Defederation isn’t going to help trolling, when they can just make users on whatever instance they want to troll.
If anything, federation will help fight trolling, since people are less likely to make throwaway accounts if they don’t need to, although idk if it’d be a noticable impact.
In any case, defederation won’t stop troll brigades.
This is the same argument about banning on Reddit, but as a former mod, my experience is that very few people will actually go through the effort to spin up an alt to keep trolling. A handful will (we had one person who put a note in their calendar to send a “mean” modmail every month for a weirdly long time), but most are just lazy bored posters who have fun messing with people they don’t like, and if they can’t conveniently browse their targets for opportunities, they’ll just go do something else they find fun rather than go through the effort. Despite accounts being basically free and meaningless, banning trolls was unexpectedly effective.
Defederation isn’t going to help trolling, when they can just make users on whatever instance they want to troll. If anything, federation will help fight trolling, since people are less likely to make throwaway accounts if they don’t need to, although idk if it’d be a noticable impact.
In any case, defederation won’t stop troll brigades.
This is the same argument about banning on Reddit, but as a former mod, my experience is that very few people will actually go through the effort to spin up an alt to keep trolling. A handful will (we had one person who put a note in their calendar to send a “mean” modmail every month for a weirdly long time), but most are just lazy bored posters who have fun messing with people they don’t like, and if they can’t conveniently browse their targets for opportunities, they’ll just go do something else they find fun rather than go through the effort. Despite accounts being basically free and meaningless, banning trolls was unexpectedly effective.