Hardly! At the time of the incident, there was already a third-party post in my community, so if they couldn’t target one of mine, they’d likely target that one. If blocking stops me from seeing their activity, that would also hamper my ability to moderate that. Defederation is the only way it seems, and I’m moving to a new instance that defederates Hexbear regardless. I’m just not sure which one would be the most fitting for me. I had to leave .world at one point and now this one after two years. Lemmy/PieFed not allowing to move community subscribers is its biggest flaw IMO.

Testing an alternative theory: the Hexbear users discovered the community through their feed by being subscribed to fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com.

To sum up, the users either have no history in fediverse_vs_disinfo, have one comment in it from a year ago, or posted to it after the Slop post that linked it.

I think the picture is crystal clear even without all the other circumstantial evidence like the timeline or Slop’s history of brigading. culrit’s short history stands out here, giving more weight to the idea that it could be alt of culpritus.

❤️

It’s a strange place to be in, having to move comms and somehow try to carry over the users, but also risking that if I join an instance that defederates, the admins may later defederate an instance I don’t think should be defederated and I’ll be in the same spot again - a true PugJesus moment. One of the reasons I picked .zip was that it’s general or “neutral”, so to speak, but the harm of it not defederating Hexbear is now also obvious.

They posted about this post to Slop as well, which resulted in over a dozen Hexbear users immediately turning to brigading that thread as well.

Upvotes to a comment from one of their users:

The user below deleted their account before I banned them just in case (not sure if an account can be re-activated):

Would a personal instance block prevent them from interacting with my posts, by the way? And if so, it still wouldn’t prevent them from interacting with other posts in my communities unless I move them to a different instance, right?

Still too centrist of a take. For one, if you search for Palestine here on Lemmy, all the most upvoted posts are found on .world and are critical of Israel or supportive of Palestine.

So let’s entertain the fairy tale of a civil war taking place from around 2004. How come only 28% of Ukraine’s East was for unification with Russia in 2013 (a figure that would only decrease from then on)? Ukraine’s West must have won that imaginary civil war already by then and before Russia’s 2014 invasion?