Why is this downvoted? These are great ideas. I like the idea of the "banning" being at the user level, or instance level.

I think if this whole fediverse idea is going to survive and grow long term, there should be no such thing as a lemmy wide ban.

You're not going to rid the world of racists. You're just not. And if Lemmy starts growing enough to overtake reddit, they're going to be all over the site long before that.

Now you can ban them. And they'll get a new email, and be back in an hour. OR you can defederate their instance. They'll continue to fester in their little groups, but every instance they try to interact with will see THAT instance has been defederated by large numbers of communities. And they'll get defederated from that one too.

Essentially you would have something like trumpsupporters.truthsocial (fictional example), and they after time would get defederated by 70% of the platform. The ones who continue to federate with them choose to do so willingly. It then becomes your responsibility as an individual user if you wish to continue seeing communities that allow them to stay.

They will remain locked in echo chambers, OR argueing with individuals who choose to argue and interact with them.

And in that way, Lemmy will see the user experience interacting with them drastically be lower than it would be if the solution was just "ban sitewide". Because then they'd just be scattered everywhere.

You'll never rid yourself of them if they exist in the real world. But you can isolate them.