It's a disgusting, terrible instance. Back when I added them to our blocklist and fediseer they even had pedobear on display as if they were proud. They have a MAP community and Pedo memes.
The link posted by OP has our findings in it with a few of their posts on an archive site for those who don't want to go to the instance directly: (https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/rqd2.net)
!boostforlemmy@lemmy.world saw it's official release and the announcement over on Reddit gave us a bump, much like when !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world was officially released a while back.
Also there might have been a (albeit smaller) bump a few days ago due to Reddit removing the ability to opt out of ad personalization.
The amount of people in here claiming there were no takedown requests is a bit frustrating. As if we were blocking those communities for shits and giggles. Sure there was that Bungie troll but around the same time we DID get a takedown request for threads in the piracy community. Threads that didn't even include direct links, it was just a discussion. Whatever you guys think, it was a lot of shit to deal with on top of what we were already dealing with.
We were also considering different hosting options to counter those DDOS attacks back than and that would mean moving the server to another country and thus exposing members of our team to legal issues should shit hit the fan. One of our team members back then was in the legal team for the hosting company we were considering moving to. So he wasn't just making this up, he literally wrote the rules.
In the end we decided not to move to that hosting company. And we took some other measures by creating some tooling to deal with this stuff better. And that takes time.
Undoing the block means more work for us too. Work we do for free on our own time, next to having jobs and a families. And we're definitely not a corporate entity with fancy lawyers.
This was not about "abusive members" this was about a member having too many communities according to you. We both seem to have a very different definition of "abuse".
The user in question does have a lot of communities but he is very active and has different moderators who he manages. Also, when the moderators of these communities do well he transfers the community over to them. As recently as yesterday when he transferred !movies@lemmy.world and !marvelstudios@lemmy.world.
While he has a lot of communities he does a good job managing his communities and training moderators and is making our lives as admins easier. If someone has a lot of communities and doesn't do anything with them, that is squatting and we take action. I think we have a good track record of that.
So unless there is something we are missing I really would not call any of what the user in question did "abusive".
Lastly the best way to get someone to look at your problem is to use the report feature. The reason you got no reply in nine days is because there was no problem.
I mean, it's easy to go over to feddit.nl and see they only have one admin who has not been active in almost two weeks.
Full transparancy: the abuse we were dealing with from that instance was vote manipulation and worse, csam. Especially in the case of csam we can not wait for days for a reaction.
Asking for nothing but patience :)
We are not 'dropping' messages from smaller instances. @ruud@lemmy.world and others did tighten up some things to fend off some attacks but that should not interfere with the federation.
If you could have at least mentioned your instance name we could ask our backend administrators to have a look and we could get back to you with an informed answer.
We will not close registrations, what we will do is show people information on how the fediverse works and give them the option to register on other instances. That will be implemented in the next couple of days.
We should probably have released a statement before going over into action and blocking them. But an official statement on this is coming asap.
There is a status page up on https://status.lemmy.world
We have been dealing with some DDOS attacks and are still taking extra measures to get everything more stable but we are working with people in different timezones so it's not always as easy to react.
So yes, we are working on improving things.