Yes, this is a feature of the fediverse, and we’re celebrating it here.
When shitty toxic communities create issues for the wider Lemmyverse, instance admins can lay down some ultimatums.
On the toxic community’s instance, the instance’s admins can demand that the toxic community correct their behavior, or the community and its offending users will get banned.
On other instances, offending communities can be blocked, and if users are regularly misbehaving, instance admins can pressure each other to enforce basic community conduct, or face defederation.
Once a community is given an ultimatum, they can either change their behavior to meet the expectations of the wider Lemmyverse, or they can find an instance that will allow their behavior.
If they choose to migrate to another instance, it will likely be a more extremist instance with poor moderation that has been significantly defederated. They have to exist within that narrow network of fringe instances now, giving them significantly less reach to harass or spread disinfo or whatever got them booted from the last place they called home.
And us users play a central role here. When we see communities doing harm, whether they are endorsing fascism, or pedophilia, or animal abuse, we need to stay “not here you don’t” and demand that action be taken.
When those communities end up migrating to some fringe instance full of dipshits, we need to applaud the mods and admins that sent them there, and let them know that their hard work was appreciated.
Federation works. Every fringe community in exile is proof of that. This is all one big community effort, so we can’t stay silent about what’s happening and expect that it all gets taken care of behind the scenes.