Social network Reddit recently began blocking mobile visitors to its website while pushing them to download the official Reddit app, and it's fair to say that the move is not going down well with users. If you visit reddit.com on your iPhone today, you may see a new popup that can't be dismissed, asking you to "get the app to keep using Reddit".
If an instance has the most people and blocks those people from seeing your post, delays it from posting, or downgrades it as a source, it could easily be done. They have control over their own instance.
Can you elaborate? Arent blocks public via the admin logs in lemmy? In addition that info can be pulled from the api from any instance/fediverse protocol.
I can reproduce of need be since i have my own lemmy and piefed instance and have over 20 years of software development experience.
This called it shadow banning on reddit, but I think of it more as shadow curating. I explain it a little more in other comments itt. Reddit does the curating as well.
IMO, you could do this live pretty easily. When I first started posting, the trolls would complain that I wasn’t consistently online, lol.