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you may notice 32 fewer annoying people on the fediverse and that's because I combed through 4 cross-site hexbear drama threads and all of !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for users on instances we're still federated with that would either vehemently rather not see this site themselves, have active beef with this site, or are just straight up reactionary, and I banned them. I banned them all. I am become George Orwell, Nineteen of Eighty-Fours. 
Cross-instance bans are kinda like shadow bans. They’ll still see our comments, but we won’t see any of their comments. They’re not even notified when they’re banned.
I know this because I went to a banned user’s profile on lemmy.ml and they were still making angry comments at us seeable there but invisble on hexbear. So they can yell into the void, basically
To the shadow realm with them.
What if I mentioned one of them?
There’s a chance they would get a notification and be unable to reply