Going by your figure, a few dozen users out of nearly 2,500 combined monthly active users behaved badly. It seems to me that defederating was/is an overreaction when user-level blocks and community-level bans exist.

[–] oatscoop@midwest.social 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

You weren't around for it, but it was bad -- you couldn't avoid them. A few dozen trolls doesn't sound like much, but they were coordinated and relentless. Blocking users didn't work because they were constantly making alts, including on other instances.

Calls were made for instances hosting them to ban those users: most did, some refused to or couldn't. Blocking instances in user settings wasn't a thing yet, so those instances were mass defederated from. Lemmygrad and hexbear were the big two and home of the dirtbags that were upset their "fun" was over.