A while back I signed up to rammy.site a small lemmy instance run by a single person. It was a very nice instance, very stable and had pretty good access to other instances, or at least it used to.
Recently though all of that has changed when the instance was taken over by far right-wing users from the right-wing instance known as exploding-heads, an instance which has been blocked by many others for the hateful content they post and the abusive behavior of its members. The reason that this was even allowed to happen was that the admin stopped moderating the server but left the server online, this is a problem because it means that anyone can hop onto the server and start posting whatever they want and create whatever communities they want and no-one can stop them.
There isn't much you can do to prevent going innactive but there are ways to mitigate what happened on rammy.site to prevent a full blown catastrophe like what has happened here. If you run a server and you are going to be going away for a while I'd recommend turning off account registration and community creation on your instance, that wouldn't prevent federated users and existing users from spamming existing communities but it would help against users joining the site and creating new communities which is what happened here on rammy.
I understand that it's not always possible to always be there to moderate your instance but you can at lease take steps to ensure that in your absence the instance won't be utterly decimated and/or used as a weapon to spread hatred or attack other instances.
Why would someone just leave a server like that running? Kind of a waste of resource they are paying for.
Also this sounds like a problem that will solve itself over time, since that server will not see any updates in the future. So it will be open to attacks or may stop working at some point when the version differences get too big.
Honestly, isn't it rather stupid to build a community with extreme views on a server you are not controlling? Eventually they are going to lose that.
Ok, question then since I haven't seen it this way.
So these dudes are on server x, but post crap in a community on server y, if I got you correct? Server x is known to host problematic content. If other servers now decide to defederate with server x, as the source of that group of people, will they still see posts of them on server y? If yes, then the only solution is for server y to defederate, which I guess is what you are writing about.
If this is true, should this not be addressed upstream in Lemmy? I wonder why if you defederate from a whole server you would still want to see their comments on other servers they are connected to. But maybe thats not possible?
No you've got the issue slightly wrong. They're on server x, but are creating alts on server y and spamming the fediverse with those alts.
Server x is already widely banned, but they can still coordinate among themselves there. The wide openness of server y is allowing them to pollute the fediverse.
Ah ok, thanks for clarifying. But how do you know its alts of the same people? I mean, if they use same emails then sure, but then you'd need access to both servers to compare that. I guess doesn't really matter in the end because its the same result, whether they are from the other server or not.
You can go look at them organising it on their instance. Obviously you won't be able to comment unless create an account but you can still go look.
It isn't locked down or anything so anyone can see what they're doing I don't think they care that we know
Yup it's a proxy to circumvent defederation, they're just posting shit there because at least when they started it was federated with many others. They'll probably just flee elsewhere but this is why it's very important to make sure you have people to manage the instance in case you aren't able to anymore.