I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:
Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn’t a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have… But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let’s look at the number of bans per community hosted:
Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.
Very interesting stuff! Defederations should count as a ban of all instance users, imo.
https://piefed.social/instances?filters=blocked&search=&page=
By that logic PieFed.social would top the charts, we can’t have that now can we?
No! Piefed is unbiased and good and pure! Just ignore all the things Rimu said to ignore!
-5000 Piefed social credit!
This list is weird, aside from the length. They must be using a very greedy regexp for this many instances to have their names partially censored.
The text “buds” has been censored, all the instances using the TLD “university” have had “univer” removed, and the word “hangout” is also gone. “Shitpisscum” made it through, so it can’t just be about slightly naughty words. Also annihilation.social is listed 3 times for some reason.
Are these slurs in a culture I’m not familiar with? Does piefed do this everywhere?
I feel like that would really skew the data, because it would then just be “instances that defederate some big instances (or just ones that defederate .world) and others that dont”, It’d be hard to ban a major instances worth of users with even a heavy handed “normal” moderation strategy surely?
I think the current methodology skews the data; consider that an instance federated with say, Hexbear, is probably going to have significantly more individual and community bans than an instance who only made 5-6 bans before recognizing the pattern and blocking the instance.
If the goal of this study is to see which places most aggressively moderate their content, you’re actually getting somewhat of the reverse.