And, there's another insidious way the problem comes up. Instance admins and moderators can "limit" another instance , as an alternative to defederating an instance which has some racists but also a lot of people who aren't racist (like mastodon.social for example). Limiting an instance means that you don't get notified when tagged in a reply from that instance (and a few other things). That's good for avoiding harassing notifications ... but is also a way that the situation Mekka describes can come up even with public and unlisted posts.

But wait, there's more. The way federation works, you generally don't see posts from people who aren't followed by anybody on your instance. If nobody on your instance wants to follow racists, good for them, but it also means that you and everybody else on your instance won't see the posts from people on that racist instance harassing Mekka (or other Black people) so can't report them.

@ColesStreetPothole@weatherishappening.network @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @ddritter@paquita.masto.host

@ColesStreetPothole @mekkaokereke @ddritter @benroyce if that's the behaviour it's also misnamed. Followers only should *mean* followers only.

i want to think it's a bug. because it's mis-named, as if the mismatch between name and function isn't deliberate. Maybe submit it as a simple bug report on that basis. 😅