I saw that a user was banned by moderator on my instance and their comments removed. I don’t have a moderator, it’s just me, I’m the only user. I thought I accidently fumble fingrred the ban button and restored their comments and appologize. Come to find out that they were banned from their own instance.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. On one hand it’s good if it’s a really bad user posting spam or worse. On the other hand it is a conduit for censorship. If an admin doesn’t like what you post on another instance, then they can censor you everywhere. On top of that, it makes it look like I am banning people, and I don’t like that at all if they’re just making normal comments. It should say something else and I should get some kind of alert that lets me know so that I can decide if the comments on my instance are appropriate.
I agree that their comments should be deleted automatically, however I did not like the message their comments were replaced with because it implies I banned them. It would also be nice if moderators and admin of other instances could at least be notified. If the user has written a really useful answer to a question or a how to guide then that could disappear forever. Someone else in this thread stated that the comments should be deleted forever. I really don’t like the idea of someone having the ability to delete things completely off of my server.
A user’s posts and comments are actually stored on their home instance, I believe, and a copy is pushed to your instance during federation.
Indeed I was able to restore their comments. However, it was somewhat of a fluke that I saw what happened.