Fwiw, lemmy.cafe defederated from lemmy.ml, and is even running a 0.19.6 beta codebase so even if there’s only a single admin they seem really on the ball.

Tesseract also has implemented a way to ban all users from lemmy.ml.

And PieFed allows personal bans on any custom instance you choose. Plus it has “categories” of communities so that you don’t have to keep searching on All, though you can do that too if you want. It seems really polished these days! Not 100% - e.g. you can’t easily search for a user in the same form as a keyword - but it looks extremely usable, so I am switching to it today.

Meanwhile, on Lemmy we were promised that 0.19.3 would allow user blocking of instances, which turned out to be not quite true, and when your instance upgrades from that to 0.19.6 when it comes out (most other instances, like mine, are already running 0.19.5), the protections that it offers will be further rolled back - e.g. on 0.19.3 I did not receive notifications from those users, whereas now on 0.19.5 I do.

And maybe some apps allow blocking of an instance, I dunno about that aspect.

Lemmy.ml was one of the first instances in the Fediverse… but that doesn’t mean that we should be forced to listen to the stuff spewing forth from it unless we choose that for ourselves, especially in the next few months as the trolls go into overdrive due to the ongoing USA election (and likely subsequent “constitutional crisis” event).

Anyway, I just wanted you to know that there are options! Not many, but they do exist!:-)