Yeah not to mention it’s not that hard to detect a shadowban if you’re aware of the possibility. Lemmy doesn’t even fuzz vote totals, so it would be trivial to verify whether or not votes are working.

I wonder if there’s a way for admins to troll back. Like instead of banning the accounts, send them into a captcha loop with unsolvable or progressively harder captchas (or ones designed to poison captcha solving bots’ training).

I really don’t want it to become worthwhile for the Russian troll farms that want every discussion to turn into a shitfest.

Or post about it and build a case for defederating from them or more users to block them individually.

Care to elaborate a bit on what it is that makes you like it so much?

It’s not so much about wanting this user base as it is eliminating potential competition and maybe stamping out a place on the internet where people can freely and openly communicate.

And I think that will go both ways. I mean, we all already have the option of joining threads right now to interact with those 100M users but I have a feeling most that are here aren’t.

Their joining the fediverse will be more disruptive than their leaving it I think. And that’s not even considering the higher costs to anyone running instances, since all that extra volume won’t be processed and stored for free (though admittedly I am not familiar with the implementation details of how federated content is handled).

Or from another angle, they won’t be able to entirely pull the plug. If they try to but users still want to be on mastodon, they can find another way.

That said, I support the immediate defederation with any threads instances.

Another option is to make migration of everything from one instance easy and let them buy whichever instances they want but let the users go somewhere else. Turn their weaponized capitalism into free money for instance admins until they wisen up and stop throwing money at it.

Or set up the terms and services to give the instances responsibilities that must be honoured even after they get purchased by another entity such that buying them becomes unattractive. Like mandate a certain portion of the topmost parent company’s profits (along with clauses to prevent Hollywood accounting from dodging that, maybe say revenue instead of profit and all related companies instead of just the topmost) must be invested back into the fediverse and that changing the TOS to remove that requires a certain number of users to agree. Set it up so that it is designed to only work if the whole point of the entity is to host a community rather than extract profit from hosted communities.