Moderation actions are logged in the modlog, but they aren't sent as notifications to users.

If you find some of your comments disappearing, check your username in the modlogs.

I think this is supposed to reduce the amount of grief that admins/moderators deal with when performing mod actions.

Defederation will result in an effective shadowban, just due to the way Lemmy is structured. If you yourself can't find one of your own, though, that indicates it was probably removed, which is different from a shadowban.

Standard forum-system here, each community sets its own rules and moderation strictness, so best to read the sidebar before you participate. Some communities are extremely strict, others are extremely loose. Applies to whole Instances too.

One thing I've noticed was not getting notifications for bans or comments/posts getting removed

They're in the modlogs but I never got notifications for the actions

It didn't matter if it was my home instance or on other instances no notifications were sent to me

So it's not really shadow banning or shadow removing as it's all in the open modlogs, but not getting told about it does feel pretty shitty

Edit: I'd love to actually get notifications for when my stuff gets removed or whatever as how am I expected to shift my behavior if I don't know I'm fucking up

I've encountered a few times where the post or a parent comment got deleted, which also appears to hide any sub-comments.

Might that be it?

I've had many comments (and I know a few others have too) quietly deleted for talking about the downsides of Linux, so mild censorship is definitely a thing depending on where you visit. But "shadow banning", if I'm not mistaken, is kinda nonexistent on a platform like this

Mods tools on Lemmy are pretty rudimentary. We mods can ban users, ban users for a defined period of time, and or ban user while removing all their content posted to a particular community.

As for posts and comments. We can remove them with or without providing a reason in our logs.

If you’re worried about getting banned or having content removed, you can see all of that in Lemmy’s public mod logs.

You can get stuff deleted by mods that don't tell you about it, but I don't know about actual shadow banning

I've had this happen, but I found out it is of magazines I had blocked later on, hiding the comments for me. (I'm on Kbin, don't know if this works the same way elsewhere)

Actual banning but the federation making it weird is also a thing. Example would be us on Kbin. Folks can get banned from a community but if they're on our instance they can still comment and it'll still show up for us.