I understand that. Beehaw has a questionnaire they require to be filled out as part of their application process.

You can filter verbatim responses (if 100 accounts have the exact same responses, they're probably not legit) and do other things to help cut down on bot accounts being used for trolling. This is why I said it's a severe hindrance, not a 100% perfect solution.

It won't stop them but it severely hinders them.

Beehaw's registration process takes time. Rather than spin up a bunch of accounts instantly and troll rapidly (causing massive admin/moderator overhead), they'll have to register direct with beehaw. This limits the number of accounts action has to be taken against.

Looking at it from an attackers perspective, is it worth it to wait 1+ days of going through a registration that requires the user submit answers to a questionnaire, just to troll users on beehaw? Probably not.

Until other instances defederate, your path of least resistance is to stay put. When that changes you'd reassess, and move elsewhere.

They (beehaw) were having issues with gore/porn trolls posting replies to legitimate comments. Regardless of your stance on free speech, I think everyone can agree that trolling is an issue.

You can't exactly open Lemmy at work during a quick break if you're expecting that stuff to show up in the middle of a productive discussion.

I think once content creators start posting regularly, we won't miss the old model of centralized content.

Lemmy keeps reminding me of the internet back in the IRC days, where you'd have multiple servers hosting different rooms within the network. All accessible, as long as you were on one of the servers in that cluster. It's a modern take on that (imo), and super cool that it's open source too!