kbin.social administration controls only what is published on kbin.social, and what content from elsewhere kbin.social users can see. An user banned from kbin.social can make another account, on another site and start recreate there his banned community. kbin.social will be able to ban this remote user and remote community, but this restricts only what kbin.social users can see.

Exactly the same for another /kbin or lemmy site - just replace the domain name accordingly.

Wouldn’t that go against the decentralized nature of the site?

No, it’s exactly the opposite. The entire point of a decentralized federation is that while yes, the admin is in complete control of what content is allowed on his or her own instance, users who don’t like what the admin is doing can just spin up their own new instances.

Ernest can ban this type of content if he likes. Others can take the kbin software and make a new instance where it’s welcome. Ernest can choose not to federate with that instance if they continue to push content that’s against his rules, but Ernest doesn’t have the power to dictate the direction for hundreds of millions of users’ experience like a certain centralized site’s mad CEO or admin board does.

What would be against the nature of ActivityPub is if Ernest built something into the software to prevent it being used for types of content he doesn’t like, even on other instances.

@KTVX94

While I kind of agree with you in being concerned about who gets to control what we see and don’t see and the censorship aspect, there is also “the paradox of tolerance” to be considered and maybe in that light it is correct to not tolerate that subs intolerance.

Regarding the Paradox of Tolerance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

It actually is one of the strengths of the decentralized nature of the Fediverse. But there are still growing pains associated with it.

Remember, kbin.social is just one instance of kbin. Ernest banning something on kbin.social does not mean banning it from the fediverse.

It could pop up on another fediverse site or even another kbin site.

“who gets to say what’s worth banning and what not?”

Just like with privately hosted services like Twitter and Reddit, it’s the person/group hosting the content. The decentralized nature means that if you disagree, you can voice that, or host your own instance, or move elsewhere that aligns with your viewpoints. Some people have multiple accounts spread out across instances to see different kinds of content.

Rambling below, you can stop reading here if you want.

Being federated doesn’t mean moderation can be ignored on either end. Some groups may not want to deal with certain content that others want to (could be for personal or legal reasons), and that’s OK. Since individual posts can’t be moderated across instances, if there are big patterns of moderation disagreements, then defederation is the only option and that’s usually not fun for anyone, so it’s generally in everyone’s best interest to stay generally acceptable to everyone else.

Of course, nothing is forcing that. There are currently instances defederated from my home instance Beehaw, for example. I’d imagine they’re still doing just fine without that federation, too. It can be argued that it’s against the spirit of federation, but at the same time you really can’t expect people to want to host data on their server that may not be morally or legally acceptable to them.

(This is all ignoring purpose-driven instances. People can choose to make an instance where only a specific kind of content is available, too. It’s much easier to manage that kind of instance due to the smaller scale, but as with anything there are downsides to that, too.)