The instance I’m on was not blocking anyone and I’d not seen where anyone was blocking them. However, there’s been a recent influx of instances having a large number of inactive accounts, maybe setting up for some kind of bot invasion. It unnerved the admins and now many are blocking instances that look like bot farms. My instance is now blocking a number of them only for that reason.

Most instances are not blocking other instances for content. Beehaw is the one instance I’m aware of that does block a lot of other instances for content. The others seem to do it much more sparingly, if at all.

As a user you’ll need to check the home instance of your communities. Go to that instance and reference the Instances link bottom of the page. Check your login instance is not blocked there. If it is and you really want to participate in that community, you need to sign up with an instance that’s not blocked.

For example my login instance is lemm.ee. There are some communities I subscribe to on beehaw.org. I go to beehaw.org and select the instances link at the bottom of the page. There I can see that that lemm.ee appears under the Linked Instances column and not the Blocked Instances column.