I think it's important to enable account portability across instances, like what Mastodon has. It should be easy for people to move to a different community, back up their data so they can re-substantiate their known persona if their instance goes poof, etc. This will help a lot with encouraging people into communities that suit them and with people who might stay in a community they are unhappy with because they don't want to start over.

Ban them. Honestly if it's egregious the admin staff takes care of it. If it's just some asshattery then the mods of the communities are left to deal with it.

Woah, this is the first time I've pressed "all" on lemmygrad. It's... so much bigger!

Downvote they ass

Some thoughts —

The original "Eternal September" (on Usenet) wasn't an influx of abusers. It was an influx of new users who didn't know how to do things properly yet.

Most of the new users were from the America Online (AOL) private service, and known as "AOLers". (As it happens, I joined Usenet around the same time, but from a local dial-up Unix BBS in the Washington DC area.)

The AOLers didn't know which aspects of the service as they saw it were due to the AOL custom client software, which were due to the AOL local server, which were due to the newsgroup (forum) they were looking at, and which were due to the global Usenet consensus. So when they had a problem, they didn't know where to address that problem. They complained on public newsgroups about UI issues with their local client, because they didn't know what was what.

And the existing users didn't have the time or capacity to help them. The AOLers were added to Usenet en-masse without preparation. Nobody had signed up to help them. The AOLers were accustomed to AOL chat rooms that had staff helpers and moderators; most of Usenet did not have any — just regularly-posted FAQ documents, which the AOLers did not know to look for, and grouchy users who angrily told them to read the goddamn FAQ before posting.

Another consequence of the influx of new folks was that Usenet suddenly just had a lot more people. This made it a tasty target for commercial spammers and other abusers; which led to the eventual spampocalypse and a lot of people abandoning Usenet for web forums or other services.

It wasn't long into Eternal September that the hardcore abusers showed up, though. That, I think, is the harder problem to deal with.

"Good" Usenet servers did not reliably disconnect themselves from the servers that were accepting and forwarding spam. It was not generally acknowledged that a good server needs to block bad servers: the free-speech ideal was assumed to mean "accept anything from anyone; let the client decide what to filter out" — which meant that new users who had not written any filters necessarily saw all the spam.

And because nothing was secured by strong encryption, forgery was rampant; with a little cleverness, anyone could pretend to be anyone from any server.

There were many, many efforts to fix the spam problem. Unfortunately, as things turned out, it wasn't enough. Eventually folks noticed that the NNTP facility offered by their ISPs was a great means for sharing pirated porn ....

If a server admin turns out to be a giant asshole (present company excepted, of course), is there a way to migrate your identity to another instance?

If a server admin gets hit by a bus and their instance goes away, do all the users just cease to exist?

I'm not worried about assholes. I'm more interested in being free. As long as the community mods are nice enough, I'm optimistic.

When the Eternal September comes, which it will, how does a Lemmy instance deal with bad actors?

i'll bully them away >:3 !!!

On the real I feel like Lemmy/the wider linkagg fediverse will prob be good at self-moderating somewhat like other fediverse software's communities are. It'll probably be easier for admins to noice bad actors on their instance than it was for site admins on Reddit to notice bad actors there because the admins-to-users ratio on here will probably be better, even if things are kinda concentrated on lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and beehaw right now (people will probably spread out as they get a grip on how things work), and the average user will probably grow a stronger connection with their instance admins for that reason too, making it easier to address things like that since more people will be able to comfortably contact their admins directly. And if said bad actor is from another instance, and the admins of that instance refuse to deal with them, there's always community-level bans (I think anyways? I'm still not familiar with the comm mod tools) and, if more drastic measures are needed, defederation.

I don't think mastodon has had this issue and it has been a while. Since we are not on Twitter, you can just block whoever is an asshole.

How long until we start seeing tiktok/instagram/facebook/reddit reposts.