Ah yes, simply block every user from .ml it doesn’t stop them from influencing the discussions happening in your instance’s communities and the culture of your instance.

I feel like this is problematic … every user? That’s necessary or warranted?? That there are so many of them and that it’s hard to do undercuts the idea that it would be warranted. It’s just way too likely that there’s a diversity of users which makes this unwarranted. Which is exactly why defederation can be abused, especially when it’s done by large instances.

Part of the idea of the fediverse is community building and grassroots social media infrastructure. If there truly are problematic users, that’s what moderation and reporting is for. If you aren’t happy with your instance’s or community’s moderation, then you likely either need to help or move.

Otherwise, encountering people you don’t like … feels to me like it’s part of social media (to an extent of course). It’s not like you could block all the subscribers of a sub-reddit over on reddit(am I wrong on that?), and I fear defederation is too often weaponised by the overzealous. Blocking all users of an instance over “they’re influencing the culture” just smells off to me.