TBH, I don’t think it’s really against any rules to dup a username across instances as SMCF is actually on .world. However, this is being done with malice and should be addressed. UM must have been holding a grudge from when he was banned from .world.

Yeah I agree, having multiple accounts with the same username is okay when your intention isn’t to cause malice. When one is doing it to impersonate/namesquat or just to troll and ban evade then it’s a problem. It’s part of why I have as many as I do. It makes it extremely difficult for people to impersonate me, except on the handful of excommunicated instances I never signed up to but those will be very clearly recognized as impersonation.

Honestly, I think the issue is that it really is a job, and there isn’t anyone who’s really well-positioned to take charge of it.

Any system which allows easy, anonymous account creation is going to be subject to some level of abuse. Any system which does that, and also is distributed among multiple instances with admins who don’t always see eye-to-eye on things, is going to be absolutely helpless in the face of even a very rudimentary attempt at abuse, and anyone who wants to will be able to run rings around the admins and just kind of run around doing whatever they want. Telling people “just block the obnoxious people on whatever new accounts they make when they get banned” obviously isn’t the answer, but it’s what people fall back on because it is the only thing that can be relied upon to work.

I think Bluesky’s idea of federating out block lists (basically, as I understand it) is probably the most straightforward non-awful way. You don’t want to make every new user encounter every obnoxious person and learn, one by one, who they are and that they need to block them. That way lies madness.