Hence why he’s saying he was “fake banned”. If I go to his profile on the instances he’s banned from, there’s a red “banned” icon next to his username. He was perma banned from the instances and perma banned in the communities of those instances he commented in (modlog shows he was perma banned from a bunch of communities all at once). But he can still comment in communities belonging to the instances he’s banned from, ones he never commented in before.
Does this mean fake bans on Lemmy are a thing? Or are we both misunderstanding something here?
Just in case it’s relevant, he’s banned from dbzer0, lemmy.blahaj.zone, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and sh.itjust.works
So, when you post to a community, you’re posting to the local copy of it. Your host then forwards that post to the site that houses the community. When you’re banned from a remote site, nothing interferes with this process until the local host forwards things along. By that time, you’ve already posted.
Now, the site that’s housing the community is responsible for federating content it receives back out again, so while you can continue to post to the community locally, those posts won’t make it to any other copy of the community. But because each instance’s copy of the community is quasi-independent from each other, you can, IIRC, still engage with other local users in that space.