Those Instances Are Up To Their Old Tricks!

Aha, I finally rediscovered the source of this comment:

We are discussing the request for defederation, but the consensus is that this may not be needed, since the 0.19 Lemmy update is expected to roll out in the upcoming weeks. This update will also enable users to block whole instances, and hopefully, address a big chunk of the issue we seem to be having here.

The original seems to have been deleted. The comment did not age well, since instance blocking turned out to be more of community muting, and even what little bit it did was later rolled back, allowing the users to trigger notifications by replying to your comments and for you to see all such communications. i.e. it is not a "block" of the "instance" at all, yet apparently the merest whisper that such a block might come in the then-future caused the entire Fediverse to avoid blocking places such as lemmy.ml and hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml for over a year.

They're not all Russian bots.

The internet is full of these obscure micro-cultures. The themes are different, but everything else is the same, comprised of the same type of person/mind.

Insecurities are easy pickings, just make them feel belonging and they'll be washed in no time. But make sure you empower them to identify that it's not them who are weak, it's "everyone else." That way when they're challenged, they lash out and are rewarded with more sense of belonging; get to a self-sustaining level.