They get defederated wherever they get consistently banned…and then they can federate with their friends and make their community of shit and yell at each other or something.

I agree with Jamie. While it is certainly possible for a bad actor to spin up burner instances for the purposes of evading defederation, that’s a disproportionate amount of effort compared to just creating a new account somewhere that already exists.

Will we see it happen? Probably. But it honestly seems easier to deal with than if those bad actors were to hide themselves in established instances.

You federate with that instance

EDIT: DEfederate. I MEANT DEFEDERATE.

I don’t usually make a habit of being an ass, but I am extra careful about what I say because I choose to self host. Since any instance admin that decides not to take a liking to me could take one look at my instance and defederate me without a second thought. If anything, self-hosting makes you more vulnerable than just normally ban evading on an open instance.

I’m not running an instance yet. If I do, I’d expect to drop any instance that seems to emit mostly junk, even if they sometimes emit non-junk.

It would be good to have tools that (for example) give instance admins an overview of what traffic they’re receiving from various other instances.

Don’t know if lemmy.buttgoats.com is good? You should be able to get a summary of all the traffic they have sent to others, and how much of it was removed by moderators.