their ability to represent that instance on any level.
They can obviously still go registered with another instance.
Yes, everything you said is correct and good. But it has nothing to do with why a user on lemmy.ml, who was banned by lemmy.ml shows up in the ban list for my instance.
Right, I agree that that's weird UX. It's probably down to the way the federation works. I just wanted to clarify so that people didn't think that one instance has the power to ban users from accessing other instances.
I'll check the Lemmy issue tracker and submit an issue if one doesn't exist. There's some adjustment that has to happen there.
Nice username by the way