Since early December, someone has created 65+ accounts with variations of the same name, and they have used those accounts for vote manipulation.
We reached out to the admin of the instance 4 weeks ago, recommending that they enable registration applications, upgrade the captcha difficulty, and/or require an email address to prevent this. We have not received a reply.
When we checked the logs this week, we saw that a new chain of accounts was created. This is creating extra work for our admin team to find and ban these accounts.
Defederation will block the instance, their communities, and their users from everyone on lemmy.ca and piefed.ca. Similarly, it will block content from lemmy.ca and piefed.ca from going to their instance.
Currently, less than 10 users from lemmy.ca are subscribed to a community there, the majority of which are subscribed to 1 community max.
You can view their communities here: https://lemmy.org/communities
Please share your feedback about this action in this thread.
The unfortunate thing is that this has a negative effect on the Lemmy brand, even if not affiliated.
This gets into copyright enforcement territory, though, which I don’t know if Lemmy is interested in doing.
It’s a trademark thing, not a copyright thing (those work differently) but you are correct that it will be brand-damaging.