With previous Rexit's like the API debarcle etc. many users were left looking for an alternative, but with decision fatigue and bad UX etc. most did not find the Fediverse a viable option.

What needs to still improve, how can we be ready this time?

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

There's one major oversight here that needs to be addressed if Lemmy/Piefed were to suddenly gain a glut of new users. How bans work.

Currently, instance bans and community bans are treated as two separate things. When a user is banned from an instance, you'll often see in the logs a bunch of community bans alongside it at once. These are communities that user has posted on. An instance ban automatically applies hard-bans to communities they have interacted in from that instance. But the problem here is its only communities they've interacted in.

The instance ban itself is simply a rejection of federation. It doesn't block users from posting in communities on that instance - only the community bans do that. It just means their posts won't federate out. This means that an instance banned user can continue to be a nuisance in most communities (or all, if they are pre-emptively banned) on an instance locally - and the moderators of that community and instance won't even know. With larger numbers of users would also mean larger amounts of trolls and incompatible users, which could greatly increase the chance of people simply vandalising communities and no-one even noticing.