WorseDoughnut

This is hilarious, they know exactly how to cater to the annoyed discord userbase.

these two instances' open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;

Doesn't this just lead you down a path of simply defederating most instances? It sounds like you just don't actually want to participate in the larger federated community. Which is admittedly fine if that's the direction you want to take this... but it certainly seems like a first step towards just running a closed-off site with none of the actual benefits of being part of the fediverse.

Just seems like a method of dealing with the problem that's mostly antithetical to the inherent connectivity of the platform it's built on. I get that not every instance wants to be a big open social media experience, but when the lemmy website showed you guys on the top of the "suggested instances" list right at the peak of the exodus from Reddit, it certainly feels like a bit of a rug pull when there's such heavy-handed / sweeping admin action with pretty annoying consequences like this. In the end it's your site, and it seems more like this is a response you your lack of ability to respond adequately with the current moderation tools, so I do respect the core issue at play. Still, feels like moving somewhere else is just the more future-proof option here, since this is certainly a red flag for me personally.

Why on earth would they have kbin.social blocked...? Such a weird move.