A friend of mine tells me the instance mas.to (last night, 1/2/24) produced this error message for him:
Due to the technical issues they are having we are temporarily stopping delivery to kbin.social, as the failures and retries are impacting our site performance. We'll monitor the situation and unblock once they're back up and running again.
Figured you'd want to know, and thank you for the service you provide.
Edit: Appears to be unblocked now, but who knows if there are other instances that disconnected.
I'm not entirely sure any of that would be effective in controlling visibility of spam accounts from other instances. I'm quite sure that up/down voting does not always federate perfectly. Those steps would all be effective in handling malicious accounts on the same instance they're registered with, as long as their malicious posts and comments are also on that same instance; the effectiveness would certainly fall off sharply for content posted at other instances.
I wonder if there needs to be some kind of "governance board," like the NATO or EU of the fediverse, where major instance admins meet and set agreed upon standards of instance behavior.
I hoped that a few stray enthusiasts would find their way to kbin
They did. "A few" as a portion of the whole, where the whole is much larger than you ever expected it would be.
One thing I have learned in my own technical career is that you can't do everything. Even if there was enough time in a day for you to do everything, you can't know everything, at least not sufficiently enough to be most effective. You have to depend on other experts, and delegate to them what you are not qualified to do. This requires a pretty high level of trust, and makes it so that you need to develop people management skills.
Lots of technical people are short on people management skills. I don't know where you sit on that spectrum, but you may need to consider bringing on an "overseer," kind of like a project manager, to keep tabs on all of the technical resources involved - yourself included. This will help ensure that concerns are prioritized appropriately, and that communication and messaging about those priorities are consistent and clear.
I've been in that kind of position, and I take a bit of pride in my use of words. I'm happy to give any advice you like.